Innocence.
One day in May Kim and I decided to throw a large party. We told all our friends and asked them to invite theirs and arranged through our bartender to have a keg on ice. It was to be a Saturday afternoon backyard party, which we’d never used for anything. It had a six-foot-high stone wall all around it, the remains of a plot of garden, some tiles near the house and some long grass, which we cut for the first time that morning. Our short front yard had a low, waist high cyclone fence, with a large gate for the driveway and a small one for the walkway to our porch. The driveway led to the backyard, so people could walk through it to the party without entering the house, where we planned to have our own more ‘select’ party.
While we were preparing the yard that morning I noticed a few wasps entering and exiting a crack on the stone wall near the beginning of the yard. We had a hose so I thought I could flush them out with water. I let this run quite a while and many came out but they only swarmed around and went back in as it was a long crack. One of our friends now showed up to help and said he had it on good authority that vinegar would do the trick. A gallon was procured and dumped in. We waited, watched, and the little swarm didn’t change their pattern, flying in circles a few feet around, then crawling back in. I could tell by the jerkiness of their movements that they were getting angry. But it was now too late to do anything, people were starting to arrive. The beer was set up on the tiled patio. It was a beautiful afternoon, and if you were smart enough not to linger within a few feet of this swarm of wasps you didn’t get stung. Of the forty or fifty people who enjoyed our get-together that day only a few failed the test.
By mid-afternoon, our house and yard were full of happy strangers and the keg empty. I took a collection and set out and bought several more cases. Since our party had been advertised days in advance, someone had decided, without telling me, to invite two Hell’s Angels members to come to the party and act as gatekeepers for free beer, to which they agreed. When I returned, my arms laden with beer, the front yard and porch full of people, they wouldn’t let me in. They didn’t know me. It took several minutes of calling out on my part and almost lost tempers before I got someone to acknowledge me as the host. They grudgingly let me in. From then on I delegated beer runs to others.
The only private room in the house, besides the bathroom, was my bedroom. It had a lockable door to the living room, so this room was designated to our close friends as the place to do lines, as long as they shared, that is, with Kim and me. Harry wasn’t there that day, probably at work. Early in the afternoon I met a girl, short, pretty and with short black hair. She had just signed up for a Navy program straight out of high school, about to start in a few weeks. We were talking away in the backyard, both sipping on a beer, when I got a tap on my shoulder and word that there was something waiting for me in the bedroom. I invited her along, closed the door and sure enough there was a long line of coke half hidden between two books on my writing table. I told her I would split it with her. She tells me that she’s never done any drugs, not even pot, in fact the beer she’s sipping on is the second she ever had. Hum, how sad I think, a virgin to life’s pleasures. We shall have to remedy that. I tell her it might be a good idea, before the Navy whisks her across the wide oceans, to gain a little experience and not have the reputation of a child, which her other mates might laugh at. She naively agreed and snorted half the line. This perked her up quite a bit. We rejoined the party and grabbed another beer.
This gets me thinking and I say to her: ‘You know, when you get there, your friends are gonna ask you if you’ve ever smoked pot. You might want to try some here so you don’t have to answer ‘No’. She hesitantly agrees so I procure a joint, which we smoke in a corner of the living room, laughing and talking away, our faces now glowing and close together.
After many more hours, many more beers, a few more lines of coke, a very tiny line of brown, Mexican heroin (such were my guests) and two Valiums late at night to help us fall asleep in my bed, I was able to complete her education and free her from the horrible stigma of being labelled ‘inexperienced’ and also ‘virgin’.
In the late morning we both wake up, believe it or not, bright and cheerful. We make coffee in my trashed kitchen, giggling and gabbing away at what we remembered of the night before. I walk her about a mile to her parents’ house and with one, long, parting kiss she thanked me for the wonderful time she had. She skipped in her front door, closed it, and I never saw or heard from her again.
I think she was the type of girl, by her naivety and her innocent, docile nature, that she never saw such a party again and had an upstanding, irreproachable career, becoming a model wife and mother. I hope the memory of that one party was enough to last her a lifetime.
On the other hand, she might have become a drunk, a slut, a drug addict, kicked out of the Navy and onto derelict streets, a prostitute. Who knows? Let’s not get sentimental here. The truth always lies somewhere in the middle. And whatever path she took was determined by a lifetime of character formation, not by a one-day detour through my devilish backyard and bedroom.
