“We’ll remember this all our lives,” Sarah Cameron said to me once, at one of the first sorority dances I took her to. She wore a cloud of yellow tulle over a bobbing hoop that belled up in back when I pressed her against me, swaying to the slow, sinuous strains of “Stardust,” and a hypnotic river of honeysuckle poured into the open windows of Brookhaven from the fringes of the dark golf course.
“I’ll remember that I flunked geometry because of this stupid dance,” I said sourly. In the beginning I was distinctly ungracious to Sarah.
“You’re an awful fool, Shep,” little Sarah Cameron said. I remember that she was not smiling.
Dancing would have been enough to make those years memorable: thirty-five dances in as many weeks, and none to be missed, if you were a true Buckhead Pink or Jell. But in addition, there was always a formal, seated dinner beforehand, at one of the city’s scant few “good” restaurants, like Hart’s on Peachtree, or at the Paradise Room of the Henry Grady Hotel, or in some long-suffering parents’ dining room, and a breakfast afterward that might last until 4:00 A.M. Sometimes, after the breakfast, we would skin into blue jeans and pile into whatever cars could be commandeered, and go out and climb the great, black bulk of Stone Mountain to the east of the city, lying winded and lipstick-smeared on the granite brow as the sun came sidling up. Or we would drop off our dates, after some obligatory skirmishing in the front or back seat—for no Pink would catch monk in earnest unless she was seriously pinned, and though some of us did go steady in the early years of high school, most played the field until lust and attrition parted us from our pins in exchange for heavy, expert petting in our later years—and go out and race, ineptly, our cars on the Marietta Highway, old U.S. 41, until dawn. I don’t remember why our parents let us stay out so late weekend after weekend, or how we survived the sheer fatigue of it. I do remember being as tired toward the end of each spring term as if I had mononucleosis. Tired and broke.
Because each event on any given dance evening—dinner, the dance itself and breakfast afterward—meant, for a Pink, a date with a different boy, and each date meant an orchid. Not just any orchid, either; purple was so far beyond the pale that a fat vocational student at Southwest DeKalb High wouldn’t have worn one to a DeMolay formal at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Pure, waxen, pristine white, nestled in net and tied with satin: we bought forests of them. I can see them now, on the bosoms and wrists and at the waists of the girls of Buckhead, usually three and as many as six, if the Pink was an officer of the sorority giving the dance.
I remember a dress that Lucy had, in her sixteenth year and my last one at North Fulton; it was the deep, jeweled navy of a Christmas night sky; silk velvet, and scalloped up at the hem to show the clouds of snowy crinolines underneath. Lucy had chosen it as a background for her white orchids; Red Chastain was taking her to the Phi Pi winter formal, and she was the social chairman that year. She had other dates for dinner and breakfast; I don’t remember who—and all in all, eight orchids were pinned and tied and taped about her. There were three on the strapless bodice of the dress, one on each wrist, one at her waist, one at the front scallop of the skirt, and one in her hair, worn loose on her shoulders, as cloudy and drifting as a squid’s ink in a clear sea.
“You look like a florist shop,” I said, as she stood looking at herself in the ormolu mirror in the foyer, waiting for whoever was taking her to the dinner.
“I look wonderful,” she said, smiling dreamily. “Nobody has ever had this many orchids. Seven is as many as there’s been, ever. I’m going to keep them all in my scrapbook, to remember the night I had more orchids than any girl ever in this town.”
“Well, it’s going to smell like a funeral parlor,” I said meanly, stung because I could afford only one orchid for Sarah Cameron, who had asked me to be her escort, and my father would not spring for a second. Stung by that, and by something else that I did not care, then, to examine.
“The only reason you’ve got that many is because Red’s father is stinking rich.”
“Exactly,” Lucy said, the smile deepening. “Red’s daddy likes me. He wants Red to bring me by before we go to the club so he can see me in my dress.” She turned from the mirror to look at me, her face incandescent.
“Oh, Gibby, you know who I wish could see me tonight? With all these flowers?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling back at her, the meanness gone from my heart to be replaced by a great wrench. “I know who. He’d be so proud of you he’d pop his buttons, Luce. You’d knock his eyes out.”
“Would I?” she breathed, looking at me with eyes that saw, not me, but that first long love. “Would I?”
“Yes,” I said. “You bet your fanny you would.”
Orchids, orchestras, satin and velvet and tulle dresses over drifts of crinoline, rented tuxedos; dinners and dances and breakfasts. No wonder we all worked summers and often weekends, even we sons of millionaires and near-millionaires. Wonder only that the Jells who were not rich could afford it at all, even with their jobs. I know that A.J. worked much harder during high school to finance the seasons of the Pinks and the Jells than he did to maintain himself later at the University of Georgia, clerking after school and on Saturdays at Bates Camera on East Paces Ferry, and running the projector weeknights at the Buckhead Theatre. I cannot imagine what the parents of those resourceless Jells felt when another autumn of dancing and spending came wheeling around. Despair, probably. But a kind of fierce unspoken pride, too, I’d be willing to bet. To be the progenitors of an Atlanta Jell, to have sired one of the elect of a generation…it must have made up for a great many skimpinesses and meannesses and omissions. I hope so. I know that Melba Kemp, A.J.’s widowed mother, who saw him through high school on her earnings from the Jolly Tot Shop, told me just before she died, when A.J. and Lana brought her by to see me, that those years when he ran with the Buckhead Jells were, in spite of the privation, the happiest of her life.
“Why?” I said, thinking of her days in the shop on aching feet, and her nights alone in the tiny house at the far end of Cheshire Bridge while A.J. was out at the dances in the country clubs and great houses that she would never enter.
“Because it was something, that crowd you all ran around with,” she said, smiling. “All those dances and parties, and a different pretty girl for every one…You boys were really something. I never saw A.J. have such a good time since.”
A.J. gave Lana and me a little mock shrug of demurral and rolled his brown eyes heavenward behind his mother’s back. But despite the gesture, I knew that she was right. A.J. was born to be an Atlanta Jell, and nobody I ever knew did it better.
Pink-and-Jellhood was not limited to the splendid preenings of the sororities and fraternities, by any means. For its initiates, it reached out to define, consume and finally become the whole of life. After school, after the ritual viewings and pairings on the sidewalk in front of Washington Seminary and the concrete circle in front of North Fulton High, we stuffed ourselves into the available automobiles and fanned out to take the city.
There was, in the full-blown years of Jellhood, my Fury; there was Snake Cheatham’s 1939 Mercury convertible, the Black Booger; there was Ben Cameron’s souped-up Chevy, which he bought with his entire life’s savings on his sixteenth birthday, and A. J. Kemp’s disreputable and fiercely admired 1935 Chevy without top or fenders, which Buckshot Jones at Northside Auto Service on Howell Mill finally gave him, just to keep him from mooning around the premises anymore. We careened all over the city in that naked, shivering wreck. We would stop at the last filling station before we crossed the Atlanta city limits hurtling toward downtown, and A.J. would leap over the door and lie on his back underneath and insert the muffler. Coming home, he would repeat the performance and remove the ineffectual device. Otherwise, around Buckhead, he simply drove it flat out and braying. None of the Buckhead constabulary particularly cared. A.J. was something of a local hero to auto aficionados for getting the Chevy running at all.
Some
of the girls had cars, too. Freddie Slaton’s father gave her a little red Triumph for her sixteenth birthday, probably and rightly figuring that hornet-mean little Freddie was going to need all the advantages she could get. Most of the Washington Seminary Pinks had cars. One way or another, after school and on Saturdays, we took to the streets like flocks of migratory birds, and our flyways were fully as stylized and inviolable.
Around Buckhead, we favored Wender & Roberts Drugstore for afternoon milkshakes and Cokes, and afterward the Buckhead and the Garden Hills theaters. Farther afield, we might alight at Rusty’s or the Pig ’n Whistle or Peacock Alley or Harry’s or Moe’s & Joe’s or the fabled Varsity, down at North Avenue and Spring, near Georgia Tech. Dr. Brewer’s Wagon Wheel at the intersection of Piedmont, Roswell and Old Ivy was popular for barbecue, and Tyree’s Pool Hall, where the one-eyed hustler would take on all comers, was forbidden and thus irresistible. In the summers, we steeped in the chlorinesmitten, azure pools in Garden Hills and Moseley Park, or at our parents’ clubs, or in one or another of our backyards.
Bowling alleys with lurid pinball machines and jukeboxes, the covered bridge out at Sope Creek, the fatally alluring Chattahoochee River which was the dividing line between Fulton and Cobb counties, the ball field down behind Peacock Alley, Minor and Carter’s Drugstore downtown—they all knew our imprint, held the ghosts of our restless and bedazzled spirits. Oh, the magic, the eldritch, spindrift glamour of streetlights through the new April green of the trees spilling over Rusty’s or Harry’s parking lot, honeysuckle and mimosa as thick in our nostrils as the Emeraude and Tigress rising steamily from the unimaginable cleavages beneath the Peter Pan collars and sleeveless, V-necked blouses. Blood and Miller High Life pounded so forcefully through our veins then that we sometimes felt that we would simply burst apart with the sheer being of young.
Inevitably, with all those hormones rampaging and all the beer and illicitly bought gin and bourbon flowing and all that forbidden white flesh flashing, there were fist fights. Most occurred during the dances, though usually outside during intermissions. I remember one, in my senior year, at Druid Hills Country Club, when Red Chastain knocked a marauding Jell from Boys’ High clear through the French doors onto the terrace after he tried repeatedly to cut in and capture a shimmering Lucy during a no-break. In those days, it was not unknown for a popular Pink to have her no-breaks booked years in advance, and by that time everyone knew that the third no-break at each formal belonged, on Lucy’s card, to Red. The Boys’ High Jell could not plead ignorance. It was a short fight, and a brutal one, and though no one particularly liked Red, we all thought the mangled Boys’ High Jell got what he deserved. No one, in those days, broke the rules of Pink-and-Jellhood with impunity.
Our fathers tolerated these fights with remarkable humor and resignation, though our mothers usually wept or scolded. We might be dutifully admonished, and sometimes desultorily punished or grounded, but our fathers knew, as we sensed, that it was important for us to learn to do our fighting in a controlled and gentlemanly manner. I am sure that my father suffered keenly because I never ventured to test my antlers in combat. It may have been a time dominated by females, by the pursuit and courting of them, but it was, nonetheless, rankly masculine in tone.
“How’d you get that shiner, kiddo?” Ben Cameron asked me once after Sunday lunch at the Driving Club, pointing to the black eye I had gotten from Snake’s elbow during a particularly exuberant boob-spotting session outside Seminary. “What does the other guy look like?”
“Shep doesn’t fight,” my father said dryly. “He’s a lover. Didn’t you know?”
Since I was sixteen and had never had a formal date except for Sarah, I reddened.
Oh yes, my father suffered.
And so in this way, through our glittering citywide networks and borne on our immortal wheels, we became true princes of the city, ranging all over it, tasting it in all its moods and hours and seasons, stretching in its sunlight, exulting in its warm darkness. It was no wonder that none of us wanted to go away to school, except, perhaps, those, like me, on whom Jellhood always sat askew. It was a ridiculously hedonistic, totally self-absorbed existence. In those cloud-borne, pell-mell days, we were our own first great obsession.
Our second was sex.
When I think of the sexual tenor of those times, what flashes back to me is a cold well of fear in the stomach and a constantly aching crotch, covered with a thin veneer of goatish, biceps-knuckling bravado. From puberty on through graduation, and often beyond and into college, we were so obsessed with sex that I wonder how we hid our perpetual erections, or dragged them through the endless days and nights. We awoke to wet sheets; talked of sex on the way to school; stared and fantasized and discussed the Pinks through six entire periods; nudged as close as we could in the cars and booths and movie seats after school in order to brush, with elaborate casualness, a breast or thigh; necked desperately with whoever would let us in the long evenings after dates, in front of darkened houses and at such designated lovers’ lanes as Sope Creek, Oakland Cemetery, the public parks and the drive-ins (on the last rows, out of the lights); petted to the limits of sanity and Pinkhood if we were pinned or about to be; and then went home and jerked off guiltily and in vast relief before falling asleep, awaking damply and beginning the routine once again. Like an army of Onans, we spilled our seed mightily upon the ground, but almost never in the patch for which it was designed.
In pairs or in groups we lied elaborately about what we did to whom, and how she moaned and begged for more, and where she learned how to do the things she knew, and we tried to appear cool with each other even as we pulled sweaters and magazines over our laps to conceal the craven tents leaping in our blue jeans. We ranged as far away as the infamous Plaza Pharmacy on Ponce de Leon to buy rubbers that soon desiccated in our wallets, and the Jell who did not have on the surface of his Buxton an imprinted circle from a condom was no Jell at all. Even I had one, given to me by Snake Cheatham, who was our official Trojan and Ramses distributor, but needless to say the occasion for it never arose, and I’m not sure I would have known how to put it on if it had. And despite our preening and crowing and posturing, I don’t think many of us did. We all said we fucked. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the Jells in high school who actually did. If you didn’t, you talked about it. If you did, you didn’t. It was just that simple. The quiet ones of us were the ones that, in our secret hearts, we revered. But we simply could not manage to keep quiet about the Great American Nooky Quest that drove us like a generation of lemmings.
“Did she? Did she?” we would all snigger fiercely in homeroom, to the one of us who had announced, the day before, that scoring that night was all but accomplished.
“Fucking A,” the scorer would say carelessly, making a jaunty circle with thumb and forefinger.
“What was it like?” Breaths held, hearts pounding.
“Like bombs away, man.”
“Jesus!”
The key, of course, was the Pinks. It was a tenet of Pinkhood that a Pink knew how to promise worlds, galaxies, universes with her eyes and smile and voice, but knew, too, how to deliver virtually nothing and still keep the Jells circling. Most of the Pinks I knew could do it. I don’t know how they managed; it must have been more difficult than quantum physics, given the length and frequency of the monk sessions in the automobiles of the Jells.
Even the girls who were pinned were presumed chaste until proven otherwise, and since there was literally no way to do that except by an obvious pregnancy, the presumption held even when the couple’s automobile was seen to be rocking in the last row of the drive-in like a dory in a high gale. Virgins or not, the Pinks of Atlanta twitched through their high school years wearing chastity like armor, and the girl who screwed and liked it, or even worse, told, was out of the pack faster than a spavined yearling in a migratory caribou herd. I never knew a Buckhead Pink who had sex and admitted it except Lucy, and somehow all rules were off when it cam
e to her. The prices she paid were higher, and had been paid earlier, than any we could exact.
It was an era of incredible double standards and witless innuendo, fueled by unrequited lust and made both piquant and terrifying by the absolute taboo of pregnancy. “P.G.” or “preggers” or “knocked up” were punch lines to locker room jokes and also the words a Jell dreaded most to hear from a white-faced, tearful steady. For a Pink, pregnancy was pure and simple social suicide. I’m sure many more Buckhead girls than I knew about made predawn visits to the sinister clinic in Copper Hill, Tennessee, whose address every prudent Jell secreted in his wallet along with the Trojans, and I am equally sure a number of quiet visits to respectable Northside physicians, who just happened to be family friends, ended in more than an invoice. Snake Cheatham, who went through Emory Med and interned at Grady before he snared a residency at Piedmont, told me much later that during our college years some people whose names were most vividly and fondly inscribed in our Hi-Ways came to him asking how to terminate a pregnancy…but that was when we were, mostly, at Tech and Georgia, in the wider and looser days of fraternity parties in earnest and far more open drinking.
I knew of no illicit pregnancies though there was always talk going around. I don’t know how the Jells of my high school days coped when they got caught, if they did. Not one of the Pinks dropped abruptly out of school like one or two anonymous non-Pinks did each year. Maybe some of those summers abroad, or at relatives’ cottages at the more remote resorts, had dual purposes; I wouldn’t have known a pregnancy in those days if the water had burst at my feet. And no matter what lies and half-truths we told each other, no matter what female functions and phenomena we tittered about—breasts, buttocks, menstruation, masturbation, aphrodisiacs, sexual techniques, the dark convolvulus of the female genitalia—we would not have talked about pregnancy and abortion. It was far too terrifying and too near.
Peachtree Road Page 22
