Don't hang up

The Orlons

In 1962, I had a bicycle on which I had mounted a tractor steering wheel  I picked up for fifty cents at a dump on the outskirts of Leavenworth, Kansas.  The wheel was still attached to the long steel rod which ran down to the steering mechanism on the tractor, so when I got home, I took a hack saw and laboriously sawed off the universal joint dangling from its end.  I removed the handlebars and steering post from my bike and tried jamming the tractor rod into the resulting hole, and what do you know but it fit!

We were living in a rental house on 16th Street on the western edge of Leavenworth while my father served what was known as a “hardship tour” in South Korea near the border with North Korea keeping the peace in the ceasefire that was less than ten years old at that time.  Assignment to Korea that year was a real and emotional hardship for him, because he was a survivor of the infamous “Gauntlet,” a bloody retreat of the 2nd Infantry Division through a valley near Kunu-ri.  The Chinese army set up roadblocks overnight that had been undetected by American forces advancing south and the division was trapped along the road, which was soon filled with wrecked vehicles and wounded and dead soldiers.  Dad would later describe it to me as a “slaughterhouse.”  More than 4,000 soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division lost their lives.  It was “a miracle” he survived, he told me.

I used to ride my bike down Osage Street all the way across town to my girlfriend’s house which was on a bombed-out block of rundown houses east of 3rd Street near the Missouri River.  Her name was Fawn, and her house was an unpainted shotgun with a front porch that sat beneath a porch roof held precariously aloft by rotting columns. 

Fawn’s father was doing something like eight years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for bank fraud, which consisted of him trying to pass counterfeit checks he had gotten a partner to print up for him down in Kansas City.  Fawn was a willowy blonde about two inches taller than me who was in the ninth grade at the junior high school in town. We met one day after school playing pinball at a candy store on the south side of town.  Every Friday we would meet up at Teentown, a club for teenagers downtown that consisted of a large dimly lit room in an old storefront with a Coke machine and a jukebox.  I fell for her the first time I asked her to dance.  Man, could she dance!  Every time I hear the song by The Orlons “Don’t Hang Up,” I think of dancing in a cloud of teenage cigarette smoke at Teentown with Fawn, spinning across the floor, hair flying, skirt fanned out, and me in a blur of 15-year-old hormones and desire.

I used to ride my bike over to her house and we would dance in her bedroom to 45’s she played on a little record player on her dresser.  We told ourselves we were practicing for the dance contests they held at Teentown every month, but really we were just filling up with the thrill of each other’s touch, luxuriating in the drunken rhythms of “Let Me In,” by The Sensations, and “Dear Lady Twist” by Gary U.S. Bonds, and “Lover Please” by Clyde McPhatter, and “Do You Love Me,” by The Contours. 

Fawn’s mother was usually in the kitchen ironing or sitting in a straight back chair smoking and gazing absentmindedly through the backyard at the house on the next street which was undistinguishable from theirs – another rundown shotgun, one room leading to the next, a single bathroom plonked down off a narrow hallway in the middle, the kitchen at the rear.  She used to bake sugar cookies and bring them to us on a plate in Fawn’s bedroom still hot from the oven.  I don’t remember ever seeing her mother in anything but her “housecoat” as women’s bathrobes were called.  I didn’t know what depression was back then, but I knew they were poor and struggled from week to week on money her mother earned from “taking in” laundry from families that lived uptown.  I have an image of her standing in the kitchen under a single overhead lightbulb at the ironing board with a cigarette in her mouth, her hair tied back with a gingham scarf, her right arm moving endlessly across the hot cotton of a shirt or a pair of men’s underwear or a woman’s blouse or a little girl’s flouncy dress. 

I used to work several nights of the week babysitting for a Catholic family with eight children up on the post at Fort Leavenworth.  They were so happy to have found a kid who could feed and bathe and put eight kids to bed, they didn’t mind when I showed up with Fawn late one afternoon before they went out to a party and asked if it was alright that we “did our homework together.”  I had gotten my driver’s license at 14, and it wasn’t technically legal to drive at night at 15, but my mother said it was okay since I was working for that nice Catholic family on the post.  I’d pick up Fawn down on Osage and we’d drive up to Fort Leavenworth, and after the parents left for their cocktail party or dinner-dance at the Officer’s Club or wherever they were going, Fawn and I would feed the kids, including the 1-year-old in the highchair.  Then I would fill the tub in the bathroom upstairs and pour a full bottle of “Bubble Up,” a kid bath product that came in a bottle shaped like a clown.  I would line the kids up in the hall naked with towels over their arms and take them one at a time into the bathroom and dip them like sheep several times into the tub seething with “Bubble Up” and pull them out and on the nights she was there, Fawn would take a towel and dry them off and help them into their PJ’s.  When we had sheep-dipped them, we would put them to bed and head down to the basement where we would play records and dance and make out until the parents got home.

One time, the kids’ mother told me she just loved waking them up in the morning because they “smell so good, and they’re so pink!”  I didn’t bother telling her it was a result of the full bottle of “Bubble Up” having removed a couple of layers of skin from each of them.

My babysitting rate was 50 cents an hour, which usually worked out to $2, or $2.50.  Having had a few, the husband, an Army major, would sometimes pull a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and hand it to me with a wink and a whisper not to tell his wife.  Fawn and I would spend it on a movie with popcorn and Cokes and have enough left over to buy 45’s of “Palisades Park” by Freddy Cannon, and “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and “Party Lights” by Claudine Clark, and “Baby It’s You” by The Shirelles.

It was a good year for us, 1962.  Fawn and I danced in her bedroom, we danced in the Major’s basement, and we won a couple of dance contests at Teentown, too.