The Neighbors

This is one of those posts that is probably going to irritate my wife... It's not because I was attracted to other women before I met her. It's that (after 40 years) I can still describe the circumstances in such excruciating detail... She probably thinks I've been obsessing over them all this time but I honestly haven't. Those particular memories simply don't degrade much. And since the whole point of this blog is to explore how I came to be who I am it would be disingenuous not to talk about them, right?

But just to be perfectly clear: My wife the only woman I have ever wanted to spend my life with. Period... I mean - who else would put up with me???

And on to the subject at hand:

There was a young newlywed couple living next door to us on Mohican Street in Denton, Texas back in 1971. The woman appeared to be in her early 20s and was a preschool teacher. Her husband was closer to 30 and was a gas station manager. And they drove identical lime green Fiat 850 Spyders - which (as near as I could tell) was the only thing they had in common :-)

The wife (whose name I no longer recall) was a "natural" type - long, wavy, sandy blonde hair - blue eyes - often wore long flowing dresses - usually without "upper body support" (if you get my drift)... At first I wondered why she never wore makeup. I mean, if she looked that good without it, then... And that was when I realized just how stupid and shallow my concept of beauty was... Yes - she's the reason I started trying to look beyond the "packaging" to the person behind it... Of course, it's now forty years later and I'm still not "there" yet, but that's not the point of this post :-)

The story actually started with those bald tires on my 1966 Charger...

Aside: Nowadays I would have gone to a chain discount tire store, but there weren't any back then. The major brands (like Goodyear and Firestone) had their own outlets but they were rather pricey. You could get tires at department stores but most folks just went to a service station... Yeah - a service station was kind of like a gas station except they also sold tires and batteries and had mechanics who did stuff like tuneups, mufflers, shocks and brakes... Back then almost everyone took their cars to service stations for pretty much everything. But then the advent of computerized engine controls jacked up the cost of offering repair services to the point where smaller operations were no longer profitable, and that's why our younger generation no longer know what a "service station" is... But I digress...

So it came to pass that I took the Charger to a station on highway 380 that always had bunches of tires out front. And "lo and behold" - the station's manager turned out to be my next door neighbor. We recognized each other immediately (he even gave me a discount) and that's what makes what happened next all the more puzzling.

But first: My new tires said "Scat Cat" on them in raised white letters. (The manufacturer later got sued by J.C. Penney for infringing their "Scat Trac" trademark but that's irrelevant.) One evening I was at a red light in Denton when a couple of black guys in a Camaro rolled up next to me. The driver pointed at my tires, said something to his buddy and they both started laughing uncontrollably... I don't know if it was a fecal joke or what - I still have no clue what could possibly have been so damn funny about those tires :-)

And on to what happened next:

As I waited in the office for my car to be done the manager decided to regale me and a couple of his employees with tales of his sexual exploits. He started with a graphic and detailed description of his wife's intimate body parts, and he talked about everything she did to him and how she did it (with lots of colorful analogies). He even explained how he coerced her into do things she didn't really want to do... This went on for at least ten minutes and the whole time I was sitting there thinking "You unimaginable bastard! She's your wife! Does that not mean anything to you???"... It was one of the few times in my life I've had an overwhelming urge to beat the living shit out of someone...

And fast forward a couple of weeks:

It was warm, sunny day and I was out in the driveway working on the Charger. I was having trouble focusing because the wife next door was weeding her flower garden in a halter top and cutoffs and she was positioned in a way that exposed more of her derriere than she probably realized... It was kind of hard to ignore :-)

(BTW: It later occurred to me that she might have been deliberately teasing me but I honestly don't think that's the case. More likely she was totally oblivious to her own hotness.)

Long story short - I dropped a screwdriver and when I reached for it my watchband welded itself to the "hot" terminal of the alternator. By the time I managed to yank it loose it had burned the hell out of my wrist...

I must have made quite a fuss because the next thing I knew she was by my side asking what had happened. I showed her the burns but didn't mention the role her ass had played in causing them :-) She led me into her house and sat me down on the couch while she ran to the kitchen to get some ice and butter, and as she doctored my wrist (a strangely pleasurable experience despite the excruciating pain) we started to talk.
Now - I was usually tongue-tied around attractive women, but something about her put me at ease... As it turned out, her parents had divorced when she was 13, her mother was something of a "free spirit" and they had moved around a lot too... Yeah - deja-vu...

We had been sitting on the couch talking for close to an hour when her husband walked in... You should have seen the look on his face... He must have been panic stricken that I had violated the "guy code", but it was clear from her demeanor that I hadn't said a word... Still, it didn't take long to figure out that he was not OK with my having been alone with his wife, so I quickly thanked her and left.

I suspect he read her the riot act about the dangers of consorting with strange young men (especially me) because she never said more than a couple of words to me after that... And in the months that followed I often wondered how it came to be that such a sweet young woman married such a vile sack of shit... I mean, she had to suspect, right?...

I didn't live on Mohican Street for much longer so I have no idea how the story ended. I hope she came to realize that she deserved better, but my years of volunteering at a family law clinic make me suspect otherwise... Sigh - I've given up trying to understand it...

But more importantly: I never wore a watch while working on a car again :-)