I spent as much time as possible with Jeana. There was a part of me that got very depressed when I looked at Jeana and thought of the future. In a year’s time we would be splitting apart. I was going to college 350 miles away, and she would be staying back home, a heartbreakingly beautiful girl in her senior year. No way was she going to wait for me, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to. I had no idea how that was going to go. Would she break up with me? Would I have to break it off with her? Our feelings for each other now were far deeper than they had been before.
Many years before, on my first shot, we had broken up at the end of that first year. Later, in college, I had called her out of the blue, and we had gone out to dinner, to see if there was anything still there. There wasn’t. We had changed, me as much as her. She was far more worldly and sophisticated, no longer a little high school kid, and to be fair, my life had moved on as well. Thomas Wolfe was right, you can’t go home again.
Right now, however, I was still dating the prettiest girl in town. I still couldn’t figure out what she saw in me, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Hell of an analogy, Jeana didn’t look at all like a horse!)
As I told Jeana, we wouldn’t have to break up when she went to Loch Raven High. What with my schedule for classes over at Towson State, it was actually fairly easy for me, at least half the time, to drive over and pick her up. She rode home with me instead of on the school bus, and if we just managed to make a stop along the way at my apartment, nobody seemed to notice. I actually felt relatively comfortable hanging around with her and her friends over there, since it was a new school primarily made up of transfers from Towson High. On my first go-around, I dated a girl my senior year who attended Dulaney Valley, our archrival to the north, and I always felt very uncomfortable there.
Now, not only could I take Jeana to school dances or plays at Towson, she could invite me over to Loch Raven for their events. Every girl likes to be taken to events, and Jeana was no different. The interesting thing to me was school plays and band concerts. After Marilyn and I started working for her father in the mid-Eighties, we built a house in a small town outside of Cooperstown, with a central school K-12 of barely 800 kids. School plays and concerts were awful, because the tryouts consisted of making sure everybody had a pulse. At Towson High, with three grades consisting of almost 2,000 students, we had enough people that they actually had tryouts and the kids had to learn their lines and compete for parts. Our senior year musical was The Music Man, and the male lead ended up going to Hollywood and becoming a real actor, though in character roles and bit parts. Still, there was an obvious depth of talent available.
The last few weeks of April through the last few weeks of May are prom season. This year I could take Jeana to three formal dances, and she went nuts figuring out dresses and outfits. We had the Senior Prom at Towson, and Junior-Senior Proms at both Towson and Loch Raven. I would only need to rent a tux for my senior prom; for the other two, a dark suit and new shirt would be sufficient. This was all in the day before people started getting crazy, with renting limos and party rooms at hotels and such. The most elaborate thing any of us did was when Tusker, one of the more flamboyant bikers and Vo-Tech students, and possessed of shoulder length red hair and a magnificent mustache, went all out on an all white tuxedo, top hat, and walking stick. He looked spectacular!
Tusker was a good friend of mine, and he was a real character. He had flunked his sophomore year and been held back. He had actually run for class president in our senior year, on the platform that he had an extra year of experience! Made sense to me! He lost, but still managed to beat out some of the other senior suckups.
Jeana wore a couple of cocktail dresses to the junior-senior proms, but did the evening gown routine again for our senior prom. Mrs. Colosimo insisted I come early each night, so she could get pictures of us, and my mother made me bring Jeana over the night of our senior prom, so she could get pictures. Jeana hinted to me that she was wearing something similar to last year for each prom, which I took to mean stockings and not pantyhose. This made me really look forward to finding out, and more than a little surprised that she would consider this while wearing above-the-knee cocktail dresses. She did, however, so I decided to surprise her as well.
At the end of the last break during the Towson High junior-senior dance, the first of the two junior-senior dances, I pulled her around the corner in the gym, into a very dark spot, and before she could stop me, I reached under her dress and pulled her lace panties off. I tucked those in my pocket and led her back out to the dance floor. Jeana was very nervous about this, as stockings themselves were extremely daring for the time, and she stayed on my arm the rest of the evening like glue. She did whisper in my ear, however, that she was incredibly turned on, and wanted to leave almost as soon as I did this, and not out of embarrassment. We never even made it back to my apartment before she was crawling across the bench seat of the Galaxie and pleading for me to stop and screw her right there in the car. I just smiled and drove to the apartment, where I took care of her in a more comfortable setting.
Chapter 22: End Of The Year
Saturday, June 9, 1973
School was over. Finals had been this week, and now they were done. Towson State had finished a couple of weeks earlier. I was basically all set. I had the credits I needed to graduate, early acceptance at RPI, and even my formal letter of acceptance into ROTC. I was signed up for a few more humanities and social sciences classes at Towson State this summer, to kill some time and pick up some more easy credits.
The most amazing thing to me was that I was the class valedictorian. This was the student with the highest grades in the class, and it seemed as if the college credits I had aced weighed more than high school credits. The really crazy part was that neither time I went through this I had been asked to join the National Honor Society. This just proved to me that it was totally about favoritism and school politics and nothing about grades. When Parker went through high school, he ended up as salutatorian (number 2 in grades) and was asked to join. When Maggie followed him a few years later, with even better grades, but a don’t fuck with me attitude, she wasn’t asked to join. How I became valedictorian without being asked amazed me.
But valedictorian I was, and now, instead of sitting with my classmates, I would sit up on the stage and have to make a speech. Graduation itself was being held off campus, since we simply didn’t have the facilities to handle it. I had a graduating class of about 660, and if you figured each of those 660 had 4–5 family members coming, you needed seats for almost 4,000. We actually were having graduation over at Essex Community College, over on the far side of the county.
I wasn’t sure I was inviting anybody, except maybe Jeana. Once I moved out of the house, I changed my address with the school to my new PO Box. However, this was in the days before massive databases, and school records were a hodgepodge of written records, some kept in the school office, some at the county Board of Education, and still others spread around to places like the counseling office. Before I even had a chance to decide if I wanted guests, my mother called to say she had received the tickets already. I just shrugged silently and got a spare ticket for Jeana. If Hamilton showed up and fucked with me, I’d just kill him on the spot and let Dad handle it.
I really thought hard about my speech. When I was 17 the first time, I was terribly afraid of public speaking. I didn’t become comfortable with speaking in front of groups until I was older and going to grad school. Once you are in an MBA program, you end up speaking to lots of classes about business plans and presentations, and I got over my nerves. I wasn’t worried at all now about speaking. I just wondered what the acoustics would be like. The school gives you a bunch of suggested topics a few weeks ahead of time, with lots of crap like how we are marching into the future, and bullshit like that.