Other than that, and letting the air out the tires of a few cars parked on the seawall, the night was uneventful. I remember thinking Denny might have slashed a few.
Nothing much happened at the base on Sundays. The club closed at ten, and even though it was summer and we were high school students, somehow the pattern that Monday begins another hard workweek seemed ingrained from birth. Was certainly true for the grown-ups in our lives. This was blue-collar turf, Pasadena, South Houston, La Porte, Kemah. Less us versus the Russians and more beer versus the Baptists.
The Baptists reigned in Pasadena, keeping the city dry and free of alcohol, but the city limits were well defined in every direction. But just like the television comics said, “Wherever you find four Baptists, you’ll always find a fifth,” and sure enough, lingering just across the street from the city proper lay a steamy world of cheap fluorescent lights, private clubs and bars, pickup trucks, sleek Chevys and Pontiacs with darktinted windshields, and women in tight, tight skirts inside and outside the “beer joints,” as my mother and her friends called them in disgust. Even the Klan had an office, KKK Headquarters, on busy College Avenue in Pasadena, frequented by good Baptists and Methodists both, and conveniently located two doors down from the Veterans of Foreign Wars Private Club.
Denny showed up the next Tuesday, asking again for Sherry, but his pleas were half-hearted. He didn’t stay long. Come Friday, he caught me sneaking my nightly drink, this time the remains of an expensive whiskey from Sherry’s favorite customer, a major who always had “way too much to drink,” according to the club manager. The major had a way about him as smooth as the whiskey he drank. When he got real drunk he’d stroke his wife’s wrist with one hand and Sherry’s tight butt with the other. Sherry always smiled and put up with it, earning her tip.
But the club manager had another problem. Confronting an officer about his drinking was risky, so he and the waitresses had their ways of keeping order. A favorite ploy was letting him take a sip from the stout drink, then replacing it with a watered-down version while he wasn’t looking.
But they couldn’t watch the front and back doors at the same time, so if I wasn’t choosy and didn’t mind somebody else’s germs, I could always get my drink, in this case the stout one.
“You on for tonight?” Denny said.
“You bet. I’ll tell the guys.”
“You do that.”
We ponied up the bucks, and Denny stuffed the bills in his pocket and pulled away to blues music blaring from his car radio.
“I hate niggers,” Denny called to me out the car window, “but I love their music.”
I hated blues, and being a big Boston Celtics fan, I kind of liked Bill Russell and the Jones boys, so I didn’t go along with Denny on the racial score either. But questioning Denny’s taste in music or anything else, well… I and Velma ain’t stupid, my favorite line from West Side Story.
That night we stayed on base. Maybe Denny thought he might’ve rushed his boys into a little too much mischief, time to back off some. We climbed over the wire fence to the officers’ swimming pool, Olympic-sized with black lane strips on the bottom for competitions, and a three-tiered diving board. Even the dressing rooms were plush, with blue carpet and a drink bar.
The doors were locked, but that didn’t stop Denny. He jimmied the lock with a screwdriver while we dangled our feet in the deep end. He soon appeared poolside with two fifths, one of rum and one of vodka.
I must’ve thrown up a dozen times that night, mostly out the window-and I was the designated driver-and capped it off with a nice bubbly mouthful of sour shrimp, which covered my pillow in the morning.
Denny coasted for a few weeks. We drank some beers and flung the empties into the officers’ pool. Some evenings, once a week or so, we drove to the moneyed suburbs, and Denny cut his car across yards, destroying manicured flowerbeds and flattening hedges. “Small crimes,” he would say, laughing.
As for me and my buds, we were scared at first, real scared, but after a while we knew Denny was above it all. We would never get caught. He wouldn’t let us get caught. None of us ever questioned the logic of a forty-five-year-old man running around with teenagers. Bobby, Charles, Eddie, and me, we were cool teenagers, cool enough to be Denny’s buds, that was our reasoning. One Saturday morning, we drove over to the pawnshop on Red Bluff Boulevard and bought ourselves switchblades, flashy cheap ones with long thin blades. Cheap because we knew we’d get kicked out of school if we got caught carrying ’em.
Summer two-a-days were starting up for the football team. Me and Bobby and Eddie lived near the high school, and since we had afternoons off, we sometimes hung out around the field watching practice. We had some track stars, state champs in the sprints, and it was cool to see Freddy Randall, a coach’s kid and our quarterback, launch a spiral while the jackrabbits outran everybody and grabbed a long one.
Then one day a defensive back, fooled at first, somehow caught up with Jimmy Whitson, one of the sprinters, and swatted a pass away. Nobody said a word, not even the coaches, and for a minute I thought maybe we hadn’t seen what we just saw, someone outrun the state quarter-mile champion. That was only the beginning. When the guy took off his helmet and we saw that he was black, we all sucked air.
“Oh shit,” said Bobby. No school in Pasadena had ever had a black student, as far as we knew, and certainly no football player.
“Case,” a coach hollered, and the newcomer ran to the sideline. He didn’t play anymore, not for the rest of practice.
When we climbed into the car to go, Eddie said, “Don’t go yet. I want to see what he’s driving.”
Near the end of August, Denny turned impatient on us, getting jumpy and nervous. Waiting was over. His time had come. After all, we were headed back to school after Labor Day. Next-to-last Friday, Denny was waiting for us at the pool. “Beer’s in the car,” he said, no-nonsense. “We don’t have much time, that’s what you boys tell me, so we better get going.”
We piled in the car and he laid rubber. In twenty minutes we were on the Gulf Freeway heading north. Two, three beers apiece and we were back in the groove. When we reached the turnoff to Gulfgate, Houston’s first shopping mall, Denny turned east and pulled to the shoulder.
“You take the wheel,” he told me. “Let’s take a drive through the neighborhood.”
I turned into a ten-year-old suburb, or what was built to be a suburb but now skirted downtown, and drove slowly down the dark, paved corridors of homes too close together and overhanging Chinese tallow trees.
“Looks like trash pickup is tomorrow,” Denny said, noting the cans lining every curb. “Pull over.”
He hopped out, grabbing the car keys on the way, and tossed a heavy metal container, brimming with refuse, into the trunk. He flipped me the keys.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To the overpass.”
I drove the five minutes back to the freeway overpass. Though it was now almost three a.m., a steady flow of traffic sped below us, sixteen-wheelers avoiding city traffic, latenight revelers headed home.
“Stop!”
I crossed the overpass and pulled over.
“What are you doing? I told you to stop.”
“I did stop,” I said.
“On the overpass. Now back up so we’re on the overpass.”
A freeway is a freeway, and though this was Interstate 10 and not the heavily trafficked Gulf Freeway, it was still a freeway, and backing up on a freeway is asking to make the morning headlines.
“Do it!”
I did as I was told. I parked near the guardrails.
“Leave it running.” Denny moved with speed and purpose, lifting the trash can over the railing and flinging it to the freeway below.