Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Sal led the way, words rushing from him in a torrent, Max and I behind him, carried along by the talk of God and blow jobs and beer and the Navy, words pulsing like blood. Friday night: all right! We left the locker club and crossed the highway, Sal’s long legs striding ahead, his crew cut at attention, like nails banged into his skull, the sky a lavender wash, cars pulling up in front of Billy’s, and Sal ignoring them, marching on down the highway, our fearless leader.

He turned right at the Baptist church, walking as if he’d been coming here all his life, pushing across a lumpy field to the unpaved driveway and past the white-painted church, until we could hear guitars and fiddles up ahead and a blurry voice on a bad microphone and we were following Sal across a lot to another low white wooden building: the Community Hall. A wide flight of stairs led to doors opening into the hall, the fiddle music louder as Sal led us closer, pointing at a sign saying SQUARE DANCE TONIGHT as if it were a caption to some exotic photograph. Off to the right were a dozen parked cars, a few pickup trucks, at least one hot rod. Behind the hall was a dense green wall of pine trees.

“Sal, I can’t go in here,” Max said. “I’m a Jew. It ain’t—”

“Come on, they got the greatest-looking broads in all of Pensacola in here— trust me!”

At the top of the steps, two young women sat at a card table selling tickets. Looming behind them was a gaunt somber man in black somber clothes. Rimless glasses perched on his long knuckled nose. “Dig the preacher!” Sal whispered. “His nose looks like a prick !” The terrible thing was that it did, right down to its knobby tip, and we started giggling as Sal handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the girls and asked for three tickets. The preacher stepped forward. His extra prick quivered above his thin mouth.

“Excuse me, young man,” he said, holding up a hand to the girls before they could tear any tickets off the roll. “I must warn you. This is a Christian affair. Neither liquor nor beer nor rowdy behavior will be tolerated.”

“Reverend,” Sal said, in a smooth, radio announcer voice, “do I look like a drinker? A rowdy ? Why, I read in the Pensacola Journal about how you’re helpin’ all the young people with your wholesome dances and I tell, you, Reverend, the things that go on in the Navy, they just would turn your stomach. My friends here, they feel like me, they want a little goodness in their lives, somethin’ truly wholesome and truly American.”

The extra prick quivered again, as if sensing the presence of the wiles of Satan, but unable to prove anything.

“Well,” the preacher said, “you’ve been warned.”

He turned around and went into the hall. Sal then leaned down to the two young women. One was about fifteen, her hair tied back in a ponytail; her grin was crooked from trying to hide braces, but her breasts rose impressively beneath a dark-blue cotton dress; I had a tough time keeping my eyes off them. The other was a woman: maybe twenty-two, a strawberry blonde, thin, with a disappointed mouth and hungry eyes. “Well,” Sal said to the younger one, switching to his Rhett Butler voice, “you sure are a dee-lahtful lookin’ youngun.” And then turned in a more courtly manner to the older one. “And you must be her baby sister.” She struggled against a smile. “Can I have the honor of the fust dance with you, my darlin’?” She giggled and the younger girl flushed. “Ah do hope,” Sal said, “that it will be a waltz …”

He took his three tickets, and turned to us. “Gentlemen,” he said and led the way into the hall. The younger one said, “Yawl have fun, y’heah?” And the older one stared after Sal.

The hall was very crowded and there were more women than men. “Will you look at all the ginch in here?” Sal whispered. “Am I smart or am I smart?”

“Yeah, but listen to the music,” Max said. “What do you dance to this music?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sal said. “Because the broads don’t care. All their guys are off at the war someplace, and they’re here . The guys write these stupid letters, all full of moony romantic bullshit from greeting cards, and the women are sittin’ around, living with their mothers, or worse, the guy’s mother, and so they go out … Looking … And how can they go to the Dirt Bar? Or Trader Jon’s? Where can they go where the old man won’t get pissed if he hears about it? So they go to church . I mean, just look at them: gettin’ wet just seein’ us walk in the door.”

“I still don’t know what to dance to this music,” Max said.

“It bothers you so much, don’t even try,” Sal said. “Just go out in the woods and fuck to it.”

We moved along the side of the crowded hall. The band was up on a raw pine stage, the musicians dressed in coveralls and flannel shirts and straw cowboy hats: two fiddlers, a bass guitar player, a balding man on piano. There was no drummer. I remembered reading in Down Beat that for centuries the drum was banned in the South because the old slave owners were afraid the slaves would use it to send messages. Messages like “Kill the fucking owners tonight.” So for rhythm, hillbilly music depended on bass players and the strong left hands of piano players. This band was playing “Jambalaya,” with the piano player handling the singing in a nasal Hank Williams twang; he couldn’t sing, but he did have a hard left hand.

We walked casually along the side of the hall, studying the girls. They were all sizes and shapes, big and fat, tall and skinny, short and round, and some with big-titted narrow-waisted long-legged big-assed bodies right out of the movies. The tall girls wore flats and the short girls wore heels. None of them wore makeup, the devil’s paint. They were clustered in small groups, their eyes darting in our direction, for a second locking into contact, then shying away, dissolving into giggles. And moving among their fleshiness, their hair and cheeks and breasts, their sweet milky odor, I thought about Eden Santana.

The following night I would be with her, but this was Friday, not Saturday, and there I was, out on the town with Sal and Max, looking at other women and aching for them. What was wrong with me? How could I feel the way I thought I felt about Eden and still want to take one of these horny Baptist women off to the dark woods? And then I thought: Why not? She could be out somewhere with Mercado: right then, as I stood alone in the crowded hall. And suppose she didn’t show up on Saturday night? Suppose she treated me like some dumb kid? Another sailor, to laugh at. Anyway, I just had a date with her. I wasn’t going steady with her, for Chrissakes. I wondered how she would look here at this dance and what I would think of her among all these young women. But that image just wouldn’t come. She was from somewhere else in the world, not New York, but not here either. And then (not yet eighteen, not yet an ex-Catholic, a virgin except for Dixie Shafer’s fleshy embrace) I felt oddly guilty, as if just being there was a kind of betrayal.

“Get’em while they’re wet!” Sal whispered, and hurried to a group of girls, peeled off a small stocky blonde and led her to the dance floor. “He’s nuts,” Max said. “Committable.” Sal was dancing with the blonde in a wild foot-stomping hee-hawing style that made the girl laugh and forced other dancers to clear some room. A brown-haired girl came over to Max. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll show your friend!” And then a tall redhead took my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Evelyn” and we were all out on the floor, dancing and yelling, and following Sal’s moves, mixing them with Lindy Hops and jitterbug and a little bit of mambo, cutting one another with sudden moves, putting on a New York street show (I thought proudly) until the number ended. Evelyn was breathless. “Well, than kyew,” she said, and looked scared. I said, “A pleasure.” And she hurried away. I wasn’t sure whether it was my dancing or the word “pleasure” that scared her, but she vanished into the crowd.