John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Okay: Press Record now, Gracie.

Already did that, Ag: The floor's yours.

"Not to mention bed and couch and any other available surface once upon a time, hey, Aggie?"

Can it, Thelm. You were saying, Ag?

…that meet the little weenie we did, Listener dear, and talked his maiden ears off for two hours straight yesterday afternoon. More than he bargained for!

"Or could handle. Did you see how he blanched when we solved his little riddles for him in the first half hour, and how he spent the next ninety minutes looking for a way to get his tushie out of here?"

Well: It wasn't really fair to spring the three of us on him when he was expecting just me. But who could resist?

His dad sure took it in stride, back in '48. But Manny Senior was a different story.

That he was: innocent, maybe, but eager to learn, and a very quick study.

And still in his teens then, Listener, don't forget. Whereas Manny Junior at age — what, mid-forties? — is plenty learned but still innocent, in our judgment, and self-programmed to stay that way. We'd bet he's never been laid in his life.

"By either sex, was Cindy's guess when she alerted Grace that we might be hearing from him."

All the same, it was a bit much of us to pile on the Lambda Upsilon details, and offer to demonstrate …

Like hell it was, Grace. If it's social history the guy's after, he should bring a camcorder instead of just audiotape, and let us show him what we're talking about! And I don't believe for a minute that he really wants three reels of us answering his scripted interview questions, now that he knows what he's gotten himself into. He was just politely hauling ass out of here.

"Bet he won't even come back to pick up this machine."

Yes, well, girls: Growing up as our Manny's namesake and only child can't have been a picnic, right? With a mom who felt disgraced by her husband's notoriety and half suspected him of actually doing all the horny stuff he wrote about? Genius can be hard on the home folks.

"Speaking of hard-ons…"

Would you quit that, Thal?

"Nope: In the interest of full and impartial social history, Listener needs to hear that when Aggie fetched out her famous three-in-one Ace of Clubs photo card from back in her 'modeling' days, let's say, old Junie-boy got a boner despite himself. Had to keep his clipboard on his lap to cover it."

Enough already about Junie-boy: Go back and start at our beginning now, Gracie, before we fill up this whole tape with chitchat. Once upon a time there were these three little sisters— stuff like that.

As I was about to say, Listener/Junior/Whoever: Once upon a World War Twotime there were three not-so-little Navy-brat teenage sisters in Annapolis EmDee, whose combat-officer dad survived the battles of Coral Sea and Leyte Gulf but not the accidental plane crash en route home after V-J Day, while his daughters were still in high school …

And whose widow became an acute depressive soon after — as our Thelma/Thalia did not, bless her, after her husband coughed his lungs out a few years ago, nor our Grace when hers unkindly dumped her back in the seventies — per Cindy-Ella's Wye story, but with important differences. Me, if I'd ever found myself a one-and-only and then lost him, I reckon I'd've gone Mom's route. But on with our story, Grace.

So we saw poor Ma as best we could through her get-me-out-of-here stage, which she abbreviated for us with a handful of sleeping pills enjoyed in the family Chevy idling with windows down in a closed garage while the three of us were out junior-senior promming …

"Thankee there, Ma, I guess, goddamn you, poor thing."

Whereafter we managed our own adolescence, as we'd pretty much been managing it already, and not remarkably well.

But we did by God manage it, folks, on Mom's Navy-widow pension, and decided on our own to go crosstown to ASTC and learn to be schoolteachers or accountants or something, if we could hack the tuition.

Which of course we couldn't, modest as it was, on our measly summer-job and babysitting wages—

"Until Socially Active Agatha, let's call her, happened to cross paths in a Georgetown club with a homely-but-rich boy from G. Washington U. who offered her ten for a blow-job, as I remember, or twenty for a backseat shag — good money in those days."

And said sister being already more round-heeled than well-heeled (she here readily admits), she shucked her last remaining virginity — namely, her amateur status — and came home neither with ten dollars nor with twenty, but with thirty, and an offer of more where that came from if she'd see fit to accommodate a couple of his classmates next time out.

Which she did, brave girl: half a dozen beer-guzzling undergrads, in the club basement of their frat house …

Serially, mind, instead of three at a crack, those being my early apprentice days.

"And came home this time with more than our next month's apartment rent, six times whatever being what it is, and rents back then being what they were."

And came home also with her mind made up that there was her ticket to higher education: better-paying and less time-intensive than waitressing, and probably not too risky if she took the right hygienic/contraceptive precautions, steered clear of pimps and rough neighborhoods, and mainly worked the Washington/Baltimore/Annapolis college circuit.

"Bit of social history here, if I may? Before and after the time we tell of, hookers in American college neighborhoods would've been a rarity. But in the nineteen-late-forties and fifties, the GI Bill flooded the campuses with older guys who'd been around the block: guys who mightn't have considered college without that free ticket, and whose military service had acquainted them with sex for hire."

Not that commercial-coital coeds like us were a standard feature of campus life even then, Listener, by any means. But we were imaginable, at least.

"Never mind imaginable, Aggie: We were real. "

It sure felt real, anyhow, for better or worse. You were saying, Grace?

. .. that Aggie having blazed the trail, so to speak, and pointed the way to our B.A.s at ASTC, we followed her lead: Thelma less reluctantly than I, I guess, although she was still only seventeen—

As opposed to our worldly-wise eighteen and a half…

— but I no less determinedly, since my heart was set on going to college.

"Gracie being the family scholar, as well as our record-keeper. And mind you, Listener: This particular seventeen-year-old had been around the block herself a few times already."

So we got down to business—

So to speak. And did we ever! Separately and together…

Never on our own campus, for propriety's sake, but working the student hangouts in Annapolis, Georgetown, and College Park—

Where the big state U. is, Listener, and the take per trick was less than at the private colleges, but the customer-count was higher.

Mostly war vets, as established, but occasional tenderfeet as well — including first-timers, who were less intimidated by us nice coed types than they would've been by bona fide hookers. And mostly in the guys' cars (the ones who had cars in those days) or off-campus rooms and apartments, but now and then in their fraternity houses.

"Which brings us… ta-da! …"

To a certain spring Saturday in '48: Harry Truman winding up his term as FDR's successor and facing Thomas E. Dewey in the upcoming election, which we roundheel coeds weren't old enough yet to vote in. And just as we're finishing dinner and discussing where to peddle our merchandise that evening, and whether Arundel State Teachers T-shirts would be a turnoff or a come-hither on Wisconsin Avenue and environs, we get a call from a very nervous-sounding lad up at Mason-Dixon U.: a turf we'd had our eyes on, it being the most prestigious hereabouts, but hadn't had a shot at yet.