I became a worrywart at the end of World War Two which all began...
IN THE THE WINTER OF 1946 WHEN...
GWYNETH THE WHORE'S HUSBAND came home from the war. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man man by the name of Jake who had been a Japanese prisoner for 3 years. But when he went into his old home on Jasmine Street in Denver there were no Welcome Home signs and no Gwyneth either. He took a taxi to the Ship Tavern on 17th Street inside of the Brown Palace Hotel and got very drunk. Then he started tossing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men's room and punched out another man at the bar. The Police came. They took him to jail. He stayed in jail overnight. The next day he left our neighborhood and never came back.
While Jake had been away Gwyneth had been playing house with both single and married men from Lowry Field Army Air Force Base almost every night. Gwyneth did not seem to be a woman who was cut-out to make a husband proud - thus the nickname, whore. She was, however, one who could make 10 year-old boys like me whisper and giggle with delight. She had hazel eyes and dark-brown hair and very long-tanned legs, which we would later learn that she had derived from sunbathing in the nude out in her backyard on lazy summer's afternoons; she also seemed fond of sitting of sitting on her front porch as Carl Johnson and I played a game of catch in my yard across the street; then liked to wink at us and hike-up her skirt and show us that she was not wearing any panties. And up until the day that she eventually moved away, both Carl and I thought that she was a most spectacular visual sight.
My Dad did not. When I told him what she had been doing because I trusted him completely and knew that he would not tell Mom, he said: We adults call women like that exhibitionists, Son. That means that she gets a kick-out of showing-off her body to men. Women like that can give you certain diseases with names like syphilis and gonorrhea. You can transmit that disease to others. It's not a good deal. You could go blind. You might even go insane. I then began to wonder if a kid my age could get diseases like that, suddenly go blind-as-a-bat, become as crazy-as-a-loon, and be institutionalized in an insane asylum with other nut jobs by the time I was 11 years-old, from just taking a peek now-and-again at a woman who liked to lift her skirt up?
It was at that very moment when other things began to to bother me and my Worrywart Syndrome began.
The war might be over, but the shortages were not, and into our kitchen marched margarine, along with the onset of the above mentioned Worrywart Syndrome. My Mother told me that the butter people would not allow the margarine to be pre-mixed, so she'd place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkled them with a yellowish powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn until the results looked vaguely like butter. I was almost certain that the dreaded Nazis had absconded with all of the butter in the entire world, and substituted it with margarine, which was probably filled with either cyanide or some sort of a laxative like Milk of Magnesia; in order to weaken our immune system and eventually take over America without having to fire so much as a single shot. So I decided that if that were the case, and if I could not have butter, which was naturally yellow, then I would have nothing. Shortly after that, the rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally butter, and I thought that I was about to be happy again.
IN THE THE WINTER OF 1946 WHEN...
GWYNETH THE WHORE'S HUSBAND came home from the war. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man man by the name of Jake who had been a Japanese prisoner for 3 years. But when he went into his old home on Jasmine Street in Denver there were no Welcome Home signs and no Gwyneth either. He took a taxi to the Ship Tavern on 17th Street inside of the Brown Palace Hotel and got very drunk. Then he started tossing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men's room and punched out another man at the bar. The Police came. They took him to jail. He stayed in jail overnight. The next day he left our neighborhood and never came back.
While Jake had been away Gwyneth had been playing house with both single and married men from Lowry Field Army Air Force Base almost every night. Gwyneth did not seem to be a woman who was cut-out to make a husband proud - thus the nickname, whore. She was, however, one who could make 10 year-old boys like me whisper and giggle with delight. She had hazel eyes and dark-brown hair and very long-tanned legs, which we would later learn that she had derived from sunbathing in the nude out in her backyard on lazy summer's afternoons; she also seemed fond of sitting of sitting on her front porch as Carl Johnson and I played a game of catch in my yard across the street; then liked to wink at us and hike-up her skirt and show us that she was not wearing any panties. And up until the day that she eventually moved away, both Carl and I thought that she was a most spectacular visual sight.
My Dad did not. When I told him what she had been doing because I trusted him completely and knew that he would not tell Mom, he said: We adults call women like that exhibitionists, Son. That means that she gets a kick-out of showing-off her body to men. Women like that can give you certain diseases with names like syphilis and gonorrhea. You can transmit that disease to others. It's not a good deal. You could go blind. You might even go insane. I then began to wonder if a kid my age could get diseases like that, suddenly go blind-as-a-bat, become as crazy-as-a-loon, and be institutionalized in an insane asylum with other nut jobs by the time I was 11 years-old, from just taking a peek now-and-again at a woman who liked to lift her skirt up?
It was at that very moment when other things began to to bother me and my Worrywart Syndrome began.
The war might be over, but the shortages were not, and into our kitchen marched margarine, along with the onset of the above mentioned Worrywart Syndrome. My Mother told me that the butter people would not allow the margarine to be pre-mixed, so she'd place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkled them with a yellowish powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn until the results looked vaguely like butter. I was almost certain that the dreaded Nazis had absconded with all of the butter in the entire world, and substituted it with margarine, which was probably filled with either cyanide or some sort of a laxative like Milk of Magnesia; in order to weaken our immune system and eventually take over America without having to fire so much as a single shot. So I decided that if that were the case, and if I could not have butter, which was naturally yellow, then I would have nothing. Shortly after that, the rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally butter, and I thought that I was about to be happy again.
Which turned out to be a short-lived dream. It was then that the family went to our usual Saturday night movie at the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue to see It's A Wonderful Life with James Stewart; and as the newsreel came onto the screen, the voice of Mel Allen began giving the names of concentration camps like "Buchenwald" and "Auschwitz," which were filled with emaciated men in striped pajamas, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their arms like dowels, their mouths slack, and I said to myself You have it good, you have a bed, you have pancakes, you are not from Buchenwald, you have a Mom and a Dad, and you are not a Jew. That night I lay in the dark, thinking that perhaps my parents were fibbing to me and that we were actually Jewish, too; that they were afraid to tell me the truth. It took courage to ask my Dad if it were true that I was not a Jew. He assured me that we were not. That we were, in fact, Lutherans. Although I was uncertain as to what a Lutheran actually was, I was greatly relieved.
That, too, did not last.
Winter refused to end. After school, every afternoon, I would walk from Montclair Elementary School down Monaco Parkway to our homes on Jasmine Street with another neighbor, Jerry Derryberry, my head bent into the wind. Jerry asked me one afternoon if I might be interested in diddling her twat when we got home. I took a moment to ponder the question since I was unsure what diddling meant or what a twat was, and finally said that I didn't think would be interested in doing something like that. The very next afternoon my best friend, Bobby Dixon, informed me that Jerry was telling everyone at school that I was a queer. Why? I asked. Bobby's dad was a gynecologist. His dad told him why she might have said something like that. He then told me. He added that the guys in the know at school, called what she had wanted me to do to her was called Playing Stink Finger. He told me why she would like me to do something like that to her. I was worried. I told my Dad. My Dad got mad. He went out the door. And the next thing I knew Jerry was sent off to a private school in Colorado Springs.
In the spring, I began to feel better about myself. The Rocky Mountain News was a handsome broadsheet that sold 100 thousand copies a day and most of its circulation was home delivered. One afternoon, I was talking to my friend Billy Reezab in our living room, and he told me that he was now delivering the newspaper. He asked my mother and father and then asked me if I might be interested in doing something like that. My parents said that would be fine and Billy took me out into the front yard to show me how to throw a paper onto a front porch, then the two of us went off to The Bluebird Theater to see The Devil Monster - Mammoth Killer of the Sea starring Barry Norton and Blanche Mehaffy.
I started the very next morning in the pre-dawn hours. There were dozens of boys in the Chat 'n Chew Restaurant parking lot "boxing" papers in triple fold and sliding them into our delivery bags. Most of the boys were older than I was and they shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed. I was given a list of the addresses of the people on my route and away I went. At first, I wobbled under the weight of the bag. But as I moved on riding my bike, the load got lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I rode into the rear of an apartment complex to deliver the last of my load. It was then that I saw it inside of a car port, swaying slowly back-and-forth in the pre-dawn darkness!
I was certain that it was The Devil Monster and it was coming to get me! I pedaled out of there as fast as my legs could pedal, laid my bike down on our front porch, took the porch steps two and three at a time and burst into the kitchen, frightened and shaken. Nobody was up yet. When my Dad eventually came into the kitchen, I told him what I had seen. He listened to me with a rather odd look on his face and then drove me over to the apartment complex. And there it was: A 100 pound Everlast boxer's punching bag, swaying to-and-fro in the wind.
My Dad smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed. You're a worrywart, Son, he said. He then gave me a hug and added, Don't worry. You'll grow out of it.
There was only one real story: A 100 pound punching bag had brought me closer to my Father and I did eventually grow out of it...
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