Chapter 12

DIRE FEMALES
(1955–63)

The band was really hot that summer. Sometimes the Shifters’ Billy Dover would play rhythm, so I could work my mic stand routine and stagger around drunkenly. I met Anne Moss at a Sigma sorority dance. “Sigma girls put out” was the line at the Smoking Tree at school. Anne wasn’t in Sigma. She was still at Colonial and everybody knew Colonial was bad. It hardly got worse than at the Colonial Canteen, where the dance was held.

Anne came in late. The band was loud and cooking. Anne had blond ducktails, sharp pointed jukebox baby knockers, and pouty bedroom eyes. She wore a tight black skirt, an equally tight black cashmere sweater, suede penny loafers, and white bobbysocks. She stood with her head down so she could cut her eyes up through her lashes, what Raymond Chandler called “the old up from under.” She turned Stoots and me on like a faucet. Stoots knew her by name, moved over easily, started grinning, and doing his Charles Heinz poses, but she was staring at me.

Stoots stole away, pissed off. He only did two songs the last set, and left me to do the singing. As usual we closed with “Hey Bo Diddley,” playing it for fifteen or twenty minutes. The crowd stopped dancing and circled the band screaming “Hey, Bo Diddley,” like a church chorus call and response. I picked up the mic stand and hit my knees, sticking the mic in my mouth and growling. I opened my eyes to get up. Who should be standing in front of me, cool as a Cuba Libre, her arms under two sharp steel-tipped titties, just barely under black cashmere pulled down as tight as her crossed arms could pull it down? Anne cold blue-eyed me up through dark lashes, looking up at me even though I was kneeling in front of her. She smiled a crooked orange smile, not moving a muscle. The crowd screamed. She never blinked. She only squeezed her arms tighter under her titties and shot me clean out of the sky. Nailed like the outlaw.

I called her the next day and we started going out. She wiggled when we made out. She rubbed me crazy with those tits of hers, moving back and forth across my chest, moaning low in her throat, teasing and twisting all over my Buick’s back seat. I gave her the Rubaiyat, a new way to approach a chick with ducktails from Colonial Acres. I also gave Vera the Rubaiyat. She said her father had owned a copy since he was young. Vera and Anne got to be friends. They were a good match, Vera the inimitable mistress.

Anne never wore the black and black outfit again—must have been hunting clothes. If she had worn it again, I might have ruined her future plans. We got caught backstage during study hall. We were supposed to be working on the set for The Glass Menagerie. I was on the floor. She unbuttoned my shirt and dragged her nails across my skin slowly, blinking, looking up, smiling, and talking the whole time: “How do you like that, hum? Feel good? I’ll bet it does. Ummmmmm!!!! Feel me diggin’ in, daddy? Ooooh, yeah!!!”

In walked Coach Ralston, the short-stuff shop teacher, madder than a fucking hornet and hot to see this tough-looking young chick crawling all over me (he figured I was some sort of pervert weirdo). She got suspended from school for three days. I went back to art class.

There were other “Dire Females,” as my mother called them. I was attracted to a type, a late-1950s thing. Many girls seemed to lead a life of selected fiction. The Brontë sisters and Ayn Rand had a death grip on the teenage temptresses who crossed my path, and like Gone with the Wind, swept through several generations of Southern females.

These girls fueled the fires of my frustration. In the ’50s the “good girls don’t do it” myth still prevailed. Popular fiction and movies furthered the myth. Saturday night at drive-in movies fostered a conflict between our parents’ morality and the mobile sex machine the back seat of the family car provided.

Through the zoo parade of jukebox babies and high school princesses, Vera returned repeatedly like the theme song in a Hollywood movie. She haunted me with the promise of the normal life I would never have. I started working on a novel, Rain Summer, a thinly disguised biography of a James Dean character, very Catcher in the Rye and Steppenwolf, set in fifties Memphis. My writing owed a lot to the teenage classic Street Rod and William Goldman’s The Temple of Gold. Vera read it and corrected the spelling. I wrote so she would read it. It foretold our relationship’s doom, but also gave me a link to her and that fantasy life I could never have.

The original story ended in suicide on New Year’s Eve, after the main character failed to go to college. I couldn’t imagine life beyond high school. I wrote by hand in big black bound notebooks from my father’s office supplies. I carried them everywhere. I worked feverishly, harder than I worked on anything during high school. I wrote about drinking and the heavy ever-present pre-sex from teenage wasteland. No music. I figured nobody would be interested.

My English teacher picked up on my interest in writing and told me I should sign up for speech and drama class.