I acknowledged his comment. “Yeah, I guess”.
“That’s more like it, son!” he continued, “She looks like
she could ride the donkey all night”.
Imploring him to keep his voice down I defended her, “Yeah, well, she is
a nice girl”.
“My ass”, Brian exploded, raising, rather than lowering,
the decibel output of his normally boisterous approach to just about
everything.
Turning my attention back to my date standing across the
room, talking to one of my fraternity brothers, I observed her perhaps in a
different light. Debbie was a bleached blonde with streaky highlights at a time
when that was not yet fashionable. It
made her look a little hard but she had a very pretty face to soften it. She was somewhat petite at 5’ 2” but had a firm,
fit body with a nice bosom. There was a
“trashy” edge to her and that is what attracted Brian, I was certain. She did love to party. When I was tired of studying I would call her
up and in a Texas minute she would accept my invitation to go up on Mount
Bunnell with a six-pack of Jax beer and look down at the Austin city lights,
“grub” a little, lose track of time and rush back to her dorm just ahead,
sometimes just behind, her curfew. She
was fun to be with.
“You have been dating such skaggs”, Brian went on, “it’s
about time you came up with a bitchin’ babe”.
He slapped me on the back and cruised off with his beer sloshing out of
his cup, hailing some girl across the room with whom there was better than an
even chance he would have carnal knowledge later in the evening, but who was
ignoring him at the moment.
“Yesterday”,
the Beatles # 1 hit came on the stereo in the main living room and people began
to dance slowly in the thick of the crowd.
Debbie was definitely better than the bevy of girls I had been dating my
freshman year. There had been a short string of “skaggs” since Diane Jolley.
Fact was, I had been engaged to Diane out of high school. She went to Sam Houston State when we
graduated and I headed off to the University of Texas at Austin. Our engagement lasted exactly two months
after our paths diverged. In October of
our freshman year she met a senior who was graduating top of his class in ROTC
and had accepted a commission to fly in the front seat of F4C fighter
jets. Why a girl would dump me for some
jar-head flyboy, who was most certainly going to Vietnam at a time when most
college guys were going to great lengths to preserve their deferments, was
beyond me, but she did. When I got the
“dear John” phone call, I trashed my dorm room, spend half the night walking
around the track in Memorial Stadium, then woke up one of my friends from high
school at the Scottish Rite dorm. She
snuck out, still in her nightgown, and we sat on the lawn talking until
dawn.
By noon the next day I was over it. Diane was not the girl I would marry and I
told myself I should count my blessings.
She sent back the ring I gave her. The diamond ended up in my UT senior
class ring…a gift from the girl I would marry. Diane ended up marrying the
aviator. He survived Vietnam and the
last time I heard from her she was raising show dogs in New Jersey. I understand she spent most of her time at
dog shows while her husband got really fat being an armchair quarterback and watching
all sixteen games a week on the DirecTV NFL Premium Package. I guess we get what we accept.
By October of 1965, some things going on in the world
were getting pretty hard to accept. The
Democrats were in power in the United States and President Lyndon Johnson was
beginning to listen to what some people thought was bad advice from his
commanders-in-chief. Back in March,
President Johnson had ordered the first “official’ combat troops into
Vietnam. As we watched on TV and saw the
first 3,500 servicemen land at Da Nang, many of my college buddies, including
myself, started to get nervous about our draft status. Apparently we were not alone. Exactly two weeks after the landing, the
first “sit-in” to protest the war was staged on the University of Michigan
campus. It was followed closely by
another protest at Columbia University and then others, mostly on northern
campuses.
By the middle of the summer, B-52 bombers were attacking
Viet Cong strongholds and the first major land offensive, which included 3,000
US troops from the 173rd Airborne Division along with over 800
Aussies, spent a month tracking the enemy through the jungles of South
Vietnam. It should have been considered
a bad omen that, despite this huge force of men, they failed to make contact
with the Viet Cong. The military’s
solution was more troops. Before the
year was out, there would be nearly 185,000 American servicemen in Southeast
Asia, but tonight, watching all these happy people celebrating the Longhorn’s
victory earlier in the day, all of that seemed so unimportant and so far away.
Debbie was now talking, in animated fashion, with Jack
Slayton. Jack was a huge figure of a
man, with dark, thick brown hair, which always looked a little disheveled. He stood 6’ 4” and weighed well over 250
pounds. Even though he was not that bad
looking, he was our entry every year in the campus Ugly Man Contest.
Debbie was fun and funny.
She was sexy, perky, even bubbly at times. She looked like she could drink more than she
could possibly consume in food. She
could drink many of my brothers under the table but could still kiss you
goodnight without slobbering all over you.
She was intelligent and made good grades. She looked good on my arm. So, what’s to lose? Count your blessings and move on with it.
I wanted to take the relationship to the next level but
Debbie was hesitant and suddenly became cool.
She wanted to date other people before she committed to one man, she
said. We dated on and off into the
winter, but on the night of our fraternity Christmas formal, she had to go back
to Dallas for a “family gathering”. The
same thing happened at our Spring Formal.
I found out later it was to see her old high school boyfriend who was
attending SMU. Consequently, I attended
our Spring Formal as a single. It turned
out to be a turning point in my life and another blessing to be counted.
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