I've tried to publish this essay for years but most editors wanted it cut and I didn't want to
cut. The good old days. . .. enjoy.
THE CHAIN GANG
I blew the dust
off the blue and gold cover of Bear Tales and opened the yearbook. "Find a Way Or Make One." That was
our class motto, the official one. The
one we made up for ourselves was: Hard as nails; tough as bricks; Blakely,
Class of '56. It was more outrageous
and we liked the thought of outrageousness.
We liked to imagine ourselves outrageous, hard and tough. We weren't.
We were like soft plastic, on our way to being something else, but we
weren't quite sure what.
1956 was the
year Rebel without A Cause played
at the Favini Theatre in Peckville and
it was the year of James Dean's death. It was the year Invasion of the Body
Snatchers played at the drive-ins. Bandstand
had gone from being Bob Horne's to being Dick Clark's. Bob Horne had gone to jail for pimping and we
weren't quite sure what that was.
Traveling rock and roll shows came to Scranton and for a modest price
you could hear Al Hibbler, Chuck Berry, and Shirley and Lee urging us to
"Let the Good Times Roll." And
on Ed Sullivan's Sunday night "Toast of the Town" you could see Elvis
himself, or half of him, singing "Don't Be Cruel" or "Love Me
Tender." Pat Boone sang
"Tuitti Frutti" and made you want to change the station, but when
Little Richard did it, you wanted to celebrate.
There were two
lives to lead - one as the honorable, upright student going to church and
getting good grades, doing everything that was hammered into us, or the other
way, the way your eyes told you the world went.
Life was not fair. The media
presented conflicting models of behavior which seemed at war and we were left
to work our way through like a minefield left from the Korean Police
Action. The fifties presented an
underbelly only touched on in Blackboard Jungle, To Catch a Thief, and
even Picnic. The Beats were
trying to tell everybody, but only a few listened. Our fathers of the G.I. Generation shushed
us. Be quiet, behave. No wonder we earned the sobriquet Silent Generation.
I was always too
anxious. My family moved all the time,
about every 1.8 years in fact. Moving
made me anxious. I was worried about
having friends, about being included. I
would be half paralyzed if I had to walk home from school alone. I would go out with people I disliked to
places I didn't want to be because they asked me, because I was so thankful to
be asked. I probably even thought I was
being cool. And being cool was a hot thing in the
fifties.
On the other hand,
I always craved change, excitement, difference.
I was bold and timid, anxious and cocky at the same time. I read a study about teen age boys who craved
excitement and did wild things and got into trouble with the law. The study found that a certain part of their
brain lacked a chemical that danger generated and all they were trying to do
was get their body chemicals in balance.
The boys were routinely given repetitive dull jobs which actually drove
them into crazier escapades. They were
excitement junkies dependent on a fix to get themselves together. They would be great Airborne Rangers or and
Marines, but not assembly line workers.
I think I've always needed that chemical too. In a way, the moving from place to place
provided that sense of danger. You could
start over, reinvent yourself.
Why do teens try
drugs? To get right with
themselves. And that’s difficult when
you don’t know what your self is.
Perhaps that's what makes teenagers the most feared group on the
planet. Hormonal maniacs, capable of
anything, at the mercy of our peers. So
equipped we set out to learn who we are.
Perhaps I was
lucky, perhaps not. To be included in a gang was a miracle for me. It gave me a place and that's what I needed,
wanted. My gang, my friends were
mercifully decent. Rumor has it that the
fifties were too dull to be bad. Not
so. Our notion of bad however wasn't
fully developed. We hadn't watched
enough television. Movies were still
operating under a code established in the 1930s.
We lived in the
midvalley town of Peckville, PA, just above Scranton, the Anthracite capital of
the world. The whole valley was at one
of those crises periods as coal was
replaced by oil. There was high unemployment,
and a sweeping migration to California, the paradise on the West Coast.
Peckville was a
town (5,000 souls more or less) created by two waves of immigrants. The first were coal miners from Wales who
settled the uptown; the next wave came from those countries eaten up after the
second world war parts of Russia, Italy, Poland, and places which didn’t even
exist on the new maps. These folks lived
downtown. There were no railroad tracks
forming a clear demarcation. Uptown was
the oldest part, near Peck's Lumber along the Lackawanna River, where stores
and protestant churches lined Main Street.
At a certain point
along Main you'd notice that the houses got newer and cheaper, there were bars
rather than churches and the names changed:
Thomas and Llewellyn became Pronko, Kashuba, and Castelli.
In the fall of 1955 we entered our senior year
at Blakely High School; we were all ready to invent ourselves. We were bored. I can't recall the exact moment, it seems as
if it was a gradual coalescence, but we hung around together, we hung out
together. We were seniors. We were the downtown kids. The moment we fused as a recognizable gang is
clear.
We were standing
out in front of the school, Blakely High School, a wooden yellow and brown shingled building
with a bell tower on Academy (of course) Street. There were three entrances: the main entrance led into the hallway by the
principal's office; the third led directly into the boys’ locker room and I
have no idea what it looked like; the other led directly into the girls’ locker
room in the basement of the school.
Undoubtedly we were standing in front of the girls' entrance waiting for
the bell in the tower to ring us in.
There were seven
of us. Babs, Dot, Sylvia, Barbara, Rose,
Chris and me, Mitch, in those days. It
was Babs' idea, at least I'll blame her or credit her. We probably stood in one of those loosely
formed circles everybody talking at once and looking around to see who was to
be seen. If it was the first day of
school we were checking the first day of school new outfits. We weren't allowed to wear slacks to school
in the fifties. We wore long, full
skirts with tight cinched waists and cotton blouses. We wore stockings probably for the first day,
and we held them up with garter belts or girdles because panty hose had not yet
been invented. We favored black
Capezio shoes or ballerina slippers as we called them, and several
crinolines. As we moved into fall and
winter we wore long straight wool skirts with a back kick pleat, short sleeved
pullover sweaters, thick white cotton or woolen bobby socks and leather penny
loafers. See and be seen might have been
our motto. Isn't that what teenagers
want? To be noticed?
Babs had a certain
style. Her hair was always a perfect
pompadour, the back chiseled straight across.
Her nails were long, curved and always meticulously polished in carmine
or smokey rose. She had the idea that we
should all get jackets alike. She had
seen them in a men's haberdashery shop in Dickson City. We all went down and took a look at them
- aqua baseball jackets, with knitted
white cuffs and partial collar. They had
slash pockets on the side and cost $6.99.
Men's jackets were in, and you wore a key chain with a charm hanging on
it attached to the zipper. The jackets
would probably have been okay by themselves, but Babs thought we should also
get white felt iron on letters and put our names on the back. It sounded like a good idea at the time.
We probably all
agreed to wear them on a certain day and we did. Everybody hooted at us as we stood out in
front of the school waiting for the last bell.
Inside everybody was buzzing about our jackets. Did you see the jackets? They got jackets. The senior girls, the downtown town girls,
the gang. You have to remember high
school to understand how important anything even slightly out of the ordinary
becomes. Every excitement junky in the
building passed the word along.
Gossip. The thrill of the
bored. If you can't live a life, listen
to one. Perhaps this is what makes soap
operas so popular or melodrama or opera.
Everything black and white, good and bad. All the subtlety and shading washed out. The stuff of myth.
I walked home
alone because I lived the furthest uptown; everybody else lived further
downtown. Guys passing in cars yelled
out my name, making howls and obscene sounds.
I never wore the jacket again after that first day. The notoriety was too much. We all laughed when we compared our
experiences. The jackets had an effect
like Marilyn Monroe walking into a room, a sort of embarrassed
recognition. Most of us didn't wear them
again, but the jackets had given us visual recognition as a gang and there was
no going back.
The other
contributing factors to the birth of the Chain Gang legend were random,
accidental, in fact, accidents.
Accidents happen to inexperienced drivers and that we were. Dot was the red haired intellectual,
steadfast. Her father owned the local
grocery store and we were all terrified of him. Dot was the first one to turn
sixteen, to get her learners permit, pass her test and become a fully licensed
driver. Wow. Our new driver's licenses were our ticket to
adventure, our ticket out of Blakely.
Dot got her father's car, a green Mercury station wagon with wood panels on the side, to drive to school
because she lived out of town. We would
all pile in after school and drive down to W-I-C-K, a supercool radio station
in Scranton, PA, which played the 'new' sounds of rock 'n roll. I was in love with the voice of a disc jockey
who started out as the Night Rider - Ed Hughes.
Now he was working the afternoon shift. We watched him play records
through a glass window and he came out and talked to us while the little 45
records played. We requested a song and
told him how much we liked his show and left. It was probably the notion we had
of ourselves laboring in the old wooden desks bolted to the oiled wooden
floors. We loaded sixteen tons of number
nine coal, every day. It was a song that
stayed popular forever in this coal mining valley and Tennessee Ernie Ford sang
it sweet and just a little sad. On the way home we listened for our request
shushing each other and squealing: "The Chain Gang" going out for the
girls from Blakely - Rose, Barbara, Babs, Silvia, Dot, Chris and Mitch. So we were identified: The Chain Gang. "And the straw boss
said, well, bless my soul." Now we
had jackets and a name.
Even today, I'll
hear that song as part of a commercial for greatest hits of the Fifties on
compact disc, and I stop what I'm doing and listen hard for Ed Hughes'
dedication - for those Blakely girls.
Silvia would raise her head, shake her black curls, her eyes half closed
in that spacey look we thought was so sexy and mouth the words. Silvia always asked the questions. "What's a straw boss," she'd ask?
I'd chime in, "what's number nine coal?" We'd all crack up in convulsive teenage laughter,
half hysteria, half giggle, a way to vent nervous energy.
We went on doing
what we did - going to school, talking on the phone, going to weekly dances at
the Catholic Youth Organization in Carbondale, drinking cokes at Kwolek's, a
local snack bar, when there was nothing better to do, dancing with ourselves,
gossiping. If we had a car we'd drive to
other hang outs in nearby towns, go in, sit in a booth, have a coke, dance,
look the place over. Sometimes a boy or
a girl would come over and talk to us and we would play do-you-know and
introduce ourselves and make friends.
Rose, tall, blonde, had relatives everywhere. They'd know her cousin, her aunt. She'd give them her sultry stare toss her
long blond hair over her shoulder and give a slow smile without showing her
teeth. She didn't like to show her teeth
because they were crooked and she intended to have them fixed because she
wanted to be a model. What was to her peers
a tall, skinny body would be her ticket out of town.
Sometimes no one
would talk to us and the atmosphere would drip with hostility, the tension
mounting, girls whispering and looking over their shoulders at us. We would finish our cokes and leave. That's how it is with teen hangouts. Sometimes you have to be born to them;
there's territoriality involved and though we didn't have a name for it at the
time, we all knew what it was when it surrounded us. In my journal there are
cryptic notes: went to Kwolek's, went to Towers for a coke, went up to Drutt's
and talked to Cathy. The eating places
were different: went to Pihl's (a
diner), went to Castelli's (a pizza place), went to Andy's (another pizza place
further uptown). I even actually wrote
down things like - washed my hair, studied P of D (Problems of Democracy). So it was a usual teenage life, expanding our
field of operations, moving out in every widening circles from the home turf,
discovering the landscape.
I hadn't had my
license longer than four months and we were driving home from the CYO dance in
Carbondale February 2nd, groundhog day.
My mother hadn't wanted me to take the car because it was snowing, but
my father was out of town so I did.
After all, the gang was counting on me.
After the dance, I panicked in a light snow going around a curve,
slammed hard on the brakes and skidded right into a tree. Barbara was sitting in the middle in front
and hit her head on the rear view mirror, but nobody else was hurt. She had a big bruise in the middle of her
forehead. I was glad no one was hurt,
but the car was a mess, the radiator hissing and dripping all over the road,
and the tree died instantly. It cost my
father $90. to have it cut down. For
years, every time we drove by that dammed tree he would remark: I own that tree. I paid $90. to have it cut down and that xxxx
tree is still standing, dead, but upright.
The police came
quickly enough, people walking out of their houses shrugging into coats to see
what the action was. A car with a friend
stopped behind us and took the girls home while I stayed to face the
music. When the cops heard I was from
Blakely they asked if I knew Mary Chase.
Fat Mary was the history teacher at Blakely and she lived in Carbondale. Fat Mary had lips so fat she used a tube of
lipstick a week. Fat Mary's legs rubbed
together when she walked and she swished down the aisle nylon on nylon like a
snake. We thought she might start the
building on fire. Fat Mary soon knew all
about the accident and told everybody in school. She asked me how I was the next day in
Problems of Democracy class. She wanted
all the gory details. For all her
nosiness, she was one of the few teachers who would give me a reference letter
when I graduated. All the fat jokes we
cracked about her out of school countered the way we sat silent in her classroom,
fearful she would catch our eyes shifting or glancing around the room. The hiss of her stockings would come down the
aisle toward us and we would grip our pencils tighter, make our letters more
carefully, relaxing slightly as she moved past us. A few more pounds and she wouldn't fit down
the aisle. "Let's give her candy
for Christmas," Silvia suggested.
My father got
thrown in the insurance pool for my tree accident. I was not a popular person in the
household. We had no car, and had to
carry the groceries from the A & P three blocks away. Every day I heard that. I said I was sorry so much I wasn't
anymore. It took them a month to fix the
front end of that big ugly 98 Olds.
Barbara had to comb her fluffy blonde bangs down over her forehead until
the bump went away. She cut school
because she didn't want anyone to see her the next day and got caught playing
hookey so she said she had a toothache.
She had to go to the dentist and get a perfectly good tooth pulled to
cover her alibi. Every time she smiled
big we could see the empty hole. She
laughed about it, that sort of out of control laugh that teeters on the brink
of tears.
Dot who wasn't
with us in the Carbondale accident was in an accident of her own with her
sister and mother. Her father ruled with
a strong hand and we were all afraid for her, but her mother stuck up for
her. It hadn't been Dot's fault.
I remember the
first rumor that got back to us. We were
sitting on the tables that ran around two sides of the high school gym. Well, it wasn't really a gymnasium, it was
the basement of the school under the auditorium with a slanted roof. It was where we had gym class so we called it
the gym. We'd have to do calisthenics
for ten or fifteen minutes and then Coach (the gym teacher) would let us play
records and dance. Silvia came over and
reported that her cousin had told her she'd heard that to join the Chain Gang
you had to wreck a car and smoke a pack of cigarettes. At the same time, we quipped. We found it
ridiculous, beyond silly. Not that we
hadn't tried a cigarette now and again, but at the time I didn't even inhale
and a pack would have lasted me a year or more even if I shared. We might practice holding the cigarette, and
Chris was really good at letting the smoke out through her pursed lips in what
we then thought was quite a sexy performance.
And they say we'll never amount to anything, we'd laugh. "Chris," Rose would drawl, "How'd
you get in the Chain Gang since you don't drive?" Chris had this angular body, long legs, wide
shoulders. She was thin, but walked with
this snaky sort of grace that I tried to copy but looked as if I were a victim
of some neuromuscular disease. She would
look for a long minute, "You don't
have to have a license to get in an accident," she'd say in her slow way with the long flat
midvalley a's. We could try out
parts and find the ones that suited us best.
You are always the
last to know. Nothing like a good cliche
for telling you what you ought to know about the way of the world. What soap opera are we in? West Side Story only there's no other
gang and there's no starcrossed lovers and there's no rumble. There's just a gang of girls who hang out so
we'll fill in the rest so things will be as they should.
Schoolmates who a
few weeks ago had been our friends or had chatted with us in class, shunned
us. One was overheard by Chris to say,
"Why, I'm afraid to walk down stairs for fear they'll push me." This was such an hysterical and overblown
response, we couldn't resist. We all
tried to get behind her walking down stairs just for the sake of terrorizing
her. We had no intention of pushing
anyone downstairs, let alone her. Why
she thought we would single her out for this is a mystery, but that's how
gossip evolves. You put yourself into it: "we'll I told her," and
"she said to me," or "I
was afraid." Everybody wants a part
of it. Like trying out for the senior
play - we want our part.
The next rumor was that we had pushed
her down the stairs. We shrugged our shoulders and practiced looking cool,
flipping up the collars of our blouses, adjusting the thick roll at the top of
our bobby socks. "Let's make a list," Rose suggested. A list of people to push down the stairs. Good idea.
Rumor is never
happy with such mundane things, however.
It's our tendency to glamorize, to want more, to push aside the routine
for the evil we know lurks in the heart of our fellow travelers. Slyly whispered hints of larger and more
terrible deeds began to appear. There were suggestions of orgies. Whatever an orgy was, I didn't know until the
sixties or early seventies when I saw some fanciful recreations in the
movies. These new rumors had no basis in
reality. They were grounded in the
folklore of the fifties, the same thing that made James Dean live again, a
vegetable, but alive in a secret sanitorium, contributed the eternal myth of
"sexual activity" to the soup of rumor that began to feed every
resident in town. We were involved in "sexual"
things, not even mentioned aloud in those days and those "acts" were added to the initiation ceremonies with
the car wrecks and the cigarettes.
Generally, we were
guilty of everything but devil worship, at least that one didn't come back to
us. I was puzzled and a little amazed at
the escalation of these rumors. They
seemed to arrive out of nowhere, usually repeated to us by friends or relatives
who didn't seem to know we were part of the gang, this mythological group of
evildoers.
In the meantime,
Ed Hughes, trying to be a friendly DJ, continued to play "Chain Gang"
for us in the prime after school hours when everybody would hear it. Our parents began to get wind of the Chain
Gang story which spread like a mine fire under the town. "There's no smoke without fire," my
father said. At first he asked me if I'd heard about it. I told him it was just a bunch of
rumors. Then he heard I was a
member. We had to have one of those
"big talks."
We sat at the
kitchen table and he lit up a Pall Mall.
I could see it would be a long talk.
My mother had fluttered away into the other room where I could hear the
television set grinding through some drama with gunshots and galloping
horses. Daddy narrowed his eyes and
looked at me with that cynical look he used on an employee who wanted something
from him. Even as I spoke forcing
innocence into my voice, the guilt I felt made my voice seem like a
liar's. It isn't true, Daddy. Yes, I have smoked one or two
cigarettes. I did not wreck the car on
purpose. I don't even have a
boyfriend. I couldn't tell him anything
more. He said he believed me, but his
body language didn't. Guilt by
intuition. I was innocent. I felt guilty. I'll never pass a lie detector test.
If chasing boys
was a crime, then we were criminals. If
talking tough was a crime, we were criminals.
We didn't do anything but drive up to the CYO dances hoping desperately
some appropriate young man would ask us to dance and then maybe want to go
steady with us. That was the extent of
our 'chasing.' Guilty until proven
innocent. The universal way.
On the other hand,
in saner moments I'd ask myself what I had to be guilty about? Ill will, yes. Smart mouth, guilty. Verbal character assassination? Once in a while. Guilt piled up around me like a snow
drift.
When those who
love you don't believe you, when those who know you best, don't believe you,
your sense of community disappears. When
no one trusts you, you don't trust anyone.
How could these people who knew me believe I would run around driving
cars into trees and attending orgies.
What this outside
pressure did was drive the gang closer together. Of course, no one else would have anything to
do with us. We had ourselves, we had
each other. If we could get a car we
could drive out of town. Out of town no
one knew us. Though sometimes, strangers
would ask if we knew the Chain Gang. We
would say yes, they were wonderful girls, much maligned. Of course, they didn't
believe it. Everyone wanted to believe
that a gang of wild depraved women with cigarettes hanging out of the corner of
their mouths were doing the dirty boogie up in Peckville. When we got back in
the car we would hoot and yodel and laugh, but when we calmed down, we'd tell
ourselves we'd struck a blow for truth and justice.
We even composed a
letter to the editor and sent it to the Scranton Times "Mail
Bag" defending ourselves and condemning the vicious gossip. Silvia repeated a conversation she'd heard
about the letter after it appeared:
"They probably wrote it themselves," someone had sneered. We found this achingly funny, laughing until
we were exhausted. Just when the
laughter would die down, someone would repeat the statement, in that tone of
righteous indignation at the notion we might be innocent: they probably wrote it themselves. Of course, we had. Who else?
We tunnelled
toward spring, toward graduation which would free us, allow us to get out of
town, escape the eternal browbeating of the teachers, the disapproval of
parents, the ostracism of our classmates.
We practiced
looking cool, looking tough and avoided our hometown taking to Carbondale when
we could find a way, to Chapman's Lake (Chaps), the Rat Races at Avoca, moving
out further and further, expanding our field of operations, looking to get away
from the evil our hometown heaped on us hoping to make us kneel or bend or
break.
Sometimes we made
up stories and passed them on ourselves and laughed as they came back to us,
distorted, enlarged, but recognizable as our own concoction by the details we
put in. The more ridiculous the rumors,
the quicker they ran.
Bobby Gee and a
group of uptown boys from our class had let the air out of Dot's tires as a
joke. He had also been heard badmouthing
us to others. It was my suggestion that
we have a talk with him. I still thought
talking solved everything. We asked him
to go for a ride with us at noon. He got
in the car and sat in the back in an uneasy silence as we began to throw
questions at him. He began to get
rattled. He was afraid. After all there were five of us present to
his one. I remember that he was afraid,
and he said he was sorry. We thought
we'd come to an understanding. But, he
hadn't meant it at all. He'd only agreed out of fear and as soon as the
car came to a stop in front of the high school, he slammed the car door and
cursed us. He told everybody we'd
kidnapped him.
The rumor
circulated and came back that the Chain Gang tried to kidnap Bobby Gee. It was his own fault, we agreed. He deserved all he got. We added elements to that basic snip of wish
fulfillment so that we'd recognize the story when it came back: the Chain Gang
broke into the school and kept Bobby Gee prisoner in the girls locker room
raping him again and again. The girls
locker room was our selected site so we'd know the rumor was ours when it
returned. A pretty unlikely place,
really, aisles of narrow green metal lockers and a few benches. Now Bobby Gee was our prisoner, really. He was tied to us by rumor which he knew
wasn't true, was in fact ridiculous.
Perhaps he knew how it felt now.
We weren't bad; I didn't say we were nice. Bobby Gee deserved exactly what he got.
To live under the
weight of social approbation, to know that everyone thinks you're a slut, to
have your parents watch your every move, is bad, but to have your pastor, the
Rev. Condro ask about this terrible gang in church was the last straw for
me. I went to church every Sunday. I sang in the choir and rehearsed every
Thursday night. On Sunday nights I went
to Westminster Fellowship. This
particular Sunday Rev. Condro was sermoning away about evil, his sermons were
usually about evil and how it appeared in the community under different guises
and how we had to recognize it and deny it.
He began to talk about the evil elements in our community, this Chain
Gang that corrupted youth and asked for prayers to protect us from their
influence. I was sitting in the choir
wearing one of those white gowns. I was
an alto and sat on the left in the front row.
Every eye in the church moved to me.
My face flushed. I bowed my head
and prayed for god to punish them all.
That's how I was then. I expected
fairness, retribution. How could the
people in my church group who had elected me president of Westminster
Fellowship a few months before, think I would do the silly or awful things the
rumors insisted. Oh, Christians, under
the oxford cloth shirts and the silk print dresses beat black hearts. I stopped going to church. Not all at once because I knew they'd think
it was because I was evil. I had
recognized their evil, I thought, and I didn't want to be associated with
them. I'd miss a Sunday, I'd say I need
time to study and dropped out of the choir.
There would be no cheek turning, on either side.
But the end was
fast approaching. Graduation meant
freedom. We planned great celebrations.
They came to little. We drove around. We
tried to get served (Pennsylvania's drinking age was 21). We got asked to leave any number of places. We came home. The night of our graduation
someone was killed in a hit and run accident in Taylor, near Scranton. The car was reported to be pale colored and
big. Early the next morning two State Troopers in full uniform and a plain
clothes detective came to my door. The
troopers were huge in their gray uniforms and Stetsons. I was barefoot, wearing shorts and a skimpy
sleeveless shirt. I felt underclothed, on display. They wanted to know where I was the night of
graduation, what kind of car I was driving, who was with me, etc. We stood in my mother's parlor where no one
but company went. They took turns throwing questions at me in their hard
voices. We'd been in Dot's father's
pale green station wagon but there was a problem with the gears and we drove
home at no more than 25 mph because the lever was frozen in first. The plain clothes detective asked if I knew
anyone else who had a big lightcolored car.
I gave him the name of the banker's daughter who lived across the
street. She drove her daddy's big powder
blue Caddy.
I didn't mention
dear sweet Wally, with his souped up powder blue Merc. Wally was a friend and we had few
enough. I'd be damned if I would turn
him in to these leering intimidating creeps their minds heaped with the filth
of their calling. Let them investigate
someone 'above suspicion'.
These years made
me suspicious, and cynical about "human nature". Sometimes I look at people and see in their
eyes that they are like salivating dogs panting at your bad fortune. They take such joy, such glee in your trouble
they can barely contain it to put on the ritual face they are supposed to pull
at such times.
I'd been out of
Peckville for ten years and gone back for my uncle's funeral and a woman whose
daughter had been in the class of 56, told a group of people including my
mother and me that her daughter hadn't gone to her high school prom because she
was terrified of the Chain Gang. Her
daughter probably hadn't gone to the prom because she hadn't been asked. I looked into this woman's eyes trying to judge the depth of her malice
or the depth of her stupidity. I
couldn't tell. I said, "Tell Louise
I said hello and give her my best."
I like to kill people with kindness.
In later years
when I'd hear about the satanist cults and sex for sale and suicide pacts at a high school somewhere
I discounted it out of hand. More people
in this country believe in the devil than believe in God. People will believe what myths they want
to. They will make life fit those myths
no matter how absurd. They are craving
that vicarious excitement gossip provides for the listener and the teller. They are gassing up that part of the brain
looking for the chemical high. They are bored.
They want to be unbored.
"Find a way or make up one."
Incurring
community disapproval was not something I did purposefully. It was an accident. It was my desire for excitement and change,
coupled with the hormonal dislocations of the teen years. It was chance, a meeting like minded friends,
it was those aqua jackets, it was the song.
Later, we called
ourselves the Gators. Hey, gators, we'd
greet each other. We asked Ed Hughes to
stop playing the "Chain Gang" song.
He was sympathetic. He played
"See you later, Alligator" for us.
The fall after we
graduated the gang drifted apart. Dot
and I went on to college, Rose and Silvia went to business school, Chris and
Barbara got jobs in Washington, D.C.
Babs got married. It appears that
circumstance was all that held us together.
We haven't seen each other since our ten year class reunion. We've wandered deep into our lives away from midvalley,
away from our pasts. But I don't think
there was any way we could have bonded more closely. Even now when I understand I didn't really
know any of them, that we were prisoners of place, of time, I love them with a
ferocity that surprises me after all these years.
