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Show '62 cowardly kids and make them cry. My victory made me a hero to the whiners and easy weepers, the halt and the lame, for about a week. Other memories stung me harder. Whatever happened to Jenny Prudhomme, and to the other Jenny? I never completely gave up on her; when I married Mary-Ellen it was for different more formal reasons; another kind of love motivated me. A desire to grow up pushed me to make up my mind. I remembered the night on the loading dock of the Burbank Feminine Appliance Company when I decided I didn't want to be a kid forever. The other men were talking about their wives, their mortgages, their kids, their ambitions, which were mostly to make a little more money, and for the first time I saw myself as a wallflower at the dance. My friends on the dock might be waltzing with fat ladies and other monsters but they were shaking a leg and trying to hop to the tune while I stood on the sidelines like a dimwit. Clement Haynesworth drove the forklift; he weighed three hundred pounds, had a bad eye and a nose like a potato, but even he had something to teach me. One evening while I loaded hair-dryers into a trailer, I was dreaming about walking hand-in-hand with Jenny through a field full of daisies. I heard the forklift come up behind me; Haynesworth leaned out of the saddle. "Did you ever eat pussy, kid? There ain't anything in the world tastes as good if you once |