This actually happened to a friend of mine. A close friend. Okay, okay. Me. This was back in 1968, when I was in the Navy, stationed in San Diego. Of course, the dream-like hyperbole gives me away every time. I once was told by a friend, "You are an exaggeration of yourself." This story does not help refute that.
The Hat Check Girl
by
Dick Morgan
Dressed in his best dress whites, a grin on his face, a
hundred bucks in his pocket, and an itch for action in his pants, Signalman
Third Class Marco DeLind saluted the officer of the
deck and sauntered down the gangway of The U.S.S. Seminole. Liberty at last, and in the
best liberty town on the West Coast, so they said. At least, according to Taylor, and everybody
knew about Hot Dog Taylor.
And Taylor said this was like spawning time. Every year, the Navy steamed up the Columbia
River to Portland for the Rose Festival, and the girls just lined up along the
sea-walls to wave at the sailors as they tied up. That much had been true. He intended to investigate the rest of the
story personally. He was supposed to
meet up with Taylor and his buddies, if he could find them. Look for the benches by the Beer Garden,
Taylor had said.
Marco had been aboard ten weeks straight. The ship had steamed nonstop across the
Pacific from Vietnam to San Diego, spent four days of liberty there-- where
Marco had pulled extra duty-- and then steamed up the coast to Portland. After landing on the beaches of Batangan
Peninsula cramped up with thirty blood-crazed Marines in a Mike-class landing
craft, and then, upon his return to the ship, receiving a Dear-John from his
girlfriend in San Diego, his dreams of home where the Colorado grasslands
wrinkling up against the foothills of the Rockies had intensified. With any luck, he'd get an early-out and go
back to college in Colorado, and never see foreign shores again. Twenty-two was the wrong age to be staring
down at the blown up body of a friend.
As if there were a right age.
Marco was ready for some serious forgetting.
He shook all of that out of his mind and looked around for
the Beer Garden. He found himself
walking along a muddy footpath bordered by game and food booths, cotton candy carts,
circus tents full of craft displays, and mechanical rides which swung people
around and turned them upside down.
Young girls screamed, boys cursed and laughed, barkers shouted, and
Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band blared from tinny speakers suspended
from streetlamp poles. Everywhere there
were halter-topped girls pinking in the warm June sun. Some even smiled at the slim and muscular
sailor in his dress whites, his white-hat cocked at a precarious angle on his
sandy hair. He didn't smile back
directly; he was already smiling. It was
so good to be on American soil, even if it was muddy.
Marco found Taylor sitting on a park bench alongside the
fairway path; Taylor, a handsome, broad-shouldered, young man with short dark
hair and a mustache, was feeding popcorn to a flock of pigeons, which cooed and
scurried around his shoes. Zamoiski the
quartermaster was with him, and old, hook-nosed Saunders, the lifer from the
radio room.
"Hey,"
Marco said to the three of them.
"Marco," Saunders answered in his slow Oklahoma
drawl.
"Ready for some beer?" Zamoiski stood up.
"Just a minute,"
Taylor said. "Let me finish here."
"Why are you
wasting precious time feeding the damned pidgeons?" Zamoiski frowned. "Let's go find the Beer Garden!"
"I like to feed them, "Taylor shrugged. "It reminds me how life works. All the pidgeons want is to be fed. I just give them what they want, and I don't
expect anything back. And they love me,
nothing more to with it than that. It
sort of reminds me how to behave around women." Taylor upended the popcorn bag, and the
pidgeons climbed over the backs of one another to get to it. "Just give them what they want, and they'll
swarm all over you," he added.
"Is that your secret for how to get butt?"
Zamoiski asked, smirking.
"That's it," Taylor grinned, stood up and brushed
off his dress whites. "That, and don't stick around too
long in one place, or you'll get shit on," Zamoiski said.
Everyone laughed except Saunders, who had been married
once. Saunders had never said much about
his marriage or the divorce. He never
said much about anything. But when Ski
had said "You'll get shit on," Saunders had snorted and said, "You
got that right," but his head was shaking as if the statement were
negative.
Zamoiski sighed with a sinuous whistle. "Hooie," he said.
Look at these women! Got to get
me some of that," He gave himself the once-over, sucking in his belly to
tuck in his dress white shirt. The
insignia on his left sleeve, a helm wheel with two stripes underneath had
separated from his shirt at the bottom.
Ski had explained that it was easier to get a thumb underneath the patch
to yank it off when he got demoted, which averaged about every four months or
so. Drunk and disorderly was his
specialty, he said, and he'd been a second class for almost six months. Surprised they let him off the quarterdeck.
Taylor was out of popcorn; Zamoiski and Saunders wanted a
beer. Primer, Ski called it. They waved Marco onward, and the four of them
walked along the muddy grass towards the festival beer garden. Game hawkers barked at them, fathers with
kids on their shoulders edged by them, and clusters of middle school girls
giggled and glanced, imagining themselves older. Two high school aged girls smiled at the four
of them; one even waved until Zamoiski smiled and waved back. Then two muscular, shirtless boys came up
from behind them carrying soft drinks and corn dogs, and the girls smirked at
Ski before they turned away.
"Damn, all the good ones are taken," Ski
said. "And me hornier than a Navy
brass band."
"Patience," Taylor said. "There's someone for everybody. Even you, Ski. Although, I shudder to think what she might
be like."
She'll be rich and crazy," Zamoiski said.
"And,
she'll be so horny she won't be very particular," Taylor said.
Zamoiski laughed.
"She'll have big tits, and she'll taste like tunafish and
cheese," he said.
Marco frowned.
"Ski, you're so crude, sometimes you gross me out," he said.
"Oh, like you wouldn't want to nibble on a cute
chick," Ski answered. "Any
chick, for that matter!"
"I'm looking for the just the right one," Marco
said.
Zamoiski snorted.
"You mean to tell me that if the universe dropped a perfectly good
chick right into your lap, you'd what, look at her teeth? Ask for
references? Pardon me, young lady,
where did you go to high school? Are you
gainfully employed? Do you read good
books? Shee-it, I'd be done with her by now." Zamoiski laughed. "Listen to the master, Marco. The right
ones are the ones that say yes."
"They're all the right ones," Taylor said.
"If you--"
"No, they're sure as hell not!" Saunders
interrupted. "Don't listen to these
assholes, Marco. Don't settle to
quickly. That can be damned
expensive."
"Listen, I got two months pay in my pocket and a
tomahawk missle in my pants," Ski answered. "I'm ready to launch, but I got no
coordinates. All I need is a target
before I just explode on the launchpad here."
"Try down by the roller coasters and the rocket
ride," Taylor said. "I hear the
stupid and reckless ones hang out down there."
"Just
my type," Ski grinned. "I'll
get some primer down, and then check that out."
They reached the beer garden, but there was a line and no
tables. The four of them stood at the
end of the line and watched the crowd.
A girl with long, curly blond hair came up to them, working
her way down the line handing out slim tracts which said FREE LUNCH at the
top. She smiled at Marco, and said,
"Hey, sailor," and handed him a tract.
Marco smiled back.
"Hey, tract girl," he said, taking the folded paper, touching her fingers. It was an accident, the touch, but almost
personal, almost intimate. The girl
smiled broadly, a gap-toothed grin that braces might have done a lot to correct
years earlier. Even so, she wasn't bad
looking for a tract girl. Faded jeans a
little too filled out in the butt, a green tank top with no bra and not much
need for one either. Tiny silver
crucifix on a cotton string around her neck.
Her best feature was her full head of blonde curls; she looked like a
big dandelion. No, her best feature was
that she had stopped in front of him, and she was smiling; never mind if he was
the last person in line.
"I'm Marco," he said. He wasn't sure if the girl was actually
pretty, or whether it was that he hadn't talked to an American girl for half a
year and maybe he'd forgotten all the rules, but suddenly he was embarrassed,
thinking she really wouldn't care what his name was.
"I'm
Gretchen," she said. She offered
her hand; Marco took it gently, but she gave it two quick pumps, which somehow
reminded him of the Beverly Hillbillies TV show.
"What's this about?" Marco said, gesturing with
the tract.
"It's just a church social," Gretchen
answered. "A way to meet nice
people. I know how sailors want to meet
people," she nodded, her head moving up and down almost too
enthusiastically for the conversation.
"Any hot girls going to be there?" Ski said over
Marco's shoulder. "Come on,
Marco. The line's starting to
move."
"Maybe," the girl said back to him.
"Will you be there?" Marco said, trying out his best smile down at
the face under the curly blonde hair.
Her eyes were blue, he noticed. "Yes," Gretchen smiled,
broadly, showing the gap in her teeth quite plainly, but without any self-consciousness.
"You want to have a beer with us?" Marco said.
"Oh no, I couldn't," Gretchen shook her head, an
odd gesture since she had already said 'no' out loud. It felt to Marco as though he'd asked her to
eat dog crap.
"How about a soda then?" Marco said. "We could get some curly fries. Are you hungry?"
She nodded and grinned her gap-toothed grin, squinting into
the sun. Marco was so close to her face,
he could see the light freckles on her nose, see the clean, unshaded roots of her hair. He could smell her shampoo; she was a natural
blue-eyed blonde that smelled like warm strawberries. But there was something about her that was
not glamorous, something off that he could not quite name. Maybe it was the smile that was too wide and
too late, like the smile of someone trying to speak in a tenuous second
language, or the jerky arm motions, or a slight stiffness in her step, like
total body uncertainty. But he didn't
care.
Marco offered his hand.
"Come on, then," he said.
She took the ends of his fingers in her fingertips, as
though she were picking up a spoon.
Marco led her away from the Beer Garden toward the boardwalk.
"You're settling too quick," Saunders yelled
after him. "Y'ain't been
listening!"
"Hah! Fish on!"
Zamoiski hooted.
Marco didn't care what the others thought. He was intrigued by the touch of her fingers
around his, its very awkwardness made him feel more drawn to her, almost
protective of her.
"Don't mind them, they're sailors," he said.
Marco bought curly fries and two sodas. They sat at a plastic table with a big
umbrella in the center. They picked at
the fries in silence until the plate was half empty. Marco wondered the whole time how to break the
silence. Six months overseas, and it was
like he'd never talked to a woman before.
He'd never been much of a suave lady's man, not like Taylor, or at least
as Taylor's rep had it. But Gretchen
wasn't helping much, either. When he
asked her a question, she would answer with only a word or two, and did not ask
questions in return. She worked at a
hotel she said. A hat-check girl. She volunteered at the church shelter,
cleaning, serving free lunches to the homeless people.
"So," Marco tried a different approach. "You're not wearing a ring, I see. Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes," she smiled. "Lots of friends at my church are
boys."
"I meant someone special," Marco said. "You know, a real boyfriend."
"No, not like... that," Gretchen blushed-- a wave
of redness sweeping over her pale skin like a cloud shadow.
"Why not?
You're so pretty," Marco said, halfway meaning it, or at least
halfway wanting her to think he meant it.
The girl fidgeted in her seat, looking down at their plate
so intently, her hair fell in front of her face, but she didn't sweep it back. "I couldn't... I mean I just
don't," she finally said, and then added, "But thank you. I think you're nice."
Marco got that feeling again, the one that felt like there
was something missing, or maybe hidden, but when Gretchen lifted her face,
swept back her hair and looked towards him, she smiled the too wide, too late
smile again, and took his hand. Her
fingers were greasy.
Their
table was among others, in the center of a ring of booths which sold corn dogs,
curly fries, Chinese noodles, teriaki chicken on sticks, cotton candy, and ice
cream cones. People milled around in
small clumps and couples in front of the booths struggling with plates, loose
change, diaper bags, squirming kids, leashed pets, spilled drinks, and lit
cigarettes; several couples were standing nearby, waiting to see if Marco and
Gretchen would be leaving their table soon.
Suddenly it seemed awkward to be just sitting there, not even talking.
"You want an ice cream cone?" Marco asked.
"No thank you," Gretchen said so politely it
reminded him of a small child in front of aging relatives.
"You want to play some of the games?" Marco pointed to a line of brightly colored
booths further down the board walk.
"Oh, yes!" Gretchen clapped her hands and bounced
up and down in her chair.
They played the ball toss, the dime-in-the-dish toss, the
horse races, and the basket hoops. Marco
won a huge pink and yellow bear at darts-- a garish mix of colors the game
hawker seemed relieved to be rid of, and Marco was embarassed to be seen with. But Gretchen acted as though it were the
nicest gift she'd ever gotten in her life.
She hugged the bear close with one hand, and held onto Marco's arm with
the other.
"Let's go to my place," Gretchen said.
""What?" Marco felt as though perhaps he had
misunderstood, or had missed a part of the conversation. A big part.
"I live near," Gretchen said, looking him
straight in the eye. He thought the look
held out something in the way of a promise.
"Come on," she added and tugged his arm. We can put my bear in a nice place at the
head of my bed." Getchen grinned.
Marco had heard only 'my place' and 'bed'. He did not have to be dragged along.
Gretchen lived in a one-room apartment above a pawn shop on
Second Avenue, behind a dirty glass entrance door and up three flights of
stairs. The noise from the festival
center could barely be heard above the traffic noise just below her only
window.
The room reminded Marco of an old black-and-white
photograph, in which everything dark had faded into layers of muted brown. Unpolished Oak bedstead, an old dresser of
some unrecognizable wood; a tiny circular table, a single wood chair. A glass ball light overhead made no
difference in the afternoon sun from the window. A Gideon Bible lay open on the dresser;
prayer beads and a crucifix lay across its pages. Even the picture above the headboard of the
bed was mostly brown-- a Goya print of the Spanish countryside. The only color in the room at all was the
garish colored bear Marco had won, and which he had come to think of as the
Pepto-Bismol Bear.
Gretchen
climbed onto the bed and propped the bear up onto the pillows. "There," she said, and settled onto
the edge of the bed and looked at him apprehensively. She patted the bedspread beside her, looking
at Marco, then folded her hands into her lap, a curiously childlike gesture for
a woman who had just invited a completely strange man to sit on a bed with her.
Marco sat next to her and slowly put his arm around her
shoulders. Gretchen's posture stiffened
slightly, but she did not move away.
"Want to talk?" Gretchen said.
"About what?" Marco said. He had begun rubbing her shoulder muscles,the
ones close to her neck, almost without being aware of having begun, as though
unconsciously expressing some need of his own.
Gretchen closed her eyes and sighed slowly, which he took
as an encourageing sign. After a second
sigh, Marco leaned in and kissed her.
Gretchen's lips puckered into a stiff kiss, but they did not open. It was, for a kiss, strangely like not
kissing. Marco thought maybe he wasn't
communicating enough of the unspoken message, the one that naturally came from
being alone with a woman on a bed. He
leaned into her until he could feel her small breasts against his chest, and
they fell over onto the bed, Marco on top of her. He could feel his own erection firming up
against Gretchen's thigh; if that wasn't enough of a message... He reached
upwards to touch her breasts, but
Gretchen's arms were in the way; both of her hands were open against his
chest.
"No, please, I... I just wanted to talk,"
Gretchen stammered.
"About what?" Marco repeated, mystified as to
what there might be to talk about right then.
"I just wanted to know if you knew about Jesus,"
she said. Her hands were still pushing
slightly on Marco's chest, and he could feel her trembling through them. Her eyes were wide open, the pupils moving
from side to side as though there were words written across his forehead.
That mystified feeling Marco had had a moment before began
to fade away, along with his erection, as he seemed to see her for the first
time. Her hair askew, no make up, her
only jewelry lay across her collarbone, a tiny silver cross tangled into its
string. Gretchen's eyes were wide, her
breath ragged, as though gummed up with even the simplest of words.
"Do you know about Jesus?" she repeated, "The Bible says, 'For God so loved the
world..."
"I know, I know..." Marco said through closed
teeth, "That He gave His only begotten son..." Marco started, but the situation had strayed
so far from where he had intended that he was unable to remember anything more.
"Yes!" Gretchen grinned. "That whosoever believeth on Him shall
not perish, but have everlasting life!"
She clapped her hands with something like glee. "You know the Bible?" she asked.
"Parts of it," he answered, and frowned. It had been ten years since he'd seen the
inside of a church. He'd stopped going
because everything seemed so simple, so certain. He had always had too many questions, too
much empathy for those left behind in the wake of mass ecstasy. The easy bliss of the true believer had
eluded him, and he had begun to feel like an outsider by the time he had
reached his teens. "A long time
ago," he added.
"Do you know Jesus?" Gretchen was reading his forehead again.
"Not personally," Marco said, but he realized
Gretchen would not get the joke. Marco
felt a bit like an old flintlock rifle; so much trouble to load, then lain
aside primed for firing, hair-triggered, dangerous.
"You have to let Him come into your heart,"
Gretchen said too earnestly.
"Sounds painful," he answered.
"It's not," Gretchen said, still looking at him
intently. She was so close to him, Marco
could smell her skin-- suntan lotion over a musky feminine smell.
"So what you do is lure sailors up to your room and
then you preach to them?" Marco was
trying to understand this.
"We just talk," Gretchen shrugged. "And I tell them about Jesus."
Marco grabbed her arm and squeezed hard, shaking her.
"But that's dangerous!" He was beginning to be upset with the
situation, with her, with himself for being there. "You'll bring some guy up here who
will... hurt you!" He wanted to say
'rape you' but as it was, he thought maybe the girl wouldn't understand.
"God watches over me.
His angels watch over me," Gretchen said, her smile almost
gone. "You're hurting my
arm." She said it in a stiff-backed,
tight lipped way that almost intimidated him, as though if he didn't let go
right then, he'd likely be struck by lightning.
Marco let go. He
swept his hair back, just to have something to do with his hands. "God watches over children, drunks, and
simpletons," he muttered.
"What?" Gretchen said.
"I said, God must watch over you," He answered
loudly, as if that were really what he had said.
"I know," she smiled widely, her two front teeth
pointing at different walls. "Will
you pray with me?" she asked.
Marco didn't feel like praying. He felt like slapping her until she woke up
out of her astonishing stupidity. He
didn't, though, because he was not someone who hit little children, or drunks,
or simpletons. But mostly, he didn't
slap her because he didn't think any good would come of it. The girl enticed men up to her room to preach
the Gospel to them, to bring them home to Jesus like some bizarre cattle drive,
and her job was to rope in the strays. The Bible commanded her to do it, and if
Marco struck her, well, then she'd just be like a frigging martyr for Jesus.
"Please?" Gretchen pleaded, touching his arm
lightly. There was no sexuality in her
touch at all.
"Do what you want," Marco sighed. Maybe after the prayer, he could get the hell
out of there. He remembered Taylor
feeding the pigeons.
Gretchen took his hands in hers, arched her back and lifted
her eyes. "Dear Jesus up there in
heaven," she said, paused, and took a deep breath. Marco caught himself glancing up at the
ceiling to see what she was looking at, then felt foolish. There was nothing up there but cracks in the
plaster, and a huge cobweb wrapped around the light chain. Nothing.
"Accept this poor sinner's heart," Gretchen
intoned, almost like a song. She began
swaying slightly with the rhythm of her own words. "Come into it and dwell there, show him
the way to your open arms and sweet bosom..." Gretchen's eyes were closed
now, and her oscillations back and forth growing wider, her hands shaking
Marco's with each word. He heard several more words but stopped listening to
their meanings and connections. There
was heaven, and sin, and save, and blood. There
were several references to soul, and one everlasting life, drawn
out like an important punctuation mark.
Finally, there was an in your sweet name, Jesus, and
the final A-men came out with two strong handshakes, like the
solidification of a business deal.
"Amen," Marco said.
Maybe it was the mildewy smell in the room, or the
cocoa-butter smell of Gretchen's lotion, or the traffic smell coming in the
window, or all the curly fries and soda, but Marco suddenly felt
nauseated. "I don't feel so
hot," he said. "Maybe I'd
better go. You don't have antacid
tablets, do you?" He hoped she
didn't.
"No," she said.
I can get you a glass of water."
"No thanks, don't bother," Marco said, relieved
that he now had a reason to leave. I'll
just go buy some at that little market I saw." He hadn't seen any market, but that did not
matter. It probably wasn't indigestion; it was the whole absurd situation, and
now Christ in his heart, interfering with his circulation, crowding his
diaphragm. His first order of business
was going to be to try and drown Him, wash Him right out with beer-- lots of
it.
Marco stood up and straightened his uniform, which didn't
need nearly as much straightening as he felt it should have, getting up off of
a bed with a girl his age. "I'll be
going now," he said.
Gretchen stood up too.
She wiped her hands on her jeans, and offered him one, just as though
they had never kissed. "Thanks for
stopping by," she said, as though he had been an old friend instead of a
stranger she had brought there.
"God be with you," she added.
"Did you know that's what good-bye means?" Gretchen grinned too widely for this small
piece of information.
"I
know," Marco sighed.
"Everybody knows."
"They do?"
"Yes."
"Then why doesn't everybody pray more?" Gretchen
furrowed her brow, contemplating this difficult and troubling puzzle.
Marco shrugged.
"I have to go."
"Okay. Have a
nice day." Gretchen's furrowed brow
melted into a broad smile as though there were no gradations of feeling in
between these two thoughts. Maybe there
wasn't; maybe her brain was like a continuously self-erasing blackboard.
Marco stepped out of the doorway, turned and waved
halfheartedly as Gretchen slowly closed the door, grinning at him like a child
the whole time. He stood for a moment,
staring at the dirty door panels, paralyzed by the wave of confusion that swept
over him. Had this actually
happened? A halfway pretty girl had
enticed him onto her bed, and then preached at him, prayed over him....
Marco had always hedged on the question of God, believing
that if there really was one, that He certainly must have a bizarre sense of
humor. Mostly, it was personal-- not
something you talked about in polite company-- like diarrhea, or masturbation,
or death. But this girl was definitely
out of the social loop. She was a danger
to herself and an embarrassment to other people, except maybe like-minded
zealots. It was a wonder that she'd
lived this long, at least without major scarring. Maybe this was evidence of some kind of
scarring, a deeply buried memory so horrendous that life couldn't be faced
without a Celestial Custodian to tidy things up. He himself had occasionally suspected there
was a Celestial Presence, but he had lost his trust in that simplistic
tidiness. Maybe God did care for some, but He had not seemed to care about
others-- in Thailand, in the Philippines, in Vietnam. Maybe He only cared for special people,
people who were easy to steer, people in the front pews, like Gretchen. Maybe angels really did watch over the girl--
simple pudgy, sexless little cherubs careening her through life like a billiard
ball. Marco himself felt smartly
careened, and headed for some unknown pocket.
He envisioned Jesus, sleeveless, wearing a visor to dim the glow from
His halo, a lit Marlboro stuck in the headband, chalking up his giant cue tip,
a celestial Fast Eddy smirking down at him.
And it's still my shot, Jesus smiles. Gretchen brings Jesus a frosty beer on a
platter, and takes the chalk cube. She
puts it in her jeans pocket where it sticks out like a big blue pimple, but
Gretchen doesn't care; she's an angel, God's own hat-check girl...
Marco finds himself still staring at the closed door, He
shook his head as though that would help to clear it, then walked down the
three flights of stairs and out the dirty glass doors.
The sidewalk was steaming as a sprinkle of light rain
evaporated. The clouds had turned white
and broken into little round balls against the bright blue sky. Marco headed for the festival center at a
brisk walk. More specifically, he headed
for the Beer Garden. Maybe Taylor,
Saunders and Ski would still be there.
He wondered what they would make of it, but he knew he'd be too
embarrassed to tell them. Let them think
whatever they wanted.
Marco found Taylor and Saunders at a little round table
inside the Beer Garden. The table had a
dozen empty beer bottles sitting in a neat row across the center. He sat down with them.
"Well, here's our big stud," Taylor slapped
Marco's shoulder. "how'd it go?"
"What's happening?" Marco asked, to get the attention away from
himself. "Where's Zamoiski?"
"He's trolling down by the rides. We're doing geometry, Taylor said.
"What?"
"Well, the diameter of this table is twelve bottles.
if we mutiply that by
Pi, the circumference ought to be thirty-eight bottles. We'll have to drink twenty-six more bottles
to prove that, though.
"I'll help," Marco said.
"We didn't expect to see you so soon," Saunders
said. "What happened?"
Marco shrugged off the question, held up a finger, desperate
for a beer.
Taylor
grinned at him. "Come on, did you
pork that poor girl?"
Marco shrugged again, then smiled as he thought of an
answer. "I just gave her what she
wanted," he said.
"You're an animal!" Taylor said. Even Saunders laughed.
"Let's get to work on that circle," Marco said,
feeling a bit on the outside of it. He
planned to finish at least half the circumference himself.
* *
* * *
