Some Truth

Baker left town before the others, I guess to return to England, but I didn't really know what was going on with them. I also mixed for a band called Ohio Power, who were an excellent group with a line-up, style and sound a lot like the band "War" who had made it nationally. A very powerful and big sound, enhanced by an awesome horn section, and strong vocals. They almost went "Big Time". The drummer for them was Henry "H-Bomb" Weck, who went to classes at the Lima branch of Ohio State, where I went to college, and was a hero of mine, as he was a truly nice guy with a ready smile and a positive attitude for everyone.

After we got married in 'sixty-eight, my wife, Patty and I had been staying at my parents house while I was attending college, working at a Clark gas station, and, during the Christmas season, working at the Post Office. I was coming home after my shift at the Clark station ended at midnight, trying to study for my classes, and taking care of the changing of diapers and the night time feeding of our newborn son Jaime, so that Patty could get some sleep during the night. It was a good experience for both Jaime and I, as we remained very close until he was four, when Patty and I divorced. Poor kid. Walking away from him is the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. I love him and I am deeply proud of him.

My wife Patty and my Mom weren't getting along, which I blamed mostly on my Mom's impatience and over-protectiveness of me, so we moved to Patty's parents' house. This was a close arrangement, due to a small house, but they were a close, good-natured family, and we were both much happier there into the following year. The strain on everyone was evident though, and I was yearning to find a job that paid well enough for us to live on our own. I finally found one, on June ninth, the end of springtime in 'sixty-nine working for the United Telephone Company.

Patty and I moved into a duplex on North Elizabeth Street in the north side of Lima shortly after I started working for the telephone company. We didn't know anyone in the neighborhood, but on Grand Avenue, the next cross street North of us, there was a convenience store and a laundromat within a block and a half walking distance, and family came by to visit, most often being Fred. Fred was Patty's brother, whom I loved like the brother I never had, and who was a decorated vet of the Viet Nam war. I was building a racecar, with the help of my high school buddy John Moss, out of an old fifty-seven Chevy station wagon that my Father-in Law had given me. I started experimenting with marijuana at this general time, that a guy at work turned me onto, which upset my buddy John, but induced Fred to visit more often. I met the neighbors' son, Terry, as a result of the pot, that fall.

He was into some much harder drugs, which I knew nothing about, but was about to learn of, the hard way. He told me one Friday, that he had to make a road trip to get some money that was owed to him, and out of general politeness I asked about it. In my mind, I associated road trips with me and my friend Dan Mills running down to Indian Lake to chase girls in his Pontiac Tempest, while the song "Indian Lake is the scene you should make, In the summer time," blasted on the car radio, so I wasn't thinking of any dire consequences. He said, "Hey, I might have some trouble collecting my money, and you're a big guy, why don't you come along and make it look like I've got some extra muscle." I said if he needed me to, I'd be glad to help out.

The next day, Saturday afternoon, we got into his friend's Mustang, a guy I'd never seen before, and didn't know at all, and headed out. We made a couple of stops, the one to get pop and candy bars being the only time I got out of the car, and then took to the highway. After a very long ride, during which I fell asleep sitting in the back seat, we stopped, which woke me up. We were parked on a very narrow street next to a chain-link fence. I had no idea at all where we were. Terry said "I'll be back in a minute, I've got to go check things out." and climbed out of the car and disappeared.

Blue lights pulled up behind us, flashing and reflecting off of everything like they do, and we had cops with flashlights at each of the two doors. No problem, we weren't doing anything wrong, as far as I knew. They asked what we were doing sitting here at this time of night. We didn't have a good answer, because we didn't know. Then they asked if they could search the car, and the driver said, "Go ahead." They looked everywhere, and underneath the spare tire in the trunk, covered by a blanket, they found a white box, a little smaller than a shoebox, with a plastic bag in it full of capsules of some kind.

We were hauled into the police station and put into separate holding cells. My one phone call was answered by my Mom, and thank God she came to my rescue on the following Monday. She couldn't come get me until I went to an arraignment hearing on Monday morning. It was a long two nights in jail, and the cops were taking me into a room and interrogating me repeatedly, trying to get me to change my story, and admit to knowing about that box, of what they said was a thousand hits of speed, but I couldn't tell them something I knew nothing about. It all ended when I took a lie detector test, after my arraignment, that I had agreed to, and which proved I was telling the truth. I was just a naïve farm boy from the country. I didn't know anything about any drugs, except a few tokes I'd taken off of some herb. When they finally dropped the charges against me and released me, Mom took me home.

I don't know. I must have "liar" written across my forehead, because no one ever believes what I say until I prove it. Maybe I don't give enough of a damn to push myself onto people dynamically enough to be believed. Whatever, take it or leave it. Once I've had my say, I don't give a rat's ass if you believe me or not. I'm not going to argue about trivial bullshit. You'll find out sooner or later, even if it is the hard way, and if you don't, so what, no sweat off my back.

I never saw Terry again after that, but since he wasn't at the police station, I assumed he never got caught. I suspected that he was a nark, and the whole thing was a setup. Patty and I moved to a nicer house closer to my job, and tried to smooth things out between us. I didn't know enough to go very slowly and gentle her along when it came to having sex. I would lick her pussy as she would be trying to climb naked out of the shower, and she always seemed to enjoy what I was doing for her.

When I would try to take it to the next level, she would go cold on me, as I was too hot-blooded and anxious, so I couldn't seem to live up to her romantic expectations. I thought that it was her fault, and she thought that it was mine. I suggested that she try having sex with someone else to get some experience, as I had been her first and only. She did that, a week or so later, with Jim Douglas, a guy whose obit I read a few years ago, in two thousand nine, who happened to be a fellow I worked with every day at the telephone company.

The idea of her giving her pussy to another guy, for some reason I cannot understand or explain, excited the hell out of me, but the reality of doing it only made matters worse. A week later, we decided to try for another baby, a personal sacrifice she was making for me, even though she was completely uncomfortable with intercourse, as a means of renewing our commitment to each other. Between her fertility and my virility, it didn't take long before all the signs indicated that we had succeeded. Then I started worrying that we should have taken longer before we tried, because now I would never be certain that it wasn't the guy I worked with, Jim's child.

Nine months later, Patty was in the hospital in the beginning stages of a hard labor, from where I had just gotten home, and Jim showed up at my door as I was unlocking the front door to go into the house. He told me that he had a couple of hot girls who wanted to party, and asked if he could have them come over to my place, since it's so much bigger. I think we can read that as "cleaner". By then, I hadn't had any sexual activity in almost three months, and being the selfish idiot I am, I told him to go ahead. Boy, How much dumber can a twenty-one year old guy get? Well, at least I hadn't killed anyone...yet.

Jim and the girls showed up an hour later, and I took one upstairs, while he took one downstairs to the basement I had fixed up. The girl I was with immediately stripped. Man, she had some big melons, but only tiny indentations where she should have had nipples, just like the end of a melon. I didn't even know what this girl's name was. She started pulling my clothes off of me, and was telling me what a nice big cock I had, and how lucky my wife was, and... That was it. When she mentioned my wife, my guilty conscience took over, as I thought about my beautiful Patty up at the hospital, giving birth to my second son, and nothing could have gotten me hard again.

I explained what the deal was to her, and apologized for being a disappointment to her, and told her there was no way I could be that cold towards the woman I loved, and was committed to, who was lying in a hospital bed at that moment, going through a tough labor with my baby. We dressed and went back downstairs and waited on the couch for Jim and his girl to come back upstairs. A half hour later they were all gone. I have since been told how during Patty's pregnancy, I screwed every loose woman in town, but "Melons" was the closest I ever came to it. Besides her, I never saw any bare skin except Patty's. The other stories the gossips spread about me, just never happened.

I was honest, and told Patty about the whole evening, and that all that happened was that I saw the girl naked and she held my dick. That ended up with me not being believed and us becoming separated, as I could no longer find the spirit to argue with her, and so, moved out. Too bad there wasn't a lie detector there for that instance. It didn't do much to make me feel open to working things out between us, that in the back of my mind was that constantly nagging thought that Jim Douglas was actually the father of our newborn baby boy.

Chapter 4

Moving on

I lived on the streets for a couple of weeks, catching showers at friends' houses, when I could, or taking them after the karate classes that I had started taking on Tuesday and Thursday nights. During this time I accepted the offer of a waitress, by the name of Karen, and we won't discuss her last name, at a diner that I stopped at for coffee breaks and lunch every day, for the use of her shower and the promise of a hot, home made meal. That's what she said, and so that's all I took it to mean; besides, she was a lot older than me.

When I got out of the shower that evening, feeling human once again, and walked back into the bedroom, which the bath was just off of, to get dressed. The bedroom door was now open, and I could see dinner was on the table and waiting, but Karen came in the bedroom and grabbed the towel from my waist, and pushed me back on her bed, saying she wanted to do something for me, and proceeded to give me a brain numbing deep-throat blowjob. Oh My God; Indescribable! It was the first time my dick had ever been in a woman's mouth, and she took all of it all the way into her throat. I had never even thought of Karen sexually before. When she had inhaled/swallowed all I had in me, knees barely supporting me, I shakily got dressed, amazed that anything on Earth could have felt so good, and we sat down to a decent meal of spaghetti.

Small talk over dinner was mostly about her absent husband, a subject I felt truly uncomfortable with. When we finished eating, she asked me to spend the night, but knowing she was married to, and separated from, a fellow employee at the phone company who was out of town and not there to defend his territory anyway, and not knowing whether they were legally separated, or just having a spat, worried me. Between all that, and the intensity of the blowjob, and her forwardness in giving it to me, the whole idea had scared me off. So, I begged out of it and ran out into the night.

A couple of weeks before Patty and I split up, I had been to a meeting of a group of fellow young adults (?) with quasi-Communist aspirations, who called themselves the Red Star Collective, run by Bob Mack, a fellow I had known from childhood. His family belonged to the Market Street Presbyterian Church, which my family attended every Sunday. I was to talk with them about putting on some concerts in Faurot Park in the coming summer. We discussed everything it would take, including all the permits, and a generator, or the appropriate connections to electricity it would take to meet the needs of the stacks of amplifiers an outdoor show requires. After the second meeting, where I had noticed a beautiful, long dark haired wisp of a girl, and after I had been on the streets for a couple of weeks, I ran into one of the people who had been at the meetings, Steve Norton.

We greeted each other and he asked me how things were going, looking at me kind of strangely. I told him what my situation was, living on the streets, and Norton told me that a room just opened up at the boarding house at which he and his wife, Cindy were staying, and he informed me of whom I needed to see to apply for a room there. Consequently, I moved into the old boarding house previously owned by sculptor and artist Wayne Trapp, on the corners of Wayne Street and McDonel Street in Lima. This house was known as the Carriage House, for the carriage house and stables, turned garage, turned into an apartment, which was behind the boarding house proper. I moved into a second floor room of the main house.

The house had a pay phone in the second floor hallway, and one day Steve's wife Cindy answered it and came to my room, telling me I had a phone call, looking at me wonderingly, as if she had never seen me before. I went to the phone and found Patty on the other end. She told me that she had gotten a job waitressing at a bar where she had to wear cute but very, very short flare-out black skirts that showed her panties, and that one thing had led to another, and she had met a guy. She told me that I had said to her that if she ever learned what sex was all about, and learned how to make love, that she should call me.

She said that she thought that she had learned how now, and that she wanted me to come over that evening and we could try starting over once again, so that maybe we could patch things up and get back together. All I heard were the words she spoke, not her hidden meanings, and with me making the same mistake once more of taking someone at their word, I didn't realize that I had to read some romance novel to learn how Prince Charming would act in my shoes. Beside that, I wouldn't have known which novel to read so that I would know what my role was supposed to be, instead of being the uncouth lout that I am.

I went to our old apartment in the duplex on South West Street that evening at seven, all slicked up, looking and smelling my casual best, and knocked. Patty opened the door and invited me in, then went and sat down on a recliner chair she had gotten from her Mom, Maggie, a dear, sweet, patient and persevering woman, whom I loved. I looked at her from where I was standing by the door. I noticed that she was braless, with her sexy huge nipples taut enough to almost poke holes through her soft cotton top, the freeing of restraint of her breasts being highly unusual behavior for her, from my experience with this very enticing, but conservatively inhibited little Catholic girl, drawing my attention to the most firmly shaped and full sized, perfect breasts that I, to this day, have ever seen.

I found it very alluring that her big nipples were excitedly erect, and poking enormous bumps out into the thin material of her white cotton pullover top. She was also wearing skin tight jeans that looked like they were painted on her gorgeous figure. She looked sexier than my best wet dream of her. She seemed as if she were, not necessarily nervous, but on edge or maybe excited, and yet, trying to act normal, but she looked mouth-watering to me, and my whole heart and being still longed for her. I wanted so fervently for us to get along and work things out. I still wish we had, but our paths were destined to separate, I guess.

Thinking I would somehow break the ice as gently as I could, I went over to her chair, got down on my knees, squatting in front of her, and put my hands on her legs, just above her knees. Sitting there on my heels, I started asking her to tell me about this new guy she was seeing. She started telling me he was just some guy who had brought her home from work a few times and that she had finally succumbed to his advances and invited him in, and they had ended up in bed a few times, but her heart wouldn't let go of me.

She said it had been going on for a few weeks, but that she really wanted for us to make it work, instead of getting involved with someone new. I loved what she was saying, the tone and timbre of her voice when she spoke, so I hesitated to do what I yearned to do as I watched her lovely, pouty lips move. They looked ripe, and I wanted to kiss them. It seemed like the right moment, but I would have hesitated much longer, if only I knew enough about romance to be able to move at the pace that she wanted, allowing her the control of the situation.

I moved up and began kissing her full, pouty lips, as I asked her if she enjoyed making love with this fellow, letting my hand go to her left breast and gently teasing the nipple. She started responding, even opening her mouth to my exploring tongue, but then suddenly she pushed me back and stood, yelling that I was always in too big of a hurry. I got up off the floor, where I had fallen backward, off-balance at her push, and I said that she invited me over, the object being to have sex with me in the first place, and that I couldn't read minds to know what she wanted. We ended up in yet another hot-headed yelling arguement, and I hate shouting matches.

I hate being screamed at, and I hate feeling like I have to raise my voice and yell back, to be heard over all the loudness. Why do people over-react rather than just wait for things to calm down and simply talk in a normal voice? I know when I'm not wanted. I left angry and went home, wondering why she was seemingly so afraid of me, what I should have done, and just how do I screw things up so badly in the first place. Persona non grata now, I didn't see her again until the day of our divorce, and that was from across the courtroom.

I did meet her boyfriend, Jerry, I think his name was. He was rather short, maybe just over Patty's height. It's likely that she enjoyed sex with him because he was smaller in size than I am, and would have been less intrusive in her than I, but that's only theory, as penises all come in different sizes, no matter our height.

Chapter 5

My New Digs

When the third floor attic room opened up a few weeks later, I talked to the owner and moved into it. The owner asked me at that time how I would feel about taking over the management of the place, keeping the tenants from getting out of hand and tearing up the house, and making sure they kept the kitchen cleaned up. He said I'd have to take out the garbage, collect the rents, and make sure they were paid on time, and then deliver them to him. I asked him what I got in return, and he told me he would cut my rent in half, so I agreed.

Looking at the ten by ten foot attic room, which only had a high bay window to let in sunshine, and feeling very claustrophobic in that dinky of a space, which I suffer from anyway, with a seven foot ceiling nine inches above my head, I had asked the owner if he would let me remodel the room. He said yes, I could do whatever I wanted, if it made the room more livable. I tore out the fiber wallboards and ceiling, and the framing behind them, and opened it up to the pyramid style roof rafters, which came to a peak twenty, and a half feet above the floor. This gave me nine hundred square feet of floor space to work with, just in the attic proper, as opposed to the hundred square feet I started with, and revealed two more dormers with windows, beyond the bay window's dormer, with plenty of headroom under their peaks, at the top of a thirty by thirty foot house.