Lost in the Fog

I did not have a social disease.

My grandmother eventually noticed the rash and she asked me what it was and I told her I didn't know, because I didn't know. She told my mother and my mother insisted I go to a dermatologist in West Chester. He looked me over and besides the rash he found a couple small white patches on my arms. He said it was psoriasis and prescribed a cream to spread on any affected areas.
I had it all over my scalp, which is why I would flake so much at a mere touch. The scalp was a common place for the disease, as were elbows and knees. He told us it liked to hide, to find a dark area. He also told us to get this special shampoo.

The cream and the shampoo smelled like telephone poles. They contained some tar base chemical substance like creosote.  Oh, I was sure the girls would be attracted to this cologne. I should have never pointed out the man with the discolored face when I was a preschooler. I was sure he had cursed me with this. He probably went to one of those witches in Downingtown and ordered up this hex. 
“Now, how do you like it?” I could hear him ask. “Let’s see if you enjoy children pointing at you.”

An incident coming home from Ronald Tipton’s seemed to represent how my next year would go. The Tiptons had moved from their apartment at Boot Road and Chestnut Street. His father bought a house in the hills north of Downingtown. The house was back up a lane off Hopewell Road. I traveled the back roads from Bucktown to his house on Friday nights and on this particular one  I left his place very late and headed up creepy Creek Road.

There was a heavy fog making it even creepier. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead and practically other to the sides. It was tricky staying on the twisted  s the road followed along the Brandywine. Eventually I had to leave this street for even less familiar and narrower country lanes. I thought I was making the correct turns at crossroads, but it sure seemed to be a lot longer than usual to get home. I also appeared to be going up hills more than I recalled, but as I went higher the fog lifted some and suddenly all I saw were trees. Trees to the left of me and trees to the right of me and not anything that looked the least familiar.
Normally it took me a half hour to drive from Ronald’s to home, but I had been driving well over an hour and still there was nothing but trees. The road only went in a circular pattern sometimes upward and other times downward yet always within the trees. It didn't matter which way I turned nothing outside changed. I was beginning to get nervous. I had no idea where I was and it didn’t matter what road I turned down I was still in this never-ending forest. It was like an episode from the Twilight Zone. "For your observation, meet Larry Meredith. A young man who thought he was just taking a short ride home, but instead he was driving into...THE TWILIGHT ZONE!"

After another half hour or so I popped out of the trees into some farmland. the scenery was vaguely familiar. I realized I had been lost in French Creek State Park all this time. I knew where I was now, but not exactly how to get out of the place. It took me another half hour or more to finally get home.

All during eleventh grade I was in a fog. There were a few clear patches and then I would feel lost again.

Richard and I were attending dances at the Warwick Junior High (left), where he still went to ninth grade. He was younger than I by six mouths, but held back two grades. I went to the dances because he needed a ride and I had the car. I was an Uber driver for most of my friends before Uber was ever thought of. At the dance I spent my time hanging along one of the walls watching others dance. I was the Woeful Wallflower of Warwick. You see, I had no confidence in asking a girl to dance. 
Oh, occasionally, I ventured over to some girl who seemed as alone and abandoned as I thinking she might want to dance. I approached even these expecting to be turned down and of course I was.

Rich did not lack confidence. He knew no fear. He used the caveman approach to getting a girl. He simply walked up to a girl, grabbed her arm and drug her onto the floor. He gave them no chance to reject him and no escape. He never said a word, he just took.  He sat out very few dances. 
One of the girls he took was Barbara Summate (pictured right) and he soon began to date her regularly. Now I was not only chauffeuring him to these shindigs, I was chauffeuring his date. I should have worn one go those little chauffeur caps. It was lonely enough before when he waltzed off with girls inside the gym all night and left me holding up my wall, but at least we communicated in the car. Now he ignored me altogether as he sat in the back seat pawing Barbara. There was no other way to describe it, except pawing, unless it escalated to mauling.

Meanwhile I was getting a complex and beginning to constantly brood over my inability to get girls to dance with me. I would be moody around the house and sometimes I would mumble my complains to my mother about it. I had a reputation at school as a decent guy. I felt this was a handicap.

“Girls don’t want nice guys,” I would say to my mother.

“Oh, it just seems that way now,” she would say.

“No, they want guys like Richard who grab them and kiss them on the first date.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get a girl,” was the best she could offer.

"I''m going to die a bachelor," was what I insisted in return.

There was a girl I liked from afar. Her name was Gail Francis (left). I thought she was spectacularly pretty. She was a year behind me at school, but I kept running into her. It was almost as if she was stalking me and it was driving me crazy. I really wanted to ask her out, but I couldn’t get up the nerve to do it. Yet, every time I turned around she would be nearby.

I sometimes read the poems I wrote to my friends at lunch. One day I was reading this parody of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. I called it “South Cemetery”. It was four song take-offs, “I’m Gonna Drink that Blood Right Outta Her Neck”, “Older Than Egypt”, “Some Enchanted Graveyard” and “A Wonderful Wolf”

I expect ev’ryone of my crowd

To make fun of my proud

Protestations of hypnotic entrances;

And they’ll say I’m sup’stitious,

A bit naïve to believe any legend

I hear from some wolf in pants.

I’ve been known to share your

Practical conclusion,

Thinking the beast could keep

Its seclusion,

‘Til all of a sudden that moon’s

Fullnesstude

Shown down and hit me smack

In the snude:

That’s how I turned out to be

The hairy young werewolf you see.

I turned around after finishing and Gail was standing right behind me listening. She had a big smile on her face.

“I think you’re really funny,” she said.

It was the perfect opportunity, except I felt my face turn warm and knew I was blushing. “Thank you,” I mumbled and hurried off into the distance as if late for class.

I still kept running into Gail everywhere I turned, but I never did ask her on a date. The irony came when we got our School Yearbooks as seniors. There was a section in every Yearbook called “Class Will”. Someone of the editorial staff wrote a little blurb about each member of the graduating class. It was what that graduate supposedly left to someone in the junior class. My blurb read, “Larry Meredith wills his collection of gory horror novels to Gail Francis. They will be good for her book reports next years.”

Just coincidence or did someone know of my crush on Gail? Or is it possible someone knew she had a crush on me?

Maybe my reputation around the school was that of nice guy, but I didn’t always live up to it. One of the biggest regrets of my life was the terrible thing I did to a girl at one of those school dances. There was a tradition at these affairs during my teenage days called the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Sadie Hawkins was a character created by Al Capp in his comic strip Li’l Abner. The strip was very popular in my youth and ran in the Sunday Papers for 40 plus years. It was set in a Hillbilly town called Dogpatch. Sadie Hawkins was “the homeliest gal in all them hills”. When she went un-courted for 35 years her father rounded up all the young men of the town and made them have a footrace with Sadie chasing down a man. The one she caught would have to marry her. The other spinsters of Dogpatch then declared an annual Sadie Hawkins’ Day where they chased down men to marry.

Borrowing from the comic strip, this reversal of traditional roles became a staple of one high school dance an evening. At some point the DJ announced a Sadie Hawkins’s Dance and the girls got to ask the boys. Normally the girls passed me over in this ritual, but not this time. I was standing at my usual place when this particular girl asked me to dance. This was a moment of decision. A decent man would have said yes. A brave man would have said yes. I was neither. I said no and made an excuse that I had to leave.

Here I had languished as a wallflower for a season dying to dance with a girl and now I turn one down. Why did I do that?

I was a coward. I had a chance to be gracious and kind and I didn’t take it. I have been ashamed of myself ever since. Guys considered this girl the homeliest girl in the class. I knew the other boys, the bulls and Fonzie-types anyway, would make fun unmercifully of any guy seen dancing with her. “Where’s your girlfriend today?” guys would ask with a mocking tone. “Larry and Whozits sittin’ in a tree…” would echo down the corridors as I passed.

Any boy worth his salt wouldn’t have cared. I proved myself worthless. I walked away.

I felt guilt almost immediately. I sat in the car the rest of the night waiting for the dance to end and Richard to come out. I was glad she was not in any of my classes because I didn’t want to face her and so I stayed outside in the car. I didn’t go back inside and ask her to dance. I knew I hurt her. I had enough experience with rejection to understand how painful that must have been for her. This remorse added to the growing moodiness I was displaying around home more and more.

Note: I left both the name and photo of this person out of the account, although I had included both in my original transcript. I see no reason to add to the humiliation she must have suffered as a teenager, for I know how cruelly the jokes and jibes aimed toward her were. Hopefully, as an adult she had a happy life. She did marry and had several children. She died relatively young, sometime between the age of 52 and 67. I do not know the circumstances of her death.

I was losing interest in going to class. I wasn’t doing my homework. I wasn’t even keeping up on my reading assignments. My marks were abysmal. I couldn’t stand most of my teachers. I was drifting more and more to my old fantasies, but I was seldom alone at home anymore. My grandmother was always there. I had to confine my imaginings to when I took a bath. I would sneak one of my magazines into the bathroom under my clothes and I would take the risk of hairy hands.

Life outside of school and home was going along fairly well. I was out most nights now, cruising with Richard or visiting my old Downingtown friends. Since I wasn't having much success with getting girls to dance with me or date me, what was I doing?
I was indulging in the other big interest of guys in my neck of the woods.

Pottstown has had a long reputation for drag racing. When I was a teen they were trying to
hard to stomp it out, but in recent years I think they have played off of that theme. Saturday nights became something of a festival in that town during the 1990s and 2000s. You would see all kinds of

hot rods and custom cars heading up the Pottstown Pike. These weren’t kids either. These were older guys showing off what they did by stealth fifty years earlier, cruising back and forth on the main street of Pottstown. They even created the official Pottstown Cruise, which has been going on for at least 20 years (pictured right Pottstown Cruise Day 1991; on the left if the Pottstown Cruise 2010, below right, Pottstown Cruise Night 2010).

But we were kids back then in 1957-58 and hot rods weren’t welcome cruising up and down High Street. My Ford was hardly a Hot Rod, but that didn’t stop me picking drag races with other kids at every stoplight. I had quick reflects, which helped on those short blocks, but if the next light didn’t change red quickly before I reached it I didn’t stand much chance with my Straight Six against V-8s.
But that was what we did night after night, pull up at red lights and lay rubber on the green.

Richard was always agitating to get his hands under the hood of my Ford. I wouldn’t let him fiddle about with my engine, but I did allow him to talk me into some modifications to the body. It’s difficult to see some of these in this picture. The pinstripes are obvious, but they were just decals. You can see that we smoothed out the trunk. We removed the original chrome trim and the lock device. The area was filled and painted over. We ran a cable from the trunk lock through the car up to the driver’s side alongside the seat. You pulled a handle on this cable to pop the trunk.

One day something went wrong with the cable. I needed to get the trunk open so I got a crowbar, stuck the flat end in the crease where the truck lid fitted against the body and tried to pry it. When doing this on one side didn’t work, I tried on the other. The only results I got were these narrow, deep groves in the top of each fender. I didn’t realize I could pull out the rear seat to access the trunk.

This wasn’t the only modification resulting in damage. Richard and I (mostly Richard) installed lowering blocks (pictured right) in the back. It was the custom of the day to have your car ride very low to the ground in the rear. Lowering blocks fastened in between springs and chassis pushed the rear down. They also made going too fast over a bump rather unforgiving. I went over a rise at the end of a driveway and broke my springs.

We removed the hubcaps to paint the wheels red. Everybody considered red wheel cool. I wanted to put Oldsmobile taillights on, but I don’t think I ever did. I also notice I had a bumper sticker reading, “Girl Wanted”. I can’t read what the snide remark below that says and I don’t remember it. I did stop Richard cold when he wanted to cut the roof supports and lower the roof height. Let's not get carried away here, man!

The most unusual dents on my car didn’t come from dragging, but from attending drag races in Lancaster. Richard and I became regulars at a couple of drag tracks, not as participants, just spectators. We went to the drags in Perkasie, which had a drag strip with grandstands (pictured left). Other times we went to the drags in Lancaster. They held these at the Lancaster Airfield. The cars raced down one of the runways. There were no stands, but if you got there early you could pull your car right up to the side of the runway to watch. We would park and climb up on my car roof for the races. Richard tended to get excited and bounce up and down. He left his impression in my car roof. Of course, this was not your traditional moon roof.

Now I had the dented front fender from when I hit the support beam, the dented back fenders from the crowbars, the broken springs and dents in my roof. What more could I do to this poor vehicle?

Attack of the Monsters of Eleventh. And Social Disease?

Eleventh Grade was to be my worse year academically in public school. I finished my Ninth Grade with a 1.77 average, which was my previous worst.  I managed a mere 1.57 average in eleventh, a very low C minus, very low. This may seem odd considering I made such an improvement in Tenth.

By Eleventh I had several friends and not many enemies. This factor did not improve my attention to school. I was far more interested in my outside activities. I also did not have a great slate of teachers and this really turned me off to school. As teachers went, so went my marks all through my school days; like my teachers my average rose, but dislike them, I caught the elevator to the bargain basement of cut rate marks.

My best subject was Driver’s Education, a required subject. I hadn't waited around to take this course  before getting my license. I had passed my driver’s test by early July and had two months of solo driving under my belt by the time my classes started in September after Labor Day.

Driver’s Ed was a full year subject, too. I was stuck with it for nine months. Considering myself already an experienced driver I probably should have been bored silly waiting for that baby to deliver, but I liked Mr. Alvin Alderfer, the instructor. Oddly enough I got an F in my midterm exam, but I finished the course with a B. It probably helped that I already had my license. It took the pressure off.

The course was kind of fun. We had these simulators in the classroom, which were like precursors to video games. You sat in this big box pretending to be a car with a steering wheel and foot pedals while a film ran before you. Kids chasing balls into the street, others on bicycles would pop out from between parked cars, an errant dog would dart across your path, and many more sudden appearances would challenge your reaction. Everything but the town drunk staggered into the car's path. The object was not to run over anyone. You got no points for kills.

As strange as it may seem, Plane Geometry proved to be my next best subject, it and health, but I’ll deal with health a little later. I got a C in geometry much to my surprise. That was a great morale booster. I had given up on math the year before. I had surrendered to my belief I could not do math after flopping Algebra.
Granted, Geometry sure wasn’t my favorite thing. I couldn’t seem to get any angle on how to do it.

I didn’t like Mrs. Shinehouse, the Geometry Teacher, nobody did, not while she had us in sight of her pointer. We kidded that when they build the school in 1912 she was already there and they put it up around her. She was an elder woman with gray hair pulled back in a bun, the very stereotype of the old-fashioned school marm. She was very tough. Nobody acted out in her classes. She forced us to do a lot of board work. You stood there with chalk in your fingers and sweat rolling down your face until you solved the problem or you couldn’t sit down. Often she kept pupils working after the bell, so there wasn't even rescue in that. She didn’t care if you were late for your next class or not. That was incentive to come to class prepared.

My assessment of Mrs. Shinehouse is she was a dedicated teacher who truly cared about her students. She wanted you to learn, dared you to learn and insisted you learn. It didn’t matter to her whether you liked her or hated her. Popularity was not her purpose for being there. Her purpose was to drum those degrees, angles and shapes into your brain. She even succeeded in making me an average math pupil, as uncomfortable as I was when called to the board. I say we need more Mrs. Shinehouses in this world.

The rest of my classes were Ds, evert last one of them, with a lot of Fs mixed in along the way. I had a lot of insane teachers giving me those marks.

In English I had Mr. Pidus. He looked like an old time movie version of the Latin Lover, sort of a Cesar Romero look.  I had him every day at 11:00 and I was always fighting sleep by that period. This was a class I often went into my out of body experiences, floating up above it all.

We had to give speeches in his class each and every marking period. In Junior High my one great strength was giving little classroom speeches, in Mr. Pidus’ English  the first speech I gave was one of the most boring speeches ever heard anywhere on God's green Earth and the planets that surround her on how television worked. It was technically correct, but dull as a test pattern. I did learn from the yawns and rolling eyes, and my speeches the rest of the year at least held the attention of my fellow classmates.

I would have done better in English if I had been a different sex. The girls made a beeline for the front row of his class. It was the best place for cute little lambs to entice the wolf. A little hitching up of the skirt worked wonders on hiking your grade level if you were female. A little lifting of my pant leg did nothing for me at all. Pidus lit up around any young lady passing through his sightline. His name was Pidus but it sure wasn’t pious.

I came into Chemistry with great expectations. I had been very interested in this subject, in sciences in general, back in grade school, even considering chemistry as a possible career path. I had anticipated having this class for years. It proved one of the biggest disappointments of my young life and by year-end I had crossed it off my list of interests. D. Marlin Horne was the teacher and I think we were his first class out of college. Look at his photo. Does that look like a happy man? He was very short, but with this incredible booming voice. You would have expected with such a deep voice he would easily command attention, yet he had no ability at controlling the class and he made Chemistry the dullest subject on earth, even duller than my lecture on television.

The school did little to help. We didn’t even have a lab. We met in a regular classroom. Every day we came to class and Horne stood (if he sat we wouldn’t have seen him) and bellowed out formulae. He would have an overhead projector and show sheet after sheet of these formulae. It might have helped if we could have seen the formulae applied to an experiment in a test tube or two, but we didn’t. Horne dissolved my interest in Chemistry faster than hydrofluoric acid dissolves silicon dioxide.

I did not have the good fortune to have Mr. Elliott for French II. I had Joan Grim, and she was all of that and my whole year proved grim. I took a dislike to her during the first class. I had trouble ever working for any teacher I disliked. Add to that my hearing problem with similar sounding words and this was not going to be one annee tres bonne. I had five Ds and five Fs and somehow finished with a D, allowing me to pass France. Merci pour afficher la pitie, Mme. Grim! 

There was something totally weird about our World History teacher. I swear he was crazy. His name was Sigmund Knies (pronounced: Kaa-neice) and he made up half the history he taught. He also brought in movies to show, but such might be a John Wayne epic with no relationship to World History. He took a dislike toward me, which usually teachers didn’t do. They might complain about my grades, but they normally were pleasant to me because I didn’t give them grief. Mr. Knies seemed to find nothing but fault with me. He is my only high school teacher to give me unsatisfactory marks in the deportment side of the card. He was very liberal with these, too. I got unsatisfactory in Cooperation, Responsibility, Seriousness of Purpose, Industry and Self-reliance. Think what he would have given me if I talked during his Wayne movies.

Mr. Buckwalter, the Marine DI, taught Eleventh Grade Health as well as Physical Education. I got a satisfactory in gym, by the way. Health I got a C. (Guess I was wrong about getting a D in everything; oh wait, I did say with the exception of Health, didn't I?)

Health was year long in Eleventh Grade. Boys and girls had separate Health classes with separate teachers, a lady for the girls and a gentleman for the boys. Well, Mr. Buckwalter, anyway. This was so the instructors could talk about S-E-X. Yes, by Eleventh Grade the powers that be decided maybe we should know about the birds and the bees.
They did not delve deeply into the subject however. I will summarize our sex education. A male has a penis. When a male marries and wants to have a baby, the male inserts his Penis (A) into the Female Socket (B). Sperm will magically swim from his penis and possibly penetrate the female egg. Yes, the female has an egg like a chicken. It must be why we call them “chicks”. If Mister Sperm gets lucky, the chick will have a baby. Apparently all it took was for me to place my Penis somewhere inside a woman for a baby to happen, where exactly was still kept some kind of secret. 

Although they described our penis to us in some graphic detail, as if we guys had never looked down and seen it, the Female Socket was not described. It remained just a socket and we were basically told not to plug our penises into it. The most important point stressed in our sex education was don’t do it until you are married.

Mr. Buckwalter explained how we boys should behave during our dates to prevent any premarital misappropriation of our penises and sockets.

“You might find yourself alone with some girl you like.” He began. "You may be in a car kissing. Remember your emotions are high at your age. You may experience some urges. You have to control them. If you ever feel such urges you need to go out behind the barn and take care of it yourself.”

In other words, if you are getting aroused, you need to go somewhere private and masturbate to dissipate the heat. He didn’t mean you took the girl out behind the barn. Actually it was surprising he recommended masturbation. Many people still considered this something of a sin and perversion. Remember Dr, Kellogg and his circumcision as a cure and punishment for masturbation? People said you would grow hair in your palms if you masturbated or worse go blind. (I use to check my palms a lot, but I couldn't see anything...ut oh!) Mr. Buckwalter’s more important advice was not to let things get to such a boiling point. Mr. Buckwalter recommended taking a lot of cold showers.

There was no mention of positions. There was no hint of oral or anal sex. No one uttered the word homosexuality in the room. Most of the discussion was not on the how and why of sex, but on all the bad things it could lead to. Pregnancy was a serious consequence of letting your hormones run away with you. No proper young man wanted to get a girl pregnant and ruin her life. (Shades of my father's advise.)

There were even worst things that might befall one called “Social Diseases”. We had a film showing the devastation of such things as syphilis, pictures of destroyed faces and warped brains. Health class was enough to give you nightmares and take a vow of celibacy.

Early in the summer after eleventh grade, Richard, Tommy and Suzy paid a visit. It was a languid day. We were lounging about behind my house. It was hot and we boys had our shirts off. My father had strung a hammock between two trees and Suzy and I were sitting on this hammock, gently swinging. We got slightly off balance and the hammock dumped us to the ground. I landed first and Suzy fell atop me. Her bottom came down on my face and my one lens shattered from the impact. She rolled off and I turned over carefully brushing away the broken glass before any got in my eye.

“What’s that rash under your arm?” Tommy asked.

I looked down and saw a red circle around my armpit. I didn’t know what it was. I pulled on my shirt to hide it. I was concerned about my broken glasses and what mom would say when I told her. I wasn’t going to worry about a rash.

Except I did worry about the rash, that was how naïve I was. I remembered all the stuff about “Social Diseases” we had been taught. Oh my gosh, I’ve gotten a venereal disease, I thought.  

I was now afraid to tell anyone I had this horrible, disgraceful thing. How this could have happened didn’t cross my mind. After all, I had not had sex with anyone. I had barely even kissed anyone at this point of my life. And if I did have a venereal disease, what kind of sex would I have been having that I caught it in my armpit?