Indian Curry, Ski Machines at Midnight, Sexland Anywhere and Donald Trump Ts Off

There was a problem, well, more than one, with the Cherry Hill Towers. It was kind of disheveled when we moved there. I got stuck in the elevator once, which is less than a comfortable experience, but since we lived on the twelfth floor I wasn’t about to skip using the lift. One, two stories, maybe three I'll walk, but four or more is pushing it. Being on a high floor gave us a great view, but it did bring inconveniences.
After we moved in, I bought us a living room suite.  It consisted of the usual components, coffee table, an end table and this gigantic sofa and love seat. The sofa was super long and you slid the love seat up against one end to form L-seating. It was called a sectional. It was gold in color, a much brighter gold than it appears in the photo, like a summer sun it was. 

We had bought it and paid for delivery and therein lay the difficulty. Two burly men showed up at our floor and hauled in everything except the long couch. One handed me a sheet to sign and said they couldn’t fit the sofa in the freight elevator.

“Oh, then take it back,” I said.

“Can’t do that,” he says. “Against company policy. You gotta call the store and make arrangements. We left it down in the basement for you.” And he left.

Being as how in those days I was obstinate, stubborn, stronger and confident in my problem solving abilities, I rode down to the basement to check out the situation.
Man, yes, that sofa was big. I’m six foot and pushed up on end that blsted sofa towered over me. There had been two of those guys, but only just one of me, which made handing that monster a bit awkward, but after an hour of twisting, turning and muttering, I got it into that elevator, out of that elevator, down our corridor and through our apartment door to the living room. (That is Lois standing at attention in the living room. Don't you just love those 'seventies fashion?)

Ah, the sanctuary of your home where you can keep the

world out, but not necessarily the odors of the neighbors. Across the hall from us lived a family of Indians (not the cowboy and indian indians, but India Indians). They were very nice people and we visited with them in their India decor apartment with the Hundu Alter against one living room wall.

They always dressed in traditional native clothes, he usually in a Mundu and short jacket, her in colorful Saris. (They were considerably older than the male model.) This was all fine, but they also ate their native foods cooked with a lot of curry, I would almost swear   every meal. The odor of curry permeated the hallway and it snuck into our living room from the space beneath our front door. We took to stuffing this crack up with towels, but nothing was 100% guardian against the curry clouds.

The Cherry Hill Mall was directly across the street from us and a couple block around the corner was the home of a TV pitchman named Gray. He had a mirror company. There were a couple companies hyping their mirrors on TV and I think both companies went down in scandals and ripoff. Anyway, this guy Gray saw him self as a big celebrity and he owned a house in Cherry Hill. I would walk by it and he had two cadillacs parked in his driveway. They were gaudy vehicles, trimmed in gold with gold hubcaps. Each had a vanity licence plate, the one read "Super" and the other "Star". Well, Mr. Superstar went to prison. I wonder if he starred there? 

We endured any and all inconveniences at the Cherry Hill Towers until the hot water pipe began hissing steam into the bathroom, I was defeated. I could not fix it and it made going in there a miserable proposition, plus I kept expected our red-flocked wallpaper to unflock. Didn’t want to ruin the décor, you know, even if it did look like a bathroom in a brothel.

I contacted the rental office, but this accomplished nothing but empty promises. They would take it up with the management, so they said. The landlord was holed up in New York City somewhere and cared not a fig for his South Jersey residents. The steam heated faux spa continued unabated and unfixed. When our lease expired we moved for the seventh time in our dozen years of marriage. Counting my first home after birth, this would be the twelfth address for me.

People sometimes find it hard to believe how our new address was possible in the flat land of South Jersey. We moved from Cherry Hill, where I never saw a cherry tree or a hill to Pine Hill, the highest elevation in Camden County, where I saw both, a big hill and many, many Pine Trees. 

We had a second floor apartment in the two-story Manchester Building within the clusters of Chalets at Ski Mountain. It was a new and lovely complex when we moved there on December 1, 1973, having many modern conveniences, including a trash compactor in the kitchen.

The backend of the complex backed right up to the edge of Ski Mountain, meaning all winter we had to bare the hum of the snow making machines running from midnight to morning light, but you get used to it. Of course, it snowed for real just after the new year. On the 8^th we left work at noon and the snow continued all the next day. On January 10 it turned bitterly cold and everything froze.

Ski Mountain remained a popular winter attraction during the five years we lived at Chalet. The whishing and slushing and wind of the two line motors went on for several months until the blessed spring thaws.

The summer attraction was Clementon Lake Amusement Park,  on Blackwood-Clementon Road just two and a half miles away. Clementon, you might recall,  was the home of Tom Newman, my 1959 friend and fellow correspondence school art student also attending the Florence Utz IBM School. The park was only two blocks from his house where I stay a couple of times that summer not realizing the future would bring me back to the area.

Clementon Park is still operating, but Ski Mountain is

long gone now. That hill it utilized went through several iterations after we moved away. In the 1980s a water park was built on the site and called Action Mountain Park.

It was an offshoot of the infamous Action Park, a Vernon, North Jersey amusement park, known as “The most dangerous amusement park in America” and listed in “Weird New Jersey”.  Action Mountain Park was perhaps not as dangerous as its parent, everyone seems to have gotten out of it alive, but from what I have learned people generally came away from it bruised and banged up.

Action Mountain closed down sometime in the nineties and in the year 2000 the Trump National Golf Club-Philadelphia was built upon the site. (Yes, that Donald Trump.) It remains a resort to this very day and has a five-star rating.


I wonder if will be the official Presidential T-off spot?

Throughout 1974 and well into 1975, Lois and I provided our own amusement park, Sexland. The only rides were us. Sexland would exist anywhere and anytime we chose. There would be fondling under the table in restaurants. When we ate out we sat on the sides that formed the right angle of the table corner; not across from each other. This allowed easy reach.

Although we had stopped any group sex activities after Wayne and Bunny, we were prone to risky public acts and displays. Lois bought a wrap dress, something introduced that year by Diana Von Furstenberg. As its name implied, it was a dress of one piece, but had no buttons. A woman put her arms through the sleeves and then wrapped the material about her, doubling one side over the other in front and tying it in place with a belt or sash. This made the thing easy to manipulate. The bodice could be pulled apart to differing widths to show cleavage or more skin. The exposure of legs could also be adjusted.

Lois would not wear underwear many times when we went out (nor would I). We often left certain restaurants and as soon as we started across the parking lot, she would undo the belt, which allowed the wrap dress to unwrap fully in the front. Eventually, as our activity grew more emboldened, we went to a lounge nearby. It had a L-shaped setup with the bar on the short part. This was where most people were when we went there, but the long side was general empty toward the back and we took a booth in that section. This allowed Lois to undo the wrap dress and basically sit there nude, though whipping the material around her if a waitress approached.

Our bathing suits also grew steadily smaller and we would fool about in any water we ever entered, even sometimes slipping out of the suits.
(We also had erotic statues about our apartment, such as the Lovers and David seen in the right of the photo.)
We’d play games in elevators taking the chance it could stop at any moment to pick up passengers. In a crowded elevator I would back against the back wall and Lois would back into me and grind. I might slip my hands up her skirt or down her blouse in empty lifts. We constantly engaged in sexual play, including while driving, Lois sometimes completely disrobing, something that had to be a treat to semi drivers who came alongside. We would drive onto the back country road of Chester County just to extend sexual play.
 One such evening while engaged in oral sex I drove off the road into a ditch. It was a deep ditch and I couldn’t get the car out. There was a farm house across the road, the only house anywhere in sight. The noise my car made attracted the residents. The porch light came on and several young women came out the front door to see what the commotion was. Meanwhile I was struggling to get my pants up and fastened as they approached us. They were giggling, so perhaps they had some idea what we had been about. Nonetheless, their dad or brother or cousin, some male anyway, got the tractor and pulled us free.

We took to having sex in public places during the day. We did it behind a tree next to a springhouse behind Lafayette’s Headquarters in the Brandywine Battlefield. In Downingtown, where I spent my boyhood, where I once stole girlie magazines from Charles’ Newsstand, we wandered to the back of Kerr Park along the Brandywine. There was a natural stage there before a grove of pine trees. They used to put on plays during summer eves, using the pine grove as the dressing rooms. We went back and had sex pressed against one of the pines. I could see out through the trunks at the people strolling the area and some kids playing tag or some such game.

In Valley Forge we did it down in a field of tall weeds just off the parking lot for the Washington memorial Chapel, where once Bob Condon and I wrote songs up in the bell tower. There was a picnic area maybe 50 yards away, perhaps less, and I watched a family set up their picnic during our activity hoping they couldn’t see us through the grass.

So why relate these secret things from the past that no one need ever to know? Because one must show what they once were in order to show change. People who had been alcoholics relate how they were fallen down drunk, how they threw up on the hostesses dress at parties, how they had accidents on the highway when in their cups. Reformed druggies might confess to days of thief or muggings to support their habit, how they boosted hubcaps from parked cars or snuck into buildings to rip off items to fence.

I wasn’t a drunk or a crack-head or a thief. I was simply a sex addict. I wasn’t raping or assaulting any one. I wasn’t jumping out of bushes to expose myself to strangers passing by. This was, of course, my rationalization and my justification that I was harming no one and no one really knew, so what was the harm. It certainly made practicing such behavior easier not believing in any God that might be observing disapprovingly. As I stated before, as an Atheist I believed the only real purpose to life was seeking pleasure.

Perhaps pleasure wasn’t so prevalent as I tried to believe if I had honestly accessed my life. I was 33. I had changed addresses 12 times, been rejected from the armed services because of psoriasis, was working at my seventh employer in 16 years, dropped out of art school and quit Temple University. Yes, I had writings published, my latest being an article in “Animal Lover’s Magazine”, but it hardly supported a living.  I didn’t feel satisfied with anything and was often angry. I marched in protests and argued with ministers and saw friends, the few I had, come and go. I spent a lot of time drinking with those I kept. I had 6 dead babies, too. I was 33 and saw no future for myself other than drifting along as I had been and hoping more stories would sell, while in reality I was selling less.

The movements of the 1960s were fading away. Once we sang “Where have all the Flowers Gone?”, now we could ask, “Where have all the Hippies Gone?” It appeared creativity was dissolving into the recent past and protests as well as the long Vietnam War ended. It was an age of disillusion; perhaps we were a new Lost Generation. The Beatles disbanded. The Trauma and Kaleidoscope (the remains of which are pictured right) were closed. Folk music was disappearing from the hit parade and the bland music of Disco was beginning to dominate. People escaped into the beat that was good to dance to and disengaged from causes. The Fugs and Country Joe and the Fish had been replaced by the Bee Gees and Village People.

Richard Nixon became the first person to resign the presidency. The moon shot was disappearing into history.

In 1973, Elmer Wilson, the father of Richard, Tommy and Suzy, died at the age of 59. In 1974, my father’s longtime friend and the father of my boyhood babysitter, Dotty Bender Walls, died in May, also at the age of 59. Dotty’s marriage had broken apart, she had been incarcerated at Embreeville State Hospital and her ex-husband was sent to jail for child molestation. In November, Joe Rubio’s mother died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 45.

I wondered what 1975 would bring. Probably more of the same old same old. I didn't expect more, and I had given up hope of ever being a father.

Drinking in New Jersey and other Diversions

 Since I was now earning a decent amount of money, I purchased a bar for our apartment. Somehow we had come to believe having a well-stocked bar in your place was the height of sophistication. It was a status symbol of success. Our bar was very well-stocked with a large variety of booze, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Bacardi 151 Rum, Smirnoff Vodka, Crown Royal Whiskey, Dubonnet, Galliano and many more. I had several mixology books and by the time we were high up in Cherry Hill Towers getting high, I had gotten a handle on making cocktails. Back in Philadelphia at the Commodore I almost killed Lois one night.

Lois’ drink of choice was a Manhattan, so this particular evening I decided to make her one. I had bought a little cocktail kit. I took the shaker and added some ice. I opened a book I had and read the recipe. It said use 8 parts whiskey to one-part Vermouth. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I assumed a jigger constituted one part. I added in 8 jiggers of whiskey and one jigger of vermouth. Dashed some bitters on top, put on the lid and shook that baby up. I poured it out into a glass and she drank it down.

Talk about woozy drunk. She staggered about and announced she felt sick, then headed into the bathroom to throw up. There was a loud crash and I hurried after her. She lay upon the bathroom floor where she passed out after falling head first against the toilet so hard it cracked the tank.

 We didn’t see them quite as often, but we did continue getting together with Bill and Grace weekly for our usual evenings of cards and drinking and listening to Bill pontificate about harapozoids. These were sometimes raunchy, but never oozed over to any group sex affair.

Besides the Stones, we still got together with Joe Rubio occasionally.  These were more on the order of normal suburban life, cookouts and cocktails and a lot of chit chat about jobs and trips.

Wayne and Bunny were out of the picture. It helped us split with them when we disappeared across the Delaware River into South Jersey, new address, new telephone number and not long after, a new employer. We certainly never had a nude Bunny at the front door or heard from them again.

At the my employer, Welder Tube, I met a fellow who would become a close friend for most of the next decade. His name was Victor Ernest and he had originally immigrated to the USA from St Lucia. He had a interesting accent. Lois thought he sounded like Grover, one of the Muppets on Seseme Street.

 He had been with the company for a few years in the position of Cost Accountant. His grade was above mine of Assistant Bookkeeper when I started. Yet in a few months our roles became reversed. He was still the Cost Accountant, but I was now his boss. He had no difficulty with the situation for the most part, although he preferred to keep it quite that I was his boss, even pretend it wasn’t so. Despite this, we become close friends and he remained such for the next several years. We were together a lot, certainly at work, but socially as well. We began playing tennis every lunch hour, putting up a makeshift net of string between lamp posts in the parking lot. We also took up golf and played every weekend. Sometimes we even got together on weekends and played tennis on a real court.

We were just average weekend golfers. My best score at a full-sized golf course was 95 at the Westwood Country Club in Woodbury, New Jersey.  This Club allowed the public to play their course. It was a lovely course. We were playing there one time when a sudden thunderstorm came roaring in overhead.  It was something of a dilemma as we were on the far back end, a long way from the clubhouse and any solid shelter. Mostly this was open field. They tell you not to stand in an open field during lightning, but the only thing around was a solidary tree, but they also say don’t stand under a tree in a storm either. All we did was walk a bit of a distance away from our bags of metal clubs.  I’m here writing this, so obviously we survived the incident.`

 Usually we played at an Executive Golf Course, called the Golf Farm. An Executive Course had nine holes, but two cups cut into each green. You played the nine, then played them again but to a different cup to make your 18-hole course. We played here because the green fees were pretty cheap and Westwood's were pretty steep.
The golf farm bordered right up against a private country club. One day as I came along the fairway near the drive into that club, this guy stopped along the side and took his club and some balls from his trunk. He began driving them directly into the Golf Farm course, darn near hitting me. I yelled at the jerk, but he kept hitting his drives anyway. Finally, he got in his car and continued on to the country club parking lot.

One time we were playing a round at The Golf Club when we came up behind two women. Instead of just waiting for them to finish a hole, we suggested playing as a foursome. After the first nine, Victor headed to the rest room and one of the women also trotted off somewhere. After chit-chatting with the pretty dark frizzy-haired lady with a spectacular figure, she suddenly suggested we go to her apartment, which was just down the road she said. , She would make us a lunch. Then she began to tell me her husband’s business kept him on the road for long stretches and he was away and how lonely she was. I turned her down on her offer of lunch and the other two returned and we finished the back nine.

I had taken the lady’s offer at face value, just a lunch thing. When I told Lois about it later she gave me a look, shaking her head. “You are so naïve,” she said.

As far as my scores, I didn’t measure my improvement by those. I measured it by how many balls I loss. When we first began we would lose several, either in the water hazard or in the rough. Eventually I reached a point where I was finishing with the same ball I started with and then I felt I was really improving.
Victor particularly hated to lose a ball anywhere. They cost money, you know, and he was a bit tight. He would tramp about in the woods or roughs for a long time before giving up on a ball and if he couldn’t find it he was unhappy. I might look about a bit if I lost a ball, but was willing to continue with a new ball rather than spend time searching. I preferred playing.

Psychologically the worse hazard was the water hazard. The Golf Farm had a lake you had to tee off over. The distance you had to clear was usually easily carried on any other hole, but staring at the water drained away one’s confidence and more likely than not, we would drive our ball straight into the water. Victor really despised this hole. On one occassion he sunk ten straight balls into the water where they disappeared forever. (Actually, they weren't lost forever. There was a guy who came around with a snorkle and fished all the sunken balls from the bottom, which he then sold to golfer for a low price.) Victor and I eventually went to a driving range and bought a bunch of used balls floaters. These balls did not sink. They floated about like strange round white fish and you could sometimes fish them out of the drink. I carried in my bag a special tool for just just a thing. It had a cup at one end and a telescoping handle that could be extended out about ten feet. 

Vic was kind of obsessive-compulsive. He lived by a pretty rigid schedule. He couldn't get together on Tuesdays because this was laundry day. He was fanatical about his appearance and festidious in his grooming. He would arrive at work and head right to the men’s room where he would wash up and fuss with his hair and beard, even though he had showered and groomed himself at home. He often spent 45 minutes in this ritual.

His pride and joy was his yellow Porsche 914. He used to park it right next to the office along the driveway instead of back in the parking lot. He didn’t want anyone parking near him that might ding or scratch his baby.

The structural steel tubing was fabricated in the long building behind the offices. Flatbed 18-wheelers would come in through the front gate, turn up the drive and deliver these great coils of steel to the plant. These coils were very large and very heavy. One day we heard a loud thud just outside the offices. We ran to the windows. Somehow as a truck turned onto the drive, the restraints gave way and one of these giant coils tipped off the side. It made a large dent in the driveway macadam and only missed Victor’s little car by a couple of inches. He never parked along the drive again. Better a couple of dings than a pancaked car beneath a steel coil.

Victor had a girlfriend named Marsha, who he eventually married, so the four of us, he and Marsha, me and Lois, did a lot of things together, but there was no sex involved in this relationship. There was still drinking at his parties.

That was a mainstay of our socializing throughout the early 1970s, parties and plenty of booze. Victor’s parties never got as drowned in the stuff as at Bill and Graces, no one got falling down drunk. We mainly loosened up and spent time singing and laughing. The guitar Victor is playing was mine, but he actually knew how to play it.

We were to continue reveling with this group of friends from 1973 to the fall of 1975 when something would happen that changed everything in my life. I had met Joe Rubio in 1967 and he was still a friend in this period. Victor Ernest became a close friend in early 1973. Both of these would still be friends into the 1980s. Our boozing with Bill and Grace began in 1972, but ended in 1975. Our sexual dalliances with Wayne and Bunny had begun in 1972, but were over by 1973 when we moved to Jersey.

This did not mean our risky sexual proclivities ended.

On September 15, 1973, Lois and I headed to Wisconsin on vacation. It had been a long time coming that we earned enough to afford a real vacation. Our last real one had been the trip to

New York and the tour of Virginia in 1962, our second year of marriage. Since then we had taken a number of day trips, a few overnight stays and one drive out to Cleveland, but that was hardly a vacation since we just drove straight to that city and then straight back home. This was a ten-day trip across several states. The first leg was sort of a dash northwest on interstates, crossing Ohio on up through Gary and Chicago, with no stops. We then went right up to the Wisconsin Dells, after a side trip to Baraboo because I wanted to see the Circus Museum there. We stayed in the Spinning Wheel Motel one night there (right).

Circus had long fascinated me, especially the Ten-in-one or sideshow or Freak Show. Circus World is a museum dedicated to the history and all things circus. Owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, it was built in Baraboo because that was the home of the Ringling Brothers. Ringling began their first circus tour out of the town in 1884.

From there we went to The Dells for a couple days. My regret is I had a fairly new movie camera at the time and I took a lot of films on the trip and not many photographs. I still have the films in a metal box, but nothing to view them with since I got rid of my projectors a few years back. If I ever have any spare money, I will take my movies to a place that can convert them to DVDs.

We took the long way home, cutting through Minnesota, then Indiana. We found a wonderful little local bar restaurant in some small town in Indiana. It wasn’t a tourist destination, but a place where the locals ate. We also had some car trouble in Indiana. The carburetor needed adjusting or something, but we were able to get it fixed quickly and continue our tour.

We began driving through Iowa. I decided we would continue into Missouri and stop over at Hannibal where there was a lot of Mark Twain stuff to visit, but we didn’t make it. After hours of driving through repetitive flat farm land and hearing obituaries being read on the radio along with pork belly market reports, we made a left turn east halfway down the state and headed home.

One of the few pictures I did take is of Lois in the Redwood Center Motel in Angola, Indiana. If much of our life sounds typically humdrum, the drinking and parties aside, our sexual behavior was not. For instance, I often parted the curtains slightly when we stayed in motels on the idea people might peek in and see us making love. Our risk taking sex life continued in these years, just as I continued buying pornography and going to the xxx films or strip shows.

Several of the adult bookstore now added cubicles or booths in the back where you could view pornography movies in private. Some even added such booths where a curtain would part revealing a naked woman who would do “tricks” for you as long as you pushed money through a slot. Sitting in those booths viewing such “performers” as Annie Sprinkle (use your imagination), I never gave a thought to all the previous men who had sat on that bench doing whatever they might be doing while watching a filthy film. The films weren’t the only thing dirty about such places, the interiors were none too clean either.

And at the end of 1973, we were moving again.