THE END OF THE ENDLESS SUMMER

Spin & Marty 

I flattened myself out on the green-painted deck of Veteran’s Memorial Park Pool, abandoning myself to the sun, to the summer heat, daydreaming the afternoon away. Vet Mem was from another era—even in the late ‘60s.  It belonged to an America that was slowly slipping away with incidents like Kent State, Altamont, hippies and Black Panthers becoming a sleekly mainstream watermark of current events like the  bloody footage of Vietnam on the news every night, “our” boys at My Lai.   But in Middletown, Connecticut, at Vet Mem Park, veterans were still treated with respect, and old values steadfastly clung to the wooded, landscaped grounds. Spring water bubbled up from a pipe, fresh and freezing cold.  There was a petting zoo with goats, lambs, chickens, bunnies and four or five beautiful fallow deer, butting each other and rubbing their newly developed antlers up against tree trunks to ease the itching.  They were the kind of deer that looked like fawns all their lives, with white flag tails and Bambi spots on their backs.  When you’d hold up some weeds or a carrot brought from home, they’d shove their wet obsidian, squared-off noses through the openings in the Cyclone fence, nudging almost desperately at your hand.

The pool itself was located in an ugly post-World War II cinderblock building, painted a jarring, chalky, Atomic Age turquoise.  For a quarter you rented a locking wire-mesh basket to your bathing suite and held the key while you swam. I’d watch the older girls and women change, trying to get a glimpse of heir bodies, and imagine what it would be like to look like that, or touch grown-up flesh not quite as taut as my own.  The women I spied on all had swaying breasts, thighs milky white in the light filtering through the screened-in windows.  Still just a kid, I’d carry my rolled-up towel to the snack bar and buy Jujubes or Snow-Caps or Junior Mints—movie candy, really—for a dime.  Then I’d spread my towel out on one of the splintery wooden chaise lounges, or maybe just keep it balled up on the grass so it wouldn’t get wet, while I spent the next three or four hours racing, doing cannonballs off the sides of the pool, or if you were old enough (and I was just getting to the), flirting with the lifeguard on duty.  I was at “that awkward age” –still wanting to dunk my little brother, race with the boys, but just beginning to notice the mating dances going on all around me.

There were a couple of lifeguards and  they were almost interchangeable.  Both were cute, bronze, with shaggy, Sun-In bleached Bobby Sherman hair.  They were lithe and tan in baggy, faded swimming trunks, with shiny silver whistles on lanyards, dangling onto their thousands-of-yards-of-Mark-Spitz-Butterfly Stroke pecs.  The lifeguards were perfect objects for testing the waters  for real flirting, and  I spied on the girls who tried to get the lifeguards’ attention, as well as spying on the lifeguards’ girlfriends, who were really pretty.  

The sun was still high at four p.m., but by that time I’d be a little whipped from all the chlorine and fancy diving, remembering to keep my legs together and as straight as possible, toes curled, chest out and back arched.  Exhausted, I’d get as flat as possible, deeply inhaling the intoxicating summer smell of pool water on hot concrete, mixed with the cocoa-butter smell of Coppertone lotion which had been seeping into the concrete and floating on the water in a thin film all summer long.  It smelled good enough to eat.  There’d be laughter in the background, blasts from the lifeguard’s whistle, and, of course, staticy Top Forty coming from someone’s small, tinny transistor radio.  I’d be covered in little droplets of chlorinated water in my snugly fitting royal blue one-piece with the nautical red star hanging just above my belly button like a military decoration.  I was daydreaming of what life would be like as a teenager.

Time seemed to move slower back then, but my body could sense adolescence was approaching rapidly.  My friends in school were already giggling about boys—though I couldn’t see being interested in my classmates when there were lifeguards around.  My mother worked in the Theatre Department at Wesleyan university, and I had a number of crushes on Theatre Majors, mostly artsy, scruffy hippie-types.  Even though the Summer Of Love wasn’t too far in the past, the lifeguards at Vet Mem held a different sort of fascination for me, in a Tiger Beat magazine kind of way.  The lifeguards seemed all about Teen Promise, proms and shit like that.  The boys in my class looked like Timmy from Lassie in their drip-dry Sears plaid shirts, and the J.C. Penney’s jeans that had elastic insets in the back of the waist panel were hardly what one would term “attractive.”  Most of the boys looked like they hadn’t figured out how to wash their own ears yet, and many of the girls towered over them, even in sneakers.  They were just boys –little kids.  I didn’t want Timmy from Lassie, I wanted Spin and Marty – long, tall dangerous teenagers with musclely arms and flat stomachs under clean white Hanes t-shirts and faded, baggy Levi’s. 

Spin and Marty were in a black and white Disney series and lived on a dude ranch.  They were always on horseback.  They looked strong and capable, gentle when they handled livestock, more interesting when they handled rope lariats and rifles.  Spin was wilder, Marty a little more compassionate, but they both had sun-bleached butch buzzcuts under their trashed straw cowboy hats.  They dragged their boots and mumbled, looked like they knew how to smoke, swear, and especially kiss.  Annette, Darlene, and Doreen from The Mickey Mouse Club always guest-starred as either Spin or Marty’s love interest.  I hated Annette, was jealous of Darlene, but Doreen was attractive in a slutty, back-seat-of-the-car-at-a-drive-in way.  When she kissed Spin on a hayride in one episode, I got an immediate stomachache.  I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what desire was at that point, I just thought the butterflies were because of something I’d eaten.  Still, I watched Spin and Marty religiously, and the stomachaches became more and more frequent.  Boys my own age were out of the question.  Lying by the Vet Mem pool that summer was almost like being encased in a chrysalis, sleeping, waiting for adulthood.  It was palpable.

Nowadays, all lifeguards look young and callow to me, too straight arrow and blank, like the good-looking boys and girls on Baywatch.  Except for Pamela Anderson—who had that awesome  Doreen/drive-in movie whorey look.  Spin and Marty are a faded black and white memory from the past.  When was the last time I saw one of their episodes, before Watergate?  I realize how they helped to shape my perception of sexual attractiveness—long limbs, pretty faces, smooth androgynous chests… and sometimes, in moments of sheer perversity, I can’t help but imagine the fate that befalls  the black and white  era ex-Disney stars, those clean cut, adolescent Midnight Cowboys.  Maybe it was Doreen that I’d heard had been in jail for writing bad checks, I’m not sure.  And poor Annette, Rest In Peace.

I imagine Spin old and haggard now, perhaps living in a one-bedroom dump in Tujunga, skin red from years of outdoor work, a few divorces, a failed Country and Western career, an  alcohol problem.  Maybe he got into Meth or something.  Marty probably grew up fey and latent queer –maybe he hustled when the agents stopped calling and the parts stopped being offered.  Did some hardcore porn in the ‘70’s.  Maybe I’d even bumped into one of them at a K-Mart or bought something from one from them at a swap meet!  You never know.  And whatever happed to Timmy?  Child stars, childhood.  We really were innocent back then.  Nobody would even make a kid’s show about a dude ranch anymore, no way.

These days, the idea of going to a public pool is repellent to me, and not just because of athlete’s foot and pee-water.  Drugs for sale, gang violence, molestations, petty crimes in the locker rooms.  If I had kids, I wouldn’t let them go no matter how hot it got.  They’d have to be satisfied with seeing Baywatch reruns.  And look who Pamela Anderson Lee is with now.  She probably preferred Spin to Marty, too.  Even the beach is too polluted to visit.  Do they eve even show Spin and Marty anymore?

Oh man…those long, lazy preteen summer afternoons at Vet Mem—suntan lotion and candy, lifeguards, covert spying missions, waiting for my period to come, waiting for some kind of indefinable action.  Testing the waters of my own undiscovered sexuality.

 And as for daydreams?  Well... who has the time?

##

 The story you’ve just read is from my book Escape From Houdini Mountain ,  signed copies available here:  http://www.princessfarhana.com/shop.htm

Or as a paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Houdini-Mountain-Pleasant-Gehman/dp/0916397688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409526182&sr=8-1&keywords=Escape+from+Houdini+Mountain

MONSANTO

Welcome to my new blog!

The story you are about to read was a spoken word piece i did for the 1999 compilation "Drinking From Puddles". My new memoir collection, Showgirl Confidential will be published in late September on Punk Hostage Press.

A book signing party for Showgirl Confidentialwill take place Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013 at Skinny's Lounge, 4923 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, CA, 6:30-9:30pm. The official launch party & reading is Wednesday, October 16, at Skylight Books,1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz,CA, at 7:00pm.

 Both events are free!

The Monsanto exhibit in all it's retro glory


These days, we cringe when we hear the name  "Monsanto" , because we all associate it with GMO crops and Round Up.  But to anyone who grew up in Southern California in the 1960's through the 1980's,  Monsanto had a  decidedly different connotation!

MONSANTO

The Monsanto exhibit at Disneyland was apparently one of their first…back in the days before Anaheim was such an urban crush, when all there was to the Magic Kingdom was a space-age mono-rail, a few whirling teacups and the powder-blue sparkly stucco walls of “It’s A Small World”, it’s countenance rife with fifties-style clock faces

Monsanto was about the wonders of the future-it was a conveyor ride,you got in these little pods, private capsules, and went on a dramatic odyssey through a single fiber of polyester…or something.

There was a huge cheesy eyeball as you rounded a bend, and a booming voice like “Mr. Wizard” explaining that you’d actually shrunk to sub-minuscule proportions and were being viewed by a scientist through the lens of a high-powered microscope.

Yeah, right!

A little later on, there was a large Styrofoam snowflake dangling on nylon cord; most of the glitter it had been covered with had worn off. These were the two landmarks, usually the only two things anyone noticed…because Monsanto was synonymous drugs and sex.

Just say the magic word, “Monsanto” to anyone who grew up in Southern California

during the sixties and seventies and a fond, nostalgic look will come over their faces, while they remember their first kiss…or their first hit of windowpane…or the last of the half pinto of southern Comfort. They’ll sigh and think of  splitting a Quaalude followed by  a sweaty, ten-minute sessions of unbridled teenage lust with someone they just  met in line for the Matterhorn, or the first maniac twinges of LSD laughter.

Monsanto was definitely the place all deals were transacted,  the place relationships were nearly consummated, the place drugs took hold and  the place the one-hits you’d done in the parking lot kicked in for the duration.

It was the one place that the Disneyland Secret Police couldn’t see into-or at least, that’s the way rumor had it!

Monsanto was probably the singular most decadent place in Southern California, at least for those in the twenty-one and under age group. Everyone has a Monsanto story from those glory days before Space Mountain , before Captain EO, before Disney’s California Adventure.

This was b ack in the days when Disneyland was trying to be more than a theme park, but a fun educational  experience …and so manylearned the ropes in the darkness of Monsanto!  We had it down, man,we knew just how many seconds it took to finish off whatever you were doing  before the ride rounded the last bend and spit you mercilessly into the daylight.

Not too long ago, Disneyland was trying to streamline and modernize, and they tried to get rid of this huge talking statue of Abraham Lincoln. Public protest was widespread and loud -everyone wondered how Disneyland could be so harshso thoughtless as to remove a landmark like old Abe.

Finally, the powers that be in The Happiest Place On Earth had to relent – they left Mr. Lincoln Standing where he was even though most people just pass by him without a thought. But Monsanto…well, Monsanto, they just razed without any uproar at all-or at least there was no public outcry. One day it was there in there in all its Atomic Agestreamlined, hyperspace, worse-for-the-wear, impossibly outdated tacky modern grandeur and the next, it was gone.

Didn’t anyone remember?

Didn’t anyone care?

How could they get rid of Monsanto?

For a little while, the implications were terrible, heads shook in disgust. Monsanto was high art, it was like a secret clubhouse known to only a few hipsters. It was a closely guarded treasure that will, in this day and age of high-tech gloss super-special FX, CPG and neon art director’s scrawls never ever happen again.

Monsanto said a lot about the Baby Boom Generation: what the general public thought went on…and what really happened.

SEASON OF THE WITCH

 Welcome to my new blog! The story you're about to read was published in my first book, Senorita Sin. My latest memoir collection Showgirl Confidential: My Life Onstage, Backstage And On The Road will be published in September, 2013 by Punk Hostage Press.

SEASON OF THE WITCH

The year my best friend Joan and I turned thirteen, we started keeping extensive journals, hoping that, since we’d now entered our teens, we’d finally have something worth writing about. That something was love, L-U-V, spelled in poison green neon capital letters, and we were ripe and ready for it… two nubile death-traps, gamey with jail-bait.

 In the early seventies, we were drunk on love– free love, Love’s Baby Soft cosmetics, Maybelline’s Roll-On Kissing Gloss, in luscious strawberry and honey orange. Our lips were dripping wet, drenched in promise, and we were dying to be kissed. Love, the way we saw it, was 18-22 years old, tall, long-haired, and lanky, hopefully in a band, and wearing tight patched jeans over a cute little ass. Sometime during that year, I’d heard that the word  triskaidecaphobia meant “fear of the number thirteen”…unfortunately; most of the would-be Love Gods we knew definitely had that fear.

Life grew complicated and took on air of espionage as we strove to be mature, mysterious, urban sophisticate foxy ladies. We rearranged our lives in our pursuit of l’amour: instead of rushing home from seventh grade to draw the shades and watch “Dark Shadows” with half the neighborhood, we’d linger at diners smoking Marlboros (the tough, worldly, hippie-chick brand) and drinking black coffee, which we absolutely hated – but God! – it looked so grown-up. After we were sufficiently wired, we’d hit the Fashion Post boutique, trying on all sorts of groovy clothes, and then the Grand Union, where we used to shoplift Maybelline Blooming Colors eye-shadow compacts. I always wore Forest Green, because Cosmo said green eye-shadow looked wanton. Over dinner, I asked my mother what “wanton” meant, and when she said “whorish”, I knew with all my heart and soul that green was, indeed the color of eye shadow I needed to express my true inner feelings.

Wanton-eyed and baby-faced, I waited as patiently as I could for what Cosmo termed a “torrid affair” to occur, but in those days of Free Love, alas…most older men didn’t seem to notice willing, bra-less 13 year-old virgins-not that it really mattered at that point in my development, anyway. And Joan and I had succeeded in terrifying all of the boys our own age. It was clear to us: we needed help in a big way.

 Desperate, we turned to Higher Forces, and very seriously practiced witchcraft, calling ourselves Pagans. We earnestly burned incense, buried bits of cloths and hanks of hair, fingernail clippings and coins tied into tiny scraps of material. We’d stare for hours into the flames of candles, we’d sew up little dolls and stick pins into their genital regions.

 We’d have sleepover parties at each other’s houses, and would smoke an entire lid of raspy dirt-week, then strip naked and lay on the bed for hours with the lights out, trying to Astral Project. It all went into our diaries– the crushes, the incantations, the drug-inspired supernatural frenzies.  We’d write exacting descriptions of what we wore every weekend on what we’d come to term  our Fox Hunts … little satin  1940’s bed jackets, glitter  platforms and tight-tight jeans covered with  Majik Marker doodles of dragons and unicorns. Mine had  Queen,  Jimmy Hendrix, Bowie and T-Rex lyrics written  all over them in a loopy child’s scrawl, the “I’s all dotted with tiny stars –  excuse me, I meant Pentagrams.

Ultimately, with no magic other than nature involved, we both got our wishes and lost our virginity, and went on to become, at least for a time, home-wreckers in earnest. Then, very suddenly, it seemed, Joan and I were separated – I moved from Connecticut  to California, and we fell out of touch.

Even more suddenly, I was no longer a teenager, and the way of life I’d aspired to as a bright young floozy had grown tiresome  by my mid-twenties. Even though I was still into lookin’ for love , I was kind of sick of bars, parking lots, motel-rooms, liars, and being The Other Woman. Being a modern-day man-eater just wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed before I’d ventured into The Jungle Of Lust.

Recently, I dug out an old, dusty box of my diaries, and with them, Joan’s letters, and spent an afternoon re-living our manic, desperate, truly wanton adolescent friendship. It was a union full of furtive notes passed in class, with entire sentences underlined; green sparkly Sally Bowles-style nail-polish, Boone’s Farm Ripple wine, headaches, hallucinations, crying jags, buying speed from bikers and carnies, dramatic entrances and exits, parental screaming matches and uncontrollable giggling.

Down near the bottom of the box was a book Joan had given to me for my fourteenth birthday:

 HOW TO BECOME A SENSUOUS WITCH: SPELLS, RITUALS AND RECIPES FOR A LIVELIER LOVE LIFE, BY ABRAGAIL AND VALARIA.

The dog-eared cover featured a sultry sorceress with overly-plucked eyebrows, hot pants and square-heeled lace-up boots posed fetchingly near a bubbling cauldron. I hadn't seen Joan in almost twenty  years, but he book still smelled like her sandalwood oil, and by the scent alone, I could conjure her up.

 I closed my eyes, and there she was before me, standing in a silver Lurex tube-top and cut-off Levi’s, her long blonde hair shimmering, daring me to take another hit off the joint she’s waving around, while she tosses her head, weaves around a bit on her platforms, dancing in all her teenage glory to her favorite song: Donovan’s “Season Of The Witch”.

  Listen to “Season Of The Witch”  from my spoken word  CD  Ruined  here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_hYGC5K1Q