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Clubius Contained Part 41 - Longnook (August 1966) [1]
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Date: 2025-04-27
It was the next morning, and mom was sleeping in. For whatever reason, I didn’t sleep in as much as I usually did, maybe because I was so excited to be there. I got up when David did and we explored the outside around our cottage. It was kind of a cool hazy morning, but not cool enough to want to put jackets on or long pants. The birds were all chirping, different ones than I was used to in Ann Arbor, including seagulls, which were kind of like the crows I was used to, only they were white and gray instead of black. The sun was up there above the haze and you could smell the ocean in the breeze.
Our cottage, the big main house, and the cottage on the other side were in a line along a long gravel driveway. In front of the main house was the main gravel driveway part that went out to Longnook Road. Left on Longnook Road went out to the main Highway 6, and right, to the beach. Around all three houses was an area with grass and on the edge of that lots of hedges, bushes, and trees, so you couldn’t really tell what was on the other side of them. David and I walked around the whole area of the three houses to check it all out and we came across all three of the cats. Then we came across the woman that lived in the big house, she was sitting on her porch in a big wicker chair reading a newspaper.
“Well hello, you two”, she said smiling, “You must be Jane’s kids. Your mother and I exchanged several letters and had a nice talk on the phone as well.” I got worried that maybe mom and told her that she and dad had gotten divorced. She was ALWAYS doing that, making friends with EVERYBODY, and then telling them stuff like that. The lady pointed a finger at me.
“You must be Cooper”, she said, and then pointing that finger at David, “And you’re David. Your mother told me all about you boys.” I got REALLY worried when she said that.
“I’m Mrs Sullivan”, she said, “But everybody just calls me Gracie. Call me what ya like, just don’t call me late for dinner”, and she laughed in that way where you just kind of hiss air out of your mouth and nose. “I just talked with your mother for a minute last night to give her the key. I assume you figured everything out and the accommodations are to your liking?” I didn’t want her to think that I was a stupid little kid not knowing what to say or even too shy to say anything, but I was still figuring out what I should say when David said something.
“We saw your three cats”, he said, “What are their names?” I was mad that David talked before I got a chance too, so now she might think I was super shy or something.
“My kittycats”, she said, her eyes twinkling, “The black one’s ‘Samiboo’. The gray one with the big whiskers is ‘Whisky’. And the little tabby is ‘Shuffles’. I hear you boys have a kittycat too… what did your mom say, uh… Midnight?” David nodded.
“He’s black, like Sammiboo”, David said, “But he has longer hair.” I still hadn’t said ANYTHING, which was really bad. I finally just said something, anything.
“Yeah it’s a nice place”, I said, saying “nice” instead of “neat”, “Though our mom got the big bedroom and my little brother and I have the small bedroom. But it’s still nice.” She did that funny hissing laugh again.
“Well”, she said, “I’m glad you approve, young man!”
Our cottage WAS really neat, much bigger and better than the one we stayed in last year by Coast Guard Beach. When you came in the front door you were in the kitchen, which was bigger than our kitchen at home. One door out of the kitchen went into the living room which had a couch and two big chairs that looked like the couch around one of those low coffee tables. Another table had the record player on it, but we had moved the record player into our bedroom. The windows in the living room looked out onto the big backyard and the hedges and trees beyond it.
The other door out of the kitchen went into the bathroom, which had ANOTHER door on the other side that went into the really big bedroom, which became mom’s. This was the biggest room in the house, that had a big bed like mom’s at home, though even bigger, and the room had a big table and chair and windows on all three sides that looked out at the backyard on two sides and out at the big house up the way from us where the woman lived. The last room in the house was the other bedroom, David and my bedroom, which you got to from the other door out of the living room. Our bedroom was kind of like the bathroom, because it had another door, opposite the one from the living room, into the big bedroom. It was a lot smaller than mom’s bedroom, but big enough for two skinny beds, kind of like our bunk beds at home with a little table in between them where we’d moved the record player to.
“How’s your mom doing this morning?” she asked.
“She’s still asleep”, David said, before I could say it. I had to be quicker.
“She’s had two long days of driving to get here”, I managed to say before David said anything else, “So she was pretty tired out.”
“Your mom said your dad wasn’t able to come with you this time”, she said, “Work kept him at home?” She ASKED it, like she didn’t know and was just guessing, and I realized mom HADN’T told her that she and dad were divorced. Maybe hadn’t told her anything about why dad wasn’t there. I looked at David, afraid he would tell her that they were. He realized I was looking at him and looked back at me, figuring out that I didn’t want him to say anything.
“Yeah”, I said, lying, “It’s too bad they couldn’t work it out.” I suddenly felt sad that they really couldn’t work it out and had gotten divorced. David was quiet, and I felt he was sad too about the same thing.
“Well”, she said, “Your dad’s being a good provider for his family. Good for him!” Then she asked, “What does he do?”
“He’s a college professor”, I said, “He teaches English and writing and journalism.” I didn’t tell her about his new job at that language center at U of M, because I couldn’t really explain what he did there if she asked, and grownups always liked it when they knew your dad was a college professor, because they figured you must be extra smart too.
“Anyway”, she said, clapping her hands together, “Once your mom’s up, tell her I’d LOVE to have the three of you over for breakfast. I’ve got fresh muffins from the bakery. Nothing beats a fresh muffin and a cup of coffee in the morning, though I imagine you two are still too young for coffee.” She did that hissing laugh again. David and I just nodded, but I felt mad that she said we were “too young”, and decided that I would NEVER drink coffee, no matter how old I got.
“So it’s just about a mile down Longnook Road to the beach”, she said, then looking up at the sky on both sides of the porch, “And it looks like it’s going to be a nice sunny day once this morning fog burns off. You can drive of course, there’s parking down at the beach, but it’s a nice walk if you want to hoof it.”
“Yeah”, I said, trying not to sound like a little kid, “We may walk down there and check it out.”
She looked worried and said, “Well, I’d wait for your mom to go with you of course!”
I really didn’t want her to think that mom was in charge of us, so I said, “Yeah maybe, but we do a lot of stuff by ourselves too.”
“WELL”, she said, doing that hissing laugh again, “You ARE a couple of big boys.”
***
A little later that morning we were back at our cottage and mom was still asleep in her big bedroom. David and I had made our own breakfast like we usually did at home, with Cheerios and milk that we’d brought. Now we were out in the yard playing with Sammiboo and Whisky who had been checking us out. But I kept thinking about walking to the beach and decided I wanted to go, not wait for mom to get up.
“So”, I said to David, “I’m going to walk to the beach and check it out.” He looked at me worried.
“That lady said it was a mile away”, he said, “And shouldn’t we wait for mom to get up?”
“Nawh”, I said, scrunching my face together, “A mile’s not very far. I walk to the Blue Front back home all the time. That’s probably a mile. And who knows when mom will get up.”
“I don’t know”, he said, still looking worried, which made me feel even more like a big kid.
“Well”, I said, “You don’t have to come with me!” Yeah David, I thought, I’m a big kid now, I’m not even in elementary school anymore, I can do stuff like this.
“Hell”, I said, trying to sound like an older kid, “Maybe I’ll just run it!” I had never come close to running a mile. I barely could finish the 600 in gym class when Coach Bing made us run it for the President’s Fitness Council thing. But of course, Mike ran the 600 better than anyone else in the class. He said he could probably run a whole mile, which we figured was three times as far.
“WHAA!” David said, eyes wide, looking at me like I was crazy, “You can’t run THAT far.”
“I don’t know”, I said, making a silly face and looking up at the sky, “I’m sure I can. You never know until you try!”
“Okay”, he said, thinking, “I think I’ll play with the cats. Samiboo was on his back swatting at David’s hands as he poked them at the cat. He looked up at me and asked, “You really going to do it by yourself?” I nodded.
“Watch me”, I said, and I started to run down the gravel driveway in front of our cottage to the woman’s big house, and then out the main driveway out to the road. Once I had gone through the trees where David couldn’t see me anymore, I stopped running and just walked. I could feel that little bit of burning in my lungs.
But now I HAD to do it, to run to the beach, or at least try. I mean I could have just walked to the beach and back and TOLD David that I’d run it, but then I’d feel like a fake, just a younger kid pretending to be an older kid. But I didn’t want to pretend. I wanted to feel like an older kid, a kid ready for junior high school, for Tappan, even though I was a year younger than all the other kids who had been in sixth grade who would be going there too.
So after catching my breath a little bit, I started to run again, and remembered that when there wasn’t a sidewalk you were supposed to walk, or run in this case, on the side of the road with the cars coming towards you.
As I ran, I got to that point like when I was running the 600, like near the end, when my muscles started to ache and my lungs burned a little and I would start to try and convince myself that it didn’t make sense to keep running. One part of me wanted to finish with the other kids out front, like Mike, Andy and Stuart, but another part of me was always saying it wasn’t worth it, and usually I’d slow down, or maybe even walk a little bit until I saw the slower kids behind me about to catch up and I would start running again. I mean it was best if you finished with the fast kids, but it was REALLY BAD if you finished with the slow ones.
And running a mile was way more than running the 600. It seemed like I had been running down Longnook Road for a long way when I went around a corner and I could see an even longer way ahead and no beach in sight and my legs were hurting and my lungs burning. So I stopped running and walked for a bit, breathing hard. Part of me wanted to give it up, but another part said that I could take a quick break but had to start running again, or else I’D know I was still a little kid, not really ready to go to junior high.
I maybe stopped and started running again three more times before I turned another corner and I could see the parking lot of the beach ahead. My lungs were burning so that part of me that thought this was all too much and wasn’t worth it won out and I walked the rest of the way to the parking lot. That other part of me that had wanted me to keep running said that it was okay to walk the last part just this FIRST time, but I’d run home and run the whole way. And even though my lungs burned and my thighs ached my whole body felt really good, better than I’d felt in a long time.
I stood in the parking lot and looked down on the beach. There were like 20 people down there, some sitting in the sand, some standing in the water but none actually swimming like mom did. I could feel the sun now burning through the fog and warming my neck and shoulders.
Everything seemed different. All the parts of my body felt warm and alive. I looked around me, down at the beach, down at the people, down by the ocean, which stretched to the foggy horizon, suddenly feeling like it was a much bigger world that I lived in than I had thought before somehow. I sat on the grassy part at the top with my feet on the edge of the sandy dune that went down maybe 50 feet to the beach. I took off my shoes and socks so I could push my bare feet down into the warm sand.
A grownup woman who had been getting stuff out of the trunk of her car walked up to me and asked, “Do you need help young man?”
I looked at her, shook my head, and said, “Nope!”. That felt REALLY good to say that to her, something a big kid would say. I didn’t just shake my head or even just say “no”, but “nope”, like I REALLY was sure about it.
She nodded slowly, thinking, and I imagined her then saying, “Are your parents here?”, and then me saying “Nope” again. But that didn’t really happen, though it would have been really cool if it had! Instead she just started walking down the sandy dune to the beach below.
I thought about my whole life so far. Seemed like it divided into three parts that I could remember. First the part before I went to regular school, when I just did pretty much whatever I wanted to. Played in the basement, the backyard, at my friend’s houses or in Allmendinger Park. Then a second part when I had to go to regular school, Bach School, and do a lot of stuff that the teachers wanted me to do, though the rest of the time when I wasn’t in school I could still do pretty much what I wanted. And then a third part, now ending, where we moved, so I had to go to a different regular school, Burns Park, and do even more stuff that the teachers wanted me to do, including some homework stuff, like math problems and writing reports that I had to do at home.
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I think that first part, before I went to regular school, had been kind of the best part, the most fun, even though I was really little. I had good friends, like Molly, Paul, James, Danny, Ricky, Marybeth and I guess even Kenny. And my best friend, Molly, was a girl, but none of my other friends thought she was my girlfriend, or tried to tease me about that. And since I didn’t have to go to regular school, almost all the time I could do what I wanted to do, and just figure everything out, getting my friends, or mom or dad, or my babysitter Margie, to help me figure stuff out if I needed help. I think I could have figured out how to read and do math problems pretty much by myself too, with just a little help maybe, the same way I figured out how to ride a bike by myself or play baseball.
Then the second part was really different because I had to go to regular school and spend lots of time each school day doing what the teacher wanted all of us to do. The BEST part of that was that I got to make new friends at school that I didn’t know already and we could hang out at recess and just talk about stuff, school stuff but other stuff too. Also I was bigger and older and could ride a bike and go anywhere I wanted to, even downtown. A BAD part was that the grownup teachers at regular school tried to be in charge of us, though my first grade teacher didn’t really seem like a regular grownup, and let us do a lot more stuff that we wanted to do even though we were in school and she was SUPPOSED to be in charge of us.
Another bad part was that the boys and girls kind of got in a war with each other at school, though I still couldn’t figure out why that happened. Maybe because we had to sit next to each other all day in class and all do the same thing instead of doing different stuff, whatever we wanted. So it became like a “contest”, yeah that’s the word, to see whether boys or girls were better at doing the same stuff that the teacher told us to do.
During the second part when I WASN’T in school - like after school, weekends, Christmas and Spring Break, or summer vacation - things were pretty much the same as the first part, with my same friends in the same places and doing pretty much whatever I wanted. Though Molly and her mom moved to Burns Park, and Molly got a new stepdad, I still got to see her a lot on the weekends. And because I was older now and had figured out how to ride a bicycle really good, I could go wherever I wanted to as long as I came home when the streetlights came on. And since I learned how to read, I could go to the library or the bookmobile and get any books I wanted to and read them myself, I didn’t have to wait for mom or dad to read them to me.
In that second part, the other thing that was really different and bad was mom and dad. Mom was getting mad at dad more and they were having all those “fights” about stuff, like not having enough money. Mom even had that “panic attack” that day when she said she couldn’t breath and I thought maybe she was going to die. I still remembered that day A LOT, and it kind of changed things, for mom and dad, but for me too. Every day after that I was worried about what might happen to mom.
After the panic attack we moved to Burns Park, which started the third part of my life so far. I had to go to a different school, which at least I didn’t have to walk a long way to get to, because it was right across the street. The GOOD part was that I made a bunch of new friends at school, and most of them I would see in the park too. But they were more complicated friends because they didn’t all like each other, which I guess wasn’t too bad, because they all liked me, and it did make spying and being a “double agent” between my different groups of friends kind of exciting and fun.
But another BAD part was that school had even more stuff that you had to do, specially if you wanted to show your teacher that you were a really good student. We even had to write reports at home, though dad helped me write a lot of mine. And there was no more recess, but “gym class” instead, where a grownup coach was in charge of you instead of just doing what you wanted at recess. I mean Coach Bing was pretty cool and all the kids liked him, but he still made us do stuff for that President’s Council on Physical Fitness, like situps and the 600, which weren’t much fun. And us kids in gym class didn’t get a chance to talk to each other like we used to at recess.
But the neatest, coolest thing about the Burns Park school, was that before I got there all the kids in the older grades had figured out how to have their own thing playing soccer, every school day before class in the morning, and again before class in the afternoon. They had figured it all out by themselves and there were NO GROWNUPS in charge of it, or there at all. Coach Bing helped by leaving some soccer balls out we could use, but that’s all he did. I had been part of it too, and we’d played soccer EVERY school day, even if it was snowing, raining, or really muddy. Our teachers didn’t like it when we came into class all muddy, but that was THEIR problem, and it felt good cuz it reminded them that outside of school they couldn’t tell us what to do.
And of course another bad part about this third part of my life here at Burns Park was mom and dad. Their fights got worse, and dad even had sex with another woman and mom found out. She said that it was bad enough that he didn’t tell her when it happened, but he lied to her all summer and now she said she could never trust him again. So they got divorced, and dad didn’t live with us anymore and mom was sad most of the time but would call dad late at night and yell at him on the phone and say really bad things to him, then hang up and cry.
And it was doubly bad because I didn’t want any of my friends to know mom and dad were divorced, even though my friend Mike knew, and my sixth grade teacher, Mrs Herman, knew cuz mom told her. I was worried that my friends might think I was a weird kid from a “broken family” and not want to talk or do stuff with me anymore, though Mike knew and he didn’t think I was weird and he didn’t tell anyone else, because Mike was different than most of my friends cuz I could trust him.
I was figuring this third part of my life was just about over, because when we got back from Cape Cod I would start going to junior high school at Tappan, which would be a new “fourth part” of my life. My school friends and I had all heard from some of their older brothers and sisters and other older kids in the park that it was VERY different than elementary school. Instead of having just one class, you had like seven or eight different ones with different teachers, and you kept moving around each hour to a different room, and your friends might not even be in the same classes as you. And there were a THOUSAND kids and we’d go from being the oldest grade, sixth, in elementary school to being the youngest grade, seventh, in junior high.
And some of the older kids said that though boys and girls were still kind of on different teams, that some boys and girls actually were boyfriend and girlfriend and even actually held hands at school or even “made out”, though they usually did that AFTER school, but sometimes at some place at school where nobody else could see them. They also had these things sometimes called “sock hops” in the gym where a band would play and boys and girls could dance with each other, though sometimes girls just danced with other girls, but boys never danced with other boys.
I think it would be fun to dance with a girl, but I couldn’t imagine ASKING a girl to dance with me, because everyone would think I wanted her to be my girlfriend. And having a girlfriend seemed WAY different than just having a regular friend who you just hung out with, did stuff with, and liked talking to. I think you were supposed to treat a girlfriend special and make her more important than your regular friends, but I didn’t really know enough about it to figure it out.
Some kids used to say Molly was my girlfriend, but she was really different than that. She was like my best friend, my closest friend, and we tried to know everything about each other. We tried to think about the same stuff and like the same stuff.
***
It was later on that afternoon and we were back home from the beach. Just like I had run to the beach this morning I had run back home, and running home I still stopped three times to catch my breath, but I didn’t walk the last part like before. David was pretty amazed when I told him that I’d run the “whole way”. Mom finally woke up and we all went to the beach in the car with our bathing suits on and our towels and the cooler with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stuff to drink in it. We all went in the ocean and mom went way out and swam back and forth for a long time. She said she loved swimming in the ocean because the salt water made it easier to float so you didn’t need to swim as hard. She showed David and me again how to bodysurf, just like she did last year, but David was older now and could do it better.
Now we were back from swimming and just hanging out in our backyard. I sat in one of the two “chaises”, where you could lay down with the bottom half of your body but sit up with the top half and read. David was off playing with the cats or something. I was reading the next James Bond book, the fifth one, “Doctor No”, which I had started reading the night before last when we stayed at that motel in Niagara Falls. It was interesting enough to keep me wanting to read the next chapter after finishing the one I was reading. This Ian Flemming guy who wrote these books had even ended the last book I’d read, “From Russia with Love”, with James Bond being stabbed in the leg by that old Russian spy woman with a secret knife blade in her boot that had nerve poison on it. At the end of the last chapter of the book, he passed out and you didn’t know what happened to him, whether he was dead or not. I mean since he was the main character and I knew there were more books they weren’t going to kill him off, but still, I really wondered what happened to him. I had to wait till last Saturday to get my allowance and then ride my bike over to the Blue Front to buy the next book, this book I was now reading, “Doctor No”, so I would have it for our trip.
So turned out at the beginning of THIS book, Bond finally got better from the poison and was able to go back to work, but his boss “M” gave him what he said would be an easy job in Jamaica, that was supposed to be like a vacation. But I knew from reading the four books before this one, that was NOT going to happen. And since this book was called “Doctor No” and not “Jamaica Vacation” or something like that, that Doctor No guy that had that secret island was going to be the main badguy and big trouble. In what I’d read already at the motel in Niagara Falls last night, Bond hadn’t met Doctor No yet, but was finding out about him and all the stuff he did to keep what he was doing on his island secret. There was even a giant poisonous centipede in Bond’s hotel bed which he figured Doctor No had got one of his guys to put there to kill him. So trying to find out what he was up to, Bond and his helper Quarrel had taken a small boat to Doctor No’s secret island and had found that young woman Honey Rider on the island, right before Doctor No’s guys tried to shoot them from a boat with a machine gun. They were able to hide from the bullets and not be seen and were still on the island sneaking around.
I read for a while before mom came out and sat in the other chaise just a few feet away from me. I didn’t really feel comfortable with her sitting next to me like that, but I had gotten there first and didn’t want to have to go somewhere else to read. She was just wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and white shorts, so her long legs with knees bent extended the length of the thing with her bare feet at the very end. She squirted baby oil on her hands and rubbed it onto her face, her arms and the length of her legs. I had seen her do this many times back home in the summer in the backyard, but it was weird to watch her from so close, her fingers running over the muscles in her arms and legs.
Mom told me she was reading “Valley of the Dolls”, which she said was a “guilty pleasure” and she was only reading it because she was on vacation.
I asked her what it was about and she sighed and said, “It’s about a bunch of people whose lives are glamorous and intertwined but have lots of problems. I guess it maybe makes the issues between me and your father seem not so bad in comparison.” She kind of laughed through her nose and shook her head, but not like she thought it was funny, but like it was weird and said, “You probably wouldn’t like it!” I DID like that she was talking to me like I was a regular person, and not some little kid.
Then she said, “And I probably wouldn’t even want you to read it, until you were older that is.” THAT made me feel more like a little kid again.
She asked me about the book I was reading.
“I don’t know yet”, I said, “The last one I read, ‘From Russia with Love’, was really cool because they were on a train. This one takes place in Jamaica. I guess it’s okay.” I had read more than a hundred pages and the most interesting part so far was that Bond really liked this young woman who he was trapped on Doctor No’s island with. The first time he saw her she was naked and he thought she was super sexy, but I wasn’t going to tell mom any of THAT stuff.
“Well”, mom said, “It’s not the kind of book I’d ever urge you to read, but I’ll be interested in how it turns out and what you think of it when you’re done. I think there was a movie but I never saw it.” I nodded. There was, but I hadn’t seen it either. I wondered if the movie showed that woman naked in it, would’ve liked to see that!
I had peeked at pictures of naked women in those Playboy magazines in the Blue Front when the guy working there wasn’t looking. The women’s naked or mostly naked bodies in the pictures were a lot different than Molly’s when she and I got naked in her bedroom when we were little. The grownup women in the pictures I saw had big breasts and round bottoms, though I never saw any pictures showing the front part of their bodies between their legs. That thing they had instead of a penis that women didn’t say what it was except maybe “lady parts”. I figured that mom must look like that when she was naked but it felt strange even thinking about that, specially with her lying next to me.
So back in the book, it was getting to be nighttime and James Bond, Quarrel, and Honey Rider were still on the island. They had found a hidden place in the trees to make a camp for the night, and Honey was opening a can of beans that Quarrel had brought for food. I guess beans were good for camping stuff because in some of the war stories I had read the soldiers ate beans a lot. They couldn’t heat them up, because to do that they would have to make a fire, and maybe Doctor No’s guys who might still be looking for them might see the fire or the smoke coming up from the fire. I read…
Her shoulder brushed against him. Bond reached out and put his hand down in her lap, open. She picked up his hand and Bond felt the cold mess of beans being poured into it. Suddenly he smelt her warm animal smell. It was so sensually thrilling that his body swayed against her and for a moment his eyes closed. She gave a short laugh in which there was shyness and satisfaction and tenderness. She said ‘There,’ maternally, and carried his laden hand away from her and back to him.
I looked at mom to make sure that there was no way she could see the words I was reading. But she could usually somehow tell what I was thinking so I was still kind of worried. She was reading her book and her long bare legs now covered with baby oil shined in the sun.
I had never thought about what women smelled like. Mom right now just smelled like baby oil. I had heard older boys and grownup men talk about liking how women LOOKED, not how they SMELLED. Older boys might say she had “nice tits”, but grownup men would say “nice figure” instead, which I think included her breasts and her bottom, and even her legs too. I think the grownup men said “figure” because that wasn’t a bad word like “tits”, and the older boys, when they were talking to other older boys, didn’t care if they used bad words and even liked using them. I liked using bad words too, like “damn” and “hell”, but not the “tits” word.
I remembered in the “Thunderball” movie, I hadn’t read THAT book yet, how James Bond had pushed that one woman into that sauna room and made her have sex with him even though she told him no. My friend Frankie had thought that she really wanted to have sex with him, even though she’d said no. But my other friend Stuart and I weren’t sure. In THIS book, I wondered why he didn’t just try to have sex with Honey. Maybe because he was hungry and had to eat his beans, or maybe because Quarrel was there and they didn’t have privacy. From what I could tell grownups only had sex when they had privacy, like in their bedrooms with the door closed.
So in the next chapter Honey told the story about her life. When she was five, these people who didn’t like her family burned their house down and her mom and dad got killed in the fire. She and her nanny were still alive and lived in the basement of the burned down house until she was fifteen. Then her nanny died and she had to live alone in that basement. The man who now owned the property was really bad and tried to come one night and have sex with her. But unlike that woman that James Bond made have sex with him in “Thunderball”, she fought with this guy and tried to stab him with her knife. She couldn’t, and he hit her hard in the face and broke her nose, which was still broken, and she thought that made her ugly. She had taken a black widow spider and snuck into his hotel room while he was sleeping and let the spider go on his stomach and then left. The spider bit him and he died a week later.
James Bond thought she was beautiful and wanted to help her and pay for a doctor to fix her nose, and then he said she’d be the most beautiful woman in Jamaica. Seemed like grownup men did that a lot, tell women that they were beautiful, like that was the thing every woman wanted to hear. He REALLY liked her and wanted to help her but I guess she couldn’t be his girlfriend because secret agents like him can’t have girlfriends, though he still might want to have sex with her.
At dinnertime when we all got hungry, mom, David and I drove to this restaurant that just had takeout food, that the woman that lived there told us about. David and I got a pizza with pepperoni and mom got a bag of fried clams. Mom LOVED fried clams, and said they were even better here than they were at the Howard Johnson’s back in Ann Arbor. When we got back to the cottage, like she did sometimes at home, mom took her clams, the bottle of cocktail sauce she brought, and a cold Tab and ate by herself in her bedroom. So David and I decided to eat in our bedroom too, and listen to records while I read more of my book and David drew his own pictures copying the comic book pictures. We had brought a bag full of record albums, including the new one by Johnny Rivers that had the “Secret Agent Man” song on it, that my school friends Frankie and Stuart really liked.
When we pulled out the record to play it, we put it on side two first because I wanted to hear that song. It had that great “der der der” guitar part at the beginning before he started singing, and it was a live album from this place called the “Whisky a Go Go” in Hollywood, so it sounded noisier and not as smooth, but that was kinda cool…
There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes
Another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow
And then that really short chorus with the very interesting words that Frankie and Stuart just LOVED…
Secret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number
And taken away your name
I thought that was about James Bond being “Double O Seven”, but Frankie thought it was more than that, that the grownups in charge of the world wanted to turn us all into robots with numbers instead of regular people with names. I wondered about that. I mean mom and dad wouldn’t want that, and most of the grownups I knew wouldn’t either, except maybe for Arthur’s mom, because she thought aliens from outer space were really running the world. But I wondered if the grownups that really DID run the world thought that way.
I was continuing to read chapter 11 of “Doctor No” as the rest of the songs on the album played. James Bond and Honey Rider were still at their camp for the night on Doctor No’s secret island. She was telling him how she was collecting shells that she sold to make money so that when she got enough, in five to ten years maybe, she would go to the U.S. to get her broken nose fixed. Then he asked her what she’d do after that, and she said she would be a “call girl” in New York City, and let men have sex with her if they paid her lots of money, even $100 each, which seemed like a huge amount of money to me.
I’d never heard of anything like that, women doing that to make money. I wondered if that really happened or it was something that Ian Fleming just made up for his story. I wondered if that could be a real thing, and if it was, then the grownup world was even stranger and weirder than I even imagined. I wasn’t really sure why people DID sex. Whether it was because it was fun, or that was something you wanted to do when you were in love, or just to make babies, or you just HAD to do it sometimes, like going to the bathroom. I’d heard some older boys in the park say that their older brothers or some other older guy that they knew had sex with some older girl that was their girlfriend, though it usually felt like they were making it up. Still, I always listened carefully to try to figure it all out, but would never ask any questions even though I had a bunch.
James told Honey that she really wouldn’t like doing that kind of work and she could go to prison because I guess it wasn’t legal. He said that because she knew so much about insects she should work in a zoo where they had insects. He said…
‘I’m sure you’d like that better. You’d be just as likely to meet a nice husband. Anyway you mustn’t think of being a call girl any more. You’ve got a beautiful body. You must keep it for the men you love.’
This was all really interesting, and I continued to read their conversation…
‘And you’re a wonderful girl. I thought so directly I saw you.’ ‘Saw my behind, you mean.’ The voice was getting drowsy, but it was full of pleasure. Bond laughed. ‘Well, it was a wonderful behind. And the other side was wonderful too.’ Bond’s body began to stir with the memory of how she had been.
I knew lots of men liked and talked about women’s figures, but those women still had clothes on. And I wondered what it was about that his body was beginning to “stir”, what that meant. If only there was someone I could ask all these questions to that would just give me the damn answers and not tease me or worry about me and think I was bad for asking!
So as Honey lay there in her sleeping bag with her eyes closed, James looked at her and thought about her…
His mind was full of the day and of this extraordinary Girl Tarzan who had come into his life. It was as if some beautiful animal had attached itself to him. There would be no dropping the leash until he had solved her problems for her. He knew it. Of course there would be no difficulty about most of them. He could fix the operation – even, with the help of friends, find a proper job and a home for her. He had the money. He would buy her dresses, have her hair done, get her started in the big world. It would be fun.
He really seemed to care about her and wanted to help her, but he also seemed to see her like a pet animal, not “dropping the leash”. Is that the way men were with women they were in love with? Did women like that way too, to be “pets”? I couldn’t even imagine being that way with one of the girls that I knew, even Molly.
I read on…
But what about the other side? What about the physical desire he felt for her? One could not make love to a child. But was she a child? There was nothing childish about her body or her personality. She was fully grown and highly intelligent in her fashion, and far more capable of taking care of herself than any girl of twenty Bond had ever met.
Yeah, that “physical desire” stuff and “making love” stuff. I couldn’t remember dad and mom and their friends ever talking about any of that. But some older boys talked about it, specially when they didn’t think younger kids were around or listening. Sometimes I’d hear those college students at Discount Records or the Dime Store talking about some girl that they had the “hots” for, wanted to “get in her pants” or “bed down”.
I mean me and all my school friends didn’t talk about girls that way or want to do that kind of stuff with them. We only talked about all the stuff girls did that was bad like they were the enemy or the other team that we wanted to beat. But my friends' older brothers and sisters would laugh at us when they heard us talk that way and said that pretty soon we’d all be “girl crazy”. I really needed to know more about all this stuff, but who could I ask about it? Maybe Mike, but I didn’t know.
And people who were 20 years old, GIRLS who were 20 years old, seemed pretty grown up to me. I mean you weren’t OFFICIALLY an adult until you got to be 21. Then you could vote and drink alcohol. I could barely imagine being even 15, let alone 20 or 21. And I guess you were OFFICIALLY a “child” until you became an “adult” at 21. Hell, I was 11 and I didn’t feel like a child anymore. Actually, I don’t know if I ever felt like a “child”, I always hated that word. It always sounded like you were nothing, or just stupid, or some precious little thing.
So the last song on that side of the album was Johnny Rivers singing that Beatles song, “Run For Your Life”, that was also on the Beatles “Rubber Soul” album. David had gotten Rubber Soul for his birthday and we had listened to it over and over. It was the last song on the second side of that album, so it always kind of finished it up, and then the record player would play the next album in the stack or play that side of Rubber Soul again, depending on how we had it set up. The music part and the beat made it a good song, but the words were pretty scary…
Well, I'd rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
You'd better keep your head, little girl
Or you won't know where I am You'd better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand, little girl
Catch you with another man, that's the end, little girl
So if the Beatles guy singing, or Johnny Rivers in this case, had a girlfriend that cheated on him he might want to chase her down and kill her? I mean maybe not REALLY kill her, but just be so mad that he felt like it. I remember after our big Little League game between the Tube Benders and Huron Valley, and what Billy said to Stuart before Stuart messed up batting and got out, that Stuart said he was going to “kill” Billy, but he was just really mad at him and he never really tried to actually kill him.
Well, you know that I'm a wicked guy
And I was born with a jealous mind
And I can't spend my whole life tryin'
Just to make you toe the line
So he says he’s a “wicked” guy. That usually means you’re REALLY bad! Would a girl even want to have a boyfriend who was wicked. And was a girl who was your girlfriend supposed to “toe the line” without you always having to tell them or make them do it. What did “toe the line” mean anyway? It didn’t sound very good!
But the last verse made it seem like he was more serious, and that he really would want to kill her…
Let this be a sermon
I mean everything I said
Baby, I'm determined
And I'd rather see you dead
I mean James Bond killed people, but that was his job, he had a “license to kill”, kind of like a soldier, but he did most of his fighting all by himself, or maybe with one other helper. I couldn’t imagine, even if he got REALLY mad at Honey, that he’d want to kill HER. It was only if he figured out that a woman was some kind of enemy secret agent who was trying to kill him first.
There was one more song on that Johnny Rivers album after “Run For Your Life” and then David flipped it over and played the other side, which was actually the first side. The first song I had heard on the radio a couple times and on the jukebox at the Food and Drug and Miller’s, though I never chose it.
On her way to work one morning
Down the path alongside the lake
A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake
His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew
"Poor thing," she cried, "I'll take you in and I'll take care of you"
And then the snake says in the chorus part…
"Take me in, tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in, tender woman," sighed the snake
So she takes the snake into her house and gets him warm and gives him food and when she gets home from work the snake is better and she’s so happy that…
She clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful," she cried
"But if I hadn't brought you in, by now you might have died"
She stroked his pretty skin again and then kissed and held him tight
But instead of saying thanks, the snake gave her a vicious bite
And then after the chorus…
"I saved you," cried that woman, "And you've bit me, but why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"
"Oh shut up, silly woman," said that reptile with a grin
"You knew darn well I was a snake before you took me in"
I remembered getting ice cream at Miller’s with Frankie and Stuart when we heard the song on the jukebox and Frankie laughed and said “Stupid woman!” I remember laughing too because I guess it was kind of stupid, but I thought about it later and that song always worried me. Were women who were trying to be nice, silly and even stupid if they tried to help someone or something that was dangerous, like a poisonous snake? And it wasn’t like the snake bit her because he thought she might be trying to hurt him, it bit her because it was a snake and it just did bad stuff like that, it couldn’t help itself. So it was HER fault that the snake bit her, not the snake’s.
I mean this wasn’t a REGULAR snake, because regular snakes don’t talk. It was more like a cartoon like Felix the Cat, or Bugs Bunny, where they were supposed to be animals but they were more like people. I mean Felix never did anything that a REAL cat, like Midnight, did. And maybe Bugs Bunny ate carrots like a real rabbit, but most of the other stuff he did was like a person. So was a cartoon snake like a really bad person, who just did bad stuff because that’s what they liked to do? Were there really people like that, who were so bad that even if you helped them, helped them a lot, they might still try to hurt you or even kill you? I’d never met a person like that, but it was scary to think they might be out there.
In all three songs it seemed like women were the problem. They might get Bond to fall in love with them but then be enemy secret agents and try to kill him. They might be your girlfriend but then cheat on you and make you super mad (though it was dad that cheated on mom and made HER super mad). Or they might be so stupid to help a poisonous snake which is going to bite them and kill them anyway.
I thought about all this as I continued to read my book. The giant “dragon” on Doctor No’s island that people had talked about, turned out to be a giant armored vehicle with a flamethrower and giant rubber tire wheels, and came after them where they had camped. Bond and Quarrel tried to shoot at it to wreck it. Bond shot out its headlights but couldn’t shoot out the giant tires. It used its flamethrower to burn up Quarrel, so Bond and Honey surrendered and were taken away by two of Doctor No’s guys.
***
The next morning I decided to run to the beach again. I told mom and David, and mom was surprised, but she said, “Good for you Coolie! Getting some exercise.” They left in the car and I put on my bathing suit and t-shirt instead of my regular clothes.
When I started out running my thighs and ankles hurt a little bit, like they were sore from the running I’d done yesterday. And there was that part of my mind that kept saying to me that my legs hurt and I really didn’t want to run the whole way AGAIN? But the other parts of my mind DID want to do it, felt that if I stopped running I would still be a little kid, even a stupid little kid that couldn’t do anything, and that I wanted to feel like a big kid. I did stop running twice, to catch my breath and give my sore muscles a chance to feel better, but that was LESS than the three times I stopped when I ran yesterday. So even though I still couldn’t run the WHOLE mile, I could run more than I had yesterday.
It was nice running, because I was so busy thinking about my muscles hurting and being out of breath that I could stop thinking about all the things I was thinking about all the time when I wasn’t running. About having to go to junior high when we got back from Cape Cod, about the James Bond story, about that “Run For Your Life” and “Snake” songs, about mom and dad being divorced, about the Little League season and what my batting average was. I just thought about trying to keep running and how my ankles were feeling, how my knees were feeling, that slight burning feeling in my legs, and how much farther I had to run. Even though it was really hard to keep running, it was also relaxing in a way not thinking about all that other stuff all the time for once.
I got to the end of the road and the parking lot up on the dunes above the beach. I was breathing hard and my lungs burned a little bit but I felt really good, like my brain was filled with all kinds of happy energy, like I could do anything. I looked out at the ocean that went way out there to a long line where it met the sky, but I knew there was more and that I just couldn’t see it because the Earth was a giant ball that was mostly ocean. But I had always been on the land part and just seen the edge of the bigger ocean part here at Cape Cod. The ocean seemed so big, so calm, so different than the land, but also really scary in a way, because I knew if I swam out too far in it, I would drown.
I looked down at all the people below, there were a lot more today than yesterday, some sitting on the beach, some walking on the edge of the water looking maybe for shells or sand dollars, some wading in the water. I saw mom and David in the water, she was showing him how to body surf. He was a really good swimmer, maybe even better than me, so I could see he was figuring it out.
I sat for a minute on the top of the dune looking down to think about stuff. Mom had said that Molly and her mom were going to be coming to rent that cottage on the other side of the big house where the lady who owned the place lived. But they wouldn’t be here until the last week. The last time I’d seen Molly was last year at my tenth birthday party. It felt strange that I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and I wondered if maybe she didn’t like me anymore. It would be strange if she came here for a whole week but didn’t want to talk or do stuff with me and be my friend.
I really hadn’t had a birthday party this year. Mom had said that she didn’t have the energy to put one together. I told her I was okay with that. I really didn’t want my school friends to come over and figure out that mom and dad were divorced, though I didn’t tell her that part. Mom DID take David and me out to dinner at the Flaming Pit restaurant for my birthday, and I had a shishkabob. Dad took me and David to a Detroit Tigers game. Mom and dad did the same kind of thing for David’s birthday at the end of June.
Finally I went down to the beach and joined mom and David in the water and I had fun doing body surfing with David, while mom went out where it was over her head to do her real swimming.
When it was lunchtime and we were going to head back to the cottage, I decided to run home, so mom and David headed off first in the car. When I ran home, again it felt really hard and parts of my body ached, and part of my mind told me I should stop. I did finally stop twice, and just walked but only for a minute, just like in the morning. But each time I made myself start running again, and though part of my mind wanted me to stop a third time, I just made myself not do it, figuring I would feel like a total failure, and not really a big kid. I finally got back to the cottage. When I ran down the driveway and finally stopped running, It felt really good again, like even though I couldn’t run the WHOLE MILE, I had only stopped twice today, so I was getting closer!
[END]
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