Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse

EP. 151 - VALERIE

WE FINALLY MOVED AWAY from that small Northern Arizona town. My mom had been a widow for a few years and gossip about her marital status and dating habits traveled like wildfire. She hated the unwanted attention.

Besides, she had lost a husband to heart attack and a son to drowning within a span of two years. It was time to seek less intrusive, warmer, and hopefully more fortuitous climes.

Northwest Phoenix in the late 1960s was comprised of thousands of flat, undeveloped acres of scrub Sonoran desert – mostly cacti, heaven-scented creosote bushes, and the occasional palo verde and mesquite trees. It lacked the stunning beauty of the higher altitude desert miles to the north but was relatively devoid of humans, save for a smattering of 1950s housing developments. Because of its unsupervised nature, the desert was an ever-present lure to every kid seeking risk, fun, and adventure.

And risk there was. Beautiful, unsupervised risk.

With no father to provide an income, my mom took a day job to pay the bills, working at that savings and loan, the one with Eddie at the helm. She had started in the teller profession, to use the term loosely, twenty years earlier in post-war Los Angeles. Then marriage and kids happened. At forty-plus and weathered by years of child-rearing us monsters, she lacked the youthful attraction of typical bank tellers.

"When can I get you to do other things like backroom operations work?" Eddie would constantly ask her. And they both knew the truth. He believed she didn't have the looks, not any longer, to interact with customers at the teller window. He wanted someone more attractively pleasant to chum with customers, and it riled her to hell.

Given her forty-five minute work drive into Phoenix proper, and a nine-hour workday including lunch, she was typically not home during our most sinister hours. And in eighth grade, there were lots of opportunities to be sinister. My testosterone had just rocketed to 'go crazy for it' mode, yet I was too uninformed to understand what was burning in my veins.

"Did you hear about Patrick and Stacie?" a friend asked me one morning. I shrugged and walked into class as if it didn't interest me but sensed something sordid was in the offing.

Being somewhat new, I was barely familiar with the two kids, though many held them in high regard since they were the class troublemakers. They smoked cigarettes in the restrooms. They never finished their homework or in-class assignments, and they were the first to guffaw or moan at the teachers' slightest requests.

I waited anxiously the entire period to hear about the mystery. What could they do that they weren't already renowned for? Vandalism? Called the teacher a bad name? Wrote graffiti somewhere? Hit another student?

Both were in my home room class. Aware of their penchant for trouble, our teacher had placed them at the front rows. I watched them during that class, snickering together as if only they were clued-in to the deep, dark secret.

"So what did they do?" I pleaded with my friend after class was dismissed.

"They 'did it,'" he whispered, his eyebrows raised in amazement.

"Did what?" I begged in all innocence.

"You know. They did the nasty thing." Then he placed his index finger on one hand through a circle he'd created with his index finger and thumb on the other hand.

Uninitiated to such things, I was flummoxed. Given his hand signals, I imagined one of them defecated outside the restroom. "Did they poop or something?"

He laughed and began to realize I didn't fully understand. "Out in the desert, I guess. Yesterday. No blanket or anything."

I was now getting the picture but it was still confusing. I probably wasn't the only eighth grader who didn't understand a thing about sexual relations with women. Sure, I'd seen a number of girlie magazines my friends stole from their father's stashes, but I never came across anything that fully explained how things actually worked.