Julie

By Dick McCullough

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It was summer, late sixty's. A time for skinny dipping, running naked in a meadow full of flowers, making love under a summer moon.

I was a skinny teenage boy pumping gas at my dad's gas station. No, that's wrong. At my dad's service station. Back then, life was different. I wore a cardboard stiff uniform two sizes too big. I looked like a giant paper doll cut-out.

Bob was short, old, ugly, cranky. And as often as possible, drunk. Bob was the high school principal. When he was younger, he had been the football coach. I think he liked coaching football a lot more than being principal.

Julie epitomized the late sixty's. Classic hippie babe. She had straight, long blond hair. Angelic blue eyes, skin from a Noxzema ad, a narrow, straight nose and a smile that caused warring nations to sue for peace. She was young, innocent, sexy and completely alive.

Julie was wearing a blousy, flowing top, tight hip hugger pants with a floral or paisley print. Knowing Julie and knowing the times, she probably wasn't wearing a bra. On her, that would have been noticeable and good.

Julie chatted with me in her excited, happy way and then turned to leave.

I will never forget the picture of her walking away from Bob and me. She didn't really walk. She strutted or glided with an air that soothingly crooned female energy and sexual confidence. Julie was not Twiggy. She did not look like a 12 year old boy. She looked like a woman. She had hips. Her ass not only swayed like a hypnotist's pocket watch, it jiggled. Her straight blond hair bounced jerkily just above her tush, like a team of Vanna White puppets, showing us what we were supposed to be looking at. Bob didn't need the help.

Being young and too stupid to appreciate the pearls cast before my swine feet, I was oblivious to the visual gift Julie was giving. But not Bob. He stared at her longingly; a condemned man gazing at a temporary reprieve.

Bob was never one to express honest emotion. But here, he emitted a deep, heartfelt sigh. Surprised, I turned to look at him and saw that face. I turned back to Julie and saw, for the first time, what Bob saw.

I never liked Bob. He was, to me, the worst of what being over 30 could mean. Angry, rigid, vindictive, distrusting. In the parlance of the day, he was a drag, man. But at that moment, I felt sorry for him. I understood him.

Bob wanted to be free, to be happy. To run naked in the meadows, to make love under the summer moon. But he never had. He never would. He was condemned by time and circumstance and himself to eternal failure. I imagine that drooling after Julie as she Fred Astaired back to her car was as close as he ever came to happiness.

Why do I remember this single event so clearly? Once, I was a boy who took beautiful women with beautiful souls to bed as casually as I now pick up the morning paper in the driveway.

I ran in the meadows, made love under the moon and never for a moment considered that it all might end.

But the sweet, carefree girls have all disappeared like mist in the summer sun. My back hurts too much to go skipping through flowers. The prison walls of age are closing in on me like a Poe horror story.

Did my teenage subconscious know that I would one day become Bob? Did it store this memory to console me?

Or to show me the way to escape?

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