On June 22, 1975,
Jaws
, the first summer blockbuster movie, opened nationwide in 409 theaters. Earlier that day, under a dazzling blue sky filled with great puffy white clouds looking like immense sheep dogs at play, I packed my 1971 Ford Pinto with a sea bag stacked full of uniforms, a duffel bag filled with neatly folded civvies and several cardboard boxes of books. Twenty minutes later, I parked in front of a house out past the greyhound track in the rural fringe of Orange Park, Florida. My buddy and I were renting the place for a third of what we expected to pay.
Sitting in the car for a moment, I listened to
Lady Marmalade
then turned the radio off. I opened my car door; at least two things were unbeknownst to me the naïve Midwestern kid, a neophyte in the Navy: First, I had no idea that Ford Pintos had defective gas tanks with an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames if rear-ended at speeds above twenty-five miles per hour. Every time I tooled down the road, I risked immolation like a saffron clad Buddhist monk in Vietnam. Secondly, that I had driven straight into the kill zone of a land borne Great White Shark, my personal Jaws. In a few moments, this predator, armed with a dastardly array of weapons, with a take no prisoner attitude would commence circling me in the same lazy fashion as the movie's slick killing machine.
Desiring more space then afforded at the barrack on base, I talked a buddy named Mark Brewer, a red haired guy from Sioux City, Iowa, a fellow who lived deep inside himself, a guy who did not run his mouth but when he did say something, it was worth listening to, into sharing a place with me. Both of us were Sailors and hospital corpsmen at the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville. I loved working on the intensive care unit; Mark hated the ortho floor. We pooled our resources, quickly found a house to rent well within our limited budget and signed the lease the day before with the rental agent.
Mark and I considered the residence a bachelor pad not a mere house. I do not know about Mark but I saw Hugh Hefner's smug countenance when I looked in a mirror. I might not have Hugh's wealth, a hutch of Playboy bunnies scampering about in such abundance you merely had to reach out and scoop one up but I was confident that my youth, enthusiasm and relentless determination would net me a few hot-blooded vixens.
The house Mark and I rented so cheaply, a two-bedroom house built on a concrete block foundation, a craftsman bungalow, built in 1921 using floor plans and materials purchased from the Sears Modern Homes Mail Order catalogue for less then fifteen hundred dollars, had a low pitched roof, a sprawling porch, lots of windows. Painted hazy gray it looked comfortable sitting amidst the scrub palmettos, cabbage palms and chinkapin trees. Islets of grass in channels of dry dirt made for a shabby front yard, a quite muddy front yard when it rained I had no doubt. In back, a path led to the placid patch of the St. John's River where a bright yellow canoe bumped against a rickety wooden pier.
In that direction, the river, in every other direction trees, trees and more trees, their bonnets of leaves provided shade, perches for birds sounding off. Along with our house, another craftsman bungalow, this one painted a pale yellow and looking invitingly cool shared the clearing and the gravel square serving as a parking lot at the end of short graveled road.
Some people, not necessarily members of my family, said, I was a good-looking kid. I did not agree. At 19, my manhood still tenuous, fresh from boot camp and Hospital Corps "A" school in Great Lakes, Illinois, I was a gangly youth who blushed too frequently, broke out with pimples way too often. I still missed my long curls of blond hair, still grieved for the missing ponytail the boot camp barber snipped off in one easy fluid motion. My immature face the image of my father at the same age, sprouted whiskers soft as dandelion stems. Females seemed to love my clear blue eyes and being totally pussy crazed, wanting to fuck my brains out with a plentiful portion of women, my eyes in my considered opinion were my solitary babe attractant. As a young child, I stammered, learned to control it, suffered through the slings and arrows cast by bullies. My slight lisp, replacing the sibilant S with the interdental Th sound, plagued me, followed me through school, into the Navy. I fought several times, sustained skinned knuckles and bloodied nose, a series of them. I gave back pain in the same portion I received it when someone hearing me slay sibilants laughed at me, assumed my speech impediment somehow signaled my effeminacy, and accused me of homosexuality. I detested the stereotypical depiction of a gay man prancing about, lisping every time he opened his mouth. I lived to fuck women, women exclusively.
I dreamed of becoming a doctor. To test that ambition, my family doctor recommended I spend four years as a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy. I followed his advice, joined the Navy and now I loved doing all the clinical procedures, treating patients, giving shots, drawing blood, learning simple lab tests, shooting x-rays, suturing lacerations, scrubbing in surgery even doing the scut work required of a Hospitalman, a swab jockey cleaning heads one moment, giving injections, making beds the next moment.
Mark and I had tossed a quarter to see who would sleep in the bigger bedroom. I won. I figured five trips from the car to bedroom. On the third trip as I passed the car, I touched the hood. Still hot to the touch and for once I had traveled from point A to point B without the adjustment screw in the carburetor jumping out and stalling my car. Leaning against the car's rear bumper, the hatchback open, I lifted a cardboard box and at the same time looked toward the yellow house and at that precise moment, you might say my ship came in. I dropped the heavy book laden box, looked skyward and said, "Thank you God."
A scant twenty or thirty feet away in the front yard of the yellow house a lovely, buxom, long limbed woman on her knees used shears to cut weeds around a palmetto tree near the center of the yard. Barefoot, her toenails painted pink, she wore short pink shorts that pressed against her firm buttocks. Her heavy breasts spilled over the top of her white halter-top as she clipped away. Her knees pressed against the ground, her legs, bent, looked as good as the rest of her.
You remember such moments until memory meanders away at the instance death embraces you. Thirty years later the memory of my first sighting of her retains its vivid clarity.
Never in my short life had desire sluiced through me with such abandon. I was no virgin but until this moment I could not remember being this hard, being erect so quickly. The closest resemblance to the suddenness of my lust was the memorable moment, shortly before joining the Navy, I stepped into the bathroom, suddenly transfixed, supremely engorged, seeing my Aunt Monica, Mom's younger sister toweling off after her shower, her huge breasts, her butterfly shaped public hair sparkling from glistening drops of water.
Placing the shears on the ground, my neighbor glided over to the porch steps, posed for me. Being an aficionado of centerfold photography, Karen Christy, December 1971, being a personal favorite, I always wondered what it would be like to stand behind a camera, look through the viewfinder and take photos of a beautiful, sexy woman. Now, I knew. She reached out with her slender left hand, a gold band on the ring finger, touched the tubular metal porch rail. Shifting weight to her shapely right leg, she bent forward, lifted her left leg, stretched it out behind her lithe body, the leg formed a flattened v shape. Then standing on tiptoes, she looked back over her right shoulder letting me feast my eyes on her ass, her slim ankles, her sculpted calves, firm thighs.
