Susie Roberts, Rick’s youngest sister, Rick Roberts the legendary Clintondale High School football and almost as legendary “lady’s man,” was stuck. No, not stuck in some car stuck place on some desolate road looking for Sir Galahad to show up and rescue the fair damsel, pulling might and main to win her favors after she had stalled out forgetting to put the clutch of her father’s Dodge in at the appropriate time, a task that she had not quite mastered yet. Or car stuck down in some Adamsville Beach parking lot late at night in some other father’s car, maybe a borrowed Buick, holding off some eager, too eager, non-Galahad looking for more than to win her favors. And decidedly not stuck on some Clintondale High Math Class Pythagorean Theorem problem looking for the square root of some distance from point A to point B. She had Lenny Linsky for that, and for any other mathsciencehistoryenglish problem that she needed resolved. Yes, Lenny was that way about her. Had been since about seventh grade when they had worked on a science project together and she nearly blew the chemistry lab where they were working up and he decided then and there that she needed some protection, and some study help as little good as it did him except a seventh grade midnight kiss.
And she had a few others on her string as well, a few hopeless others, not hopelessly willing however to join Lenny in the slave- quarters. Everyone, hopeless or hopeful, agreed that while Susie was not up to speed in the mechanical or smarts departments she was cute (no knock-down drag-out beautiful but pretty enough, pretty enough not to have to worry about mechanics or math now, and probably ever), tall, blonde, real blonde if you can believe that in this day, this 1966 day in age, pert, and Miss Personality. And in the final analysis isn’t that what you wanted in a high school honey?
That though was exactly where Susie’s stuck problem came in. See she was stuck on a soda jerk over at Doc’s Drugstore in North Adamsville. And not just any of Doc’s five jerks (yes, I know soda jerks, but let’s just shorthand this thing as jerks, no slander intended, okay) but Jeff Brigham. Yes, Jeff Brigham the big time politico, student body version, who had his picture taken with Robert Kennedy at some Northeast anti-war student conference where they were mapping out ways to end the war in Vietnam. And that was really where the problem came in. Jeff, bright, agile, good-looking Jeff, those days has no time for Susie, well, Susie no brains, although not really no brains but more no political brains. And why Susie had continually asked herself should a sophomore, a good-looking sophomore girl in the year of our lord, 1966, have to care about war, a war in some place she could not locate on a map and couldn’t pronoun, about black civil rights in the far-off south (and which Mr. Roberts had decidedly retro positions on which he freely imparted over the dinner table about uppity n----rs), about whether Red China or some China, she never got that clear, should be in the United Nations or not, or about which way America should be going in the world just to keep up to speed with a jerk. Even Doc’s top jerk with that heavenly smile that he once sent her way. Once before he got the bug, before he wanted to tilt windmills for the world and not for her.
Something was out of whack and Susie couldn’t figure out an angle to get to Jeff. Hey, any other time, say a couple of years before in 1964 when he could hardly keep his eyes off of her, Jeff would be so much putty in her hands. Would have been jerk proud, like the others at Doc’s, just to have Susie come in and talk to him. But, damn, Susie muttered under her breath they weren’t Jeff. And as many signals as she had given Jeff when she played Doc’s juke box, played it to perdition, and tried to interest him in talking about songs like The Temptations’ crooning My Girl; Otis Redding’s be-bopping I’ve Been Loving You Too Long; Barbara Lewis practically begging her man to take what he wants on Baby, I’m Yours; and when she turned the volume up for Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman he just smiled his non-committal smile and started talking about whether Robert Kennedy should, or should not, run for President in 1968, or some such thing. And then Susie fumed under her breath, the times were damn well out of joint.
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