Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
The fall of 1942 arrived and I was off to Edmonton and the halls of advanced learning. I had my mind set on studying dentistry.
'I wouldn't want to influence you,' Dad said, 'but I think you should give some thought to that.'
'Whatta you mean? 'Doc' Maxwell does O.K., doesn't he?'
'Well, he makes a pretty good living but except for the bit of shooting we do and his golf, he's pretty well tied to his job.'
'You've got a point there.' I said. Dad had taken a winter off to go to New York and manage the New York Americans hockey team for his old friend Mervyn 'Red' Dutton, so I figured he was qualified to comment.
'Besides, he spends all day standing on his feet looking into people's mouths.'
'Better than proctology,' I suggested gloomiIy. No, he didn't want to influence me! Fat chance! I registered in Engineering.
I think I told you previously that 'Pop' Weir had a long-standing ambition to send a complete class to university some year. He spent three years with every class culling out the ones he thought unfit for his 'super' class. The year I went up he nearly made it--thirty-seven out of forty-two! Not bad! We had the three fellows from our class with us who had achieved the highest marks in Alberta in the School Board exams. It was a tough league! When we started classes we found out that all the lads from B.C. had taken most of our inorganic chemistry course already because they had a Grade 13, whereas our top grade was 12. Then we learned that one chap from Vegreville had memorized the logarithmic tables. This was similar to memorizing the Koran. I felt like a jerk!
I moved into a house with a cousin of my mother's on 82nd Avenue and stayed in a room with one of the 'Three Geniuses' (Genii?). The house itself was roomy but either lacked a furnace or they had never learned how to use it. I goddam near died of hypothermia! I customarily did my studying sitting at a desk on the top floor wearing my long underwear, my winter overcoat and overshoes.
I grant that there was a war on but I think they could have done a bit better in the way of victualling. Another young student from Red Deer joined us for lunch which usually consisted of cold cuts and sliced white bread, uncoloured margarine and skim milk. None of us was threatened by obesity.
There was a long, tiresome series of exams toward the end of October, following which we had a short November break. Most of the Calgary fellows piled onto the train at Strathcona Station and took the five-hour train ride to Calgary. I was so keen I took all of my books with me so I could study during the holidays. What a joke! I never cracked a book!
The train had a stopover at Red Deer, halfway to Calgary. Never one to be concerned about schedules, Frank, one of my buddies, decided that there would be time enough to run from the station to buy himself a sandwich at the nearest restaurant. The train was pulling out of the station as he strolled casually back onto the station platform.
'Get your ass in gear, pal!' I shouted as he suddenly became galvanized into a brisk run. Several of us had gathered on the back platform of the train and were cheering him on. He closed quickly on the train, but as it picked up speed he was barely keeping pace with it.
'Come on, one last burst of speed should do it!' I yelled encouragingly. At that point he tripped and measured his length on the railroad ties. The last we saw of him he was gathering up the remaining pieces of his partially eaten beef and lettuce sandwich.
I had become a sophisticated beer drinker and party drunk and there was a party to accommodate me every night. Lloyd had signed up with the Canadian Navy and I spent part of my holiday sitting on the toilet seat picking crabs out of his pubic hair. In those days the Calgary Naval headquarters, called 'Tecumseh', were stationed on Seventh Avenue just east of Eaton's. Tecumseh was 100% 'pusser' as they say in the navy and all the same rules and traditions were in effect just as if the ship were at sea. Lloyd and one of his shipmates were on night guard duty one week and the usual camp-following girls were loitering around teasing them and making lewd suggestions.
Finally Lloyd and his shipmate worked out a plan; one of them would remain on guard while the other took one of the girls back into the darkened ship and had his wicked way on one of the gymnasium mats. The plan worked splendidly until Lloyd became aware of a persistent uncomfortable itching in his crotch that was unrelated to the other kind of horniness. On close examination he discovered a thriving colony of 'pediculosis pubis' commonly referred to as 'crabs'. I had the good fortune to be elected 'Chief Delouser' and Lloyd paid the price for his prurience by having to stand patiently while I sat on the toilet seat and learned a new trade. First of all I had to lather him up and shave off his pubic hair, since this was the easiest way to dispose of the nits, the tiny eggs which the lice had cemented to the hairs and could not be removed by simple soap and water washing. Some of the mature lice, looking like miniature sea crabs, were embedded in the skin of the flesh above his penis. Some were the size of a large mustard seed, and I was able to remove these by sliding the tip of the scissors underneath them and prying them free.
'Yuck!' Lloyd said as each one came free.
'Cheer up!' I said, 'they say you haven't really got 'em bad until you've got 'em in your eyelashes!'
'Well, thank you for that little uplifting comment,' he said sarcastically.
When all the hair had been shaved off and all of the mature lice removed, it was time for the 'blue ointment' which was the only effective salve available in those days.
'Ooh, that smarts!' he complained as I rubbed it in.
'All part of the treatment,' I said gleefully. 'I should keep my distance from those gymnasium mats, though, if I were you, and rub that ointment in twice a day for two weeks!'
'I'm pretty sure I got these from a toilet seat,' he said guiltily.
'Well, at least Mom believed it,' I said sarcastically.
The crowning blow with my genius roommate came when I returned to Edmonton following the November break. He looked like he was suffering a massive hangover; sunken cheeks, red-rimmed eyes and several days' growth of beard.
'What the hell have you been doing?' I asked.
'I got in forty-seven hours!' he said with ill-disguised pride.
'Forty-seven hours of what? Non-stop fucking? It certainly looks like it!'
'Don't be vulgar,' he said.'
'Jeez'! I thought, 'How do you compete with a dork like that?' Rather than encouraging me to make additional efforts to catch up, it had exactly the opposite effect. I had been pledged to join the Phi Kappa Pi fraternity by this time and concentrated my energies on all the things that fraternities claim they don't indulge in, namely: partying, drinking to excess, singing obscene songs and gambling.
Life presents a dismal picture
All is silent as a tomb
Father has a penis stricture
Mother has a fallen womb.
Sister Sue has just aborted
For the forty-second time
Brother Bill has been deported
For a homosexual crime.
(Sung to the tune of 'Rock of Ages')
My mother's cousin and her husband were disappointed and embarrassed when I decided to change lodgings following the Christmas break. I moved into a large three-story house on 111th Street where I had a room of my own on the top floor. Mrs. Ford led the way upstairs ahead of me to show me my room. Her tight-fitting gray skirt showed off her magnificent bum to advantage and I imagined it had a slightly seductive wiggle as it mounted the stairs. She was a native-born Hungarian still carrying a slight trace of an accent. Absolutely charming! Her husband was about twenty years older than she and close to retirement with a drainage culvert marketing company. In addition, he was also an alcoholic! They slept in a bedroom at the head of the first flight of stairs. Across the hall was a bathroom that was shared by all of the residents.
At the other end of the hallway was a bedroom occupied by a young woman in her final year of Bachelor of Science studies in Nursing. She was about twenty years old, not unattractive-looking, with a medium build which included a splendid pair of breasts. I came to know that she had a large supply of the female sex hormone. I had to pass her bedroom door to reach the bottom of the staircase leading up to my bedroom. Sometimes the door was closed; sometimes it was slightly ajar. If the latter, she would occasionally call out my name. If I paused and pushed my head into the room I would usually find her lying 'en negligee' in her bed, which lay against the wall with her head near the door. She would say something marvellously cogent, such as 'What are you doing' There was always an overpowering fragrance of perfume from the powder she used which lent a pronounced whorehouse atmosphere to the room (or so they say!).
Mrs. Ford was keen on horseback riding and would occasionally don her riding outfit which included tight-fitting jodhpurs and a white silk shirt with long white tubular ties attached to the wrists.
'Could I ask for your assistance here, Ronald? 'she said to me one day as she was preparing to go riding. She was standing in the dining rooms with her arms outstretched when I entered and the wrist ties were dangling down.
'These things are such a nuisance,' she said. 'I'd be grateful if you could fasten them for me'. I guess I should have wondered what she would have done if no one else had been around. Worn some other shirt? She stood looking at me with her large brown eyes as I fastened the ties.
'You're very shy, aren't you?' she said with a trace of a smile.
'I am?' I said sheepishly. I realize now that I should have ravished her on the spot, pulled her to the floor in the dining room and made mad, passionate love to her! Dream on, silly boy! I was, in fact, surrounded by female pulchritude, but was too shy to take advantage of it; (Is 'dumb' a synonym for 'shy'?) I came back to the house one day just as Marg was descending the stairs to check her mail. We had each received a letter from home and, instead of going to our rooms, we stood in the hallway to read them. We were standing close together and I became aware of the sound of heavy breathing. After assuring myself that I was breathing normally I realized that my fellow resident was in oestrus. I glanced sideways and saw that her full bosom was literally heaving.
I was tormented for days by thoughts of a thousand different ploys a skilled operator could have used to get her into bed but they were all after the fact and I had only my nocturnal fantasies to console me. But it was not as though she were turned off by my neglect. One weekend afternoon she invited me into her room to meet one of her classmates.
'We were just talking about pessaries,' she said. 'You do know what a pessary is, don't you?'
'Of course,' I said knowledgeably, trying not to show my embarrassment. 'It's a device inserted in the uterus of women to compensate for a fallen womb.'
Marg looked at her friend with a 'See what I mean..!' look, and her friend tried to suppress a smile,
'I have one,' Marg said, looking directly at me without smiling.
'Gee, I'm sorry to hear that!' I said, thinking she meant she had a fallen womb. Neither of them spoke; they were obviously speechless--dumbstruck--in fact!
I left the room shortly thereafter, redolent of cheap perfume, confident that the conversation had been redemptive. It was at least a year before the penny dropped. She was talking about a contraceptive diaphragm! She might as well have said 'Fuck me at your leisure! I'm available!' Jesus! Was I dumb!
One Saturday afternoon I was in my room studying when there was a light tap on my door and Marg came in. She was barefoot and was wearing a light bathrobe.
'Hi! I was just having a bath so I just thought I'd pop in and see how you were doing!' 'Pop in'? I thought. If she'd had a bath she would have had to pass her own bedroom door in order to climb the stairs to my room. So she could have gone into her room and changed her clothes, which led me to believe that she had nothing on beneath her dressing gown. Aha! she had plans to entrap me! Well, she was not about to gull the 'old timer' with that trick. Actually, none of these thoughts even crossed my mind; I was simply wondering what she wanted to talk about on a Saturday afternoon.
There she was, round and warm, full-blown and ready, and there I was, young and horny and extremely dumb, shy and sitting as though glued to my chair while she lolled Maja-like on the nearby bed. Eventually she departed quietly, no doubt thinking what a prudish, thick-headed jerk I was. I, on the other hand, would have liked to give myself a good, swift kick in the ass, but I was sitting down and couldn't move.
I give myself cold comfort in retrospect by thinking what would have resulted if I had indulged myself that winter in reality rather than fantasy. Rather than having a tired arm (resulting from 'The Devil's Handshake,' as the priests would say) I would probably have flunked most of my exams and returned home consisting primarily of cheekbones and eyeballs--'fucked out' as they say. Very cold comfort, indeed!
— The End —