THE S CLUB

Faster than you can say “aw shit,” Ronnie had pulled up her dusty panties, zipped up her skirt and was scanning the ground for her blouse. “Hey hot stuff, it’s time to pay up.”

“Pay for what?” argued Neil. “I was only in there for a minute.”

“A minute is a minute. No matter what it ain’t free,” Ronnie lit a cigarette.

“I can’t believe President Kennedy get shot,” I said confounded. “Oh surely he was shot in shoulder, he is too good to be dead.”

“No Edmund,” said Madge suddenly gentle. ”Farley said he was dead.”

“Then this is the end of everything,” I concluded. I sensed the rotation of the earth; the turn of History, a state of shock in which everything changes forever. And one must amend his ways, attitudes and goals around it. I was a Roman watching his city sacked my Huns. I heard the radio announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I smelled the gunpowder billowing from the Presidential box at the Fords’ Theatre.

“Pay up, Neil because if your mother doesn’t finish you, my friends will,” threatened Ronnie.

“This is the end of everything,” I said. With Kennedy shot, we will never go to the moon.” The Soviets will secretly send the missiles back to Cuba. With Johnson as President, the Negroes will never upgrade their slums.

“Pay me,” demanded Ronnie.

“I am thinking about it. I am thinking about it.”

Crime will crest again. Jimmy Hoffa will continue to side-step the law. The New Frontier is over. The Communist Threat will take Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The future was put on hold. The dollar will lose its value. The Empire was officially declining. Lady Bird will redo everything Jackie did in the White House. Terrorism had already proved itself a dais for change. The world was thrown off its axis. Everything was askew. From then on, we began to live in a world where there were no more political heroes, just Pop and Public Relation campaigns.

“Everything is going to change for the worse,” I uttered in my augur’s trance.

“Yeah, you said it,” piped in Chris.

Three hundred yards away, Mother and Boom had pulled up in a car. They opened the door and began to walk toward us.

“I am not too interested in meeting any more of your relatives so pay up,” barked Ronnie.

“O.K. Skunk,” conceded Neil. Obviously he had figured that it was better to get rid of her, that way, he could deny everything. He gave her the fifty dollars and Ronnie scampered away knock kneed to a distant grove of pines that led to the ditch which ran along the railroad tracks back to town.

“Boy are you going to get it,” said Madge.

“Shut up little no tits,” he said. “You are in a whole lot of trouble too.”

“Fuck you,” said my little sister, ”you were fucking and I was just watching.”

Madge’s eyes scanned a hypothetical labyrinth. She was thinking very hard. She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, but I can say Kennedy got shot and we were let out early and I was passing on my way home when I saw all you guys watchin’ the fucking.”

“You say that and I say that you have been stripping all along,” retorted Neil

“Neil,” declared my sister conclusively, “You really are an asshole.”

“Besides,” I said, “Farley has already told them that anyway.”

“Fuck that little bitch,” exclaimed Madge. “I’ll never let use my bicycle again.”

Everything has changed forever in the neighborhood.

Boom had been crying. The most handsome President this country ever elected had been shot down. It was on the way home from the supermarket when she noticed the flags at the Post Office and Elementary School had lowered, quickly she turned on the radio and heard. Hot tears jumped out from behind her eyes. She parked the car on the side of the road, she let go behind the steering wheel and cried. She then screamed. Shocking herself into reality, she put the car in drove and proceeded home. When Farley came crying to her, she had taken it for granted that it was over the assassination. Then she noticed her torn dress.

“No mommy,” lamented Farley. “Neil was fucking some ninth grader in the potato field. He is letting everyone watch but me. He takes pictures of Madge naked and everything. Look how he beats me. Oh Mommy,” a torrent of tears followed.

“What’s this I hear about you fucking some whore in these huts? These huts are coming down and this club is abolished.” Boom screamed.

“Absolutely,” said my Mother stern-eyed at me. “How dare you be in such a club?”

“We weren’t doing,” said Neil all contrite, ”nothing.”

“Then tell me what is that bra doing there,” said Boom pointing to the ground.

Everything was over forever.

The embarrassment of being busted on a morals charge crept up my spine.

“It isn’t like that, Mom,” I said. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

“You disgust me, young man and I thought you were an adult, but you are not, you are like every other animal in the world, fascinated by sex.” She looked so grey and so sad. “And to think I thought you were going to enter the priesthood.”

Weighed down in guilt, my head swung toward the ground, I was being misjudged. I am really good. I am really good. Oh God, did I hate puberty!

“Well you children are grounded until Christmas,” my mother said. ”And you have put me in a horrible mood. Just wait until your Father comes home.”

“And to think you children could do something like this on the day the President gets shot. I’ll tell you this country is going to the dogs and you children are going right alone with it,” proclaimed Boom Boom.

We got in the car and heard that Johnson had just been in sworn in as President on Air Force One.