Backseat Memories

Music has a way of jogging the old memory circuits. The other day, I heard a song by Neil Sedaka and it more than jogged, it jolted a very real recollection from my distant past.

As a freshman in college, I met a girl with whom I had attended high school. I will call her Miss B. I was attending Northeast Louisiana, she, a small Baptist college in Pineville. I would call Miss B when I came home on weekends and we would usually go out if she were also in town. She lived in the tiny nearby town of Hosston.

Her dad was a Baptist deacon. Baptists don’t dance and they don’t drink alcohol. Still, there are many Baptists in the world and it’s not because they are opposed to having sex. She and I usually spent much of our many dates making out in the back of my parent’s yellow Pontiac. We never really did the deed, but we came close.

I probably wasn’t Miss B’s first love because she already knew the best “parking” spots in and around Hosston. Our favorite was the Hosston grade school parking lot, but we also knew a few secluded oil leases that worked in case our favorite was in use for some function, or other. One such parking incident stands out in my mind.

Miss B and I had double-dated with my close friend Tim and his date at the time. We had gone to a movie in nearby Atlanta, Texas. Miss B and I sat in the backseat of Tim’s Chevy (at least I think it was a Chevy). Miss B was as hot as the proverbial west Texas summer wind, and practically tore my clothes off on the drive back to Vivian. Worried about his date, Tim took us to a rural churchyard and turned out the lights. It was the night that I thought I was going to get lucky.

Miss B and I were going at it hot and heavy in the backseat of Tim’s Chevy when someone knocked on the car’s rear window. Tim rolled down the fogged front window to see a Vivian cop.

“This place is off limits. You need to go home or I’ll have to run you all in.”

“Thanks, officer,” Tim said, cranking the engine and moving out smartly, none of us bothering to ask what the cop was doing so far out of the city limits.

The incident put a pall on Miss B’s ardor. She adjusted her skirt and blouse and crossed her arms tightly against her chest. She didn’t even give me an inkling of a kiss when I dropped her off at her house.

The next week, I got a letter from Miss B. She had, it seems, found a boyfriend, the new love of her life, at the college in Pineville. He was a Baptist and I was not, and I was suddenly out of luck.

As I listened to the Neil Sedaka’s Laughter in the Rain, I wondered about Miss B. Did she marry her new Baptist beau and have a dozen kids? I hope so, but I guess I’ll never know.

Fiction South