Grass or Gas: No One Rides for Free

by M'Lynn Alston Childers

Overview

An idealistic young woman is seduced by the promise of a creative and spiritual renaissance which the 60's and 70's rebels tauted to be their goal. She moved from a stable midwestern community where morality was enforced by the impact of families being known to each other for generations. She arrived in a dizzying metropolis of strangers unknown even to themselves. She spent thirty years testing, rejecting and coming to terms with her own beliefs. She was well past her 50's when she first read Betty Friedan's, FEMININE MYSTIQUE but in her youth she felt the dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunity for creativity and growth midwestern women suffered.
When she finally read the book, she was surprised to learn Ms. Friedan had not meant to start a political movement, but was making a case for growth movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504376891
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	03/25/2017
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.32(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE LOVE AFFAIR IS OVER

Leaving Los Angeles was as emotional as breaking away from a love affair that's over. The good memories enticed me to give it one more chance. "There will never be another so special," they coaxed.

My decision to leave was firm and would not be reversed. The movers were scheduled and packing boxes reserved. Over the weekend, I would go through my hoard of concert programs and playbills to choose what to keep for my scrapbook. I knew Misha's posters, along with Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar programs, would make the cut. And I would always keep that one special love letter.

I may never recover from my first movie-star moment. I was waiting in the foyer of Chasen's restaurant. The agent I was to meet was running late. This was an important interview for me — so important I had taken a taxi to get there while my car was in the shop — and I feared I had been stood up.

Forty-five minutes waiting for the agent was trying my patience, and when he did appear, he had neither soul nor sex appeal. I was not inclined to be generous with his lack of talent.

He breezed in, and rather than talking to me, he looked me over as if he were assessing whether or not I was worthy of him before walking away to search for the maître d' to seat us.

I was in no hurry to follow him and had only taken a couple of steps when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind.

I turned around and was looking right into the laughing eyes of Dean Martin. I was so stunned, all I could manage was to inform Mr. Martin, "You're Dean Martin; you're Dino."

"I know, honey, I know," Mr. Martin assured me. He placed his hand on my lower back, leaned in, and said, "You don't belong with this guy; let's go make some memories."

He evidently took my nervous laugh as a yes because he used the hand on my back to turn me around and steer me toward the door. "I don't want to make a scene and embarrass my friends here," he explained as he looked back to see if the agent had realized what was happening.

We were at the car before I registered the magnitude of what had occurred.

"You don't need to waste your time on that guy. He can't do anything for you." He evidently thought I was the agent's date, and he continued, "If you ever do decide to sell out for a job, make sure the one you are selling out to can deliver what he promises."

I was glad Mr. Martin kept talking. I hoped my nodding and agreeing would suffice until I trusted my voice to make sounds. I had never had a fear of speaking in public, but I had never been starstruck either.

He directed the car toward Sunset Boulevard and told me he was going to show me a part of Hollywood no one else would.

Once on Sunset, he started driving toward the Will Rogers State Beach, but when he reached the canyon that separates Hollywood from Beverly Hills, he turned up the road and stopped at a house that seemed too modest to have a Beverly Hills address. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine. After a while, he said, "This is where Marilyn lived the last five years of her life and where she was found when she overdosed."

His pensive mood and my awe of the man ensured silence for his reverie. I didn't ask the questions I wanted to, like whether he knew Marilyn and if they were friends or if he was a student of Hollywood much like any newcomer just trying to figure out what it was all about.

Soon he started the car and pulled back onto Sunset going toward the beach. At Westwood, he cut across to Wilshire Boulevard. In the heart of this university village was a large Cineplex that had at least twenty-five theatres. I had been to the movies there many times. I always parked behind the cinema alongside a brick structure that I thought housed the garbage cans for the theater. The structure appeared to be eight feet tall and was a square approximately fifty feet by fifty feet at largest. The area was well lighted, and whenever I went to the movies there, I always felt safe leaving the theater after dark.

Mr. Martin parked in the same place. When he got out and motioned for me to follow him, I realized he was going to try to get into this "garbage storage area."

I was still dumbstruck and reluctantly followed.

At the far side of the brick structure, there was an unlocked wood gate. He opened the gate and held it for me to follow. Inside I could see that this was a mausoleum along the entire wall of the theater. He walked to the wall and pointed to Marilyn's burial place.

The red rose that Joe DiMaggio was said to send every day was in a vial that dangled on a damaged brick as tentatively as Marilyn had appeared to hang on to reality. Mr. Martin's respectful mood returned as he looked at the names on the wall.

Shortly after, he walked to a grave site at the opposite side of the structure where there were regular burial plots in the ground. He pointed to one of the sites and said, "This is where Natalie Wood is buried."

I had adored Natalie Wood since I was a teenager and seen her and James Dean in Rebel without a Cause.

I remembered Natalie beautifully wearing the black and avocado-green costumes designed for the movie. With her black hair and olive complexion, she was exquisite. Even though I was a blonde, I insisted on having a black blouse and an avocado-green skirt.

I did not have reverence for the plot of ground Mr. Martin showed. He probably grew up in Jersey and didn't know much about beautiful cemeteries that took up acres of fertile farmland like the one in Enid, Oklahoma. The one that was so grand my parents always clucked when we passed it, "What a shame so much good, fertile land is going to waste when it could feed half the starving children of Africa."

I had not grown up in the Depression as they had, and I did not share their empathy for the starving children. If I had my way, I would take Natalie and Marilyn and bury them beside Bob Kraus, the talented, beautiful older brother of my girlfriend. Bob had had a single-engine airplane he was piloting go down in a wheat field in Nebraska. A short few years ago, he had been the athletic all-star in our high school. Every junior high girl who could charm him into smiling at her was in love with him.

The beautiful ladies would be safe and happy buried beside Bob, and I knew he would like having them there. They could lie in those rich surroundings and stare up at the heavens, figuring out how they could get from here to there.

At night, when heaven turned on its lights, the sky would put on a light show just for the beautiful young people.

They would like their resting place almost as much as heaven and wouldn't be in any hurry to leave.

When we went back to the car, Mr. Martin opened the door for me. When he was seated behind the wheel, he confided, "This is what happens to pretty young girls who come to Hollywood and don't have anyone to take care of them." I nodded my head yes, believing he was telling me to take care of myself.

If he had ever had any thought this might be a sexual encounter, I'm sure he gave that up when he saw how starstruck I was. He had to know I was in no condition to give consent, and he was not a man who would take advantage.

I told him where I lived, and when we arrived at Barrington and Gorham, he got out and opened my door. He put his arm around my shoulder as we walked to the patio of my apartment. At the gate, he gave me a squeeze before turning and going.

I called after him, "Thank you for a wonderful memory." He looked back and gave a cute salute; his big smile told me I had said the perfect goodbye. I wanted to call him back and have him stay forever and be taken care of, but I just watched him go.

I didn't fall asleep for a long time. I had liked being in the same car with Mr. Martin and having his arm around my shoulder at the gate, but I wanted to stop worrying about Marilyn and Natalie being left behind the Cineplex in a place that looked like a garbage holding area.

Who had made the decision to put them there? Were they so heartless they couldn't see the souls of these beautiful young women? Natalie's little girl must have played paper dolls just as I had. I bet she dressed them up like movie stars.

I doubted Marilyn's little girl had ever been carefree enough to play. If she played at all, I expected it was putting on makeup long before she was old enough for red lipstick, hoping someone would notice how pretty she was.

Did it take a week, or longer, for a hungry agent to convince the builders of the Cineplex the brilliance of exploiting this site of so many beloved by making them subservient to the movies for eternity?

CHAPTER 2

GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN

When I moved from the Bible Belt to the West Coast, I was looking for more excitement than I had known at home, where the highs of the year were Christmas and the Fourth of July. Changes of weather added whatever excitement we could expect between the two holidays.

When I was six, I remember a beautiful snowstorm that closed the highways, and we got to stay home from school. I loved the snow, and I was up early looking for signs of life. I wondered if our old rooster would crow. I knew he crowed at sunup, but there wasn't any sun this morning.

After looking out the window for what seemed an hour, I finally saw a cottontail scuttling along the fencerow where leaves had drifted. The leaves formed a base for the snow to fall on, and he would be safe from falling into the snow deeper than his legs and getting marooned. If I watched close enough, I could see the snow drifting. The rooster still hadn't crowed, and I could smell bacon frying downstairs.

My older brothers, Jack and Kurt, were already fully dressed in their hunting clothes, sitting at the table eating breakfast. Their rifles were carefully laid across a chair close to the back door. Jack was seventeen and too grown-up to play with kids, especially a little girl. Kurt sometimes played with me, but I would have to play alone today. I didn't mind. I would make snow angels and build a girl snowman.

By late morning, I was getting bored with the acre of snow angels I had made, and the snowlady was having a problem keeping her boobs on. If Kurt had played with me, he would have refused to build a snowgirl for this very reason. I understood his frustration. If they fell once more, I would give her a corncob pipe and remove the old lady hat I had put on her.

I was ready for the sun to melt the snow, and I was looking forward to tomorrow when we would get our shoes muddy walking to the school bus. We'd be late to first period because we were cleaning our shoes. A day with teachers being more concerned with out tracking mud into the classroom than getting the lesson plans completely covered was one of the good things about bad weather.

The snow vacation was a lifetime ago when I only dreamed of going to the ocean and wearing beautiful clothes like I had seen in the occasional movie we were treated to. Now I expected LA to deliver the passion the movies had awakened in me when I was a teenager watching them as greedily as the slutty girls devoured True Romance magazines.

The make-out sessions with my boyfriend after seeing On the Beach with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster were smoking hot, but the rumor that we singed the wheat stubble on either side of the dirt road where we parked was just gossip. Miss Kerr's kittenish whimpering and Mr. Lancaster's masculine dominance would have nuns shedding ugly habits for trashy lingerie.

Every Friday night we went to the movies, and for our make-out sessions after the "good shows," the ones heavy on the love scenes, we parked on a dirt road about a mile from my house. The land on either side of the road belonged to the Krittenbrinks. I often babysat for their three little girls. Clarence was perpetually nervous, and he depended on his beloved, Leola, to keep him calm. His sense of humor was wicked, and it was hard to tell if he was serious or just messing with you.

Leola told me months after this all happened that three consecutive Saturdays after he went for his morning stroll, Clarence returned to the house in an awful excitement. "Leola, don't go reporting this to the Medford News, but I'm pretty sure we have a UFO landing on the Jefferson Place. There's a patch of singed stubble a couple of miles from town. On either side of the road, it looks like someone tried to set fire to it. It's just about the right size for a UFO landing."

"Lynn, where did you and Lee park Friday night?" was Leola's greeting when I ran out to her car to say hi when she let her girls off at school on Monday.

"Who said we parked?" I stalled.

"You be careful you don't get yourself pregnant. I need you to help me raise my girls before you start having babies," she ordered.

"We don't go all the way. I know how you get pregnant, and it's not going to happen to me until I have a ring on the third finger, left hand," I assured her.

"It's awfully hard to say no when you spend two hours watching a movie like On the Beach. Clarence and I saw it, and afterwards he drove straight to our old make-out place in Jefferson Park. I scolded him, 'We have a home to go to,' but he said, 'Yeah but there are three little girls sound asleep there who would remind us how much trouble we get into when we are all heated up.'"

If I told anyone what I did when I was full of tension and excitement after a make-out session, it would have been Leola. She was only about twenty-seven, and she never let me forget who was boss, but we were friends.

Lee and I parked as near my house as we could without all the town seeing the car lights turned off in the middle of nowhere, only to come back on an hour later. I lived there and knew the hazards to look out for. It was mostly Connie Belcher, the town constable who was a nosy old goat. He snuck up on us one night and flashed a bright light right on us to see what we were doing. I'm sure he was disappointed to discover we were fully clothed and sitting and talking. It was the night after we saw The Robe. I was glad he didn't pay a visit the session after we saw William Holden and Jean Simmons in Sayanora. That picture show rendered me to a helpless puddle of whimpering. I could whimper just like Deborah Kerr, and at the end of the evening, Lee was angry when I pulled out of his clutches. "I swear I'm going to have a heart attack if we don't have sex," he declared.

I couldn't form the words to tell him how furious I was that he would put pressure on me. He had to know this was as hard for me as it was for him, and he knew very well I was not that kind of girl. "Take me home this minute."

When we pulled into my driveway, I took off his class ring and threw it at him. "I can't go steady with you anymore. I can hardly be mindful of my own feelings much less worry about yours. And this time I mean it."

Lee was used to getting his ring back and responded with, "Hey, where's my good-night kiss? I'll bring the ring back when I see you tomorrow night."

The screen door was left unlatched, and I was supposed to latch it when I got home. I went inside and headed straight to the bathroom and masturbated thinking of William and Deborah lolling at the edge of the ocean in water and sand and passion. I never questioned how I learned to masturbate; we didn't have sex education beginning in kindergarten. It was just a natural response, like being hungry and grabbing a glass of milk and peanut butter sandwich, knowing a snack would satisfy my stomach.

That was a long time ago. I was now in an atmosphere where sex permeated the air and rules didn't exist. There was no wrong, and all morals were seriously weakened by crossing, ignoring, and disrespecting the line we had always been told to think long and hard about the consequences before crossing it.

CHAPTER 3

FIRST DAY IN LA

Apartment hunting was foremost on my list of importance. By noon, I had not yet found an acceptable apartment, but I had learned that the Hollywood of my fantasies didn't exist.

The newspaper ad had given me an address on Fairfax for what sounded like an adorable studio where I could live out my dreams. I parked my new Pontiac LeMans with the white racing stripe square with the curb. I checked the address to make sure I was in the right place before walking to the front of the building.

When no one answered my knock, I thought the place might be deserted since the grass was overgrown. Right before I started to walk away, an inordinately tall woman appeared. Her makeup was too bright, and she was wobbly on her high heels. I started backing away from the door, thinking the landlady had been drinking very early in the morning.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Grass Or Gas"
by .
Copyright © 2017 M'Lynn Alston Childers.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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