The Navy and I, - VII

This is not totally unlike STAR WARS. Several segments into the overall story and you now are having to deal with a regular length flashback:

Before I went on active duty I went to monthly weekend meetings.

Which gave me E.M. Club privileges. We made quiet a few visits to the E.M. Club and to the Base Exchange and the service station which sold 3.2 beer by the case.

I wanted to get all the benefits I was entitled to.

I was going in the service and a friend of mine, Ed, was coming out of the service. His father worked construction and had an accident. His hand was squashed. He would never be able to work again. Ed was stationed in the Army in Germany. He came home and was getting out with a hardship discharge to help with the family.

He asked me to line him up with a date. The receptionist, Sue, at the company I worked for was just out of high school and was boy crazy. I lined Sue and Ed up. And she in turn, lined me up with her cousin Billy Jean, up visiting form Newnan, Georgia.

We went to the E.M. Club. A live redneck band was playing on the top songs. Billy Jean was bouncing all over with rhythm of the music. She had music in her brain and blood. Me? I always made fun of people dancing to fast music, saying it was some kind of native ritual.

Never the less, we got up to dance. Her in her rock and roll mode and I, in my make-a-mockery- of-rock-and-roll dancing mode. We made a good dance couple.

We got out on the dance floor and she would do these wild steps and I would do near the same in jest. I think we should have been given credit for inventing several dances that night… one that comes to mind is where one person pretend they have an invisible lasso and ropes you and tugs you in – we did that, we also ran and yipped and leaped around the perimeter of the inner walls of the E.M. Club… everybody else quit dancing and watched us… the guitar player where follow us on twanging out twangs to spark even more outlandish rhythm jerks from us.

It was a night to remember or regret.

Ed and Sue got married and had two children. They are now divorced. Before they divorced they both called me up, each on an extension and both gave me a piece of their mind for introducing them.

Billy Jean married another friend of mine. They are divorced too. Billy Jean now owns a nursing home, which was the same type of business her parents owned in Newnan.