Chapter 39: Sin City

After dinner, we went back to the frat house and watched TV in the living room, and then went upstairs, made love, and went to sleep. We got a little more action the next morning, and then our holiday weekend was over. We got up, cleaned up, dressed, and did another load of sheets and towels while eating breakfast. A little before noon a call came in on the house phone. It was Joe Bradley down at the Albany bus station looking for a lift back.

Marilyn agreed it was time for her to take off, also. We kissed good-bye, and then she climbed into her Challenger, and I got in the Galaxie. By the time I got to the bus station, I found Arnie standing there with Joe, so I loaded them both into my car and brought them home. On the drive back, Joe asked, “So, how’d the visit at Marilyn’s go?”

“Don’t ask,” I replied.

“That good, huh?”

“That bad.”

This was a subject Joe never really understood about me, my relationship with my own family. His family was tight; even though he was living away from home, he often visited them, riding the bus down to the Port Authority and then taking a local bus off into the wilds of Bergen County. I met them once or twice when they would drive up at the beginning and end of the school year, but the only thing I remembered about them was that he had a sister still in high school so achingly gorgeous that most guys would drag their balls through broken glass just for the privilege of being spit on by her. “So, what happened?”

I glanced in the rear-view mirror, but Arnie was already snoozing for the fifteen-minute drive home. I shrugged my shoulders. “I got into it with her father and one of her brothers, and told them both where to head in. Then I left and came back here. Marilyn showed up an hour or two later and spent the rest of the week here. She left to go back right after you called.”

“They must have loved that.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t ask. I just say thank you.”

Back at the house I helped Joe move his shit back upstairs. He immediately noticed the improvement in our hygienic standards. “Hurricane Marilyn came for a visit,” I commented.

“Maybe I can send her down to my sister’s room at our house,” he replied.

“Don’t be surprised if she gives you some shit the next time we’re all here. I had to put up with her on a rampage, and so should you!” He just laughed and waved aside the very notion.

The rest of the semester went quickly and quietly. In three weeks’ time we had finals, and as soon as they were finished, people started streaming out of the place. A few brothers would be coming back in a couple of weeks for another J-Term, but I was skipping J-Term to go on vacation with Marilyn. There was already a rumor going around that J-Term was ending after this year, and that they would simply have the regular semester start a few weeks earlier in the future. I knew this to be true.

Christmas Eve was a Tuesday, so I drove out to Utica a little before lunch. I got there about two and spent a quiet hour with Marilyn before we all bundled off to church. For the Lefleur family, everything was done Christmas Eve. After Mass, we would have a big dinner and then in the evening Santa would visit and they would do presents. Santa actually visited, too, since they had somebody come in every year. You were required to be there Christmas Eve, on pain of dismissal from the family, and the only year we got out of it involved an ice storm. Before long, the kids were getting married and bringing wives, fiancées, and girlfriends, and eventually their own children. It was the loudest and most obnoxious gathering imaginable, with screaming kids everywhere. I often hid out in a side room and read a book, just to keep my sanity. No such luck now. I sat there on the couch next to Marilyn and just tried to let it all wash over me.

On the plus side, Mark must have had the riot act read to him. He never said a peep to me. There were several conversations with Big Bob and Harriet and Marilyn, although really, they were between Big Bob and me. Marilyn and her mother just sat there on the sidelines and listened in. The first was on Christmas Eve, over dinner, when Big Bob semi-apologized for what he said about my going in the Army, to the extent that he said, “I just don’t understand. If you’re so bright, why are you going into the army?”

I rolled my eyes at that, and bit my tongue before replying, ’You want stupid people defending you?’ No, I didn’t say that. “Well, as I explained, the army is paying for me to go to school, so this is how I pay them back.”

“You couldn’t get any scholarships?”

“I did, Mister Lefleur. I got an army scholarship.” He looked shocked at that. This was simply an argument we would never settle. The Lefleurs, none of them, not even Marilyn, simply didn’t understand the concept of public service. “Sir, let me explain. In my family, we were brought up to be good citizens. We vote, we pay our taxes, we sit on juries, we obey the law, and we defend the country. I’ve known my family served since I was their age,” I said, pointing at Ruth and Peter. “Why shouldn’t I let them pay for me to go to college? They paid for my father to go to an Ivy League college.”

“But it’s such a waste to go if you don’t have to.”

I glanced over at Marilyn. At heart she agreed with her father, but she loved me and wanted me to do well at what I was doing. I had to stop this. We would never agree on this, and I didn’t want to tell him what I thought of his family before I was married to her. “It’s a family tradition, Mister Lefleur. We serve our country. It’s my turn now.”

For Christmas I gave Marilyn an RPI sweatshirt, but inside it was a small box from a jewelry store, with a gold necklace in it. Marilyn oohed and aahhed while I put it around her neck, and then planted a big kiss on me in front of the parents. I happily settled for a very nice sweater, always useful in upstate New York. The summer, the only semi-warm weather in the entire state, was when I would be down south in training.

Christmas Day was a more difficult conversation. Marilyn had not discussed my home life with her parents, and quite innocently her mother raised the topic after breakfast. “Aren’t you planning on calling your family, Carl? Feel free to use the telephone,” she offered.

I looked across the kitchen island at Marilyn, but she just shrugged in response. Her parents noticed this and then looked back at me for an answer. I gave a small sigh. “Thank you. I will try and call my sister before the day is out.”

“What about your parents?”

“I don’t really have much to do with my family anymore. I’m basically independent of them.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Big Bob.

I took a deep breath. “It means exactly that. I’ve been living on my own since I was sixteen. I have very little to do with my family.”

“Sixteen! What do you mean you’ve been living on your own? What about this past summer? I thought Marilyn visited you at your parents?”

Marilyn reached across the table and placed her hand on mine reassuringly. It calmed me quite a bit. “She did, sir. We stayed at my family’s house for a few days before going to the beach.” I glanced at her again, and then turned back. “Let me explain. I have told Marilyn everything about my family. I haven’t hidden anything from her. I wanted her to understand me.”

“That’s true!” she chimed in. “Carl and I have had long talks about his family.”

To what extent that mollified them, I don’t know. He came back with, “So, does that mean you ran away from home? Or did they throw you out?”

I shrugged and gave a half smile. “A little bit of both, I guess. By the time I was sixteen it was really obvious I couldn’t stay, so I told my father I was leaving, and he could either go along with it or I would simply run away. He helped me find an apartment and helped me pack up and move out. I lived on my own for the last two years of high school. The last time I saw my folks was this past summer, and the last time before that was after I graduated high school. It’s easier on all of us this way.”

They were both totally flummoxed by this. Family was the most important thing to the Lefleur family. “Your father moved you into an apartment when you were sixteen and paid for you to live somewhere else?”

That sort of startled me. “Oh, no sir, I paid. I’ve never seen a penny from my family since I was a little kid. I’m totally independent. I pay my own way.” That should at least make me look good in their eyes, I thought.

Or not. “You paid? Where did you get the money for that? What are you, rich?”

Oh, good Christ! This wasn’t looking very positive. The day was really swirling around the bowl now. Marilyn just patted my hand. I sighed and nodded to her. “I had some money of my own, and a job.”

“Money from what?”

I looked over at my girlfriend. “You know, I don’t think I ever told you this story. Remember how Tessa told you how I protected her that time in high school? This is sort of similar.” I turned back to Big Bob and Harriet. “Okay, here goes. Back when I was in junior high, when I was thirteen, I was attacked by three bullies. When it was all over with, they were arrested by the police, and I was able to sue them for assaulting me. I saved the money. Part of it bought my car, and part of it went to pay for my living expenses when I moved out.”

Big Bob looked at me with disgust. “You got beat up in school and sued the bullies?”

“Uh, it wasn’t like that, sir. I only got a black eye. They all ended up in the hospital. That’s where they were when the police arrested them.”

“You put three boys in the hospital?” gasped Harriet.

“Ma’am, they attacked me, not the other way around, and besides, it wasn’t like they were smaller than me. They were all a year or two older.”

“Why did they attack you?” she asked.

“They wanted my lunch money.” I looked over at Marilyn sheepishly. “Kind of lame, huh?” I turned back to Harriet. “Mrs. Lefleur, I know how to handle myself. Marilyn is very safe when she’s around me. Nobody will ever hurt her when she’s with me,” I promised.

“Well, I never!” she huffed out, looking at her husband.

“You never explained why you had to move out of your house,” said Big Bob.

I just rubbed my face with my hands. “Sir, that would take a long, long time to explain. There’s a few basic reasons, though. For one thing, I have a brother who’s, well, he’s crazy. As in, he’s nuts.” I made a whirly sign around my head with an extended finger. “He’s not safe to be around. One of us would have killed the other one by now, and I am not exaggerating. Either he would have killed me, or I would have killed him defending myself. Marilyn knows, she’s met him. I never let him be alone with her and I made sure I locked him in his room at nights.” Marilyn simply nodded in agreement. Her parents stared at me in disbelief. “Secondly, my family is not like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver. My folks are good people, but lousy parents. It’s better not being there.”

“What? Like they beat you?” asked Big Bob sarcastically.

I was a touch slow answering this and he noticed this. “I made them stop when I got older. I got my father to stop, anyway. I just stayed away from Mom.”

Big Bob’s mouth slammed shut when he heard my answer, and he stared at his wife. “I don’t believe it. I don’t know what to say.”

Marilyn came over behind me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s true, all true. The nice one, though, is his sister Suzie. She’s an absolute sweetheart.”

I nodded and smiled. “She is. You should invite her up here this summer, while I’m in training. She’d love it.”

“That’s a great idea!” she replied, beaming. “I’ll ask her the next time I write.” Looking at her parents, she explained, “We write back and forth all the time.”

“You know, we should give her a call now. You should call and ask for her. Hamilton doesn’t know your voice, and he won’t hang up on you or break the telephone.”

“Okay, good idea.”

We stood. As I passed her parents, I said, “Hamilton’s my brother. He usually intercepts all calls and hangs up on me. One time he even broke the phone when I called my father.” Big Bob and Harriet just stared at each other with open mouths. We went over to the kitchen phone and Marilyn called Suzie, and then handed me the phone. She confirmed my box with presents had arrived at Dad’s office, and she asked if their box had arrived. I said it had. I put Marilyn on with Suzie, and then took it back. I talked to my dad for a couple of minutes, and then to my mother even more briefly. I hung up with a sense of considerable relief.

“What was that bit about the horse?” asked Marilyn.

I laughed at that. “That’s a long-time family joke. Years ago, when she was little, Suzie decided she wanted a horse and asked for one for Christmas. Well, you’ve seen the house. No way could we have a horse! So, my parents just mumbled that they would think about it and bought her a calendar for Christmas with horses on it. Well, she asked again for her birthday the next summer, and she got something else horse related. Cowgirl Barbie and a toy pony, I think. Anyway, ever since then, we’ve been getting her something horsey ever since. This year she got a key ring with a Mustang convertible on it, along with the words that it was the only kind of Mustang her parents would ever buy for her!”

We both laughed at that. “What about your parents?” she asked.

Marilyn’s parents were both watching us. All I could do was shrug. “Dad said he was sorry we were apart like this. Dad always says he’s sorry. Mom blamed me for destroying the family.”

“You! They drove you out!” exclaimed Marilyn.

I just grinned back at her. “Don’t sweat it. She also blames you for leading me astray.”

“What!”

I just started laughing. “After all these years, she finally got it right!” Marilyn started punching me at that, so I just wrapped my arms around her in self-defense and kept laughing. Her parents weren’t as amused, but they didn’t say much. After a few minutes I said, “Your birthday’s in June, right?”

“The eleventh.”

“Suzie’s is the fourteenth, Flag Day. Invite her up that week. Have a joint party or something. Dad can stick her on a plane, and you can pick her up. Does Utica have an airport? Maybe fly her into Albany or Syracuse.”

“That would be so much fun! I’ll write her and ask.”

I looked over at her parents. “Suzie’s the normal one in the family. You’ll love her. She wants to become a nurse. That’s about as normal as you can get.” I looked at Marilyn and smiled. “With my family, she should probably become a psychiatric nurse!”

“She’d never run out of patients, that’s for sure.”

I kissed Marilyn on the cheek and hugged her to me. Afterwards I said, “I think I need to be getting back to Kegs.” I turned to Big Bob and Harriet. “Probably the one thing I most envy about your daughter is her family. You have a really nice family, much nicer than mine. I envy her. I just wanted you to know that.” I wandered off to the library, packed my bags, and grabbed my coat and hat. Marilyn promised to meet me at the frat house the next day. I kissed her thoroughly and left.

I spent a quiet night at the house, and Marilyn showed up a little after lunch the next day. I have no idea what line of bullshit she handed her parents to get them to sign off on her going somewhere with me. I just don’t think they wanted to know. Our flight out was at six in the morning from Albany, so we needed to get up by four or so. Marilyn had two gigantic suitcases, along with a carry-on bag. I had a hanging bag for dress clothes and my B4. We moved a couple of nice dresses from her bags into my hanging bag, and then got out some clothes to travel in. I teased her that the travel time counted as vacation and she needed to wear a miniskirt and no panties, but Marilyn was having no part of that idea! She selected jeans, a cotton blouse, and sneakers.

The alarm clock was abysmally loud the next morning, and we would have probably destroyed it if it was within reach, but I had placed it on the desk across the room. We stumbled alive and cleaned up. I had her leave yesterday’s clothes on my bed, as opposed to taking them with us. Dressed, we packed our toilet kits and grabbed our bags and made our way down to the Galaxie. The weather was a bit crappy, but not bad enough to ground the plane, and the Galaxie was heavier than her car, so it would handle better on the wet and slushy roads.

This was in the good old days, when airplane travel was still sort of enjoyable and exciting. If you showed up only an hour ahead of time, that was perfectly fine, and nobody got strip searched and run through body scanners. You didn’t even need identification on domestic flights. They ran television ads about just grabbing your honey and taking her away for a quick flight to the Bahamas on a lark. Thirty years later you needed a passport and a public body cavity search to even get in the security checkpoint lineup. Nobody flew on a lark anymore.

The Albany airport is a real airport (as compared to some of the grass strips I’ve flown in and out of) but not a very big airport. Several of the majors flew in and out, but mostly feeding to hubs like New York or Chicago. At five in the morning there was a decent amount of room to park in the lot near the terminal. After getting out of the car, I peeled off my parka and pulled on a windbreaker. Marilyn stared, since it was freezing cold. “Where we’re going, we won’t need a parka,” I explained.

She nodded and peeled off her own winter coat and tossed it in the back with mine. “Where are we going, anyway?”

I still hadn’t told her. I grinned and said, “Somewhere we won’t need parkas!” She flipped me the bird at that, and I laughed.

It was too damn chilly to stand there and chat. I grabbed my bags and both of hers, and then moving like a Sherpa, hustled through the parking lot and across the drive-through area and into the terminal. I looked around and found the Allegheny Airlines desk and led the way. I wanted to keep Marilyn in suspense as long as possible, so I only handed over our tickets to New York. Marilyn missed the ID tags placed on our luggage. After getting our boarding passes, I led her to the escalator up to the second floor, where we walked to our gate. Along the way we stopped at the only place in the airport open for food at that hour, a coffee and pastry stand, and got some Danishes.

“You have to tell me where we’re going! I know we’re not going to New York!”

“And how do you know that?” I asked.

“No beaches,” she said primly.

I just smiled. “And maybe I just lied to you. Maybe we’re going to the City and spending the week living on room service and going to Broadway shows.”

“I don’t believe you.” She looked daggers at me, but I just let it wash over me.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” After a bit, our plane, a 727, started boarding and first-class passengers were called. “That’s us,” I announced, and stood up.

“First class?” she asked gawking.

“Don’t we deserve to be first class?”

“I mean the tickets, you jerk!”

“Check your boarding pass.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, and then grabbed her carryon bag. “Come on, get going.”

She shuffled along with me, not quite believing we were going in first class, but finally accepting it when we were seated in the second row. First class wasn’t all that spectacular on a 727, but I had the money.

Actually, I had a fair bit of money. My portfolio was now between $1.5 and $2 million bucks. Just because the economy was sucky didn’t mean you couldn’t make some money. There is just as much money to be made on the downside as the up. By the winter of ‘74-’75, the American economy was in turmoil. Nixon had resigned in disgrace and Ford, his replacement, was under a major cloud because he pardoned Nixon. The oil shock from last year had eased, but people were still getting used to gas prices they couldn’t afford, and unemployment and inflation were both rising. The rest of the decade, including Jimmy Carter’s none too glorious term, were not easy on most people. I was invested in a variety of inflation indexed and recession resistant stocks. My next big play wouldn’t be until after I graduated, but I was rich enough that I bought myself a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, in stainless steel, for my birthday. Fuck it, Happy Birthday to me! I was also thinking about replacing the rusty Galaxie.

First class sure beat the hell out of peasant class in the back. The seats were leather, extra wide, and far enough apart you had legroom and the ability to recline, and they were only four across. Sardine class packed them in six across, and if you didn’t sit bolt upright you couldn’t move your legs.

First class is nice, and not just because you get to lord it over the lesser beings flying in the back. The seats alone are worth the extra expense, but in first class you got real food and real drinks - for free! By the time I recycled the flight attendants were issued cash registers and sold you everything from your food and drinks to pillows and blankets, and even the bathrooms were pay toilets. I swear that if the plane was falling out of the sky, they were instructed to make you pay to use the oxygen masks that fell from the overheads.

In 1974, first class passengers were promptly served a Danish and juice or coffee, and on a real plate and a real cup or glass. The flight was only an hour long, but as soon as we got up, a first class only flight attendant was serving us. Marilyn was impressed. “Ever flown before?” I asked her.

“Yes. A couple of years ago my class went to France on a school trip. We were gone for two weeks,” she answered.

“Really! We were lucky if they loaded us on a bus and took us to a museum. Did your brothers go when it was their turn?”

She shook her head. “They didn’t do that at Notre Dame, only UCA.”

I hadn’t been entirely clear on that before anyway, so I asked her to clarify. In Utica, at the time, there were several parochial elementary and junior high schools, but really only two high schools. The younger grades were coed, but the high schools weren’t. UCA was the girl’s school and Notre Dame was the boy’s school. Long before Ruth got to that age, UCA was shut down, and everything was combined at Notre Dame. All of Marilyn’s brothers and sisters went to Notre Dame. Only UCA did the trip to France.

“Learn anything?” I asked.

She grinned at me. “I learned I didn’t want to go to any more museums or cathedrals in France!” Bless her sweet heart, but Marilyn is not the intellectual type. I’d have killed for the opportunity! “Have you ever flown?” she asked me.

I nodded “Back when I was ten, my father had to fly out to Pittsburgh, for his company, and they were taking this little propeller driven puddle jumper, and he asked if I wanted to fly with him. It was the summer, and I said, ‘Sure!’ Boy, did Hamilton throw a fit over that! Anyway, we never left sight of the ground, and that little sucker bounced all over the sky. On the trip back, there was some turbulence and the pilot announced we were going to fly a little lower, and I told him to land on the highway and taxi home!”

We both had a laugh over that, and by the time we were done talking about our flight experience, we were descending into JFK. We were right on time (another difference from the future) and I led the way through the airport to American Airlines. Back then you had to get your boarding pass at each airline; you couldn’t get them all at the same time up front. The computer technology just didn’t exist yet.

The cat was out of the bag as soon as I handed the ticket agent our tickets. I had done all this through a travel agent in Troy this fall and had arranged the flights and the hotel room. The agent looked at my tickets and said, “That’ll be two first class tickets to Las Vegas, correct?”

Marilyn gasped. “Las Vegas!”