Not yet fourteen years old, alone and adrift in early adolescence, I wandered the decks of a Wilson Line excursion boat as it churned its way back up the Delaware River. In the company of my parents and my younger brother, I’d reluctantly spent the day at River View Beach amusement park. I had not been much amused. Reaching the top of yet another flight of grated steel stairs, I walked out onto a empty wooden dance floor where a brightly lit and flashing juke box was pouring out the wrenching, over-the-top sobbing of Johnny Ray’s “Cry.”
On weekends in that summer of 1951, the Wilson Line was still running “Moonlight Dance Cruises” down the Delaware River with a live band and a bar. The dance cruises would periodically make the news when the police came on board at Chester to break up the drunken fistfights. This being an early evening, a mid-week trip back up the river to Philadelphia, there were only a half-dozen couples clustered at the edge the dance floor.
In the course of the previous year, despite all evidence to the contrary, I assumed that my passage into young manhood had occurred without mishap, that I had passed unscathed. After all, hadn’t I been to parties where I had kissed girls in the dark, hadn’t I tasted purloined beer from brown quart bottles? I wanted to believe that I had, to some degree, figured out the ways of the world. Aside from my new and chronic melancholy and more profoundly, my failed attempts to come to grips with a new and constant interior background of unquenchable, non-directional lust, growing up didn’t seem to be any big deal. But what I saw that early summer evening threw me into one of those searing moments of self-doubt, of yearning, and agonizing reappraisal that recur and recur as we stumble through the process of trying to find out who we are and what it is we think we need or want.
In the angled evening sunlight, the dirty brown river had turned golden. Vibrations from the ship’s engine rippled the steel deck under my feet while from the jukebox came back on with the sweet aching sound of Al Alberts and Four Aces. “Take away the breath of flowers…It’s a sin.” There were girls out on the dance floor, girls who I realized were not much older than me, girls of fourteen and fifteen. But these girls were not like the eighth-grade girls I had known at the Incarnation parish school. These girls were wearing the make-up and the clothes of grown-up women. I was suddenly and intensely aware that I wanted nothing else in the world than to be close to girls like these. I also knew that I hadn’t a clue as to how to even begin. Probably for the first time, I began to sense that there might be a whole universe of alternatives, of worlds different from and more attractive and exciting than anything I had yet encountered. This one seemed close enough to touch.
These kids were behaving as if they were completely in charge of their own lives. How did they get here? They seemed to have no visible connections to the constraints of the larger adult world. They looked to be on their own, free in ways I hadn’t even thought possible. There I was on the same boat with them, but I was with my mother, my father and my little brother. These kids were hanging out, dancing, smoking cigarettes. I was in awe of them and how they were dressed; in blue jeans, real Levi’s blue jeans, not the generic baggy blue dungarees I was wearing, the ones my mother had bought on sale in Strawbridge’s basement. Several of the boys had tattoos on their upper arms, and some them were wearing boots, not cowboy boots, but the black engineer’s boots that later became known as motorcycle boots. And some of them were even drinking beer, right out in public, taking swigs from quart bottles in paper bags. “Oh boy,” I thought, “Why can’t I be like them? They’re having a great time. This is what I should be doing.”
But how, I wondered, do you get to be like one of these kids. Maybe it was all in the look, the jeans, the “duck’s ass” box haircuts, the black motorcycle boots. Maybe if I looked the way they looked, then maybe I could go out on that floor and casually, confidently ask one of those incredibly glamorous girls to dance with me. Maybe. That’s if I knew how to dance.
It had taken only a fraction of a second for me to measure the distance separating my world from that of those kids on the dance floor. And in that same flash, I was overwhelmed by waves of shame at the depths of my own inadequacy. I had to get away from there before anyone saw me for the sappy looking little kid I was. I couldn’t stay there, and no way did I want to go back and sit on a deck chair with my parents and my kid brother. I had discovered something, and realized that I desperately wanted to be a part of it. I had found what I thought was an identity worthy of aspiring to. The image of myself, not as I was, but as one of those super cool kids on that excursion boat dance floor was now fixed to my frontal lobes. I had found a paradigm for my adolescence, a state-of-being that might save me from the boring, everyday future I’d unknowingly been facing just moments before; a future of school projects, supervised activities, dumb jobs and good clean fun.
Before I turned to leave that dance floor, I’d made my decision, a decision similar to those made by earlier generations, decisions to go off to sea, to run away with the circus, to light out for the territories. I was making my break. I was going over to the other side, joining the new nation of postwar American teenagers. I was about to become one of those kids who said “thanks, but no thanks” to any proffered mantles of adult responsibility.
But first things first. Climbing the open steel steps to the upper deck of the Wilson Liner, I knew that I was out of uniform. If I was going to become something different, then I had to look the part. All the rest, the attitude, the confidence, the excitement, the glamour would be certain to follow. Appearances, attitude and reality, weren’t they were all just inseparable qualities? With a new look would come a new identity. I would be transformed, and everyone would see me as I really was, the star of my own life. One week later, I went up Fifth Street and spent three dollars and ninety-five cents of my paper route money on a pair of genuine Levi Strauss jeans. Two weeks after that, I told my parents that I wanted a pair of engineer’s boots for my fourteenth birthday, a pair of black ones.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1951, al alberts, chester pa, duck's ass haircut, johnny ray, levi's, memoir, motorcyle boots, olney, philadelphia, riverview beach, strawbrideg's, tattoos, the four aces, wilson line
