I hadn’t seen Joanie Cannon since the previous August when our brief but intense romantic interlude had ended with her tossing me off like an old sweat sock. Joanie was eighteen-months my senior and drop-dead good-looking. She had come out of Jimmy’s Tomato Pies one July evening on the arm of Howie Wells, a guy generally regarded as one of the neighborhood’s heavy-hitters. I hadn’t seen her before, and that first sight of her made me light-headed. Struck dumb, I didn’t notice that she was scanning the crowd of guys gathered in front of Jimmy’s for prospects. Howie Wells didn’t know it, but he was already history, one more notch on her gun. As they passed through the crowd, she looked right at me and smiled. I took it as an honor to be next on her list.
I was willingly defenseless and within less than a week, we were an item. Three weeks later it was all over. I was left dazed, confused and disoriented. I felt like I’d been put through an emotional sausage machine. From the start, she had been scouting new talent from among my own friends, and in those few brief weeks she played me off first against Ray Vileos and then Georgie Ryan. By the time I got over my moping, both of those guys had been dumped.
So now it’s the following Spring, a good eight months since I’d so much as spoken to her. I come out of the A & P on a Thursday night, the store had just added Thursday night hours, and there’s Joanie Cannon waiting for me. She still had the stuff to make go wobbly in the knees. We stood along the low wall of the parking lot and went on awkwardly for a couple of minutes doing the “how you been” business. In the middle of our third or fourth innocuous gambit, she looks at me with those big soft eyes and says, “You know, I’ve missed you.” She was really good, and she may even have believed she meant what she was saying.
My capacity for foolishness is something I‘ve come to understand as innate, constant and always to be guarded against. Here was one of the most desirable girls I’d ever known, a girl who had led me on to new levels of infatuation and then kicked my legs out from under me. Here she was telling that she had made a terrible mistake, that I just might be the only one. Underlying the combustible mix of high-octane emotions was a dangerous rush of puffed-up self-regard that threatened to override my frail powers of judgment. Whatever brought her there that night, a little light-bag workout, an impulse to see if she still had the right stuff. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. It was like I was up on the big screen, vindicated, the star in my own fantasy movie, a magnanimous, if reluctant, swooning object of desire. It would have been oh so easy.
The balloon of heady romantic ambience that had transformed the darkened sidewalk in front of a dumpy supermarket on Fifth Street was punctured when I heard myself say, “Hey Joanie, a lot has changed since last summer.” Just as I spoke those words, and before I could take them back, Freddy Krug’s lime-green ‘40 Ford two-door rumbled up to the curb. I signaled to Freddy to wait a minute and asked Joanie if we could drop her off. She shook her head and walked away.
The essence of what had transpired was not about love or about a relationship, it was all about me, and I felt like a God, an idol. When I got into the front seat of that old Ford, I could see myself in a Tony Curtis role casually brushing off some starlet. I was so full of myself, so flattered to be the cause of a beautiful girl’s attentions that I scarcely heard Freddy say, “You ain’t going to start messing around with that again, are you? Man, she’s a fucking nut case and you know it.”
The next day, still awash with waves of euphoria, it began to dawn on me that what I had said to Joanie was the truth. A lot had changed since last summer. I had changed. Not that too many people would have noticed, but I had begun moving away from the pointless, aimless and self-destructive drift that had been the hallmark of my adolescence. And not long after Joanie Cannon had humiliated and then dumped me, I had met a girl, a girl very different from Joanie Cannon.
I had met her in September. By Christmas, we were going steady. The idea that we can know essential things about ourselves, about what we want or don’t want, about life itself was obliterated in the course of my getting to spend time with this girl. At seventeen years old, I was a veteran of a thousand, if not thousands of infatuations, of years of free floating desires, of a continuous string of puppy love affairs, linked, layered, one after another. And there was the constant, dominating, primordial teenaged lust that burned inside me like a continuing coal mine fire. All of the above were present in this new relationship, particularly the physical attraction. But this time there was more.
To the adult world we were just another pair of kids going out together. But I knew better. What bothered me was that I knew that this was different in ways that mattered to me as nothing had ever mattered before. I didn’t understand it, but I knew. The kind of playing with each other’s minds, the insincere stroking, the kind of head games that Joanie had rolled out the night before, those things were entirely absent in this new relationship. Most importantly, for the first time in my life there was someone I wanted to think well of me, someone in whose eyes I wanted to be better than I would otherwise ever be. On the trolley car going to school that Friday morning, at lunchtime catching a smoke under the bleachers, working that afternoon and evening in the A & P, I knew that for the very first time in my life, I was really in love. And it wasn’t with Joanie Cannon.
About ten minutes before closing time the next night, Friday night, turning around from my register, I got the signal through the store window from my new steady that she’d be waiting for me across the street. And like every Friday night for the past six months, she’d be in front of O’Dea’s house between Leon’s Luncheonette and the eye doctor’s office. She wouldn’t stand in the light in front of Leon’s and be mistaken for one of the girls who hung out there. She didn’t hang out. I had made up my mind that I would say nothing about the previous night. It was over, all over except for giddy rushes of “oh man. Who would have ever believed that …” The self-congratulatory interior monologue distracting me continued me, but with ever diminishing frequency. Thinking that all was well in the best of all possible worlds, I heard a sharp knocking on the window that turned every head in the front of the store. It was Joanie Cannon.
Until then I had spent most of my conscious life trying to speed up time. When would I be old enough to drive, to smoke in the house, to get laid, to drink in a bar? The ten minutes till nine-o-clock went by in a microsecond. I was always among the first out the door at quitting time. That night, I was still dawdling in the back room when Big Stanley went to the fuse panel and began turning the lights off. As the store manager, Charlie Watson walked past me, I got an aside. “Peter, don’t you have anywhere to go this evening. You can’t stay here. We’re closing.” Charlie liked to laugh at his own remarks. The closest I’ve ever felt to what I felt that night was standing at the open door of an airplane four thousand feet above the earth waiting for the signal to jump. Irene Rudinski was standing by the store’s door with her keys. I was the last one out other than her, Charlie, and Big Stanley.
Out on the sidewalk, I immediately looked across Fifth Street to see if my now steady girl was still standing in front of O’Dea’s steps, waiting for me. Then swiveling my head back and forth, I looked up and down Fifth Street. No Joanie Cannon anywhere. What was going on? What had happened? I started across the street, dodging an approaching trolley car that clanged its bell at me. Walking up to her slowly, I began to try and explain what had gone on. With an abrupt wave of her hand, she stopped me. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. We didn’t say anything all the way up Fifth Street to Olney Avenue where we stood and waited for the Twenty-Six car to take us up to her neighborhood. The noise of the trolley going up Rising Sun Avenue didn’t encourage conversation, and I knew enough not to try and explain anything while we walked to her door. “Call me tomorrow,” she said letting herself into her mother’s house. I walked back through the dark streets to catch the trolley car home.
In the more than fifty years since, that we’ve been together, I have yet to get an explanation of exactly what took place that night during those ten minutes outside of that A & P on Fifth Street.
Tags: 1940 ford two-door, 1945-1955, a & p, coal mine fire, memoir, olney, olney avenue, philadelphia, puppy love, tomato pies, tony curtis, twenty-six trolley
