The Town, Part One

A wife vs. a lover. Rowdy frat boys get fried. Plus: Goudy Geese!

Jul 01, 2024

THE TOWN describes experiences I had while in high school that changed everything for me. I first wrote this essay over twenty years ago and have refined it over the years. It’s divided here into three parts, with installments added in future editions of Wild Things. Though I have altered the names and a few details, these are true stories.

I. Brianna and Vivian

WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. was shot and killed in Memphis in 1968, I had just turned sixteen. On TV, I watched the buildings burn, the silhouettes throwing stones, the phalanx of cops, faces covered by dark plexiglass, clubbing people in the streets.

King’s murder marked the first time I was old enough to feel devastated by a great tragedy, one that overtook not only the nation’s psyche, but also my own. It afflicted even the small town in rural Kansas where I lived and where everything important seemed to happen somewhere else. The year following King’s death was to bring more tragedies closer to home, ones also born of old hatreds and human frailty.

After the Civil War, Kansas attracted freed slaves who remembered John Brown and the abolitionists who fought against pro-slavery gangs and militias along the Missouri border. Some believed it was the promised land. Most of the Blacks in my town lived in modest homes set in a gully between the railroad tracks and the river. They had their own dentist, barber, and funeral director. Raymond Wilcox was their doctor.

My mother befriended Raymond’s wife, Brianna, and while I was too young to fully understand their bond, I believe they brought out a free spirit in on another. Their mixed-race socializing bound them together in defiance of the sullen hostility they faced from locals. At town bars, they ordered mixed drinks, joked and flirted, and sometimes agreed to a dance. Why not?

The Wilcox family lived outside of town in a large, turquoise-shingled, split-level house with outbuildings that sprawled across a few acres carved from a wheat farm. Cars and bikes lined the dirt driveway that twisted down from the asphalt county road. In the afternoon, Briana drew thick shades over the windows, left the TV on, and dispatched chores to her children from a large, round, green-quilted bed in the center of the house.

Now and again, Mother would squeeze us all into the station wagon to go to the Wilcox place. The kids played in the large yard while she and Brianna visited. The oldest, Butch, was my age. Blind since birth, he played the electric organ and worshipped Stevie Wonder. Butch was also scary strong. Get within striking distance and he’d grab you by the neck and lock you in a head vise. When you begged, he laughed and squeezed harder.

We rarely saw Raymond—Dr. Wilcox. Kids know which adults to avoid. His blue-black face was lean, pitted, and casually menacing.

Vivian was another of my mother’s free-spirited friends. Marooned on a ranch on the Kansas prairie, Vivian like to dress in a gauzy whirl of daffodil yellow set against her thick black hair and ivory skin. The disappointment just below her fine features abetted her allure. Her wealthy husband was often away on ranch business and her three adopted children were half grown and looked after one another.

Vivian was in love with Raymond Wilcox. Years later, when I asked my mother about it, her only explanation was that there are some men who just know how to talk to women. One night, when he left his wedding ring on her bed stand, Vivian took it as a sign and decided to keep it on a chain around her neck.

When Brianna found out, she was furious and wanted the ring back. It took some doing, but mother convinced Vivian to give it up and arranged a meet. Late one summer night, Vivian parked her yellow LeMans convertible behind Briana’s olive-green Imperial near a mile marker on the blacktop that ran past the Wilcox home. Mosquitoes swarmed to the cars’ headlights. The air was heavy with the sounds of insects and frogs and the scent of road oil mixed with prairie pollen.

Mother parked her car behind Vivian’s. She walked uneasily along the edge of asphalt toward the the LeMans, took the ring from Vivian through the rolled-down window, and walked on to the Imperial. Briana pulled herself up out of the car and took the ring from my mother’s outstretched hand. She held it for a long while and then turned and hurled it into the wheat field. “I know he likes white,” she said. “But I’ve got the eight kids.”

Months later, Raymond asked Vivian to meet him at a motel in Wichita. He knew people in Detroit and he’d get a practice up there. They’d send for her children.

Vivian checked in and waited for two days. The third day, she stripped off her yellow dress, climbed into the bathtub, and razored open a vein. A maid found her, still breathing. Vivian’s husband went to see her at the state mental hospital after the electroshock treatments. The hormones made her crazy, the doctors told him, and they’d removed her barren womb. When they released her, he drove her back home to the ranch.

Coming in two weeks in Part Two: Karla, I discover sex and encounter the dead.

A skating grace

By Barbara Ramsey

THE SUN WAS OUT in Seattle. I was a twenty-seven-year-old medical intern at a local hospital and had a rare Saturday off. I wanted make the most of it and landed on the idea of taking a spin around Green Lake on my skates.

I enjoyed skating and owned a serious pair of lace-up roller skates. Roller blades were coming into fashion but they felt a little unsteady. Four wheels per skate was my requirement. Even then, I had trouble stopping. I never fully got the hang of using the toe top at the front of the boot and needed a long runway to slow down.

I had no luck getting any of my girlfriends to join me at the lake so I decided to go it alone. I set out wearing some very short REI shorts and a thin T-shirt. The day was glorious! I kept thinking of the Joni Mitchell song, Chelsea Morning, where “the sun poured in like butterscotch.” People were having a good time, walking dogs, pushing strollers, and chasing frisbees.

As it turned out, a few were having too good a time. Around noon, I saw a knot of four frat boys walking toward me, drinking beer and apparently carrying on the festivities from the night before. Perhaps an informal graduation celebration? Or just a “glad we haven’t been expelled” party? They were clearly feeling no pain.

As I passed them, they whistled and shouted lewd remarks. I got it. They were in their twenties and it was the 1970s. I was shapely and scantily clad. Fortunately, I was also sober and had many years of experience in ignoring this kind of crap. I rolled past without a word. They seemed like small boys to me, obnoxious but harmless.

As I rolled on, I felt a lovely breeze. The lake was sparkling. Families sat on the grass having lunch. I found the swaying branches of young alder trees captivating. I remembered and then let go of a recent incident at the hospital that infuriated me, marveling at the way exercise can relieve stress. I thought: I should do this more often!

In my reverie, I lost track of time. And then I saw the frat boys. Again. The path around Green Lake is a three mile loop and we were meeting once more. Except now, one of them was carrying a bicycle tire. No wheel, no inner tube, just a floppy tire that he was waving around for the hell of it. Only a drunk person would have found this amusing. His friends were laughing uproariously.

I saw them before they saw me and started planning my next move. I wanted to give them a wide berth, but the four of them had spread out the full width of the pathway. The grass was too bumpy and uneven to skate on. I suppose I could have turned around but who were they to make me change course? They were just jerks. I decided to skate right through their midst.

As I approached, the catcalls began again. The one with the bicycle tire changed his grip on the rubber and headed directly for me, holding out the tire like a lasso.

My mind froze but my body continued to hurtle forward. It was too late to change course. With my lack of braking skills, a sudden stop would hurl me to the ground. This idiot was clearly not thinking about physics, but I was. If he caught me with that tire, we’d both go flying into the emergency room.

Then grace found me. I’m an atheist, but I know enough Christian theology to understand how undeserved favor can fill your being. A sudden rush of memory handed me my salvation. Years earlier, a guy told me about a line a stripper friend used to repel unruly customers, and I’d never forgotten it.

“Listen, buddy!” I shouted at my would-be attacker. “I already have one asshole in my pants and that’s enough.”

The frat boy stopped dead in his tracks. The other three, who had been goading him on five seconds earlier, turned on him in a flash. Now they were laughing at their fool of a friend, suddenly brought low. The guy hung his head and released the tire. I sailed on, smiling into the sun’s butterscotch.

BIRDS-OF-A-TYPE CARD SERIES

Goudy geese

THE BORDER for this card comes from the 1923 American Type Founders Specimen Book and Catalog. In 1981, I drove to a rare book store in Santa Cruz, California and paid $300 I didn’t have to purchase this 320-page gem. ATF was a business trust created by the merger of twenty-three foundries in 1892. They had a huge success in 1915 with the release of Goudy Old Style, a typeface commissioned from Frederick William Goudy, who sold his drawings for $1,500 and never received a royalty. Every magazine and newspaper advertising section for the next thirty years used it. The ATF catalog had an prodigious influence then and again in the 1970s when designers such as Roger Black and Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone went to its well again and again. Goudy designed over ninety faces, including one commissioned for the University of California at Berkeley that they still use in a modified cut called Berkeley Old Style. For this card design, I couldn’t resist including the Goudy Italic ampersand, one of the most marvelous in the typeface universe.

CANADA GEESE are numerous in the Pacific Northwest and, especially in flying flocks like this one, their distinctive honk is hard to miss. (Never, by the way, call them Canadian Geese, especially on a copy-editor’s test.) I photographed this group flying over a Port Townsend lagoon called Chinese Gardens. The area used to contain vegetable gardens tended by Chinese immigrants who trucked the produce to markets in the latter 1800s. The 1880s were a period of anti-Chinese legislation and violence, but I recently read that the local Chinatown was considered one of the safer harbors. A 1900 fire destroyed much of the neighborhood. Today, there is little evidence of a once-thriving community. Just a place name.

Birds-of-a-type is a regular feature that combines two of my obsessions—birds and typography. It’s a blast for me to design these cards and I hope you enjoy them.

Snippits

JOSH JOHNSON is our favorite new (to us) stand-up comic. Here, he discusses the internet meme on whether you’d rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear—if you’re a woman. Stay tuned for the riff on one-star reviews.