Young Flemingway

By John Fielden

Young Flemingway is a fictional, coming-of-age story of a teenager on the island of Puerto Rico. Set in mid-1966, the book takes the reader on a frolicking adventure through booze, barrels, bongs and boobs. Although the initial jaunt ends mid-1970, the actions and emotions of the main character are as timeless as puberty itself. We have all been there. Our circumstances may have been different, we may lived in earlier times or now, but we all share those same confusing thoughts and actions of youth, wanting to grow up.

CAUTION: Book describes drug and alcohol use and abuse, non-edited profanity and graphically depicted sex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Fielden
• Release date: Oct 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780984437979

Book preview

Young Flemingway

Puerto Rico -1969

Young Flemingway

a novel based on true events

john.fielden

Smashwords Edition

MY PLANET PRESS

HONOLULU

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Epilogue

Copyright © 2012 by My Planet Press, Honolulu, HI 96816

All Rights Reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Name, characters and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 0-9844379-7-5

ISBN 13: 978-0-9844379-7-9

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R1024 2205

Brenda

for the inspiration

Chapter One

1966

My Secret in the Dark

I leaned my body against the concrete block wall and pressed the side of my face onto the cool, painted cement. A single light, the yellow hue from the street lamp, cast back a serrated glow off the reflective metal louvers, slicing the background shadows of night. When I stepped forward, to peer through those now familiar slats, that irregular black, masked my dark intent.

While listening to falling water, I’m distracted by a scurry of noise between the cardboard boxes stacked about the room behind. Damn B-fifty-twos. I spoke in a hushed tone. They better not fly and land on me, and shivered from the base of my spine at the thought of those grotesque scampering brown creatures. I am of course referring to the large, dive-bombing tropical cockroaches, who with inherent accuracy and an insect skirr, target and land on unsuspecting humans in the dark.

Looking back into the room, trying to locate those shadowy bugs, scuttling from one area to another, their crusted exoskeleton scraping along the sides of the containers, I notice a spare of boxes, their flaps still taped down, patiently waiting to be opened and rummaged to reveal their forgotten mysteries from an earlier life.

The intermittent splashes from across, from the small bathroom window, recaptured my focus. I forgot about those darting bugs and concentrated on my parents’ whereabouts.

Both of them should still be in the living room, watching television.

Staying alert for their unwanted footsteps, I constructed what to say if they enter and question me about why I was standing in the backroom, in the dark; especially, since I earlier excused myself from watching television on the premise of going to bed and read.

Maybe if I hide among the boxes, they won’t detect me. A childish impulse. I knew better. I’ll just pretend I’m looking for something. It didn’t bother me I had no excuse to why I neglected to turn on the light and prefer to look for something inside those deep boxes in near-total blackness. Teenage logic. Fortunately, I never had to come up with an excuse.

I stood without movement in the darkness and my heart pounds from the fear of getting caught. I anticipated the moment that was about to happen, as it had, nearly every night for the past month and then I heard it...the sound of the splashing water stopped.

Remnant drops bounced around the porcelain tub and the shower curtain opened with that irking metal against metal rake. Moments later, with a flick of a light switch, she appeared in the neighbor’s bedroom window. A Latin beauty of average height, nineteen years of age, whose body curves rivaled any model I had seen in the Playboy magazines I kept hidden in an unmarked cardboard box under my bed.

My neighbor, Yvonne, a college student, habitually showered around this hour in the evening and goes into her mother’s bedroom to dry off and primp. I discovered this routine by accident one night while looking inside those cardboard boxes, and made a nightly ritual of sneaking into the backroom, hoping to get a glimpse of her wet naked body. I only saw her nude waist up, but that was enough for this young pubescent teenager, since I had never seen a live nude female above the age of six.

Yvonne entered the room with one towel tucked around her body and another, a white beehive, covered her head. Flashing patches of bareness, she twirled around, dropped and draped her towel across a padded bench. She stretched in her nakedness; and unwrapped the terry-cloth bonnet, releasing her dark locks to tumble low beyond the cut of her cocoa shoulders. Yvonne began singing a melody with a soft out-of-tune voice, a love song that had been in her head all day. She brushed her damp hair, and swayed in canorous time, setting droplets of iridescence to dance down the curves of her Junoesque back.

Her reflection from the ornate vanity unveiled a classic face of Latina heritage. Lunette curvatures of her meticulously plucked eyebrows, diamond sparkles in her almond brown eyes and the crisp outlines from her full pouted lips; all shaped with masterpiece precision, and all competed for my admiration. Makeup a detriment to such beauty.

Her dark nipples discovered my presence, fixating my position and prevented the release of my impassioned glaze. I glorify in the sight of her flawless breasts and watch her massage creamery lotions upon them.

Jesus, she’s absolutely amazing!

I froze. Rotating away from the window, I silently prayed my sudden outburst of pleasure wasn’t too loud...

And have her catch me in this most unbelievably awkward, but wonderful act.

*****

That Nice Young Boy

This was late in the summer of 1966 on the island of Puerto Rico and I, Young Jonathan Flemingway was in the budding puberty of my somewhat innocent thirteen years of life. My mother, Isabella Guadalupe de Santa Maria, supposedly named me after one of her favorite movie actors, Gig Young. Although Lupe, pronounced Loopy, a nickname given to her by her so-called friends, would deny it, the real reason she gave me that name, to be a reminder of her youth that was no more.

By the nature of the word young being an adjective, throughout my brief life, I was frequently called by my first and last name together, as in there goes young Flemingway or tell young Flemingway to come here. This worked fine while in my youth, but I often questioned how I would be known when I became an adult, when I was no longer…young.

Maybe, I will call myself by my middle name. I postured in front of the bathroom mirror, a mirror that returned a distorted truth.

Jonathan, Jonathan Flemingway. Just like James Bond.

***

I often admired my mother’s beauty from the sepia photos thoughtfully placed around our house. The old tarnished framed pictures depicted a sprightly, youthful woman, with a complexion of fine olive-skin from her Spanish birthright and aboriginal lineaments born by a Mexican peon; a petite buxom woman with thick dark-brown wavy hair and fatty lips and a squashed nose, which she hated since it reminded her of when she was poor.

My mother’s past was a closely kept secret. I tried to stitch together a history of her and her family from the stories she told me or when she slipped and said something unknowingly but truthful about her youth; but there were far too many inaccuracies in her vague tales of family history to know what was true.

From what I gathered, she was born around 1916 in the coastal Mexican town, Mazatlan, to a handsome, semi-wealthy couple; her father a polished European gentleman and her mother, either his servant or a rapscallion lady. Her unmarried parents died, and I never knew how, when she was a young girl around eight or nine or any number of years before or after. Her uncle and aunt from her mother’s side, took her in along with her brother; who she never spoke of at all, not even his name. Her new guardians received very little inheritance from their dead relatives–the lawyers and bankers took the majority–and with two extra mouths to feed, they were forced to live meager in river shanties along the border in Tijuana.

When my mother turned sixteen, she moved out on her own and everyday crossed the Mexican-American border into San Ysidro, California, to work in a shoe shop owned by a crafted elder immigrant, an Italian shoe maker; who could only make a living from repairing old shoes instead of designing new ones. The shoemaker, and his wife and her sister, took my mother under their care as if she were their daughter, teaching her rudimentary English as they learned themselves; and provided her with the love she needed, in lieu of her missing relatives.

She met my father, a Border Patrol agent, one day while crossing the border bridge, and they had a daughter, Anita, her first child, while she was still in the prime of her beauty at the age of twenty-four. They married a few months later. From the long labor my mother endured, she didn’t want anymore children, she couldn’t stand the pain, or the sight of blood, or the fear of destroying her body. Who does? But my father wanted a son, so after a couple of miscarriages, by accident and on purpose, my mother gave birth to me when she was thirty-seven in the year 1953. And either from her own guilt or from possibly genuine motherly love I became her forever gushing favorite baby boy, and with the age difference from my sibling, I was treated and pampered as her only child.

As an infant, I was unable to be breast-fed by her, and not knowing what else to do, she resorted to canned sweetened condensed milk as my main baby formula; alternating with Gerber’s mashed bananas from a jar. The consequences of this naive inept Lupe action, may provide a background to not only my being overweight most of my life, but maybe that explained my underlying passion I have with the female breast–or maybe not. But quite possibly, because of the indigestible milk-fat and unable to properly digest solid foods, I was always the second largest, by height and girth, among all my elementary school classmates.

Coupled with the 1950 style eyeglass frames that I wore from an early age, my father added to my embarrassment about my burgeoning size by always concluding his introduction to his son, me, by proudly declaring to the weekly poker-playing guests, ...and, a football player in the making.

My physical insecurities kept me quiet, shy and withdrawn and during those poker parties, I often played with my toy soldiers in the living room, alone.

Your boy Young, he’s so quiet you don’t even know he’s here.

I know. And he plays so well by himself.

You must be very proud.

A hushed conversation I intently overheard from the card playing ladies, while the men discussed their work. But I didn’t mind, because at these weekly poker games I looked forward to all the snacks I could eat; onion and clam dips with an assortment of corn and potato chips, sodas of different flavors–including root beer–and my favorite, pitted green and black olives and tiny sour pickles. My parents never gave me a limit as long as I didn’t interfere.

And now, with puberty changing my features–the development of unspeakable body hair and an alternating, multi-tone crackle in my voice–I still preferred and was quite comfortable living as a solitudinarian, without the need for any close friends.

It’s safer this way, rather than risk the ridicule from others.

*****

I’ll Show You Mine...

My previous sexual encounters were twofold before my vision of the Spanish goddess, Yvonne. First, there was Carrie, the six year old playmate.

While in my parents’ garage, Carrie and I innocently and naturally, stripped out of our clothes and played, you show me yours and I will show you mine. Of course, the parents found out, and they did not think it was so natural–it was 1958–and Carrie and I were playmates no longer. The immediate separation from my favorite friend left me with a permanent subconscious marker–getting caught in a sexual act is bad, no matter what age.

The other encounter, not as guiltless; at twelve years old and on an overnight camping sleepover in my back yard, two of my best buddies convinced me to play, let me play with yours and I will let you play with mine.

While lying in a row, me in the middle, staring at the occasional star peeking through a cloud, and the only noise, a persistent electrical buzz coming from the high-power transformers in the adjacent lot, we reached into each other’s sleeping bag, groped in the dark, trying to find and massage the other’s private part. With the fear of getting caught by my parents, who were in the house only a few feet away, I withdrew my hand after touching my friend’s semi-flaccid penis. I was quite uncomfortable with this experiment and at that time, I did not like someone other than myself touching mine. I reached in my bag and took off the other boy’s hand, which had found a home.

Because of my inexperience with sex and by the very nature of it being inconsequential, I did not consider this a homosexual incident, more like awkward juvenile exploration; and suppressed most of the quilt deep within my subconscious.

However, I was now entering the hormonal age, where future sexual encounters will become more important and more abundant. I was starting high school in the fall, with real, live girls, who might be interested in boys. I know I needed to learn how to socialize with the opposite sex, but I didn’t have a clue on how or what to say to them. My plan? I confidently thought by methodically studying the pictures in my Playboy magazines, know a few off-color jokes, and from observing Yvonne’s live nude form, I could handle any sexual situation that might come up.

Hah!

*****

The Move

We moved to Puerto Rico from Los Angeles in the early summer of 1966. My parents hated LA. Moving from a small east coast city to the sprawled, multi-city, traffic-infested, conglomerate called Los Angeles County was too much of a change. After the Watts riots in 1965, which came within blocks of our house, my parents decided they had enough. At the first opportunity of a job transfer, my father jumped on the idea of moving to a tropical island, where he could enjoy a less agitated life with more ample opportunities for his favorite pastime, fishing. He offered my mother the choice of two different new locations, Guam or Puerto Rico; she told me she chose the latter, because she heard Guam had bigger rats.

My sister was married by then, and as the only child, I saw an excellent opportunity for my future as a new high school student in a faraway land. I contemplated what benefits I might receive from my parents for being ripped away from my dearest friends and my beloved school–I wouldn’t remember their names a month later. I daydreamed of endless possibilities; a bigger allowance, car, and if I play the angle right, maybe even a dog.

Besides, I was getting into a bit of trouble with my aforementioned friends by rummaging–and yes, stealing–electronic parts and small fan motors from new apartment construction sites. I did the deed just to be in with the group and since I had no need for the items, I gave them away to an electronics freak friend. But as early patterns shape the foundations of our life, this too became a recurring theme.

I told my parents it was time to go and grow into a new person with new friends and a new school. In reality, I breathed a sigh of relief–I’m getting out of here just in time.

So, I gladly packed my belongings, and with my family, got on the first freighter headed towards puberty.

*****

Mod

In 1966, the Mod years bloomed in Puerto Rico. The kids bought flamboyant colorful clothes with ballooning sleeves, contrasting polka-dots, bright-color corduroy and two-inch wide white belts–and by kids, I mean guys.

I decided to use my increased allowance to buy these