Son: Saved from Myself

By David Appleton

Beginning with his high school years, David Appleton embarks upon the journey called Life with high hopes and aspirations for a happy, fulfilling existence on this Earth. In a desperate struggle to free himself from his past, which has been marred by the emotional and mental trauma that was imposed upon him during his childhood, he seeks and finds a new identity for himself, taking dangerous risks, meeting and making friends with people from all walks of life and indulging in sex, drugs and alcohol while carousing with wild abandonment. His future seems uncertain until he takes a trip with his best friend, riding motorcycles from Los Angeles to New York. In the course of their travels, he meets Jesus in a miraculous, unexpected encounter, which is foreshadowed by events that have taken place earlier in his life. Gradually, his devotion to Jesus grows and develops. In his ministry of spreading The Gospel, he receives revelations, visions and miracles from God. He finds himself compelled to resist the nocturnal attacks of evil spirits and demons, which employ witchcraft and black magic in an attempt to prevent him from continuing his witness for Jesus. Based upon his experiences, he arrives at the conclusion that all is not what it seemingly appears to be in the day-to-day routine of ordinary living. He begins to strongly suspect that God has a plan for each individual within the context of a reality to which most human beings are oblivious. Utilizing the concept of subjective reality, he persists in sharing his faith in Jesus with others, as his relationship with Jesus evolves into a close personal friendship. The finale of this story is completely unforseeable and incredible, leaving the reader with an uplifting sense of awe and wonder as David's destiny unfolds in accordance with The Divine Plan of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462000524

David Appleton

David Appleton was born and raised in Denton, Texas and fell in love with the enchantment of wild places as a toddler and ultimately went on to work as a professional outdoor guide, leader and adventure company owner for some 30 years. Through the years, he traveled to and led groups into a wide array of places doing all sorts of outdoor sports and activities. From climbing on Huayna Potosi and Sajama in Bolivia, Mt. Hunter in Alaska and Argentina’s Aconcagua; to mapping lost trails and trekking the remote reaches of Copper Canyon; mountain biking Porcupine Rim, Slick Rock and Poison Spider in Moab along with Colorado’s Monarch Crest and more than just a few rocky, obscure trails in the Texas Hill Country; exploring jungles in the Oriente of Ecuador and on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and to backpacking the Wind River Range, Mexico’s Maderas del Carmen and all over the Colorado Rockies- he was ultimately able to experience an astounding array of some of the world’s greatest adventure destinations. And on top of it all, he got to do it with a wide array of compelling characters.He ultimately based his business, Outpost Wilderness Adventure (OWA), in the wilds of the Tarryall Mountains of Colorado. Currently, he resides in the Texas Hill Country.

Book preview

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

JANIS

CHAPTER 2

DANCING IN THE SUN

CHAPTER 3

GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD

CHAPTER 4

YOU GOTTA ASK

CHAPTER 5

WHEN TOMORROW NEVER COMES

CHAPTER 6

KEEP ON DOIN’ WHAT YOU’RE DOIN’

CHAPTER 7

ON DISTANT SHORES

CHAPTER 8

THE VOODOO LOUNGE

CHAPTER 9

JENNA’S SONG

CHAPTER 10

AIN’T GIVIN’ UP

CHAPTER 11

FULLA THANKS

CHAPTER 12

THE END OF SUMMER

CHAPTER 13

SHEEP

CHAPTER 14

EYERIETATANKDALOD

CHAPTER 15

COMING HOME

CHAPTER 16

I WANT TO KNOW YOU

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John 3:3

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

2 Thessalonians 2:13

God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.

John 15:16

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you.

John 1:12

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.

Revelation 21:7

He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.

2 Timothy 1:9

God has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.

Romans 8:14

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.

Prologue

This prologue is intended to enrich your understanding and enjoyment of the story you are about to read, as well as to give me peace of mind that you fully comprehend the nature and objective of this work.

This book is a novel, a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

I am not a professional writer. In fact, I didn’t know where to begin when I sat down at my word processor to narrate the tale that you are about to read. The Lord put the words into my mind and I typed what He told me He wanted me to write.

There is no question on my part that this work is a vital part of His plan for my life and that it needed to be made available for reading by the general public.

Many times during the composition of this book, as well as during the creation of the music soundtrack CD, which I intended to enhance the reader’s appreciation of the story told herein, I became discouraged and very nearly gave up on completing the project.

With the encouragement and support of my dear friends, all agents of The Lord, I persevered in my efforts until one day I came to the realization that the work was completed.

Leonardo DaVinci once propounded that a work of art is never completed. It is only abandoned. However, that is not the case here.

The Lord told me to rest from my labors. The task was finished.

I do not believe that I could improve upon what I have rendered. This is my best effort.

The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, assumed complete control when I wrote the last chapter, as well as the epilogue. I had no idea of what I was writing as the words poured into my mind.

I simply obeyed the prompting of The Holy Spirit and wrote what The Lord revealed to me.

I remain astounded at the words given to me by God. I know that I am not capable of creating such a work of my own knowledge, experience and ability.

What you are about to read is the account of an ordinary, and at the same time, extraordinary life and death of one man from among the multitude of all humanity. He is nobody special, just another face in the crowd, unremarkable and anonymous. The odyssey upon which he will embark is often moving, certainly. Sometimes it is quite disturbing. At other times it is inspirational. In the final analysis, however, it is truly incredible. Then again, when evaluated from the perspective of the seemingly endless state of consciousness that we perceive as our existence, this cognizance of the condition of being that we call life, everyone’s passage from birth to death is truly an incredible journey, a voyage that none of us, to the best of our knowledge, has ever taken before, or at least, not that we can recall. How it began is a mystery and how and where it shall end remains to be seen.

You will see one such journey here, through the eyes of the protagonist. Hopefully, that vision will bring you to the realization that his life could have actually been your own, if that had been The Divine Will of God. That consideration alone is all that distinguishes you from him in the larger order of things.

If you take nothing else from this book, I pray that you will gain more awareness that we are brethren in this life and that we are the crowning achievement of God’s Glory, His most prized creation. God intended for us to love one another and to receive eternal life with Him and His Family in Heaven.

When you see another who appears to be less blessed than you have been, and there is always someone in that category regardless of your own circumstances, try to remember that, but for The Grace of God, there go you.

I am thankful to The Lord for letting me serve Him in this capacity and I pray that you, my friend, will close this book after you have finished reading it and experience the true, everlasting peace, joy and abundant life that is in our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only begotten Son of God and His Holy Sacrificial Lamb, our appointed Savior. Amen.

Now ENJOY!

CHAPTER 1

JANIS

Senior year.

My first year on the football team, thanks to Larry Valenti’s apparent inability to kick a football ten yards in a straight line.

Larry was an all-state soccer star, but he couldn’t stay out of trouble off the soccer field. He was good-looking, with a physique like Michelangelo’s sculpture of David. Plenty of girls chased him.

To his detriment, he enjoyed having his fun more than he liked following the soccer team’s rules. The soccer coach booted him off the team, whereupon the football coach asked him to be their placekicker.

In my time outside of the classroom, I watched T.V., hung out with my buddies and practiced kicking a football in my backyard. I practiced so much, in fact, that I had become quite accurate by the time Coach Loudon recruited Larry to play on the football team as the very first placekicking specialist in North Point High School history.

Pete Gogolak was making sports headlines as the original NFL sideswipe, soccer-style kicking specialist. Never having played soccer, I had learned to kick a football using the old-school, Lou The Toe Groza, straight-on kicking technique. Although it was not spectacular, it was reliable. Eventually, I beat Larry out of the kicking job, just in time to earn the status of starter and a coveted varsity letter award.

I lived through more surprises, triumphs, drama and heartbreaks during my senior year of high school than I had experienced in all of the seventeen combined years of my life up to that point. I truly began to live, similarly to waking up in the morning and starting a brand new day, when I turned seventeen.

Flashback to my sophomore year.

Ed Kirk and Tommy Olson invited me over to Ed’s house to hang out after the initial marching band practice of the new school year. It was late summer. After marching all over an NPHS parking lot while carrying and playing our musical instruments as we practiced for the approaching football season, all three of us needed a long, cool drink of lemonade.

Ed asked no one in particular, See any girls you can’t live without?

I wish that I could say yes, but, no, Tommy admitted, a tone of resigned exasperation in his voice.

Hot-looking, desirable females were a rare commodity at NPHS, at least in the assessment of our fifteen year old libidos. The cutest girls at our high school all looked pretty much like your sister looked if you had a sister. There really weren’t any girls who could fire up your imagination.

I stayed out of their conversation. I was unsure about what to say. Anything I might have tried to add to their discourse would have probably sounded dumb, I figured, because I hadn’t any experience with females other than watching them run around planet Earth like aliens from another world, a world that, quite frankly, scared the shit out of me.

Of course, I admired girls from a distance, but that was the full extent of my involvement with them.

What frightened me the most was the thought that eventually I would have to get around to kissing a girl, I mean, really kissing, a long kiss, not just touching lips, but French kissing, our tongues inside each other’s mouth.

I had heard about French kissing from some of the guys who acted as though they had a lot of experience with girls and sex, but I had no idea of what it felt like, or if there was a certain technique involved, just how it got started and if you would respect the girl afterwards and … I just could not imagine what it was like to French kiss a girl.

I was completely clueless.

Even more to the point, I was deathly afraid of the unknown. Just the thought of having to French kiss a girl brought on an attack of butterflies, paralyzing my brain and rendering me speechless, my lips clamped shut and my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth.

I heard Tommy intone mysteriously to Ed, Think we should introduce him to Janis Kerns? He deliberately turned his head in Ed’s direction, as though he were trying to conceal his words from me, but clued me in by spying on me out of the corner of his eye.

Ed looked directly at me, his eyes twinkling with knowing humor as he responded, Dave’s our friend. Why would we want to introduce him to Janis? He made no attempt to conceal his answer to Tommy’s question, speaking clearly and succinctly so that I could hear him plainly.

They began laughing, both of them looking at me as they enjoyed their private joke. I stood there transfixed like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck, lost in the progression of their discourse.

I had no idea who they were discussing. Their laughter made me curious. With innocent inquisitiveness, I stepped out onto the thin ice, requesting of Ed, Who is Janis Kerns?

After casting a sideways glance at Tommy, Ed returned a bland gaze at me and dismissively replied, Just a girl we know.

The smirk had disappeared from his face.

Evidently, whatever the two of them had found so humorous at the beginning of the conversation no longer seemed amusing to them.

Not satisfied with the outcome to my inquiry, I continued to press the issue, my interest now aroused.

Is she pretty?

Tommy let out a savvy, jaded-sounding chuckle and confessed, Oh, yeah, she’s pretty, alright, but you don’t want to meet her, believe me.

Ohhh, c’mon. Introduce me.

This was becoming a challenge.

Exchanging another knowledgeable look with Ed, Tommy conclusively shut the door on my earnest entreaty. Believe me, you’ll be better off if we don’t introduce you to Janis.

Like Ed, Tommy seemed to have made the transition from hearty jocularity to mild annoyance, so I decided the best policy would be to drop the subject. I didn’t want to become a pain in the ass to my new high school friends, although I was reluctant about relinquishing the opportunity to meet an attractive, mysterious female stranger.

It would be nearly three years before I ever heard the name Janis Kerns mentioned again, in spite of the fact that, evidently, we attended the same high school.

In my opinion, a major problem with NPHS was the lack of gorgeous, sexy girls, the kind of girls you see in movies and magazines.

Oh, sure, there were nice-looking girls, in a girl-next-door kind of way, and some cute girls, as in pixie cute, but never in my first two years of traversing the halls and grounds of the school did I notice a girl who could make me dream about true romance. I would fall in love with movie actresses and fictional characters in the books that I read, but never with a real, live girl with whom I could actually talk and dance and (butterflies) French kiss.

I held hands once on a date with Cindy Walters, but that was as far as it went.

We were both sixteen at the time, juniors in high school. Cindy attended a private school, so I never saw her at NPHS. My mom knew her mom and she introduced me to Cindy.

I took her hand in mine while we rode in a small boat together in the darkness of the Tunnel of Love at FunTime amusement park. She squeezed my hand with her fingers, teasingly, as though she wanted me to kiss her, but I was too nervous to follow through on her obvious invitation.

I really didn’t want to kiss her, anyway, since I didn’t know her very well. It felt awkward to me just to think about doing something so intimate with a girl who was, essentially, a stranger to me.

I was shy around girls. I thought about moving in for the big smooch, but then I ended up chickening out.

In fact, the only reason that I had given any consideration whatsoever to the idea of kissing Cindy Walters was to get it over with, hoping thereby to purge myself of my apprehension of the experience.

In my personal assessment, the situation was somewhat similar to the first time I had jumped off a twenty foot cliff into the water below, something that I had done when I was thirteen years old. You know, once you get past the first time, it’s no problem.

However, thinking about kissing Cindy Walters filled me with so much trepidation that I decided not to try, my curiosity notwithstanding. It would have been dirty of me, to my way of thinking, to kiss a girl I barely knew.

I went on a few other dates, one-timers, with the same result: that is, no result whatsoever.

While the cool guys at school were getting laid, if you believed their stories, I couldn’t conceive of giving or receiving my first, real, open-mouth kiss, trading tongue, much less going past first base.

I didn’t worry about it very much, though. Life would just take its natural course, I figured. Someday, I’d get that first real kiss out of the way and then … well, there would be kids.

I knew how children were conceived because I paid attention in health education class, which was the polite term for sex education in the 1960s.

That was strictly book knowledge, though. Book knowledge about sex was all that I had to go on at the time, lacking the benefit of experience. As my life progressed, I found that my book knowledge was nothing more than a dim and distorted reflection of reality.

Reading about sex is completely divergent from actually engaging in it. Reading about it is an intellectual exercise. Engaging in it means a lot of heavy breathing, sweating and getting funky.

Intellect has absolutely nothing to do with sex.

Indeed, you have to let go of your intellect if you want to get off. At least, I do. I guess that’s why sex was termed The Wild Thing in a popular song. Good sex involves anything and everything except gentility.

Henry Rearden had it right in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged. He described truly satisfying sex as depravity. I never forgot the philosophy expressed by that fictitious character after I had experienced the sex act personally, for myself. I found out that to reach an orgasm and truly enjoy it to the fullest extent, you have to give up your humanity and become an animal, literally. You’ve got to let the animal take over and just run with it. That knowledge would come much later, but not in high school: not for me, anyway.

Regarding the practice of sexual intercourse, the dangers of syphilis and gonorrhea were the most heavily-stressed concerns in the teaching and literature of the day. The conclusive emphasis of our health (read sex) education classes promoted abstinence until marriage.

Penicillin was never mentioned.

AIDS was unknown to humankind when I attended high school, so it was not the factor that it later became in provoking an avoidance mentality toward casual sex.

The mainstream of a generally conservative society simply frowned upon premarital sex in the era during which I attended high school. Thus, its occurrence among adolescents was limited to those of us who had no respect for the mores and traditions of our elders or who were, to describe them in the common vernacular of the day, sluts and hoodlums, or hoods, as we goody-goodies referred to them collectively, ignoring gender.

The odds against getting laid when I was in high school seemed astronomical, unless you were some sort of a rebel or a hood.

I was neither of those stereotypes before I got to college, where I was far-distant in both physical location and psychological mindset from the restrictive influences of my parents, teachers, former mentors and, above all, the powerful brainwashing of my formative years.

Part of our programming in health education class focused on surviving a nuclear attack, since the Cold War was at its peak during the years I spent in high school. I still remember the procedure we were taught to follow in the case of an atom-bomb blast.

A poster on the classroom wall constantly reminded us of the three steps that the authorities who concerned themselves with such matters advised us to take:

1. DO NOT LOOK AT THE FLASH—YOU CAN BE BLINDED

2. CLASP YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD

3. PLACE YOUR HEAD BETWEEN YOUR KNEES

The posters and our instructors as well, always omitted the final and most pertinent step in the procedure:

4. KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE

I could never have imagined that a nuclear explosion would simultaneously end my illusory existence on Earth and initiate the ultimate reality of my everlasting life. Just for the record, let me say that I failed to observe the recommended procedure, including the fourth step that wasn’t listed on the poster. I never had the chance to follow through on the advice of the health education instructors, nor did it matter very much to me that I didn’t when the blast occurred unexpectedly, instantly killing me and some thirty-five thousand others. I was already dead to this life on Earth by the time that a nuclear bomb detonation incinerated my flesh.

One day in our health education class, Vinnie DePaolo passed around a small picture of himself having sexual intercourse with some random girl. I didn’t recognize her. A friend of Vinnie’s had taken the picture from behind the scene. All that I could actually discern was a naked Vinnie on top of a female.

The photograph shocked the hell out of me.

I had never seen anything like that picture. It was my very first taste of pornography and it seemed ugly and dirty. If I’d ever had any respect for Vinnie, which I didn’t, since he had a reputation for engaging in less-than-respectable behavior as a matter of course, it would have flown out the window of that classroom the instant I glimpsed the picture.

In my opinion, Vinnie was a slimy hood. Viewing that photograph did nothing to change my point of view.

At the same time that I was feeling disgust over viewing the sordid picture, a certain subconscious lust sneakily overtook me. I was unable to control it.

Indeed, I felt a dark, wild, primitive and powerful desire to be in Vinnie’s place in the scene that was recorded on that photograph.

I thought about it from time to time after that glimpse, but I always shoved the lustful thoughts aside and went on with the life that I knew and to which I was accustomed.

However, in the uttermost depths of my subconsciousness, I became aware that something astonishing and yet, at the same time, pleasurable and exciting was in my future, patiently waiting for me to discover it, my contempt for Vinnie notwithstanding.

I still was not quite ready to deal with these new urges and compulsions. My anticipation was counteracted by my trepidation.

A classic approach/avoidance conflict began to develop within me. I no longer could simply avoid the dilemma by playing ostrich and hiding my head in the sand. This was real and it was impossible to ignore.

I had to start somewhere, but I didn’t know where to begin.

It wasn’t much help that there were no girls, or at least none in my world, who could inspire me to venture on a chanceful journey to the unexplored land of lust, desire and hot sex.

However, even if I was not yet doing anything more than just contemplating it, I was certainly giving it my somewhat reluctant attention. There was no doubt about that.

Sue Sanders sat in math class, her sexy legs crossed. From my vantage point, sitting just in front and off to the side of her, I could see up her skirt.

Sue had dark blonde hair, which fell over one eye sometimes, like Veronica Lake’s in one of those old movies. She was one of the cutest girls in my high school.

Her stockings and garters were visible, nearly four inches of bare, creamy thigh exposed above them. I was helpless in my efforts to suppress my sexual arousal at the sight.

In fact, I made it a point of dropping my pencil on the floor so often that she must have thought that I was spastic, either that or else she knew why I was dropping that pencil and secretly gloating over the power that her femininity held over the male gender. My suspicion, however, was that she was ignorant of the fact that I was a horny, lecherous teenager, although I refused to admit that to myself.

After thinking about how embarrassed I would be if Sue acknowledged her awareness that I was peeking at her stockings and garters, I came to the conclusion that she just didn’t know or care about what I did in the classroom. She had her own private agenda to think about and was utterly unmindful of my behavior.

She never mentioned anything to me about it or indicated in any way that she knew I was furtively sneaking peeks up her skirt.

I had absolutely no confidence whatsoever in my approach to girls. Although I longed to get my hands on those sexy legs that Sue Sanders would cross one way and then the other, I was unable to imagine any viable approach to accomplishing my goal that wouldn’t cost me my dignity.

I just stared at the incredible sight before me and fantasized about giving Sue a long, passionate kiss while I stroked those stocking-tops and garters with my right hand, my left hand on one of her perky breasts.

At that point, I was ready and willing to get it on. How I would go about getting to the point of breaking the ice with that first French kiss, though, was still a complete mystery to me.

I wasn’t in love with Sue Sanders. She wasn’t the girl of my dreams, not by a long shot. She was very pretty, but she wasn’t The One. With her plaid, school-girl skirt and shameless display of legs, Sue simply made me horny, but nothing any deeper than that.

I wondered if she showed off those nylon-clad thighs with the deliberate intent of teasing the boys or if she was merely sitting comfortably, innocent of the effect her posture exerted on the males in the classroom.

Tanya Jareau used to do the same thing in the cafeteria. I’d be sitting at a table during lunch period, eating a tuna fish sandwich, while pretty Tanya sat directly across from me, her sexy legs crossed, stocking-tops, garters and bare thighs above them caressed only by an occasional breeze drifting through the lunchroom.

I knew that she was Zach Miller’s girlfriend. I often found myself speculating about whether Zach got to feel up those legs of hers at the end of one of their dates.

I was becoming obsessed with kissing, legs, breasts and pretty girls in general.

However, I couldn’t find the one girl who inspired me enough to actually live the dream, my perfect girl, with whom I could share that wonderful, innocent and exciting first love.

As I discovered in time, that ideal would prove to be nothing more substantive than a passing phenomenon, jaded by experience and doomed to the tarnish of repetition and familiarity.

I ran into Ricky Roberts on the way to class. He asked me if I wanted to go to the city with him on Saturday.

What’ll we do?

The second the words left my lips, I knew that it was a dumb thing to say.

Explore, Ricky answered matter-of-factly, as though I had asked a stupid question, which, of course, I had. He was kind enough to ignore my ignorant response, handling my boorish behavior with an ease born of quiet confidence in his social prowess.

Sounds good, I quickly countered, trying to sound suave and debonair, hoping to salvage at least a part of my budding social reputation. Ricky had let me off the hook I had set for myself.

My stupidity chagrined me. I was hopeful that I had regained some of the ground I had lost with my moronic question by coming back with a cool, confident-sounding response.

I’ll drive, pick you up around eleven, he offered.

See you then.

I breathed an inward sigh of relief. It seemed to me that I had managed to recover quite nicely from my social gaffe.

Ricky Roberts didn’t need me anywhere near as much as I needed him.

He was a really cool guy, with looks a lot like Steve McQueen, his blond hair cut short and combed forward in the style of those sculptured busts of Roman emperors. He dressed in preppy clothes and was never at a loss for words.

I was out of my league and I knew it. I was just hoping to pick up some style pointers from him.

I didn’t know him very well, but that was the way my senior year was going. I was meeting people whom I never knew existed at NPHS: new, exciting people, like Ricky Roberts.

Asking him what we would do in the city was insulting, as if he had to talk me into going with him by tempting me with some irresistible agenda. The truth was that just hanging out with him was a good enough reason to go along for the ride.

In addition to the invitation from Ricky to hang out with him, I began to notice that girls seemed to be checking me out, which was another first for me.

Some of the cuter coeds would look directly at me in class. Sometimes, when I returned their glances, they smiled and maintained eye contact, giving me the impression that they wanted me to approach them.

The best way that I can describe it is to say that they seemed to be overly friendly to me, for no apparent reason, or at least, no reason that I was able to discern.

They certainly weren’t after my money, since I didn’t have any, other than a few bucks with which to buy my lunch.

Unlike some of the other guys who drove a car to school, I walked the three blocks from my home to NPHS.

If I wanted to drive anywhere, I had to borrow my mom’s cheesy Plymouth Valiant, since dad’s big Chrysler was strictly off-limits for me. He guarded that thing like the crown jewels.

As far as I knew, I had nothing of value to offer a girl that would motivate her to intentionally seek my friendship, lacking an overt invitation from me. Being too shy and insecure to initiate contact with a girl, my invitations to interact with girls were few and far-between. In fact, my overtures toward girls were non-existent. I hung strictly with the guys.

Nonetheless, girls were definitely giving me the come-on. Dumb as I was about the opposite sex, it was obvious even to me.

I was interested in learning why girls were suddenly noticing me, since that had never happened before. If it had, I failed to notice it, anyway. Trying to act casual, I offhandedly asked a girl who was just a friend from one of my classes, Do you think I’m good-looking?

Why do you ask? she replied, her brown eyes widening with surprised anticipation.

Our relationship was purely platonic. We sat next to one another in class. That was it.

I think girls are looking at me, but I don’t know why they’re doing that. I was slightly embarrassed by the conversation.

Still, I needed an objective opinion from a female, so I toughed out my feelings of awkwardness and waited for her to give me an honest appraisal.

It never occurred to me that she might think that I was flirting with her, appearing to be much smoother and more sophisticated in my approach than I actually was. I truly was that naïve about women.

She smiled invitingly at me as she suddenly turned in her seat to face me. Tilting her head as though giving me a critical, objective visual appraisal, she coyly answered, "Well, from a certain angle you are very handsome."

Her reaction took me by surprise, although I had no physical attraction to her. Nonetheless, I was pleased at the thought that at least one member of the opposite sex considered me to be attractive enough to say so.

An entirely new world was starting to open up for me. I embraced it with a growing interest in the possibilities of a social life, which, up until my senior year, had consisted of hanging out with the guys, my socially inept circle of friends with whom I played sports at our old elementary schoolyard. They were as awkward with girls as I was.

Ricky Roberts was a stud. There were rumors he had gotten laid more than once.

Now, I wanted to be a part of the good life that Ricky Roberts appeared to lead.

Ricky picked me up as planned and we headed for New York City. After riding the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, we stood at a window with a view of the limitless panorama, extending out as far as the eye could see. Taller buildings towered above squat, smaller buildings, like chess pieces on a checkered board, the lines separating them occupied by automobiles moving along as though they were vividly colored beetles in procession, scurrying about on their unfathomable business. The perspective from the height at which we stood changed the nature of reality into a fantasy world of Lilliputian dimensions, a miniature realm molded by the whimsy of our imaginations.

My glimpse of the sidewalk immediately below, however, initiated an episode of vertigo. I became dizzy and disoriented. As if I weren’t feeling sufficiently nauseous as it was, the trip back down in the swiftly-moving elevator left my stomach several floors behind. Truthfully, I was happy to be back on good old terra firma by the time we stepped off the elevator and walked back into the lobby.

I have always been fearful of heights, a victim of acrophobia.

After a short while, the queasiness subsided. I was back to my usual ebullient self, joking with Ricky about starting a vending business selling barf bags at the Empire State Building. You can never find them when you really need them, I wise-cracked.

Like ashtrays, Ricky easily segued into my facetious observation as he lit a smoke, That’s why I wear cuffed pants.

Ricky was good company. I was becoming more at ease with him as I began to realize that I didn’t need to deliver clever, movie-scripted lines to keep up with his conversation. We discussed mutual acquaintances, sports, teachers and classes that we were taking, just the ordinary conversation du jour.

Ricky struck me as a genuine, regular guy. He was affable, agreeable and good-natured in general, although some of his manners and habits, such as smoking, were far beyond my level of social sophistication.

When we ate lunch in a tony restaurant near the Empire State Building, Ricky ordered a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk. I followed suit, not really knowing what to order in a restaurant.

I ate most of my meals at home, prepared by the Haitian caretaker whom my parents employed to perform the household duties for which they had no time. A restaurant meal was an unusual adventure for me, so it struck me as being a unique, remarkable experience, glamorous in its novelty. I had been unaware that people regularly did things like take a trip to the city and eat in a restaurant.

I was now relaxed, beginning to thoroughly enjoy our small adventure, as I munched my sandwich and exchanged a few amusing stories with Ricky. I was having fun with a really cool guy and fitting right in, I thought to myself.

It had worried me that Ricky would order something exotic for lunch and wash it down with a beer or two, leaving me in the dust of nerdy-ness, but he was as normal and down-to-earth as my playground buddies when it came to eating and drinking, as I was discovering.

We walked around the city, checked out some shops and department stores, looked at the huge ocean liners docked on the Hudson River and then began the drive back home to the suburbs of North Point.

Halfway there, Ricky asked me in an off-handed manner, Do you know Alice Marshall?

I shook my head and then verbally reiterated my response, No, just in case he hadn’t seen me. Ricky’s attention was on his driving, his eyes focused on the road ahead.

She goes all the way.

He uttered the statement dryly, objectively, still watching the traffic as we passed another car.

He might just as well have been commenting on the weather. He made it sound as though it was no big deal, business as usual, just another day at the office, or in this case, just another night between the sheets with a female.

His tone of voice and facial expression were completely devoid of any emotion as he provided me with this information, delivering his comment in the same manner that one would recite a factual answer to a question in the classroom.

I was silent in my shock, ignorant of how I should respond. I hadn’t expected him to throw a bomb this late in the game. He had caught me asleep at the line of scrimmage, expecting the usual three yards and a cloud of dust. Now, with Ricky’s long toss spiraling through the air on its way downfield, I was toast, so to speak, in keeping with my football analogy. He had me.

My take, up until the time Ricky made that statement about Alice going all the way, was that Ricky was an ordinary, average guy, just like me and my other friends, living in sexual ignorance and dreaming of the day that we would be adults and engage in socially-acceptable, morally-sanctioned erotic activity.

His unforeseen revelation stunned me. I had heard that Ricky Roberts had gotten laid, but previously, I had always dismissed the notion out of hand as being nothing more than some rumor lacking substance, having absolutely no truth to it.

At least, that was what I had thought up until the time that this conversation took place.

I was quiet for too long. I knew that I had to say something. The silence was growing uncomfortable.

Finally, I managed to stammer out, How do you know that?

The discussion was already on shaky ground for me. I would soon be a fish-out-of-water if Ricky continued in the current direction of this discourse.

With a knowing, jaded smile, Ricky confided, I did her. She’s pretty good, too. She kicks her legs in the air while you’re boffin’ her. You oughta get in on the action.

I was completely dumbfounded at Ricky’s description of Alice kicking her legs in the air while he boffed her. That really blew it for me. What could I say? The only reason I was able to discern his meaning when he referred to sexual intercourse as boffing was that the connotation was unmistakable, based on the tenor of the conversation. I had never heard sexual intercourse called boffing. I was now in some deep doo-doo. I realized that I was over my head, for sure.

There was no way that I could admit to Ricky that I’d never even French kissed a girl, much less lie about getting her to kick her legs in the air while I boffed her. I would then be exposing myself as the naïve, clueless idiot that I was, in reality.

Hoping to end the verbal exchange, I tried dropping back and punting, attempting to get out from under the shadow of my own goalpost, sticking with the football motif in my own mind. I hastily mumbled something to the effect of, I’ll have to check her out, although I didn’t really mean it when I said it.

Despite my professed interest in hustling Alice, which I had used as nothing more than a ploy to get Ricky to change the subject, I was actually reviled by the thought of meeting Alice Marshall, whoever she was, much less boffing her while she kicked her legs in the air, like some sleazy prostitute in a cheap motel.

Obviously, she was a dirty, disgusting female for even thinking of behaving in such a manner, much less acting out that kind of debauchery.

I will freely admit that Ricky’s disclosure had surprised the crap out of me. I couldn’t imagine human beings engaging in that sort of dissolute, immoral behavior, as though they were a bunch of degenerate, drunken Romans at a pagan orgy, burning in their lust with no thought of what was right, clean and decent in the world.

I couldn’t believe that Ricky had openly admitted to engaging in sexual intercourse with some girl and then proceeded to describe the event to me, and in such shameless, obscene detail, yet!

I formerly didn’t have even an inkling that any of my classmates engaged in such unimaginably depraved behavior, despite having seen the disgusting picture that Vinnie DePaolo had brazenly displayed in health education class. I had presumed that all the rumors about Ricky Roberts getting laid were nothing more than the side effects of idle banter, you know, the way guys talk to build up their ego in an attempt to garner respect and admiration from their peers.

I could accept the idea of a disgusting hoodlum like Vinnie having sex with some sleazy girl, but Ricky Roberts was the scion of a respectable, upper-middle class family, as was I. He should have known better than to behave like a slime doggy, I reflected to myself.

That was the first time and the last time that Ricky Roberts invited me to hang out with him.

He must have been psychic, because when he signed my yearbook after our graduation, he wrote, Get laid.

I was at the playground after school, playing touch football with my buddies.

Kenny Matthews was covering me on a long pass play.

The ball flew over our heads and landed on the ground beyond us. I got to it first. Picking it up, I flipped it to Kenny. As we jogged together back to the line of scrimmage, Kenny asked me, Do you know Alayna Parker?

No, should I?

She’s really nigh-auss! Kenny exclaimed with enthusiasm, his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.

He meant that she was good-looking.

Art Goldstein’s grandfather was from the old country. His pronunciation of English was heavily accented by his eastern-European Jewish heritage. When once he commented to Art, Kenny Mahtch-ose seems like a very nigh-auss boy, we all adopted new nicknames.

In fact, that one sentence uttered by Grandpa Goldstein gave birth to our own unique, comradely argot.

Nigh-auss, Grandpapa Goldstein’s pronunciation of the word nice, meant good-looking when we were describing a girl. In keeping with that style of speech, Art became Ott-awe. Sam Orbacher became Bah-caw. Ralph Forbes was Faw-buss and of course, none of us ever again addressed Kenny by any name other than Mahtch-ose.

I was occasionally addressed as Dav-itt but mostly I was called by my surname, as was our custom prior to Grandpa Goldstein’s unintentional but effective invention of a new language for us to use for the purposes of our own esoteric entertainment.

My birthname, David Appleton, didn’t much lend itself to bending to Grandpa Goldstein’s peculiar argot, but then, I always stood apart from others in some unusual, inexplicable way that I still don’t quite understand. I guess it was just how God made me. I can’t think of why else.

Mahtch-ose was cool and easy-going. Among the fellows in our group, only he seemed to be in his element in the company of girls. He never bragged about his sexual exploits, if indeed he had anything to brag about, refusing to answer any questions about his relations with the opposite sex. He left it to our imagination.

However, some of the other guys felt the need to assert their manliness by relating fanciful tales of their legendary albeit, in truth, non-existent sexual exploits.

Every Saturday night there was a school-sponsored dance held at a recreation center called Center Point. The students at NPHS invariably attended the dance in large numbers.

Saturday night at Center Point was a happenin’ gig.

On one of those Saturday nights, our clique of playground buddies decided that we would all attend the dance at Center Point as a group. Peter Pie-taw Gillis managed to hook up with a girl who was average-looking and that’s giving her the benefit of the doubt. Match-ose certainly wouldn’t have accorded her the accolade of being nigh-auss. However, she was about Pie-taw’s speed. Relatively short in stature and not exactly an Adonis, Pie-taw took what he could get. With his receding hairline and facial features already displaying the preliminary signs of advancing age, he appeared to be approaching his thirties when he was only seventeen, poor guy.

We observed him sitting on a couch at the dance with his new girlfriend. They were holding hands, we noticed, but no one mentioned anything about it to Pie-Taw that evening.

The following week, during a short break in our playground basketball game, we were discussing the dance, comparing notes on the classmates we saw, the girls we liked and exploring similar topics of a social nature. Pie-taw was grinning broadly as he unexpectedly issued the bold announcement, I got the action! He was literally oozing self-satisfied smugness, as though this revelation made him suddenly superior and more worldly-wise than the rest of us.

We were helpless in our laughter. Among us, only Pie-taw remained serious.

In spite of our affection for our pal, we had to let him know that we had seen him holding hands with his girl that night. Since we had all left together, Pie-taw having been in plain view the entire time that we were at the dance, we knew that holding hands was the full extent of the action that he had gotten.

Pie-taw, to his credit, reacted with chagrin, seemingly shamed by our calling him out on his bold misrepresentation of the facts.

I’m sure that he would have stuck to his guns and become more descriptive of the action he got that night if we had bought into his bluster and given him the chance to embellish his story, but we all knew damn well that Pie-taw had never in his life gotten any more action than anyone else in our group. He wouldn’t have been convincing even if he had attempted to devise an account of his sexual activities that evening. Like the rest of us, with the possible exception of Match-ose, Pie-Taw had no clue of what it was like to actually engage in sex.

Heck, the only sex that any of us had ever experienced personally was what we saw on TV or in the movies and in 1965, there wasn’t very much of that sort of thing to see.

I suppose that I should qualify that statement by explaining that there wasn’t much blatant sex in anything that our parents allowed us to see, anyway.

Perhaps Vinnie DePaolo’s parents imposed less stringent controls on what Vinnie got to watch on TV or at the movies. It’s quite possible that they were too busy with their own lives to bother with imposing any sort of controls whatsoever on Vinnie. I never asked him about that, since we never conversed. We rarely even exchanged greetings with one another, other than an occasional nod of the head.

In fact, I would never have given even so much as a passing thought to the notion of discussing a matter so personal as sex and morals with Vinnie. He was from a different world than the world from which I came. Our worlds collided but they never met. You don’t choose the people with whom you attend high school. Everyone just shows up, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

The truth of the matter is that the members of my small universe of chosen friends were all nigh-auss boys. No way you’d catch us with a pornographic magazine or in a porn theater, not when we were seventeen years old, living in the upper-middle-class suburbs of North Point.

As a result of his attempt to impress us with his imaginary sexual exploits, Pie-taw managed to earn himself another nickname, Pete The Action Man, or as we occasionally referred to him in jest after that incident, PTAM.

I still derive considerable amusement from recalling that classic and humorous episode in the days of our adolescence.

Reflecting back, I now realize that the magic and innocence of youth is a phenomenon that occurs for only a short period, relatively speaking, in the course of a person’s lifetime. Unfortunately, it requires the distance and perspective of many years of experience to fully appreciate and cherish the wonder and enthusiasm of those early, carefree days. As they say, youth is wasted on the young.

Mahtch-ose, Ott-awe, Pie-taw and the rest of the old gang, myself included, continued to get together during the summers, when we were home from college, for a game of touch football or basketball at the old playground that served as our clubhouse when we were in high school, but I never saw any of those guys again after I graduated from college.

It’s kind of sad, in a way, remembering all the good times we had, the laughs we shared, the girls we discussed and prognosticated about and the brotherly camaraderie that existed among us during the halcyon time of our high school years.

Back then, the world seemed to us to be full of promise and hope, in spite of the strife, war, disease, hunger, cruelty and general misery that were a part of daily reality only in some remote, unimaginable realm, a place that lay far beyond our cozy little corner of existence.

We were oblivious to the dark side of life, our only awareness of it imposed upon us through the remote, illusory influence of television and radio news reports, newspaper stories and history books. The fact of its reality seemed so distant and inconceivable to us that we never really paid any attention to the perpetration of evil that occurred everywhere in the world except where we lived and played.

Life held a bright and fulfilling future with limitless possibilities for us. We eagerly looked forward to realizing the potential of becoming involved in a successful career, the inviting prospects of close friends and enjoyable leisure activities … and the promise of the perfect girl with whom we would spend our entire lifetime being in true love.

I played the trombone in the high school marching band as well as the orchestra. It was by chance that I played the trombone, not by choice. One would think that I should have played the piano.

My mother was an illustrious concert pianist. She performed classical music in Carnegie Hall and other prestigious venues across the country and occasionally in Europe, as well. Educated at the renowned Julliard School of Music in New York City, she later taught the famous performer Van Cliburn when he was a student there.

Mom was away from home much of the time, playing concerts. My father wasn’t home very often, either, although he worked in New York City and could have come home every night after work, if he chose to do that.

However, he was not a particularly domestic type of parent, preferring the clink of martini glasses and the tinkle of female laughter to the clunk of children breaking toys and the tinkle of juvenile urine hitting the water in the toilet and sometimes missing by a wide margin.

Hence, our parents hired a caretaker to cook our meals, make our beds, clean up the messes we made and look out for us when they weren’t home, which was most of the time until I reached the age of ten.

Our caretaker’s name was Carrie. She had come to America from Haiti, seeking an escape from the horrors of Papa Doc and his notoriously evil and brutal Tonton Macoutes.

Carrie had been my grandmother’s caretaker for years until Mim, as she was affectionately known to us, passed away. At that point, Carrie moved into our house to work for my parents.

Carrie died during my senior year in high school.

That was a sad and tragic day for both my brother Jeff and me. We loved Carrie, having depended upon her in loco parentis for nearly eight years. Although my brother and I were a handful, Carrie had demonstrated the patience of a saint as well as the love of Sister Teresa with us as we grew from children into young men.

Carrie Carson had no love life, no social life and no children of her own.

In fact, she had no life whatsoever outside of taking care of Jeff and me and being a servant for our parents.

Carrie was all alone, all by herself, in a white man’s world, with no one to depend upon except my parents, who provided her with employment and a home in which to live.

She worshipped Jesus without reservation, waiting upon His return with all of her heart and soul. I know this because she told me so, all of those many years ago, when I was too young to understand God’s Love for us all, the great and the small, but especially for the meek and the humble.

I had no idea of what her life must have been like, attending to us white folks, going to sleep every night in her small room in our converted attic, one of three bedrooms upstairs that she occupied along with Jeff in his room and me in mine, and having nothing to look forward to other than the day that her beloved Lord Jesus returned to bring her to Heaven to make her an angel in His glorious Kingdom.

I didn’t realize at the time how blessed a soul she was and is to The Lord. I found it out near the end of my life, because Jesus revealed it to me.

Now, I understand and embrace the smallness of her humble existence and her dearness to The Only One who gives anyone of us a reason to have any glimmer of hope whatsoever. As Jim Morrison of the musical group The Doors once said, Nobody gets out alive.

During the time in which Carrie was living with us in humble servitude, I didn’t give much thought to those matters. I lived in my own little world, oblivious to everything other than my family, my friends and my personal activities, just like everybody else did, or at least, those whom I knew.

I was clueless in my youth, a silly savage. The only mitigating excuse for my ignorance and self-centeredness was that most of the people with whom I associated were the same way that I was. I simply didn’t know any better. I was never taught otherwise.

I lived in a world that was rigidly structured and, for the most part, blind to the concepts of social awareness, unmindful of the moral correctness of race, class, age and gender equality.

Moreover, the world that I inhabited was seemingly oblivious to the love of our Creator for each and every one of us, the love that His only begotten Son Jesus had shown to us by dying on the cross in our place to absolve us of our sin and save us, regardless of our ethnicity, age or sex, from our consequent sentence of eternal destruction and torment that was imposed upon us by The Righteous, Almighty God in Heaven because of our sinfulness.

Everybody I knew was pretty much out for themselves and theirs and screw everyone else, so I learned to be like them when I was growing up.

All of the caretakers whom my parents hired to care for us were of African descent, or colored as they were referred to in those days. It was taken for granted, implied in the relationship, that the servants must be inferior to their employers. That view was shared by my parents’ relatives, friends and neighbors.

Growing up, we never questioned the validity or morality of that customarily-ingrained mentality.

In spite of growing up with that mindless orientation toward people of disadvantaged means, deprived education and non-existent social status, I developed a certain kinship with and understanding of African-Americans from having had such close, meaningful and personal contact with people of color during my childhood, such as our beloved family caretaker, Carrie Carson.

My roommate in my college fraternity was also an African-American. He was one of the most humorous, perceptive and congenial people I have ever known. He, too, disappeared from my life after college graduation, as have so many of the names and faces with which I shared some episode in our time on this planet, but not before he enlightened me to the fact that yellow, red, black or white, all are equal in God’s sight.

My mother’s influence on me was minimal while I was growing up into manhood. She was too involved in her career to get involved in my affairs. Although she was an enormously accomplished concert pianist, she explained to me that she felt as though she would be forcing me to learn to play the piano if she gave me lessons and that she didn’t want to force me into doing anything. She professed that she wanted me to make my own choices in life, because she believed that the time would come when I would hate doing anything that she compelled me to do.

The fact that it would have been impossible for her to teach me to play the piano when she was hardly ever at home was never mentioned.

Thus, my parents asked me to make my own choice of a musical instrument to learn how to play, insisting that I take up a musical discipline.

For some reason, which to this day I still cannot explain, I chose the trombone. After achieving a modest degree of proficiency at playing the instrument, I joined the school orchestra.

Most of the time, I sat first-chair as it is described in the argot of the music world, meaning that I was ostensibly the best trombone player in our high school orchestra, or at least, the best in the opinion of the only person whose assessment really counted. That was the orchestra director.

Nonetheless, I constantly battled it out with three other excellent trombonists for the highly coveted distinction of sitting first-chair.

Every two weeks, any of the other trombonists could challenge the current first-chair for the position to determine who would sit first-chair for the next orchestral performance.

Occasionally, I lost a challenge.

First chair was not by any means a static, guaranteed post. We fiercely competed with one another for the honor.

Al Marini, the orchestra director, was at his podium in front of the orchestra in the rehearsal classroom. When Mike Timms walked in holding his trombone, he gave Mr. Marini the thumbs-up sign.

Most of the members of the orchestra called him Mr. Marini, all of the time. There wasn’t any student at North Point High School who failed to address him as Mr. Marini when face-to-face with him.

Al Marini was a large man. He had a thick mane of black, wavy hair and dark, distinctively Italian facial features. He could be tough when he needed to be. Nobody messed around with Al Marini, for good reason.

Mr. Marini was a good man, a kind man, but he could intimidate an antagonist with just a fleeting glance. His dark eyes would brim with fire and implied menace when he was deliberately provoked. He wasn’t somebody you wanted to go out of your way to piss-off.

Cool guys like Mike Timms called him Big Al or just Al behind his back, when there were only a few of the guys hanging around, waiting for him to appear in front of the orchestra to begin rehearsal.

Mike was two years ahead of me in school. It was rumored that he could run the one hundred yard dash in about eleven seconds, which is exceptionally swift.

In addition, it impressed me that his younger sister Sue, who was my age, had a reputation for being one of the cuter girls at NPHS.

I dated her a few times. Mike never uttered a word to me when I came over to pick her up for a date, despite the fact that we sat right next to one another in the trombone section.

I never figured out if he ignored me because he was my senior in years or because he didn’t like the idea of me dating his sister. I was too intimidated by him to ask him about it, so I would just nod to him when I arrived to pick up Sue and then get her out of the Timms’ house as quickly as I could.

Mike Timms came across to me as being experienced in matters that involved sexual activity. He called a trombone the bone and then laughed knowingly right after making the remark. He even called us the bone section during rehearsals. He threw the comment directly at