Adios, Scheherazade

The parade, gang. It’s Thanksgiving, let’s count our blessings. Well, it’s raining, how’s that for a blessing? Raining all over the parade. And I really don’t think I’m going to make nine hundred dollars out of Dwayne and Liz, I don’t think I can write that book again.

It’s funny, but every once in a while when I’m making love to Betsy I smell Christmas trees, but seeing a Christmas tree doesn’t necessarily make me horny for Betsy.

I know why I smell Christmas trees, of course. It’s that truck of her brothers’, Birge and Johnny. Have I mentioned how Birge and Johnny make their living? They drive Christmas trees to New York.

Do I hear you say that this seems unlikely, that there’s maybe six weeks a year when there will be a call for Christmas trees to be driven to New York, and that Teamsters’ Union or no Teamsters’ Union a truck driver cannot possibly earn a year’s living in six weeks of driving Christmas trees to New York, is that what I hear you saying, partner? Then let me tell you the surprise. Inside every truck load of Christmas trees there are other things. Radios. Luggage. Television sets. Typewriters. All sorts of things like that, on their way to New York City for the Christmas season.

Stolen.

I don’t mean that Birge and Johnny steal things, because they don’t. But other people steal things, and when they do they take them to Birge and Johnny, who have a barn north of Monequois on the old Montreal road, not far from their father’s Esso station, which by the way is doing rotten business since the new Montreal highway was put in and old man Blake would love to sell the station if you’re interested. He lives at 216 Clinton Street, Monequois, New York. I don’t know the zip code. His first name is Chester.

Anyway, all year long that barn of Birge and Johnny’s fills up with stolen goods, and at Christmastime the stolen goods are packed in the truck with the Christmas trees, load after load, and all driven down to New York, and sold to some people there.

When I first heard about this I said, “Is nothing sacred?” and laughed and laughed, because I thought that was funny. Christmas being sacred, you see, but the Christmas tree actually being pagan and not part of the religious aspect, so when I said, “Is nothing sacred?” I meant it as a joke, and I myself thought the joke was very funny. Betsy didn’t. First she didn’t get it, and then when I explained it to her she didn’t think it was funny. Neither do I, looking back at it. I see the humor of what I was trying for, but I don’t think I made it.

How I got to this, I was remarking how sex with Betsy sometimes makes me smell Christmas trees, and that’s because that truck of Birge and Johnny’s, since it rarely carries anything but Christmas trees, smells like Christmas trees all year long. So the first time we had sex, in the back of her brothers’ truck on a warm May night in 1963, was with the smell of Christmas trees all around us.

Betsy was very cold-blooded in setting that up, now I come to think of it. Up to and including whispering to me, as we stretched out on the blanket in the back of the truck, “It’s okay. It’s safe.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What’s safe?” I said.

“It’s a safe time of the month,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh,” I said, and felt a chill finger of belated apprehension run up my back. Pregnant. I hadn’t even thought about it.

I think that was when I decided I loved her. Not because I finally got into her, though that was a lot of fun at the time too, but because she’d remembered about getting pregnant, which I thought meant she was being considerate of me. I know, I know, but that’s what I thought. Also, I took her word for it. I took her word for it that night, and on every occasion after that for thirteen months, and then one night in June of 1964 I took her word for it once too often, and along about March 21st, 1965, along came Fred. Elfreda.

I don’t mean we played Vatican roulette all the time. Times she said it wasn’t safe I wore a rubber, but I always hated to wear one and she didn’t like it much either, so whenever she thought it was safe I’d go at her naked. Boom, Elfreda.

Anyway, after that night in the truck I couldn’t get enough of Betsy, and for a while she couldn’t get enough of me either. We were at each other every chance we got, and as the spring got warmer and warmer the chances got more and more frequent. I finally did sneak her into my room in the dorm, in the middle of the day, and on two memorable occasions she snuck me into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Also I didn’t go home to Albany for summer vacation, I got a cheap furnished room in town and a job at the makeup factory that was Monequois’s only attempt at local industry, and I spent all summer rutting atop my Betsy.