I made a promise to myself as I watched this un-welcome wagon creep off into the dark adult reaches beyond the square. A parade of invective - contempt - streaked through my mind like life flashing before death: These people were plastic! They were ticky-tacky! Uptight! Straight arrows! Honkies! They represented everything I loathed and feared about what my future might bring. My world of the Forever Young had been breached - violated - by this family and its goddamn station wagon. I said nothing to them - how would I have explained it? - and we made our way inside Carl’s.īut I knew exactly where the rage came from. I must have registered it somehow my friends shot me glances. In an instant the gas-lit lamps of Gaslight Square glowed a hellish red as the future slouched in behind that station wagon. I’m pretty sure there was a dog, and I’m pretty sure the dog’s name was Spot. The gaslights illuminated the faces inside.
It was crawling eastward in the honking traffic.
#Stl post dispatch schizophrenia mod
I was inspecting a young dolly-bird in a short mod dress and go-go boots when, for some reason, I shifted my gaze to the street and spotted the station wagon. We were standing out in front of a hot pastrami mecca called Jack Carl’s 2 Cents Plain. And here I was on the square with a bunch of college buddies.
A year out of Mizzou, I had landed a cool gig: sportswriter for the St. I was feeling kind of hip and groovy myself on that spring night in 1964. The nighttime sidewalks on both sides of Olive were thronged with girls in bee-hive bouffants and guys in Vietnam-ready crew cuts: the hip, the groovy, the young, the Forever Young. The square was in the middle of its dozen-year existence - a vapor-lit Milky Way of Dixieland joints, piano bars, and jazz and blues venues that spilled eastward down Olive Street from Boyle until it trickled into darkness. Yet I can still turn my eyes from whatever I am looking at and call it up with lapidary precision. I remember the moment that I promised myself I would never father a child.
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