Wendy and Denise
And We have commanded people to ˹honour˺ their parents. Their mothers bore them through hardship upon hardship, and their weaning takes two years. So be grateful to Me and your parents. To Me is the final return.
– Surah Luqman 31:14
I heard gravel crunching from a car pulling up behind PawPaw’s truck; I reached up and twisted the carport doorknob open and lept out the door and through the narrow corridor between PawPaw’s truck and the piles of Yellow Pages and towards the passenger side of Wendy’s old yellow Datsun hatchback that was the color of last year’s Yellow Pages left out in the sun too long.
Denise stepped out and knelt down. Not that she needed to. Denise was only 5’1″, when she squatted down she was shorter than I was. But she was spherical, so without squatting down and holding her hands out I couldn’t hug her. I stepped into her open arms and she leaned her head forward so that her cheek pressed up against mine.
I squirted back out and showed her how I had learned to pull off my nose like she showed me last time; I reached up to my face with my right hand and yanked it off and held it up for her to see.
My nose was poking between my first and second fingers. It looked a lot like my thumb.
Denise gasped and said I amazed her.
Her voice was as sweet as a Cajun French beignet. She was Denise Leboux from Thibadeux. The Lebouxs moved to Baton Rouge from Thibadeax when Denise was around my age, but she kept her childhood accent. She had attended Glenoaks High School with Wendy, my dad, Linda, Craig, and practically every person I knew back then. She was the only one who pronounced my name Pa’tan, like the plumber named Patin on Saturday morning TV commercials who jumped into the scene when a woman who looked like MawMaw stood in her bathroom with water shooting out of the toliet and ankle deep water on the floor; that man named Patin smiled broadly said: “Shoulda called Pa’tan!
“Aren’t you going to say hello to Wendy?” Denise asked.
I looked up and Wendy’s standing by PawPaw on the driver’s side. I quickly crunch-crunch-crunched around the Datsun; Wendy squated down and was taller than Denise but not as tall as PawPaw when they hug me.
Wendy was Wendy Anne Pa’tan. She had strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that crinkled in the corners like crows feet when she smiled. Wendy was fit with athletic arms but a bosom bigger than Denise’s. In a few years, she would dress as Dolly Parton for Halloween by wearing country singer clothes and a shirt tied into a knot that exposed her belly and exaggerated her bosom, but only needing to do so slightly for the illusion to work. Most people pronounced our last name like Dolly Parton’s.
Our hug broke but Wendy stayed squatted and kept her hands on my shoulders and crinkled her eyes and told me how much I had grown.
I told her I had climbed into the saddle on my tree by myself that morning.
She said we’d go to the park and climb on the merry-go-round after we delivered the Yellow Pages.
I asked if we could get a Slushie.
Her eyes crinkled loudly and she said of course.
PawPaw crunched over and said we had better get busy, those Yellow Pages won’t load themselves.
We began loading the Datsun. Denise made sure I know the back right seat was mine – the one behind her seat – and suggested I arrange books on the floorboard while they loaded the hatchback. I focused on my job and they did theres. When we finished the Datsun sagged like an old mare carrying too many sacks of a farmer’s potatoes.
Wendy and Denise stood back to admire their work and smoke their red-filtered cigarettes. PawPaw smoked an unfiltered Camel that he had put the right side in his mouth that time. He learned quickly.
I played with weeds growing in the mushy ground along the gravel driveway. They finished their cigarettes and we squeeze into the car. PawPaw helped me get in the back seat; we had loaded so many that there was hardly any room for me and I sat on atop a pile of around ten books. I was so tall that my head poked above Denise’s headrest like the weeds poking their heads above MawMaw’s tire.
Denise got in the front and turned her head to see me looking down at her. She was surprised I had grown so quickly, so I explained that I was sitting on a stack of Yellow Pagers. Wendy got in the driver’s seat and the Datsun grumbled awake.
PawPaw told us goodbye. MawMaw didn’t come out (she never came out to see us leave). Wendy cranked the shift into first and we all lurched forward and the Datsun’s tires sent gravel sprinkling against the Ford truck with the rat-a-tat sound of a small caliber machine gun. PawPaw dodged the wave of gravel and chuckled and waved. I turtled my neck down so I could see him through the curved hatchback window and waved back.
We reached the end of the driveway and the Datsun slammed to a halt and my face slammed into Denise’s headrest. Wendy cursed something I didn’t understand and Denise told her it was fine and that driving a stick takes practice. The Datsun grumbled to life again and we whipped onto the blacktop and flew towards Plank Road with gravel from the tires plinking down Hooper behind us.
We stopped at the red light and I pointed to the saddle in my tree and Wendy says maybe we could stop there on the way back and I could show her. The light turned green and we lurched forward and turned right and a minute later passed the airport and went up the I-110 onramp towards Baton Rouge. I-110 is elevated over some swampy land and neighborhoods built before it that had become run down and littered with old refrigerators and more car parts than what was piled behind PawPaw’s barn, but out in the open.
I looked down at the faces looking up and imagine I’m flying in one of the airplanes we always see overhead. The windows were open and my hair blows and I stick out my hand palm-down and flat and rotate my wrist so my hand flys up and down like Superman.
A squeaky mouse must have lived under the Datsun’s dashboard. It wouldn’t stop squeaking, and Wendy felt around the dashboard with her right hand saying she couldn’t get it to stop. She turned off the radio and opened and shut the ashtray, but the mouse kept squeaking. She told Denise it was annoying and she slapped the dashboard with the palm of her hand. It squeaked again and she cursed and made a fist and slammed it onto the dashboard three times while she kept cursing.
“Whoa, Wendy, whoa…” Denise said.
She rested her chubby hand on Wendy’s slim forearm. Both of Wendy’s hands were clenching the stickshift and her knuckles were white.
“Calm down,” Denise said. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a little squeak.”
The mouse squeaked in agreement.
“Here,” Denise said. “I’ll roll us a joint.”
Denise rolled up her window and whipped out her Frisbee and flipped it dish-side up. She pulled out her little blue hand-sewn bag with tiny yellow flowers embroidered on it, unzipped it and withdrew a plastic sandwich bag rolled around a bit of herb.
She asked Wendy to roll up her window and she did, as if relieved to have something to do rather than clench the steering wheel.
Denise dumped the herb into the Frisbee and uses the rigid cardboard edge of rolling papers to push the herb up and allow seeds to roll down. Like one of the TV cowboys rolling a cigarette, Denise deftly rolled a thin joint and puts it between her fleshy lips. In the blink of an eye and with the dexterity of a magician vanishing a handkerchief she had refilled the baggie and tucked her blue bag away and put the Frisbee into her floorboard. She produced a Bic lighter and lit the joint and took a drag.
“Here,” she said through pursed lips and with a lung full of smoke.
Wendy took her right hand off the steering wheel and accepted the joint and took a deep drag. Denise rolled the window handle down a half turn and looked up and exhaled a stream of smoke towards the thin opening.
Wendy cracked her window and exhaled but kept her eyes on the road. She relaxed and handed the joint back to Denise.
“See?” Denise said. “Everything’s fine.”
Denise took another drag and they passed back and forth a few times and laughed about nothing in particular. The mouse squeaked and no one seemed to notice.
I was feeling pretty fine myself when Denise turned the radio back on. Instantly, she gasped and tapped Wendy’s arm and Wendy laughed and they turned up the radio.
Janis Joplin’s raspy voice sang:
Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Waitin’ for a train
When I’s feeling near as faded as my jeans…
It was her 1971 posthumous hit, Me and Bobby McGee, that every radio station in Baton Rouge seemed to play all day every day. If Baton Rouge had an anthem in the 1970’s, it was Me and Bobby McGee. And it was the fashion for girls Wendy and Denise’s age: they all looked like Janis Joplin to me, especially when they sang along with her songs on the radio or her vinyl album when I was with them and their friends.
Wendy and Denise sang:
Windshield wipers slappin’ time,
I was holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine
We sang every song that driver knew
They got to the part about her dirty red bandana and Denise pulled out a clean red bandana and handed it to me and held my hand in hers while she sang the blues. I was feeling fine and sang along the best I could. I didn’t know what to do with the bandana so I just kept it in my hand and laughed for no reason at all.
Soon after the joint was finished we pulled off Drusilla lane near the fancy seafood restaurant Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob took us to now and then. We turned towards their home in Sherwood Forest subdivision near the Sherwood Forest Country Club, but we didn’t go to their house. Instead, we parked by Westminster Elementary School, where Wendy had gone to kindergarten and I would, too, two months later. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew we had work to do.
Wendy kept the car running and Denise and I hopped out and began walking copies of the Yellow Pages to each doorstep. Denise began with the books on my seat and then the ones in my floorboard. Debbie would carry two and I would carry one, and every three houses Wendy would lurch forward and meet us at the curb and we’d take out three more books. About an hour or two later we’re finished and Wendy said it was time to celebrate with Slushies. She told Denise it’ll be her treat to thank Debbie for helping. Denise told me I helped, too, and I’d also get a Slushie.
We stopped at the 7-11 by the fancy seafood restaurant and I got a blue Slushie. 7-11 said it was blue rasberry; I don’t know about that – it didn’t taste like any rasberry I had ever eaten – but it was sweet and turned your tongue blue and was my favorite color Slushie. Wendy got a poop brown Coke Slushie, and Debbie got bright red cherry the color of MawMaw’s lipstick. We zoomed back onto I-10 and were soon flying above downtown towards I-110. Debbie and I kept sticking our tongues out at each other and laughing at the bright colors; she pulled a makeup mirror from her purse and let me see my blue tongue. Wendy focused on driving and sipping her boring brown Slushie. No one seemed to mind the mouse.
We took our Slushies and only had time for a sip or two before we reached the small neighborhood park tucked off Hooper Road that no one ever seemed to visit except us. Wendy came to a hault under the shade of a cluster of green pine trees towering over azelea bushes blooming with red flowers. She was driving better after a day of practice, though that may have just been the weed slowing her down. We rolled the windows all the way down to allow a breeze. The smell of springtime azeleas smell the flowers and sit in the shade and sip our Slushies peacefully.
Wendy hopped out of the car and plucked a red azelea and placed it in her strawberry blonde hair and smiled generously and posed like a happy ballerina in mid pirouette.
Wendy got back in and told Denise that azaleas like to grow in acidic soil under pine trees. She had learned that from PawPaw. Anyone who spent any time around PawPaw picked up things about plants and trees.
Denise wasn’t interested. She turned to me and made a serious face. She contorted her plum body so her shoulders were somewhat squared towards me, and with her right hand she held up her red bandana at shoulder level.
“Watch this, Jason,” she said.
I glued my gaze to the bandana.
She picked up the tail with her left fingers and spread her hands apart to make the bandana taut. She wiggled her wrists and the bandana flipped over itself a few times and became a thin line. She brought her hands together and faster and more deftly than she rolled a joint she tucked a bit of bandana here and pulled a bit from there and dropped the tail and spun the head around and tied a knot that made two big ears.
Denise’s bandana was now the mouse that had been hiding in the dashboard.
If you think that was impressive, you should have seen what happened next: the mouse jumped out of Debbie’s hands and ran up her arm with her hands wiggling and trying to catch it all the way up to her chubby cheek.
I couldn’t believe it!
Before I could ask how she did it, Denise caught the mouse and held him up by his ears and tail and yanked her hands apart. The dashboard mouse vanished and Denise was holding her hands apart with a twirled up red bandana again. She shook it and it became a crinkled version of the red bandana she began with that morning.
I asked how to do it.
Denise chuckled and said, “Well, Jason. That one’s hard. I’ll show you when we have more time.”
I must have looked disheartened.
“But,” she said to perk me up. “I’ll show you something just as good. When you learn this, it’ll make learning the mouse easier.”
She held up her right hand again.
I locked my gaze on her hand. I wouldn’t miss anything this time.
The back of her hand faced me; her fingers were spread wide apart; I could see the Datsun’s windshield through the gaps, but I stayed focused on her hand and the window was just a blur. She took a deep breath and stared at her first finger of her right hand; so did I. She covered that finger with her left hand, but with the tip poking through the first two fingers of her clenched fist.
Suddenly, she made a Pop! sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth and yanked her fist away away and took the finger with it!
I gasped!
My head bounced back and forth between the nub remaining where her finger used to be and the severed tip clenched in her fist.
She brought her hands back together and Pop! the finger was back on.
The mouse was forgotten. Decades later, I’d read that marijuana impairs short term memory; I don’t recall where I read that, but I can attest that in 1976 the miracle of the mouse was dropped from my mind and nothing but popping off your finger mattered to me at that moment.
I said: How’d you do that? You just pulled your finger off and put it back on! How’d you do that? I repeated, just like the Saint’s chant Who D’at! Who D’at!
I wanted to know how she did that, I said.
Denise
Denise taught me how to pop off my finger while Wendy hummed along to something on the radio. Conveniently, Denise was left-handed and I’m right-handed. Watching her demonstrate was like looking in a mirror and easier to learn, because my mind didn’t have to make sense of a reversed image. In no time at all I was removing my finger and holding it a foot away.
Denise said the pop! sound was important. She taught me how to do that, too. The trick is building up pressure with your tongue before making the popping sound. She turned to roll another joint while I practiced.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
I was beoming a master at popping off my finger. Denise and Wendy laughed and I sat there pop! pop! popping and laughing with them until a song came and Wendy gasped like I had and turned up the radio.
She told me it was our song. She said it was because it was Saturday and we were going to the park.
The song was Chicago’s 1971 Saturday in the Park. It’s lyrics go:
Saturday in the park
I think it was the Fourth of July
Saturday in the park
I think it was the Fourth of July
People dancing, people laughing
A man selling ice cream
Singing Italian songs…
I’m certain those were the two songs we sang that day. It was probable. A lot of my childhood memories of Wendy and Denise revolved around driving somewhere and listening to the radio in that Datsun, and local DJ’s knew what people wanted to hear. Saturdays in Baton Rouge meant they played Me and Bobby McGee and Saturday in the Park. I knew the lyrics to both before I learned the pledge of allegiance.
A song that would make Wendy’s cheerful hazel eyes leak tears and lead Denise to turn off the radio and roll another joint was Led Zepplin’s 1971 Going to California. I never learned the lyrics – probably because Denise always turned it off – but they go like this:
Spent my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine
Made up my mind to make a new start
Going to California with an achin’ in my heart
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
We didn’t play in the park that Saturday. Usually Wendy and Denise would spin me around in the the rusted creaky merry-go-round (most outdoor metals rust in muggy Baton Rouge after the paint flakes off) or swing from seats held to the tall metal poles by squeaky chains that sounded like they had lost of mice in them. But we ran out of time and Denise ran out of herb. I was so busy pop! pop! pop! ing that I wasn’t concerned. Besides, we were going to see Brian the one armed drug dealer, and I always had fun with him.
Wendy kept the flower in her hair and cranked on the Datsun and we eased onto Hooper Road towards Brian’s house.
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