Chapter 2

A year after I had been cut on the morning that basketball tryouts were starting for a new season, I packed my gym bag as if I might try out again.  The odds were stacked against a junior who hadn’t been on the JV team as a sophomore to make either the varsity or junior varsity. I knew it, and everybody knew it, including my father, but five years earlier my brother David had pulled it off. My father framed my decision-making process this way: “I’d show up and make them cut you again.”  Easy for him to say.

After I had been cut the year before, my father called the JV coach to tell him what a big mistake and injustice it was that he had cut me.  My father was mad, and the call lasted at least 30 minutes. I hadn’t discouraged my father from making the call, but he should have known better. It was obviously a mistake. We didn’t think the coach was going to change his mind and put me on the team. The call was just venting for the both of us, and it was an act of love by my father. 

To make matters worse, during the first game of the season for the JVs, my father took a seat in the bleachers in the first row directly behind the coach. My father wanted the coach to know he was being observed with a critical eye.

That morning, when I packed my gym bag I think I knew in my heart that I wasn’t going to tryouts. My father’s phone call was a factor, but more than anything else, I didn’t like my chances and thought it was futile to try.  A few weeks later, my father accepted the transfer to Virginia. If I had tried out, beaten the odds, and made the team, he wouldn’t have. We would have stayed in Vestal.

********

A few weeks before we moved, my parents and I took a trip to Fairfax, Virginia to see the house, the neighborhood where we would live, and Herndon High School. The school was 12 miles from our house. That alone was foreboding and strange to me. 12 miles away? Were my parents sure that Herndon was the right school for me to enroll in?  My father assured me that it was. When we made a reconnaissance drive from our house in Fairfax to the school, dusk was setting in on a cool gray late-winter day. It was depressing. The reality of the move finally struck me. This was no good. Months later, my father told me that he had had similar feelings and lamented to himself, what have I got my son into.

We got back from Virginia late on a Friday afternoon. While I was unpacking from the trip, Barb Youngblood and Cindy Chantler dropped by. They were friends from school, and both were tall, blonde, outgoing, and funny—and most importantly, they thought I was hilarious. Cindy was kind of hot, and Barb was cute enough. To my surprise, they considered me socially connected and wanted to know what was “happening” that Friday night. It was flattering. My parents were impressed that these two attractive girls had dropped by. My mother assumed that they wanted to date me. Barb did. As I was peaking socially, we were moving 300 miles away.

On a Friday, March 7, 1973—the movers, paid in full courtesy of IBM, loaded our furniture and belongings into a large bright yellow with green lettering Mayflower moving van. That night, I went to a huge Vestal High School party at somebody’s house, and I suspect about 90 percent of the revelers didn’t know.  Will Cheng spoke to me and showed me several joints he’d rolled up for the party. He was offering to share with me.  I’d heard he and Burwasser had gotten into pot, and I didn’t approve, but I recognized it as a peace offering, which meant a lot to me. 

Under normal circumstances, I would have enjoyed the party. It was a great party, but I was just going through the motions. I was leaving for Virginia in the morning, and I felt painfully lonely among the dozens of revelers including my closest friends.  As I was leaving for the party, I sought out Bob Burwasser to say goodbye. I interrupted the ping pong game he was playing, offered my hand, and let him know I was leaving in the morning.  We had been best friends from the fifth grade until our falling out. He shook my hand warmly, and I could tell the moment made him sad.  A year or so later, he told me after I left he bent over the ping pong table with his head in his hands.

I spent the night after the party at Ed Welch’s house. I got up and left early in the morning. Ed expressed his farewell wistfully, addressing me by the nickname he used for me: “God damn Faultless.” God damn indeed. As I was pulling away from Ed’s house, “Peaceful” by Helen Reddy was playing on the radio. Until that moment, the song had held absolutely no significance to me. I didn’t know what the lyrics meant, and I didn’t care, but the clarinet and Reddy’s voice in the beginning are mournful, which seemed an appropriate accompaniment to my leaving Vestal.

Herndon High School

The night before my first day at Herndon High School, we were staying at a motel in Fairfax. That night, we watched UCLA beat Providence for the College Basketball National Championship. It was their eighth straight championship. Bill Walton had a record-breaking game. I wasn’t nervous about the next day. I figured I’d meet some girls.

Herndon had something like 2,800 students, but Vestal’s student body was about the same size. I was used to a big school. I didn’t anticipate how overwhelmed I was going to feel that day. My new guidance counselor gave me my class schedule, and then I was on my own. The school building was a large, two-story rectangular grid, and I found my classes easily enough. But I didn’t know anybody, and nobody cared that I didn’t know anybody. The feeling of isolation and loneliness set in immediately. I thought about what I’d be doing if I was in Vestal High School that morning.

Maureen Malone

There was one welcoming moment that first day.  When my Algebra II/Trigonometry teacher introduced me to the class, a strikingly attractive girl, very tanned, buxom, with light-brown hair, called out in an alluring southern accent, “Put him next to me.” I was embarrassed and assumed she was patronizing me. But there was an empty desk next to hers, so that’s where I sat. Her name was Maureen Malone. She wasn’t patronizing, just nice and outgoing, and, as I was soon to learn had a high profile at Herndon High School.   I was disappointed when a guy—obviously her boyfriend—was waiting to meet her after class. Still, during those first weeks, she was the closest thing I had to a friend at Herndon. Too bad she had a boyfriend. Too bad I only saw her 45 minutes a day Monday through Friday. 

Lunch

That first day during my lunch period at Herndon, I walked into the cafeteria and looked to see where to get in line to buy lunch. A simple task. It should have been, anyway. But it wasn’t readily apparent to me exactly what to do and I couldn’t see myself eating alone among the hundreds of students in that large cafeteria.  I spent my lunch period in the library. For the next ten weeks until school was out for the summer, I spent all my lunch periods in the library reading or doing homework. My mother made lunch for me when I got home at the end of the day. I was grateful for the indulgence.

Gym Class

I never liked gym class at Vestal. I loved sports, but I didn’t like sweating and showering in the middle of the school day. But in Herndon, gym class was as close as I got to having fun. The first few weeks in Herndon, my gym class was in a basketball unit.  My teammates in the pickup games didn’t know me or talk to me, but they passed me the ball because I could shoot and dribble, which put me head and shoulders above about 75 percent of the class. I had status during the basketball unit in gym class.

After the basketball unit, we had a softball unit. Not exactly my game, but I was competent. Randy Jessup, the star point guard of Herndon’s varsity basketball team, was in my gym class. Basketball season had been over a week or so before I started at Herndon, but I knew the team had had good, year making a deep run in the state playoffs. Randy was short, about 5’ 7”, with curly red hair that he wore in a perm. He was quick as a cat, athletic, and confident. It wasn’t hard for me to see how he could have been the star of the basketball team, and I could tell that he would be good at just about any sport. Turns out he was also a nice guy, which I found pleasantly surprising for a short red-haired cocky star basketball player.

One day during the softball unit, Randy was one of the captains choosing up sides and he picked me. During the game, one of my at-bats came with a couple of runners on base. As I stood in the batter’s box waiting for the first pitch, Randy called out, “Come on, Billy!” My presence was being acknowledged. I was surprised he knew my name. It was like I was one of the guys. Suddenly, I was extremely focused. On the first pitch, I hit a shot to left field well past the left fielder, clearly a homerun as soon as I hit it. I don’t think I ever hit another ball as hard or as far in my life. When I finished circling the bases and went back to the bench, I cried. I didn’t let anybody see me, but I cried.

Gym class continued to be an eventful part of my first couple of months at Herndon High School. After softball, we had a golf unit. For the first week, we had beginners group lessons. I had been playing golf since I was 12 and had been taught by my father who was a single-digit handicapper and I’d had lessons from a golf pro. So that first week was an opportunity to show off my firm grasp of the fundamentals to the beginners, who were a majority of the class.

At the end of the golf unit, we had a field trip to a golf course where we played 9 holes. The course we played was Reston South Golf Club, about four miles from the high school. It was an excellent course, (now known as Reston National) one of the top-rated public golf courses in the country. Most of the class rode the bus to the course, but if you had driven to school that day, which I had, you were allowed to drive.

The foursome I played with included Joe Camarda. Technically, Joe and I know each other. I say technically since I hadn’t seen Joe since I was five years old. Our fathers had worked together at IBM In Bethesda, Maryland for a few years in the early sixties. Our parents had socialized together so Joe and I had been thrown together several times at very young ages. My older brother Clayton had babysat Joe and his younger brother Danny. Eventually, our fathers went separate ways within IBM. My father transferred to Houston and then to Owego, New York. Joe’s dad was transferred to Endicott, New York, and then to Manassas, Virginia.

Joe and I hit it off during the 9-hole round. We had fun laughing at the other two players in our foursome. It was the most fun I’d had in Virginia. After golf, the class had lunch in the golf course clubhouse. Our foursome sat together. I invited them to ride back to school with me instead of taking the bus. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer for them to enthusiastically accept my invitation and I especially wanted Joe to ride with me so we could continue bonding our new friendship. Joe didn’t accept, and the other two followed his lead. I was surprised and saddened that Joe had declined my offer. I was really bummed out.

As for our new friendship, Joe didn’t even acknowledge me when we passed in the hallways at school for the rest of that school year and the next.

*******

Between March and the end of the school year, I had no social life. I spent every night, including the weekends at home, with my parents watching television and again imagining what I would be doing those nights in Vestal. One evening I got irritated with my mother and snapped at her, and she rebuked me. My father said something to the effect of, “give him a break, it has to be hard spending this much time at home with parents at 17 years old.”

One afternoon when I got home from school, I drove the family car from our house in Fairfax to Arlington Cemetery to visit the Kennedy graves. That was a big afternoon for me in those days.

Sometime during the last few weeks of that school year, Maureen Malone broke up with her boyfriend.  I thought I should ask her out. Maybe we could date during the summer. One evening after school I dropped by Big Daddy’s, the fast-food restaurant in Reston where she worked. I was nervous about the possibility that she would be there, and it would be obvious I had come by for the express purpose of seeing her.  I stood outside the restaurant for several minutes before I worked up the courage to go in. I was almost relieved when she wasn’t there.  You see, I had never really dated in Vestal. I had never called a girl on the phone and asked her out. My brief flings were the result of a girl making the first move at a party or group gathering. One time, a girl walked up to where I was sitting and plunked herself down in my lap.  You think that would have given me confidence, but it didn’t. I didn’t go by the restaurant again where Maureen worked, and I couldn’t work up the gumption to ask her out at school or call her up.  What was wrong with me?

*****

At the beginning of that summer between my junior and senior years, I was in Vestal hanging out after my ill-fated attempt at re-enrolling in Vestal High School.  Ed Welch, my brother David, and I drove from Vestal to Austin, where David and my oldest brother Clayton lived. Ed had never been to Texas, and he got a kick out of the people he saw wearing cowboy hats and boots. We stayed at David’s apartment and basked in our independence from our parents and the 20-something lifestyle we lived for a couple of weeks. Ed and I crashed a freshman orientation session at the Kinsolving dormitory lobby on the UT campus. We enjoyed pretending to be incoming freshmen and an advisor asked us if we’d completed our schedules for the fall semester. “We said No, not yet.”

One afternoon around 5, I donned one of David’s blazers and a pair of his slacks and equipped with his UT student ID I went into a convenience store, Ed waited in the car, and bought a six-pack of beer. I flashed David’s ID to prove I was 21.  It worked, and when I returned to the car with the beer, Ed and I couldn’t stop laughing.

A constant during our trip to Texas was Watergate. The senate Watergate hearings were always on television when we were hanging out at David’s apartment during the day. They were compelling some of the time but at times boring. One afternoon, Ed and I dozed off while the hearings droned on. The news breaks on the Top 40 radio stations we listened to while driving around Austin were dominated by hot takes from the hearings. Ed and I thought Nixon was guilty of everything and anything that was being alleged against him. Who didn’t, right?

My parents flew into Austin for a visit the second week we were there, and Ed and I rode back to Virginia from Austin with them. From Virginia, Ed and I drove my father’s 1970 Firebird back to Vestal, where I hung out for a week or so staying at Ed’s house.

By the end of the week in Vestal, I’d been away from home for nearly four weeks.  I had no social life and nothing in Virginia to look forward to. But after weeks on the road, I was homesick and ready to go home. As I drove east on the Vestal Parkway towards I-81 South and Virginia, I had a sense of purpose to bring an end to my fantasy life of still living in Vestal and get on with my life with my parents in Virginia and Herndon High School in September.

Well I’m New York City-born and raised
But nowadays
I’m lost between two shores
L.A.’s fine, but it ain’t home
New York’s home
But it ain’t mine no more
                                                           -Neil Diamond

Dart Drug

I got my first steady job at Dart Drug in Fairfax that summer of ‘73. Dart was a large discount store that was the size of an early Walmart and carried similar merchandise. In addition to the pharmacy, Dart carried everything from grocery nonperishables, beer and wine, kitchenware, hardware, and even automotive supplies such as motor oil, car batteries, and fan belts. I was a stock boy and occasionally a cashier, and they paid me $1.80 per hour. I worked 35 hours a week. The highlight of my career at Dart was getting a raise after six months to $1.95 per hour and being put in charge of the beer and wine section.

I used my earnings to buy a lightly used 1973 Chevy Vega. At the time Vega was considered kind of a cool car. It was Motor Trends 1971 “car of the year.”  I had car payments of $59 per month, and during the 10 months I worked at Dart, I usually made two payments per month. By the time I quit the following May, I had nearly paid off the 24- month note on the car.

Senior Year

About a week before my senior year in high school began, I met Vickie Vaughan at Dart, where she worked in the clothing department that Dart leased to a discount clothing wholesaler. Vickie was about 5’2” with blonde hair and a twinkle in her blue eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was cute and confident. We met when Vickie asked me to help her break down the boxes she had unpacked while stocking shelves. For the stockers, breaking down your empty boxes was a strict job requirement, and you received a stern rebuke from supervisors if you were caught putting boxes in the dumpster without breaking them down. Vickie asked me for help in a flirtatious way that was like asking me to help her unzip her dress, and I was instantly attracted to her.  In the words of Flounder from “Animal House,” I thought to myself, “This is great!”

Like me, Vickie was going to be a senior at Herndon. During an early conversation, I let Vickie know I owned my own car and would be driving to school every day, not riding the bus. She responded to this information by informing me that of course, I would be driving her to school with me. Again, I thought to myself, “This is great!”

Vickie conveniently lived only a couple of blocks away. When I picked her up each morning, it was usually two or three minutes after I pulled up in front of her house before she walked out the front door with a small carton of orange juice and got in my car. She dressed well most mornings, pretty much like she was going on a date, which to me was exactly what it was. She smelled good from her shampoo and the perfume she wore.  This was intoxicating to me, a senior in high school with no formal dating experience.

Just like that, my senior year at Herndon High School was off to a promising start. I was no longer thinking about what I would be doing if I was still in Vestal.