Torchy
Author’s Note
Some people have what is known as a photographic (or eidetic) memory, and I happen to have a pronounced ability to recall the spoken word. I remember, virtually verbatim, every significant conversation I’ve taken part in since the age of seven or eight.
by Michael Baughman
In 1955 a football scholarship took me all the way from Honolulu to Boston University. Some of my teammates became friends and invited me to their homes for weekends. There were my Italian roommate from Providence, a Hungarian boy from Pittsburgh, and an Irishman from Ipswich, all of their parents emigrants from the old countries.
My Pittsburgh visit included a Saturday night excursion across the state line to the whorehouses in Steubenville, Ohio, where a “straight” or a “French” cost three dollars and a “half-and-half” raised the price to five. The teammate friend I was with told me he’d been visiting Steubenville two or three times per month for as long as he’d had his driver’s license.
What happened to me in Steubenville reminded me of a scene from The Catcher in the Rye. Sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield had a room in a mid-town Manhattan hotel and when an elevator operator asked if he was “innerested in a little tail,” Holden told him yes. The prostitute who came to his room didn’t look much older than he was, and because of her innocent appearance he turned her down.
The young prostitute I chose in Steubenville – she looked about my age – called herself Torchy. She was short, slender and beautiful. The long red hair that she wore in a pony tail probably explained the name. She struck me as strangely shy and what seemed sincerely friendly. When I followed her into her room she turned around and looked at me and looked away and looked back. “You’re a handsome boy,” she said with a bashful smile. She looked away again.
“You’re pretty,” I said. “You’re beautiful. I hope you don’t mind it if I say so.”
“I don’t mind. Why would I?”
“I guess I don’t know. I mean I guess I don’t know why you’d mind. I’m sorry. I feel stupid.”
“Some people who come here aren’t nice. Hardly anybody is. You seem nice though.”
“I’m glad you think so. Listen. Please. I mean this might be stupid too but I want to ask you something.”
“Okay. What?”
“Could I see you again sometime? Someplace instead of here?”
“Like where for instance? Why?”
“I’ll be here tomorrow before I head back to where I came from. Boston. Maybe we could talk, just get to know each other a little. I don’t know where though, that’d be up to you. Maybe we could go someplace in town for lunch or something. Or dinner even. I like you. I don’t even know why but I do.”
“Okay. I like you too. Not many people who come here are nice. You’re nice though. I can tell that. I knew that right away.”
“I could tell you were nice as soon as I saw you too. That’s why I…”
I couldn’t come up with the right words.
“Chose me,” she said with another small smile. “I’m sure glad you did.” She looked away again.
“Could we meet someplace to talk sometime tomorrow then?”
“I’m thinking about it.” She smiled and looked me in the eye.
We did what I’d come there for. When I was done she kissed me on the cheek. I knew that prostitutes were known for never kissing men. “That was nice,” she said. “I liked that. I never told anybody that before. Anybody in this place I mean.”
“Thank you, Torchy. I mean for telling me that.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mike.”
“You’re welcome, Mike.”
“I think this is the second time I ever fell in love.”
“Don’t say that. Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Then I think you’re crazy, Mike.”
“Maybe.”
“Not really. There’s this little coffee shop in the middle of town called Andrew’s. They sell coffee in bags and pastries too but they have a few tables too. Nobody there knows who I am. At least not yet they don’t. They sell pastries to eat there with coffee I mean. I’ll meet you there at ten in the morning if you really want to.”
“I do want to.”
“Okay then. I want to too.”
When I walked into Andrew’s at ten minutes before ten Torchy was already there with a white coffee mug in front of her at a corner table at the back of the room. She was wearing blue jeans and a black wool sweater. She’d undone her pony tail.
The only other customers were an old couple sitting near the front window, also with white coffee mugs. As I walked past them they both smiled and said good morning and I smiled and said it back. Torchy smiled at me and waved and looked away and looked back. The middle-aged woman wearing a white apron behind the glass counter to my right smiled at me too. Everybody was smiling.
I took the chair across the table from Torchy. I still don’t understand why but I was much more nervous than I’d ever been before with a girl.
“Both of us got here early,” I said.
“Maybe I know why,” Torchy answered. “I mean, maybe we wanted to be sure we didn’t get here late. Did you live in Pittsburgh?”
“I’m visiting a friend there.”
“The boy you were with last night?”
“Yes. He drove home last night. He was using his dad’s car. We found this place before he started home. I stayed in the motel right down the road.”
“You did all that for me?”
“I did.”
“So you really do like me.”
“I do.”
“I’m really glad. But I don’t guess I understand.”
Still smiling, or smiling again, the lady from behind the counter came up to our table. “Hello, kids,” she said. “Good morning, what’ll you have?”
I nodded at Torchy.
“Coffee with cream and sugar please. And a piece of cheesecake.”
“Same for me,” I said. I didn’t really want the cream and sugar but I didn’t want to say so.
“Be right back,” the lady said.
“I live in Boston,” I said. “I mean I’m in college there. My friend I was with last night lives in Pittsburgh. The last place I really lived must be about five thousand miles from Ohio.”
For the first time since we’d met Torchy laughed. “That’s impossible!” she said.
“It’s true.”
“There isn’t any place five thousand miles from here. Nowhere near it.”
“Yes there is. Hawaii. It might even be more than five thousand. I’m pretty sure it’s at least that.”
“Hawaii?”
I nodded my head and she laughed again. “This is crazy,” she said. “What’s it like there?”
“It’s okay. We had a nice grass shack right on the beach.”
“No you didn’t. No way. You’re full of it.”
“Full of what?”
“It, that’s what, you know.”
Our coffee in white mugs and cheesecake on white plates arrived. “Here you are,” the lady from behind the counter said. “You two sure are a cute young couple.” She put the mugs and plates in front of us.
“Thank you,” Torchy and I said in unison, and we looked at each other and laughed.
With her biggest smile yet the lady turned around and walked back behind the counter.
“This is the first time I ever had cheesecake,” I said.
“Really? How come you ordered it then?”
“I figured if you ordered it it must be good.”
“How come you came all the way from Hawaii to Boston?”
“To be on the football team at Boston University.”
“I never talked to anybody from Hawaii. I never even met anybody from there before. Tell me what Hawaii’s like.”
As we ate cheesecake – I liked it – and drank coffee – it was better than I’d thought it would be with cream and sugar – I told Torchy what had to be more than she wanted to know: about Hawaii’s perfect climate, a little bit of the history I knew, the fact that the Territory might become a state before long, that the islands were more than two thousand miles from the mainland, some details I’d learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I told her the James Jones novel From Here to Eternity was mostly about what Hawaii had been like before the war, and I realized that the reason the novel came to mind was because the protagonist, Prewitt, fell in love with a prostitute in a downtown Honolulu whorehouse. I didn’t tell Torchy anything about that. While I was talking two more elderly couples came in to join the couple up front. When I finally shut up Torchy proved she was smarter than I was.
“I read From Here to Eternity too,” she said, “and then I saw the movie. Maggio was my favorite character. I liked Prewitt too but Maggio more. I liked the sergeant too.”
“Warden.”
“Right, Warden. The women characters weren’t as believable to me. I was thinking I’d ask you what you thought of Lorene, Prewitt’s girl, Alma was her real name, but then I knew you didn’t want to talk about that. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
She tilted her head to the side when she smiled. “I do like you, Mike,” she said. “I like you so much.”
“I love you.”
“How could you?”
“I don’t know. But I know I do. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”
Torchy reached across the table and put her small warm hand over mine. She wasn’t wearing any nail polish. When I saw that I realized she wasn’t wearing any makeup either. She didn’t need it. “I have an idea,” she said. “Want to hear it?”
“Yeah I do.”
“My car’s right outside here, my green Ford. We could drive someplace and park, like couples used to do in high school. Did they park and make out in Hawaii?”
“Sure. There’s a volcano crater near Waikiki Beach. That’s the most popular beach in Hawaii. Diamond Head. That’s the crater I mean. There was a big area to park near Diamond Head with a view out over the ocean. When we parked there at night we joked about how we wanted to watch the submarine races.”
When Torchy laughed hard and squeezed my hand I experienced an odd new joy I’d never felt before. I noticed that the three old couples were looking at us and smiling.
“Here’s what I wish for,” Torchy said. “We’ll drive out to a place I know, it’s out of town with a nice view. I go hiking there sometimes. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and see some airplane races. And we can talk and make out, neck, whatever you want to call it. Maybe you think I’m crazy not to want to do anything more than that. You’re the nicest boy I’ve met in a long time is why. What I’m trying to say is, this is about friendliness. Being friends.”
I understood and was glad.
“Affection,” I said.
“Yes!”
“You’re the nicest girl I’ve ever met.”
“Okay then, let’s go.”
I paid the woman behind the counter and told her to keep the change. “Thank you two for coming in,” she said. “You sure are a sweet looking couple.”
As we passed by the old couples up front they waved at us and smiled and we smiled and waved back. When I opened the door for Torchy a bell I hadn’t noticed coming in jangled over our heads. I spotted Torchy’s two-door green Ford halfway down the block. Traffic was light on the street and we held hands walking down the sidewalk. She was wearing leather sandals on her bare feet. “I have a private secret name for my car,” she said. “I call it the Green Hornet.”
The Green Hornet was a popular 1950s radio show featuring a crime-fighting masked hero. I opened Torchy’s Green Hornet’s driver’s side door for her. She drove us a little ways out of town and turned off a two-lane paved road onto a dirt road that climbed a small hill. “I bet there’s nobody here on a Sunday morning,” she said.
She was right. She parked between two tall trees on a hillside with a view of another forested hill across a narrow valley. “We’ll be innocent kids again today,” she said. She seemed self-assured when she told me what we would do. “We can kiss, make out, whatever you called it in Hawaii. We can touch each other but we can’t go all the way. When you’re getting too excited just say Stop. I will too. Then we can talk a while and cool off before we start again. Okay with you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“One more thing.”
“What?”
“I love you, Mike. Because of how you make me feel this morning.”
“I love you. Should I call you Torchy?”
“Hell yes! I got that nickname in high school.”
She slid across the seat, kissed my mouth and put her arms around me. I held her tight. For more than an hour – maybe two hours – we did what she said we should do. We both said Stop many times and to calm down we told jokes and talked about many things but never ourselves.
Torchy drove us back to town and dropped me off at the Greyhound station.
“I can’t get out of the car, Mike.”
“Why not?”
“There could be people here who know me.”
“Will we ever see each other again?”
“No.”
She pulled away with another true smile on her face and she didn’t look back.
by Michael Baughman
© Michael Baughman. All rights reserved.
Oregon writer Michael Baughman, who was born in Buffalo, New York and raised in Pennsylvania and Hawaii, is the author of nine books, including the recently-released An Old Man Remembering Birds (OSU Press). Baughman previously taught literature and writing at Southern Oregon State University in Ashland for 30 years.
Editor’s Note:
I was a student in Michael Baughman’s Creative Writing classes at Southern Oregon State University back in 1984, and he proved instrumental in guiding me to San Francisco, where I enrolled at SF State and eventually launched my own career in journalism. 40 years later, the student is now publishing the teacher’s work as the writing process reaches a new level of maturity. In many respects, our personal journeys have merged in a full circle.
Electric Review 