It was the fall of 1981. I was teaching at the University of Oklahoma and enjoying it mightily. Those were very fine days for me, and I look back on them fondly. What I can remember of them. To be perfectly honest, a lot of those days were filled with so much cannabis smoke and booze-fumes that some of my recollections are today a little foggy. I shall, however, be as precise and accurate and as truthful as I possibly can in the telling.
I was single and some pounds lighter than I am today. The scary specter of rampant sexually transmitted disease had not yet become so universally threatening. The faculty at OU—those in the English Department, anyway—were a rowdy bunch many of whom favored Country & Western dancing in county-line bars, beer-drinking, softball and touch-football and handball playing, marathon running, golfing and enjoying ice-cold pitchers of beer at lunch with members of the rugby team. We were some of the greatest scholars ever to have gathered in one place . . . believe it.
We once rented a large touring bus complete with restrooms and a full bar to travel from Norman, Oklahoma, to Houston, Texas (a distance of some four hundred and fifty miles), for an important Language Arts Association meeting. I remember there was a high-stakes poker game on the ride south, and that one evening during the conference we chided the also rented bus driver into taking us to Gilley’s Dance Hall where we two-stepped around the huge dance floor to live music. Later, on the way back to the hotel someone passed a hat and an attractive woman from the University of Oklahoma Press went into a 7/11-type store in a bad part of suburban Houston and purchased several cases of beer. She reported that the foreign clerk was wide-eyed at the huge bus that had pulled up by the gas pumps and seemed confused when she paid for the beer with small bills.
Twelve of us, men and women, had managed to squeeze into the expensive (to us) convention-site hotel room designed for two. I remember that my good friend David Mair who went on to make a name for himself in Technical Writing and University Administration circles curled up on the carpeted floor of the air-conditioned room with only a hotel-issued bath towel covering him. I, on the other hand, was fortunate in that just as the dozen of us were agreeing on chaste sleeping arrangements the room telephone rang. We figured we’d been found out by management and were about to be asked to vacate immediately. Rather the caller asked for me. Seems the woman from the Press who’d purchased the beer knew of our predicament and allowed as how she had an extra bed in her Press-paid room and wondered if I might be more comfortable there. Without so much as a blush I left my eleven companions to the sound of boos and catcalls.
The hotel’s atrium, I recall, had a glass elevator that went all the way to the upper floors—fifteen or twenty stories. One night—actually, it was the wee hours of the morning—while the rest of our rowdy bunch was gathered in the lobby trying to decide where we could find some more trouble to get into, my friend and colleague Dr. Laurie Fink and I happened to enter the elevator together after visiting our respective rooms and descended to the lobby, all the while watching our party huddled below. We waved and made faces, but no one seemed to see us. When we joined the group I said, “Hey, didn’t you see Laurie and me mooning you people as we came down the elevator?” Of course, we hadn’t—that was just an example of my witty repartee. However, some time later, Laurie told me that her then-fiancé—another instructor at OU—had accused her of lying when she told him I had only been kidding.
“Bullshit!” She reported he said. “I saw you!”
And I think he had convinced himself, too. Anyway, I wasn’t invited to their wedding a year or two later.
I was single and some pounds lighter than I am today. The scary specter of rampant sexually transmitted disease had not yet become so universally threatening. The faculty at OU—those in the English Department, anyway—were a rowdy bunch many of whom favored Country & Western dancing in county-line bars, beer-drinking, softball and touch-football and handball playing, marathon running, golfing and enjoying ice-cold pitchers of beer at lunch with members of the rugby team. We were some of the greatest scholars ever to have gathered in one place . . . believe it.
We once rented a large touring bus complete with restrooms and a full bar to travel from Norman, Oklahoma, to Houston, Texas (a distance of some four hundred and fifty miles), for an important Language Arts Association meeting. I remember there was a high-stakes poker game on the ride south, and that one evening during the conference we chided the also rented bus driver into taking us to Gilley’s Dance Hall where we two-stepped around the huge dance floor to live music. Later, on the way back to the hotel someone passed a hat and an attractive woman from the University of Oklahoma Press went into a 7/11-type store in a bad part of suburban Houston and purchased several cases of beer. She reported that the foreign clerk was wide-eyed at the huge bus that had pulled up by the gas pumps and seemed confused when she paid for the beer with small bills.
Twelve of us, men and women, had managed to squeeze into the expensive (to us) convention-site hotel room designed for two. I remember that my good friend David Mair who went on to make a name for himself in Technical Writing and University Administration circles curled up on the carpeted floor of the air-conditioned room with only a hotel-issued bath towel covering him. I, on the other hand, was fortunate in that just as the dozen of us were agreeing on chaste sleeping arrangements the room telephone rang. We figured we’d been found out by management and were about to be asked to vacate immediately. Rather the caller asked for me. Seems the woman from the Press who’d purchased the beer knew of our predicament and allowed as how she had an extra bed in her Press-paid room and wondered if I might be more comfortable there. Without so much as a blush I left my eleven companions to the sound of boos and catcalls.
The hotel’s atrium, I recall, had a glass elevator that went all the way to the upper floors—fifteen or twenty stories. One night—actually, it was the wee hours of the morning—while the rest of our rowdy bunch was gathered in the lobby trying to decide where we could find some more trouble to get into, my friend and colleague Dr. Laurie Fink and I happened to enter the elevator together after visiting our respective rooms and descended to the lobby, all the while watching our party huddled below. We waved and made faces, but no one seemed to see us. When we joined the group I said, “Hey, didn’t you see Laurie and me mooning you people as we came down the elevator?” Of course, we hadn’t—that was just an example of my witty repartee. However, some time later, Laurie told me that her then-fiancé—another instructor at OU—had accused her of lying when she told him I had only been kidding.
“Bullshit!” She reported he said. “I saw you!”
And I think he had convinced himself, too. Anyway, I wasn’t invited to their wedding a year or two later.
