During lunch today I got into a discussion about growing up in Central Texas in the sixties. When you really look at things from a realistic point of view it becomes enlightening, and a bit amusing. First off I was poor white trash, as opposed to rich white trash, which is a totally Texas phenomenon. Poor white trash takes a girl to the drive in movie in an old pickup. Rich white trash takes the girl in a new pickup. The mud, of course, is optional. It was much later that liners were added to the beds of the newer models to negate picking up anything in the pickup.
In The Last Picture Show, there were things that didn’t ring true about that period of time in Texas. First off, the girls did not look like that little blonde who bailed off in the pool with her boyfriend’s gift of a new watch. All the girls I went to school with looked like Olive Oyl. No girl was allowed to wear jeans in school, and that was good because none of them had any reason to wear them. They worked on keeping their front teeth white, but if you looked at them from the side you could see that everything behind the canines was a shade of yellow. When you took them to the drive in and reached your arm around their shoulders, and did the little sneaky snake thing, trying to reach down, that was pointless because until the government pumped up the milk with all those hormones there was nothing to reach for!
The other thing that was off in the movie was all the booze. We were poor! When the weekend came around, providing we had gas, which involved a collection ranging up to about two dollars, we’d swing around to the 7/11 and pick up a quart of Borden’s chocolate milk. That was a big deal, and if we had a Burger Chef Burger, Oh, my LIVING God! We wouldn’t have to eat again until Monday, which was fine because we all got free lunches at school. School lunches were pre-Michelle, so you could actually live off of them. When you serve a poor kid who’s been living off turnip greens a stalk of broccoli you just made a friend for life.
I didn’t have a pickup. I had a ’54 Chevy. The good thing about it was you could get four friends in the trunk when you went to the show. That meant for you, and the girl, it cost about seventy cents to get in. That’s right, one girl, five boys. Hey, we weren’t Muslims, she was safe. Also, if you were lucky she would be an Army brat and have five dollars or so in her purse, which would turn into buttered popcorn for everybody. The way you convinced her to give up the money was a gift, usually flowers, which meant a swing through the graveyard on the way to pick her up. They didn’t show that in the Last Picture Show either!
Then, of course, there was the fight. Five guys and one girl, you do the math. It was a winner take all situation, unless Santos showed up. For the uninformed, Santos was the seventh grader with a mustache. If he come over to the car he got the girl, and we got the shaft. I think the only movie I actually watched was The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. All the other times I was trying to get my hand down Lillian Sprinke’s blouse. I never made it.
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