THE SIXTH PAGE

High school was hardly different from the ninth grade, but the girls were different. They looked better, more like movie stars. Tits. But they didn’t want to play with us boys anymore. They wanted sex, but they didn’t want it with us because we stank, they said. College guys probably used deodorant and they got what they wanted.

The high school girls and the college guys paid for what they got with drunken and fatal car crashes and the occasional, inexplicable pregnancy.

They had their world and I had mine with Allison MacKenzie, who yearned to throw off the yoke of small-town puritanical life and be liberated by big city life; Selena Cross of the “lips that looked like swollen Concord grapes,” the shy creep like me, Norman Page; and Rodney Harrington, who was stolen from Allison by Betty Anderson, who learned her sexy walk by watching movies. They were my playmates, even if they did live far away in PEYTON PLACE.

The young citizens of PEYTON PLACE lived in what seemed to be an alternate universe of New England, far away from the Midwest or West or Southwest or whatever geographical tag given my native Oklahoma.

Allison MacKenzie beat me to New York, but eventually went home to Peyton Place. I couldn’t be at home until I got to New York.