Growing Up In Denver In The Sixties
The Rise and Fall of the Nasty Club
Circa 1966, there were about a hundred kids who lived on the city block where I grew up, in the Cheesman Neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. All the houses on the street were versions of the Denver Square, an architectural style unique, apparently, to Denver–kind of a Colorado-shaped floor plan. Oddly enough, the front door of the house in which I lived was positioned on the north side of the house not facing the street, but facing the neighbor’s voluminous and impenetrable privet hedge. As a kid I thought: maybe my house was supposed to be turned 90 degrees clockwise and the long way, like a line drawn between Burlington and Fruita was supposed to face the street, but because there wasn’t enough room on the lot, they just positioned it so that the short way, like a line drawn between Virginia Dale and Trinidad, faced the street, leaving the front door on the side.
1966, apogee of the baby boom, one hundred screaming kids between the ages of fifteen and five, caught between ‘duck-and-cover drills’ and Woodstock. (which has nothing to do with a Clothier) We romped. We roared. We hullabalooed and scallywagged too. We strummed tennis racquets like guitars and thought we were the Beatles, “Love, love me do, you know I’ll be true”
Color TV was new. No cell phones. No video/computer gaming. No chat rooms. No friending and unfriending on FB. What were we to do?
The Nasty Club had inauspicious beginnings, just some kids sitting around talking, laughing, scheming, dreaming and generally wondering what there was to do. As enrollment and participation surged, we felt we needed to organize and formalize our existence as a society of like-minded “divisibles”, write up a mission statement, elect officers, hold meetings, form committees–“Just like the Country Club,” said one kid; “No, like the Roteree Club’” said another; and little Willy Conners piped in with, “Yeah, like the Salvation Army!” Willy Conners, though not a household name, is now a very successful writer living in Brooklyn.
Someone got a hold of a dog-eared copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. We did our best to follow the rules, but being kids, we weren’t really very big on rules, and hard as we tried few of us could keep from giggling when somebody felt compelled to make a movement. Little Willy Conners was a fastidious sort of kid who worried over every detail of the articles of incorporation. Whenever someone made a motion, Willy would petition TO POSTONE TO A TIME TOO FAR, and then he’d snicker and say “Whatever that means.”
The Nasty Club had seasonal sporting events just like the pro sports teams. Spring brought on the season of spin-the-bottle and strip poker. Summer was filled with Red Rover, Red Rover–lots of inappropriate groping and fondling went on–and Capture the Colorado Flag–in which a four by six inch Colorado flag that had been torn from its teeny wooden staff was placed surreptitiously in a pants pocket of a lucky young girl and everybody had to find the girl and figure out in which pocket she kept the flag. Need I say that we were all at an age when the girls still wanted to play with us boys. And they were game! The fall was given over to B Ball, in which a honey bee was caught (they were more plentiful back then) its wings pulled off and the bee was then placed inside a tennis ball which had a one inch diameter hole cut out of it. So each participant had to cup the ball in his or her hands, with a palm exposed to the hole and hold it like that to a count of eight (like in the rodeo) and pass the ball to the person immediately to their right. The duration of one count was somewhat subjective. (Bunch of kids walking around Denver with scars like stigmata) But the winter, the winter was reserved for SOCK-TAG! Now, Sock-Tag is just like its sounds, a cross between dodge-ball and ‘You’re It’, played with a pair of rolled up socks. But Sock-Tag isn’t what Sock-Tag was really about. The noisy game of Sock-Tag, where balls of socks bounced off kids heads and kids bounced off brick and plaster walls was just a cover for what really went on. How do you keep the grown-ups away? Get loud and blow smoke rings of kid energy out your ears, that’s how.
In the basement of the large four-story house where our Sock-Tag tilts took place, there was, of course, the tag arena, a huge room mostly empty and with all breakable objects either removed for their protection or already broken and discarded, although cushy couches lined the walls and served as bleachers and/or the penalty box which had to be big enough to accommodate up to eleven players at a time–if a team was given twelve penalties worthy of temporary ejection, the game was lost for that team because terrible things tended to happen to the lonely thirteenth player. Then another game was started, thirteen players on each side were selected and the mayhem began all over again. Now, as I mentioned, Sock-Tag wasn’t what Sock-Tag was really about. There was another room in this basement, which served as the Garment Storage area for the moderately wealthy parents of our friend and Nasty Club Member, Dewey Witherspoon, whose guests we all were. An averaged sized room, it held hundreds of dresses and suits and both men’s and women’s shoes and belts and ties and fur coats and mink stoles and fedoras and Sunday church hats for Mrs. Witherspoon and long silky gloves, canes, overcoats, galoshes, costume jewelry and the like.
The Human Resources position in the The Nasty Club was significant and sought-after, except if you held the job on the Super Bowl Sunday of Sock-Tag. So coveted was the position of Human Resources Director that the post was term-limited to one week, unless, of course, you held the job on the Super Bowl Sunday of Sock-Tag, in which case, as the new Commissioner of The Nasty Club, you would be forced to remain in the position until the following fall when the pre-season games began. The main task of the Human Resources Director was to select one boy and one girl to repair to the Garment Storage room.
What went on in the Garment Storage room was something of a mystery, even to those who had some tenure in the Club, unless you had already been selected as Prince and Princess for the week, in which case an easy-boy recliner was reserved for the two of you, like the royal box at Wimbledon, in which you would snuggle up to watch the games and await the possible summons to the Garment Room.
So it came to pass, that on a particularly cold and snowy Sunday in the winter of 1966, I was crowned Prince, and my Princess was an eleven-year-old girl who we called Bubbie. I think her given name was probably Barbara, but we all called her Bubbie, a nickname she enjoyed, until, in the coming years, the name acquired a slightly different pronunciation. As Bubbie and I walked out of the Sock-Tag arena and made our way down the hall, which at the time felt an awful lot like a stadium tunnel, to the Garment Storage Room, I was desperate to ask her, “Do you know what we’re supposed to do in there?” but decided that the question would make me appear in-expert at whatever it was. Of course, I wanted Bubbie to think me an expert.
We closed the door to the room, and, for some reason, took up positions in opposite corners, she by the women’s dresses, me by the men’s suits. As I snuck darting glances at Bubbie and then looked away trying to look unconcerned, she finally asked me, “Well, are ya just going to stand there?” She turned and walked along the rack of dresses, letting one hand trail along touching each article like a casual female shopper with loads of money and time, and began to unbutton her blouse. Aha! In two seconds flat I was totally naked except for my pair of droopy once-white socks. And then I seemed rooted to the spot, unable to move, paralyzed by anticipation and resignation to the forces currently overwhelming me. By now Bubbie had removed her blouse and cut-off jean shorts, and down to her panties now she selected a pair of old-fashioned panty-hose and began wiggling into them. She then picked out a dress, put it on, and with her back still turned to me said, “Zip me up?”
Still rooted to the spot like a quaking aspen, I discovered that there was one part of me that was not paralyzed. When I did not cross the room to zip Bubbie up, with an obvious and vocalized, but worldless complaint, she turned and looked at me. Her eyes widened. She blushed. And then she put one hand in front of her mouth. And then she giggled.
Sometime after my adventure in the garment room, we boys, slow as we were, began to realize, that for reasons beyond our comprehension, the girls stopped wanting to play with us. This sudden ejection from the happy confines of co-ed childhood is probably every young boy’s first taste of depression. With no girls in attendance, club meetings became intolerably boring and club activities went from nasty to downright perverse. Little Willie Conners tried to postpone this new social development to a time too far, to no avail.
The Nasty Club did make one attempt to hold onto relevancy. We boys developed a game with all the same rules as Sock-Tag, but the old winter sport was rescheduled for the dog days of summer and had morphed into something we called Shit-Ball-Tag, in which an old tennis ball was rubbed in fresh dog shit and hurled at fellow male members.
After making the mistake of telling this story to my psychiatrist, she calmly asked, “Ken, have you ever experienced frustration in dealing with women?”
And I replied, “Not that I’m aware of.”
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