“If You Don’t Go Dance with Judy, I’ll Kick Your Ass!”

So, do you remember David Arp, the guy in the “fight club” (Chapter 56) back in my high school days? He is essentially responsible for Judy and I being together today.

After Corey’s mom and I split, I ended up in a “heat related” relationship with a girl I had spotted one day as she entered the cafeteria at work. I was thirty-two and she was twenty, maybe! Right from the beginning it was an instant sexual attraction thing, and probably remained so right to the end.

Long story short, Linda and I married, both our second marriage with her first at age sixteen! It was an informal thing in her parent’s home, and a ceremony that Papa John refused to validate by standing in the same room. His Catholic beliefs frowned on the proceedings, and as it turned out I should have stood beside him.

Most women run men off for staying out late carousing with their male friends drinking, but there are occasions when men are forced to do the same. I never did figure out if she was bisexual or what, but she ran with a group that included a couple of “bull dykes”!

I did figure out too late that she was bulimic and addicted to cocaine. So, after just a few weeks together, she left and went back home, saying she was still in love with her first husband! Later she came back for a couple of months to try and reconcile, but after an “all-nighter” with “the girls” I told her to get out – it was over!

There is a whole book to this tale, but I will not include it here. This is only here to prepare the way for the love of my life – Judy Poland.

Judy is the girl I have written about several times, the one with the “Betty Davis” eyes, and the girl I was so infatuated with in high school.

She and I talked at school, out behind the “Carol Ann” burger stand, and we even “buddied” around as part of a group of “friends” that went to dances, or just rode the streets and circling the drive-ins!

Judy was attached to Freeman Moody, whom she married after graduating, and who became Tracy’s father. Since Freeman was a couple of years older and “graduated” he was bigger than life to me and I never dared to ask Judy out on a real date. However, secretly I wanted her to be mine, but that did not happen for seventeen years!

A couple of months after Linda left, but before ink was applied to the divorce papers, Judy and I began talking at night on the phone. We had met again at work.

I began working on an instructional communications video at the Y-12 TV production facility, which was in the same building as the photography department where Judy worked. We struck up an old acquaintance, and I learned that Freeman had died over ten years earlier from a form of cancer.

She and I began to talk on the phone at work and at home at night. Sometimes those conversations went long into the night, but it was like two friends sharing their past lives. I told her detailed stories of my life and loves that later came back to haunt me, but little did we know we were falling in love.

Finally, we showed up separately at the fifteenth year reunion of the Class of ’64!

I was deep into a bottle of Jack (not knowing better then about George Dickel), coat off, vest unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, tie askew, hair sweaty from cuttin’ a rug with several classmates, when David came up to me and said. “You do know Judy Moody is here don’t ya?”

“Whur she at,” I said trying not to slur my words?

David pointed across the room. Of course, I had already spotted her, but had not yet the courage to approach her. That is when David gave me the emotional shove I needed and said, “If you don’t go dance with Judy, I’ll kick your ass!”

Frankly, as much as I wanted to either kick someone’s ass or have mine kicked over the recent events in my life, I decided to stroll over and ask her to dance. I do not remember if we actually danced or just sat and talked, but her girlfriends moved away and gave us some room.

Later that “morning” we were still talking, sitting in her living room, and watching the sunrise through her sliding glass doors. That became a habit that grew on us both.

It was good to be with her, regardless of what we were doing. One of our favorite things to do was to just drive the back roads, seeing where they went, and sharing a couple of beers, laughing and enjoying the company of the other.

The best thing about Judy, that topped all others, was that she praised me and lifted me up, she pushed me to be me, and wanted me to continue to do the things in life I liked to do. She even tried to share hunting with me, but could not take the early and cold hours it required, but she always seemed to enjoy the fact that I was enjoying life.

Together life is good and we have shared a lot since we married in 1980. We have laughed a lot, cried little, had few disagreements and no altercations, and have seen a lot of the world together. God willing, we will share much more.