They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat. Lewis Grizzard

      1

       Murmurings and Sad Love Songs

      I’ve had trouble with my heart for as long as I can remember. Somebody keeps breaking it. I saw one of those public service announcements on late-night television. It offered some sort of pamphlet to young women who needed to learn how to say “No.”

      Can you imagine that? Young women today have to write off to Washington for a pamphlet in order to learn how to say “No.” I thought it was something they were born with, like their inability to parallel park.

      Girls never needed to look in a book to learn how to turn me down. Take when I was in high school. Those were timid, simpler times. All I wanted was to get kissed, but girls with whom I went out had a never-ending supply of excuses not to kiss me.

      “I have a cold,” was one I heard over and over. For years, practically every girl I cornered in the back seat of a 1957 Chevrolet had a bad cold. I started carrying around my own aspirin and orange juice. It didn’t help.

      Another excuse was, “I don’t want to smear my lipstick.”

      “Go ahead and smear it,” I would say. “Helena Rubenstein is a personal friend of mine.”

      My all-time favorite excuse for not kissing me was, “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

      Don’t want to get into trouble? Was I asleep during biology class? You can “get into trouble” just by kissing?

      The only way I ever got around all this was when I went to college and began to use a wily technique known as “practice kissing.” Here is how that worked:

      “Let’s kiss,” I would say to my victim, “but it will just be for practice.”

      “For practice?” she would ask.

      “Sure,” I would continue, “we’ll kiss but it won’t count. We’ll do it just to see what we need to work on in case we ever decide to kiss for real.”

      One particular evening it took a young Phi Mu and me nearly 450 practice kisses before we finally got it right.

      It was a friend of mine, Ronnie Jenkins, who taught me my first real lesson about women, which was, you never can tell about women.

      We were between our junior and senior years in high school and we thumbed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, because we heard there were, in fact, fine young women there and you could buy beer legally at eighteen, which meant if you were sixteen, like us, you could even order it in a loud voice.

      The best accommodations we could afford upon our eventual arrival at Myrtle Beach was the utility room behind The Waves Motel. We paid a woman who had no teeth two dollars a night for the privilege of sleeping amongst the discarded lounge chairs and deflated beach balls. There was no air conditioning, of course, but one side of the room was chicken wire, which allowed a soft, ocean breeze to creep in, not to mention the gnats and mosquitoes.

      Our first night there, we were into modest involvement with two young women when a strange thing happened. A man, obviously very drunk, came out of nowhere and began climbing on the chicken wire that was one side of the utility room.