WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, PARTS ONE AND TWO
Chapter Excerpt from the novel “After Harry Met Sally”
by Stephen Paul Foster
Stephen Paul Foster's After Harry Met Sally is the parental investigations of a young man who never knew his father and only knew his mother on a first-name basis. “Harry” met “Sally” -- their names changed to protect the guilty -- on a blind date in 1969 that culminated in an inebriated coupling in the back seat of an Oldsmobile at a drive-in movie theater. Nine months after this first and only date, Sally gave birth to Joseph. After Harry met Sally, then, is the story of Joseph’s growing up, a compelling confession of a tortured young man struggling to understand his brilliant, driven, but self-destructive mother and to come to grips with the mystery of Harry, who disappeared when he learned of Sally’s “family way.”
Joseph’s “good fortune,” he tells the reader at the beginning of his narrative, was to have a mother and father whose long lives of “misbehaving” act out a fascinating drama with an emotional wallop. The careers of Harry and Sally, as captured by their son, compose a chronicle of disillusionment and deviance—a droll and sardonic commentary on the darkness that makes its mark on the modern world. After Harry met Sally is the sequel to Toward the Bad I Keep on Turning.
Ladies and gentlemen: The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Introduction to TV series “Dragnet”
To protect the guilty, my mom, I’ll call “Sally,” and my dad, “Harry.” Harry met Sally on a blind date in April of 1969, when they were both in college.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire…
T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
“Memory and desire” — two of the most unreliable features of our lives, the “mixing” of which sometimes leads to “grief,” sometimes to unforeseen disaster.
You must keep the following images in mind. The typical U.S. college experience in 1969 was a confection of bacchanalia and recreational vandalism known as “protesting.” Which made “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” the most obvious question to pose for students on any campus other than Bob Jones University.
The blind date was fixed up by my future dad’s roommate, Larry Duggan, and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bentley. Elizabeth’s roommate was my future mom. She had just broken up with Gus Hall, a degenerate, pothead drummer from a garage band called Orgasmic Explosion. It was rapidly imploding. Mom was acutely “bummed,” as they put it back then, and up for an outing with a “really cute” guy, which my father, I am told, very much was. Ok, so far, so good. But…this double date that started out with all due politeness and the usual blind-date reserve ended up at a drive-in movie theater. My future parents, occupying the car’s ample backseat, at some point, put their bashfulness aside as they shared a pint of sloe gin — and became…uh…intimately acquainted.
In the backseat of Larry’s 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire, on Harry and Sally’s first and only date, I was conceived. This maculate conception occurred during the unwatched double feature of “How the West was Won” and “Tom Jones.” Most likely, if you think about it, it must have been during “Tom Jones.” “Life imitates art” suggests that this had to be how it all “came off,” so to speak.
I know what you’re thinking about my mother, Sally. “Jeezus H. Christ! First date? A drive-in? With a couple in the front seat?” But take a breath. Come on now, Mr. and Mrs. Judgmental. Remember? This was freaking 1969. Give her a break! Liberation from rules was then the only rule. Those “feelings” as reliable guidelines I talked about — “in continual mutation,” per Hobbes. Remember? They come and stay a while. Then, poof! Off they go like acid indigestion or an Excedrin migraine. A couple of lines from one of the worst pop songs ever recorded, one that continues to spark “nothing more” than my own “feelings” of revulsion:”
Feelings, nothing more than feelings
Trying to forget my feelings of love
Morris Albert, “Feelings”
Then, there was the ruling maxim of the era that was in force that particular evening: “If it feels good, do it — whatever feels ‘natural.’” That would open up a whole lot of heretofore unchartered territory. With so much “natural,” little remained of “unnatural” — mildly disturbing, when you think about the implications. Unfortunately, this “feels good” guideline, practiced with the wild abandon of those times, put the kibosh on a wide spectrum of inhibitions. Some of them made good sense, ever since the days saber-toothed tigers were chasing cavemen around.
For helpful perspective on Sally’s infelicitous flirtation that took place during the Age of Aquarius: This gin-lubricated, liberated act of “feel-good” occurred about the time the Yoko-smitten John Lennon unleashed his “living for today,” deranged, sing-along yodel, or, in mom’s case, that April, “living for tonight.”
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
John Lennon, “Imagine”
I’ve always thought that it was harder to imagine that there was a heaven, but maybe that’s just me. Whatever you care to say about John Lennon, he sucked at being a theologian. East meets West, as in the chronicle of John and Yoko, was most unfortunate. Less Yoko, more Hobbes was in order, specifically on the bad stuff that happens when “there is no power to overawe” the young and the restless. Some pointers from Mr. Hobbes might have spiked that hirsute simpleton’s spastic fit of fantasy and mercifully saved us from this crackpot anthem that aging, decrepit hippies still go weepy over. It continues to pollute the airwaves.
“Living for today” — what could be more fun? But, for my mom, “for today” and for tonight turned cruelly into — yikes! — tomorrow. Not so hard to imagine, if you try. Then came next week, next month with no monthly — and for Sally’s friends and family? Well, now…she had “some splainin’ to do,” per Ricky Ricardo, when sternly holding poor wife Lucy to account for lesser kinds of…uh…screwups. Sally must have been wishing that what had been so “easy if you try” hadn’t been quite so easy in that backseat. She was thinking now that her future was going to be a lot less easy — how about “shitty,” for starters? “No hell below us”? No, but the nausea and vomiting every morning post-blind date gave my mom a regular, little taste of hell right up here in Winter Wonderland, Michigan, in the privacy of her own bathroom. “Nothing to kill or die for”? Except a poor something or other in a lab that had to die — the cute little bunny rabbit that took one for the team, crumpled up into a stiff, furry ball after the syringe delivered a dose of Mom’s pee.
“You may say I’m a dreamer.” No, John, I’d just say you had a brain-crippling bout of dementia.
“But I’m not the only one.” Sigh. Yes, we know. It’s unfortunate. It explains why so much has gone wrong.
But, living on a particular day in the crazy, confused “I’m ok; you’re ok” world of 1969, Sally found herself in Dr. Marcus Shelby’s office, digesting the inevitable and acutely embarrassing “bad news.”
The hysterical bride in the penny arcade
Screaming, she moans: ‘I’ve just been made’
Then sends out for the doctor, who pulls down the shade
And says, ‘My advice is to not let the boys in.’
Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues”
Bob Dylan does a “reality check” on John Lennon.
I try to “imagine” what getting that bad news must have been like for Sally. By the standards of the time, she was not a wildly promiscuous young woman. Her misfortune that evening was to go up against Harry, a beguiling master of seduction, the likes of whom she had never before encountered. With the gin as Harry’s furtive accomplice, she had no chance to avoid surrender that fateful evening. Sally’s feckless chaperone on that date was a guy named “Really Bad Luck.”
Doctor Shelby: “You are roughly two months pregnant, Ms.”
He seemed to enjoy tacking on the “Ms.” at the end of that sentence.
Sally turned pale and remained mute for several moments. Then:
“That’s impossible.”
Doctor Shelby blinked, smirked, and remained silent. He was thinking: “Well, she did ‘let the boys in.’ Don’t kids these days listen to Dylan?” In threateningly slow motion, he pushed the lab report with his notes across his desk toward Sally, who recoiled from it like it was a giant spider charging toward her.
Sally, with a sob: “I’m not married. I don’t even know the guy. What am I going to do?”
Doctor Shelby smiled menacingly and showed his large white teeth.
“Maintain a healthy diet and prepare for motherhood.”
“Oh God! What am I going to tell my parents? My dad is a Baptist minister.”
Too bad, Sally. The Doctor was a Unitarian. He worshipped a gentle and reasonable God — and only with a phlegmatic air that approached casual indifference, which reflected the indifference of his non-judgmental God, who was hoping to get around to “world peace” someday. His toothy smile beat a hasty retreat. An annoying sigh eased out of him as he defaulted to his rehearsed posture of fake sympathy and handed Sally a box of Kleenex.
“You’ll be fine.”
A canned, emotionless discharge so predictable and routine that even he musthave found it unconvincing. Fine, yeah!
“There, there, young lady. My advice is…oh, right, too late for that.”
And just how far up from the bottom of your medical school class did you happen to graduate, Doctor Marcus, no-clue douchebag?
Sorry, John Lennon, you blithering imbecile. With my parson grandad looming in the background, no way for this mom-to-be to imagine “no religion, too.” She was in what they used to call “the family way” way before a family was “Heather has two mommies.” And where exactly was that one-night-stand Lothario, the slickster who had managed to get her in that old-fashioned, family way? “Imagine there’s no countries”? How about no states, dipshit limey? How about no Ohio?
Ask Neil Young while you’re at it.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Ohio”
Harry’s hearing “the drumming,” too, and figuring that he, too, is “on his own.” And, with his college draft deferment about to expire, I suspect that his attempts to “imagine” away a country called the “Republic of South Vietnam” weren’t getting much traction. Plus, there was at least one country he knew he didn’t want to imagine away: Canada.
And what was Sally going to tell her dad?
Well, a gal named Sally
Met a guy named Harry
And they got very merry
At the drive-in show
Harry talked so sweetly
Sally acted indiscreetly
On that big backseat
Of Larry’s Oldsmobile
Sally wished she had been wiser
Wished someone had advised her
Not to get so lovey-dovey
In an Oldsmobile
Sally should have said “maybe”
‘Why did I act so crazy?’
On that big backseat
Of Larry’s Oldsmobile
Backseat Baby, “Love in an Oldsmobile”
Two and a half months pregnant, Mom pulled herself together and teetered her way across the stage and through her university graduation ceremony. She had been cruising on overdrive until the middle of her last semester. This very smart lady was on her way to a happy summa cum laude finish, up until that April evening when Mr. Gallant knocked her up on the backseat of Larry’s Oldsmobile.
Sally’s parents were in attendance. They were pleased to sit up straight, look attentive, and endure the tedious formalities. Included were the usual banalities and bromides of false inspiration. They sat near the front row in the auditorium at Michigan State University in East Lansing — home of “the Spartans,” although they called themselves the “Aggies” until 1925. Clifford M. Hardin, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, was the keynote speaker. Hardin, who displayed the stern countenance of suspicious benevolence, shared what passed for his “wisdom” with an unmoved congregation for a half-hour. Not a single memorable sentence was attempted, much less completed. No matter. Sally’s parents were proud as punch of their academic achiever. Sally herself was looking a slight cast of green at the ceremony. This proud couple was still unaware, of course, that their daughter was six and a half months away from leaving them a special post-graduation “gift” — moi.
Since that unfortunate blind date, Sally had caught a few fleeting, on-campus sightings of Harry. You see, Harry was warming himself up to perfect what would be his lifelong Great Disappearing Act. “When the going gets tough, I’m fucking outta here.” I think that captures the essence of this Harry Houdini’s performance art. He was also riding out his final semester of a less than stellar academic performance. His challenging double major? Would you believe, draft dodging and draft beer? But he was good at time management and managed to pick up a minor in womanizing along the way, as well — a véritable athlète de l’amour. That made the rigors of his studies endurable. His four-year detour around adulthood and personal responsibility was rapidly drawing to an inconclusive conclusion. Now, he was suddenly focused on trying to figure out what the rest of his life was supposed to look like. So far, the days of his youth had been the flat-out pursuit of self-indulgence — pursued, that is, by someone with the most unrefined sense of self. Most likely, he had not given Sally, one of his many one-night inamoratas, and his backseat romp with her much serious reflection. I’m guessing also that the prospect of fatherhood in the near future for this young man from a family of “Primitive Methodists” was about as appealing as the thought of spending the rest of his life as a celibate Roman Catholic priest.
After Doc Shelby gave Sally the bad news a couple of weeks before graduation, she set out in desperate search of the elusive escape artist. Finally, she tracked him down. He was ensconced in his late-afternoon habitat, a rat-shit bar called “Jimmy’s.” Jimmy’s, five blocks from where Harry lived in Lansing, was an easy walk back to this apartment. A good thing, for reasons that should be obvious.
Standing outside, if you were struggling to decide whether Jimmy’s was worth a stop off, you’d be facing an old, two-story construction, finished in grimy red stucco with one big window. It was plastered with beer decals and probably was last washed when Harry Truman was President and American soldiers were getting killed in Korea for reasons that still remain obscure. Nothing on the outside would tempt you to enter. The block letters composing “Jimmy’s” above the door had eroded somewhat, with the top of the “J” partly missing and the “s” almost gone.
Inside, the walls were littered with the heads of deer, moose, black bear, and assorted game fish — large-mouth bass, mostly. Jimmy’s was a sports bar before there were “sports bars” — a rustic Field & Stream, Guns-n-Ammo kind of hangout. No television screens. No perky, young waitresses in tight sweaters. No Expresso or Cranberry Martinis available from the bar. Ralphie, the bartender, was the fashion plate of the joint, with a flat-top haircut and accoutered in a ratty sweatshirt. At 5’10” and around 280 pounds, this human battle tank had never, in his forty or so years, met a living soul he could not easily intimidate. With the disposition of an abused Rottweiler, Ralphie delivered service with a snarl. He also doubled as the bouncer — mostly, a ceremonial function. To gain entry to the men’s john in this den of dead critters, you had to cross the path of a striped-helmeted sentry, a fierce, yellow-toothed badger mounted not far from the door. Courtesy of a — probably drunken — taxidermist was the moldy carcass of a northern Michigan Wild Cat perched high on a ledge behind the bar, jaws stretched menacingly wide-open, crouched and ready to spring. A fourteen-ounce jar of Carlings Black Label draft beer ran you forty cents — from four to six p.m., two for half a buck. Achieving inebriation at Jimmy’s — the only way to appreciate the nuances of its ambiance — was a risk-free venture — high return, so to speak, on low investment.
Harry had camped out in the back of the bar in a corner booth, from which he could survey his humble kingdom. On this particular afternoon, he was pondering his diminishing options. Taking meditative puffs on a Phillies cheroot, his right hand was fixed in its natural position, wrapped around a brown bottle beside an empty shot glass recently topped off with Jim Beam. Attached to the wall immediately above him were the massive head and antlers of a once-proud white-tailed buck, whose glass eyes glowered suspiciously at the clientele as they wandered past. With Harry were two of his buddies, Dick Sorge and Mike Straight, both of whom resembled motley rejects from a police lineup. They were half-heartedly engaged in alcohol-tinged persiflage that was descending from almost-recognizable conversation into competing echoes of inebriated incoherence.
Sally was standing nervously outside Jimmy’s, listening to the din drifting out from the fusty inner sanctum. She couldn’t help but wonder exactly what she would say to Harry if she found her one-night paramour in its cheesy bowels. How sober would he be? It was still early, so, maybe. No matter. Here goes. She took a deep breath and pushed open the heavy wooden door to the tavern. Sally hesitated a moment and cautiously made her way into this funky-smelling stowage of wildlife cadavers and hebetudinous dipsomaniacs. Ralphie peered owlishly out from behind the bar and puzzled over what or who in this drab underworld under his jealous guardianship could possibly entice an unaccompanied, young woman with such admirable physical credentials to enter. Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” was wafting out of the jukebox:
We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.
Too late, Sally was thinking, for “livin’ right.” “Bein’ free”? Well, being a little too free was what got her into this sorry fix and standing in this dump. Sally then paused slightly and let her eyes adjust to the smoke and the gloomy darkness. She was momentarily at a loss for words that might capture the feel of Jimmy’s and signal that it might be best to decamp. Somehow, “seedy” or “derelict” did not quite do it. No, onward. In search of Harry, what did she expect? She moved cautiously toward the back of the bar then stopped. There was Harry slouched in a booth. Finally. Now, what?
Harry looked up. She was standing a few feet away, silent, motionless, eyes fixed, staring at him. He reacted with a startle reflex, like that buck now on the wall above him when he snapped his head up just before the slug from the hunter’s 308 Winchester rifle hit him behind the front shoulder, collapsing him onto the snow-covered ground. Recovering, then, sheepishly, to himself: “Damn! It’s Sally. I should have called her. No way to avoid her now.”
He told his friends to take off, which they did quickly. But, before he could get up, Sally quickly slid into the booth across from him. Coming to a stop, she bent and planked her elbows down on the table, face cupped in her hands, little-girl-like. She was leaning over toward Harry with a big, fake smile, not saying a word, waiting for the squirming, vanishing Romeo to figure out what to say — certainly, an awkward moment for Mister Intrepid of one-night romances and rapid retreats. I’ll relate the conversation that ensued, as I’ve tried over the years to imagine how it unfolded. It must have been a doozy.
Harry with insulting insincerity: “Hey, hey, Sally. Uh…great to see you. I’ve been meaning to call you. How’ve you been?”
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as the Bard put it.
Sally: “Hey, hey, ha-ha, glad you remembered my name, Terry. Oh, wait, it’s Larry, Jerry, whatever. How have I been? Guess what, Harrrry? I’m…whadda call it? Pa-reg-nant. Pregnant, asshole — knocked up, with child, bun in the oven, any and all of the above — just in case you’ve been wondering. So, how’ve you been? Where have you been? I thought maybe…”
Harry: “Whoa, whoa, whoa…”
This unfortunate word-choice of a horse-drawn carriage coachman drove Sally to translate her pent-up fury into an effusion of punishing sarcasm:
“‘Whoa, whoa, whoa’? No, Harry. Way too late. Maybe you don’t remember: It was all go, go, go and no whoa that night at the movies. So, where are we now? Well, I’m going to have your baby, long about late December. Hey, a Christmas Baby-Jesus just for you, Joseph! Maybe we can find a stable near that hick town where you said you’re from, and you can pitch in with the delivery. The angels singing from on high…‘My Baby does the Hanky-Panky.’ Some of the sheep-buggering local shepherds you grew up with maybe will wander over from the nearby fields to get a peek at our little guy or gal in the manger? Any Wise Men you know from the east — Detroit, maybe — to make the trek and bring gifts?”
Harry was looking god-awful desperate, like some low-life perp getting the third degree from Telly Savalas in an episode of “Kojak.”
So, let’s follow the exchange now as it moved rapidly downward — downward as in Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ “five stages of grief.” Grief comes in many guises. Sally and Harry were feeling “a great deal of grief,” as Hobbes might say, each in her and his own special way, as well as with each other.
Jog my memory, could you, Reader? What’s the first stage?
Ah, yes, “denial.”
Harry: “You’re sure you’re pregnant? You’re sure it’s…?”
Denial, of a very churlish sort.
Sally, as you can see, was already well past her brief stage of denial in Doc Shelby’s office. She was deep into stage two, anger — anger of the simmering kind. She flinched and pulled back with a long, piercing stare. Then, slowly, she put up the digitus infamis of her right hand, pulling it slowly back toward her face. The stare turned into the nastiest sneer she could muster. Stage-two anger expressed, you might say, with a hostile exclamation point.
Harry: “Ok, ok. Sorry. Wow. Jesus. Fuck…”
Harry’s denial was moving toward anger.
Sally: “Fuck? Oh, perfect. That lousy, backseat fuckety-fuck you so quickly forgot about is why you and I are having this friendly conversation here in your charming taxidermist’s happy hunting ground.”
Harry took a long pull on his bottle of Drewrys Extra Dry. He was thinking, thinking, thinking — well, something that weakly resembled thinking. Then, the next dumbass question, just the one you’d predict.
Harry: “Is it too late to…you know?”
Stage three, bargaining, feckless bargaining.
Sally: “To, you know, you know…too late to do what? Find some board-certified surgeon with a rusty coat hanger?”
Stuck in anger.
Harry: “No, Jesus, an abortion — safely, with a real doctor. It’s gotta be legal somewhere.”
More feeble bargaining.
Sally: “Oh, yeah, I’ll just go…somewhere! And with some money from…somebody. And in quest of some ‘real’ Dr. Somebody or Other. That’s a plan that makes perfect sense, Harry. So simple, easy, and affordable. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Can’t move off anger cum sarcasm.
A long pause followed while they sat and stared hopelessly at each other. Stage four, depression, setting in for both.
Sally gave a deep sigh and teared up. Then:
“Look, ok, shit. I’m sorry, Harry. Not really. I’m losing it. I’m really pissed at you, but I was just as willing as you and even more stupid, if that’s possible. I’m scared. You probably won’t believe it, but ‘that night’ was not my usual dating etiquette. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my folks. It would be one thing for me to tell them that my long-term boyfriend is the father. They wouldn’t be happy, but they might forgive me for that. But, come on! Some guy I just happened to meet and just happened to hump on the first date? My parents are very — I mean very — Baptist. How do you think that is going to go over? ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Honey. A little bundle of joy sent from heaven above — ok, from a drive-in movie down here below curtesy of Mr. Who-is-it now? Hey, but that’s almost as good. Just what we were hoping for.’”
Stage four, dripping with sarcasm.
Harry just sat in that booth across from my mom, his head down, looking like one ashamed, pathetic young man. Finally:
“I’m really sorry, Sally. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m broke. My student draft-deferment is over. Vietnam is calling. I’m working on a job possibility out of state in Kansas City, Missouri. It will pay well. But it’s a long shot. If I can pull it off and dodge the draft, I can send you money.”
Sally: “Sorry, your ass. I’m a lot worse off than sorry. Ok, I really didn’t expect you to do anything just now. I just needed you to know. You would want to know, right? Don’t answer. I’m going ahead with the graduation ceremony in a couple of weeks for the sake of my parents. After that, I’ll have to tell them that I got knocked up on a blind date with a guy from… Where is it, again, you’re from? Any suggestions on how to put a positive spin on it? Forget it. It’s really better for them and for me if you are out of the picture — at least for now. Here’s my home address. Contact me when you get settled. I’ll let you know — boy or girl. I am going to need money.”
For both Harry and Sally: stage five, “acceptance,” of sorts.
Havin’ my baby…
The seed inside you,
Do you feel it growin’?
Are you happy in knowin’ that you’re having my baby?
Paul Anka, “Having my Baby”
No.
Mr. Foster is a world traveler and a philosopher (Ph.D. St. Louis University) whose writings cover the world of politics, religion, and contemporary culture. His lifelong fascination is with totalitarian tendencies in modern life. He is a native Midwesterner who grew up in Michigan, married in Missouri, and currently resides in Ohio, with his wife of forty years.