Great Lovers I have known--VI--Dan Tonks

Great Lovers I have Known—Dan Tonks

After my year with Craig I moved back into the apartment complex in which I had lived before I was drafted. Among my roommates were James “Cecil” Simons, Dave Hall, Redge Bake, Rob Talbert, and for one year, my brother, Gavin. After Gavin got married and moved out, Dan Tonks moved in and took his place.
I was excited to have Dan move in, although, just off his mission he was by several years the youngest of us. He was from my home town, Pocatello, and was, in fact, the son of “TV” Tonks. “TV” was one of the high school physics and electronics teachers in Pocatello, but his chief claim to fame was that he would drive around in a brightly-colored, clearly-stenciled van advertising the fact that he was your best choice if your television set needed repair. His fame—or notoriety—was considerably enhanced by the fact that the van had a loud speaker attached to the top, which he would occasionally use to advertise the fact that he was in the neighborhood and willing—even eager—to repair your defunct, or poorly functioning television set. One reason I was excited to have Dan as a roommate is that I assumed that he, like his father, would be a physics major. He immediately disabused me on that score, stating that he had no interest whatever in either math or science.
We soon learned, however, that Dan did have one talent that the rest of us lacked. To understand his unique talent, it will help to understand the routine in our apartment on Monday through Wed evening. Usually, on Monday night right after dinner most of us would begin the weekly litany—namely, asking each other, “who should I ask out for this week-end. The exceptions were Dan and Dave Hall.
Dave was the most organized roommate I ever had—I suspect, possibly the most organized roommate anyone ever had. He is the only student I ever knew who never wasted a dime, a minute, or a square inch. Whenever anyone in the apartment—and even a good many outside the apartment—needed anything, especially if they needed it in a hurry, they would ask Dave. You weren’t often disappointed. For example, being returned missionaries, we all had those little sewing kits for doing minor repairs to clothing, such as sewing on buttons. As I said, we all had them, but when a button came off, generally, we asked Dave for his, because, although we all had them, he was the only one who could actually find his.
At any rate, this super-organization carried over into his dating life. At the first of every semester, Dave would meet all the new girls in the ward, in his classes, and in the neighborhood and make up a list of those he would like to date. Every Tuesday night at exactly 7 PM he would walk out of his study area, go to the phone and call the next 2 girls on the list and ask them out for that week-end. By 7:30 generally, he had the job done. Now I’m the first to admit that I admired this procedure tremendously, but I also recognized that this was even more out of the cards for me than keeping track of my sewing kit.
Dan, on the other hand, would ask right after dinner on Monday night, “Does anyone need to use the phone for the next little while?” Of course, no one did. By that time most of us still hadn’t decided who we were going to ask out, and even if we had decided who we wanted to ask out, it would require at least one night—usually two—of coaxing and encouraging from roommates before we would actually have the courage to do it.
Dan would then go to the phone and ask a girl out. We soon learned that by “little while” Dan actually meant anywhere from one to 2 ½ hours. Already it was clear that he was a phenomenon. The rest of us, after we had actually worked up the courage to ask a girl out, would do it. If she said “yes” we quickly explained the arrangements, thanked her, and hung up—the idea being to get off the phone as quickly as possible so as not to leave the girl enough time to change her mind. Dan, on the other hand, would make small talk for some time before asking the girl out and then continue to make small talk after he had gotten the date. “What would he do if the girl turned him down?” the reader is undoubtedly asking him/herself. The answer is, “I don’t know.” To my knowledge, he was never turned down. He was probably one of the greatest—if not the greatest—askers for dates ever. He was incredible. The problem was that while being the greatest asker for dates, he was also, undoubtedly, the world’s worst dater--the reason being that he never actually went on any of his dates, as will be explained forthwith.
We learned that there might be a problem the very first week Dan was with us. The Sat. after his first scheduled date, I was eating breakfast when he came into the kitchen.
“How was your date?” I asked perfunctorily expecting an equally perfunctory response like, “Oh, fine.”
Instead I got, “I didn’t go.”
“Didn’t go!” I responded amazed. “What happened?”
“Oh, I was up on campus studying and I forgot all about it. I’ll apologize tomorrow when I see her at church,” he said in a matter of fact tone of voice.
I couldn’t believe it. I decided right there and then that all the agonizing, the hem hawing, the questioning, the wondering was worth something. At least, I never forgot that I had a date. I decided that Dan, who seemed to get dates effortlessly, had the sort of “easy come, easy go” problem.
I discovered the next Sat. that that was not the only problem, when again I asked—this time less perfunctorily—“How was your date?” I got the same response as the week before, only this time it was a different excuse. This time he had been downtown and his car gave him trouble. By the time he had got it taken care of it was too late to go on the date, or so he claimed.
The next Sat. morning we were all together in the living room when someone asked and we got a much more truculent response. It turns out that this time, it wasn’t his memory or his car, it was us—his roommates. Because we were all older and “desperate to get married”, he felt forced to ask girls out, but he wasn’t, he claimed, interested in marriage or dating or anything related to it. It was just having old roommates who were decidedly unhappy in their bachelorhood that was forcing him into asking girls out—which he did not want to do.
“Listen,” I said, somewhat annoyed—an annoyance obviously shared by my roommates, “no one is forcing you to get dates. If you don’t want to get dates, don’t. But if you do, then by all means go on the date.”
The next Monday when it was his usual time to get his date, he apologized and said he was sorry for what he had said. He really did, he said, want to date, and he proceeded to get another date, and as usual he spent the whole evening talking with the girl after getting the date.
But the next Sat. morning it was the same story, only this time it was not only our fault, it was also the fault of BYU which, according to Dan, was nothing more than a large marriage mill—not even an educational institution at all. He didn’t understand why he had ever come to BYU and planned to leave at the earliest possible moment.
What bothered me more and more was that with every passing week, the denunciations became more bitter and the accusations against us, his roommates, against the school, and finally, against the church itself more acrimonious. Curiously enough, somewhere in all this, he actually did go on a date. The date was with Jean Simmons, a very cute girl whose apartment he visited frequently and who he spent a good deal of time talking with. He finally asked her out. We were all nervous that it would be the same old story, but it wasn’t. The curious thing—at least, to me, was that for once he really did have a legitimate reason for canceling the date. In the morning of the date, he had gone to the dentist to have a couple of wisdom teeth removed. But what was scheduled to be a two-hour appointment lasted all day. It turns out that his wisdom teeth were impacted, or something, that required the dentist to work literally hours to get the teeth out. He came home in absolute agony. Worse, from a dating standpoint—in my opinion, at least—was the fact that he was bleeding badly from his mouth. When he opened his mouth he looked like someone in a class B vampire movie. Blood was literally dripping from his teeth. Under the circumstances, even I suggested that he cancel the date, but for some reason, possibly, because he really liked and respected Jean, he went through with it. Although he did go on the date, I suspect that Jean must have made it clear that she didn’t want to date him again because he never asked her out again. But we all felt greatly relieved. He had actually gone on a date. We were sure he was cured.
No such luck. The next week was the same old story with escalating repercussions. This time, he typed up a “Paper” condemning dating practices at BYU and denouncing the pressure placed on unwilling young men to date and marry. He made about twenty copies of this paper and spread them though our parking lot and the parking lot of the girls’ apartments next door. Furthermore, he actually began venting his anger by throwing things, books and the garbage can, against the wall in his bedroom. The situation was bad enough that our roommate, Cecil Simons, who was a psychology major, decided to take things in hand by counseling with Dan. Both he and Dan stayed home from classes all day Monday while Cecil conducted an intensive therapy session. Monday night both Dan and Cecil announced that Dan had responded positively to therapy and was, therefore, cured.
Since he was cured, Dan proceeded to ask Laurie _____ to a major dance—either the Junior Prom or the Senior Ball, I don’t remember which, but it was definitely “a big deal”. For my part, I was amazed that Laurie didn’t have a date already for the big event. She was, if not the cutest girl in our ward, certainly very close to the cutest and whatever she may have lacked—and as I said, it would be hard to show that she lacked anything—in that respect, she more than made up in the vivacious personality department. I wanted desperately to date her myself, but since I was nigh onto thirty and she was a freshman of 17 or 18, I decided it would be a bit of a stretch, but most of the guys in the ward—even those for whom it was that big a stretch or even bigger, had made a bid for her at one time or another.
Anyway, Dan worked his usual magic on the phone and got the date for the big dance Friday night. Friday night right after dinner, Dan announced that he was going to take his car into the mountains to escape the pressure that everyone in the apartment, in the ward, at the school and in the church in general were putting him under to date and get married even though he didn’t want to do any of those things.
“But what about Laurie?” I asked incredulously.
“What about her?” he snapped back. “She’s part of the whole conspiracy. She can go to H___ for all I care!” With that he stamped out, slamming the door as hard as he could as he left.
“This is my fault,” Cecil said after he left. “We can’t not let Laurie sit home and miss the big dance. I’ll run downtown, buy a corsage, and say that something came up that Dan couldn’t make it, and offer to take her myself.”
I had mixed feelings about whether Cecil’s offer was entirely altruistic, since, like the rest of us had wanted to take her out, but hadn’t worked up the nerve. Still, I felt like it was a good thing and offered to help pay for the corsage.
Well, Cecil went to the dance, and reported that he had a wonderful time. Dan came home really late, even after Cecil was back from the dance. He spent the night in a rage so that the roommates that shared his bedroom got hardly any sleep. He not only threw things against the wall, breaking the plasterboard, but he actually put his foot though the bedroom door (it was one of those cheap veneer wood doors). For my part, I became really nervous that he was going to actually get violent against us, but by the next day he had settled down again somewhat.
Monday was another all day therapy day with Cecil, but I was skeptical. I don’t know what it was, I think it was having to help pay for Laurie’s corsage, that gave me the one good counseling idea, I have had in my life. When we came home, just as they had done on the previous Monday, Dan and Cecil pronounced Dan cured and, just as he had done on the previous Monday, Dan went to the phone, asked a girl out, and spent the whole evening in small talk with her.
After Dan hung up the phone I walked over and picked it up.
“It’s kind of late to be asking for a date,” Dan said. “Who are you calling at this hour?”
“I’m not asking for a date,” I responded. “I’m calling the girl you just asked out.”
“Why ever for?” Dan demanded.
“I’m simply going to explain to her that although she thinks she has a date, she doesn’t have one. I plan on telling her about your history of dating and tell her that she can forget about having a date and that if she has another offer for Friday night, by all means, snap it up.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” Dan protested.
“Oh no, watch me.”
“But I’m cured,” Dan complained plaintively. “It’s unfair. Just ask Cecil if I’m not cured.”
“You were cured last week and all we got was a hole in the door and in the wall.”
I picked up the phone and started to dial.
“Please don’t,” he pleaded.
“I tell you what,” I said suspending my dialing, “if you will put down a $10 deposit, I’ll let it go. If you actually go on the date, you get your $10 back. If not, we use it to buy the girl something in the way of a consolation offering.”
At first he said “no way” but when I continued dialing he agreed to it. I did not, however, put down the phone until he had actually pulled the $10 out of his wallet and given it to me. It is important to understand that back then $10—especially to a student—was more like $50 today.
Did it work? Well, yes and no. Dan marched into the apartment at midnight and admitted after careful questioning that he had not gone on the date. But, he claimed, it was due to the fact that he had been downtown and his car had gone on the blink and it had taken him all that time to correct the problem. How then, you may ask, did it work? It worked in the sense that there was no loud complaining about having old, desperate-to-get-married roommates, no moaning about being trapped at school in a marriage mill, and no hand waving against the pressure the Church was putting on him; no kicked-in doors, no thrown waste baskets, no nothing except perfect amiability.
We used the $10 to buy his almost “date” flowers and chocolates—which shows how much more $10 would buy back then.
The next Monday was exactly the same story with the exception, of course, that it was a different girl and also the fact that I upped the ante to $20.
Did it work? It did. Twenty dollars was the magic key. Dan not only went on the date, but he started dating that date regularly. The result? Dan got married before any of the rest of us. He was actually married, as I remember it, that summer.
All this goes to show, I believe, that, in some cases at least, certainly in this one, that economics trumps psychology.

Great Lovers I have known--V--Craig Johnson

Great Lovers I have Known—Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson and I had served together in the army, but he was discharged one year before I was. We had always planned to live together as soon as I got out, which we did. We lived in the basement of an elderly couple’s home in very cramped quarters, but we didn’t need much and the rent was definitely right at $25 each a month for the four of us. One roommate, Alma _____ was Craig’s friend from Mesa. We didn’t see a great deal of him, because he was engaged and spent most of his free time with his fiancée. Our other roommate, Paul _____, I have described in a previous essay.
Craig was the most humble, soft-spoken, mild-mannered man I think I have ever known. The longer I get to know people, generally, the more I become acquainted with, not only their strengths, but their weaknesses. But the longer I knew Craig, the more I became convinced that he had none. In our theology, when a person becomes perfect he is translated, more or less like the prophet Elijah, who was taken up by a chariot into heaven. It just seemed to me almost unfair that someone as kind and considerate as Craig would be subjected to the same sort of trials and abuse as the rest of us. I somehow expected that someone like Craig, who never lost his temper, who seemed always in perfect control of himself, deserved every bit as much as Elijah to be taken up. Of course, that was before I was married and had children and came to realize that someone can be perfectly mild-mannered when he has only himself to be responsible for, but that mild manner can be severely tested when dealing with a teen-ager that everyone assumes you should have some, at least, responsibility for. At any rate, it was a bit of a challenge to one’s faith, or something like that, to see someone so perfect still there with the rest of us. All that changed in one very revealing incident.
Craig was driving with Paul and me in the car down 7th East in Provo. We hit 5th North where there is a 4-way stop, but a rather unusual one, because one of the streets is not properly a street at all but an entrance road into an apartment complex. We were following a girl in her late teens or early twenties when she stopped at the stop sign in front of us. I don’t know whether it was the unusual nature of the 4-way stop or whether she simply wasn’t paying attention, but for whatever reason, when it was her turn to pull into the intersection she just sat there until finally the driver next in line pulled out.
Quick as a flash, Craig jumped out of our car, threw his fist up into the air and yelled, (before then I had never heard him raise his voice, I didn’t even know that he could yell). At any rate he yelled out in an angry tone of voice, “Lady, you move that car, and you better be quick about it, or I’m coming up there and move it for you!”
Having said that, he jumped back into the car, because the lady had pulled her car into the intersection before he had even finished with his threat. Paul and I sat there with our mouths open.
“Some people just don’t pay attention to what they’re doing when they’re driving,” Craig said by way of self justification. For my part, I realized that there was at least something that Craig could learn before he was taken up like Elijah.
Every week Craig and I would sit down, usually about Tuesday and begin stewing over the question of who to ask out for the week-end. Since we were both approaching 30 we felt that is was more or less obligatory for us to have dates for both Friday and Sat. and possibly one for a fireside on Sunday. Paul, as mentioned in a previous essay, never seemed to worry about it until a few minutes before the date and Alma, our other roommate, was engaged. Craig and I would banter names back and forth hoping to get suggestions and even encouragement. For my part, if I had spent the time studying that I spent worrying about and actually getting dates, I would probably have my PhD and possibly even a Nobel Prize by now. Craig’s task, while almost as bad, was never quite as bad, because on most week-ends, a girl would ask him out, usually to a church dance. So after a few weeks when he said, “who could I ask out this week-end?” I responded with, “Why don’t you ask one of the girls on the ballroom dance team? They are all certainly very cute, and they also all seem to like you.”
“They are cute,” he acknowledged, “but they just don’t seem to be my type. They lack something that is really important to me.” He never seemed to be able to pin-point exactly what that “something” was, indeed, I’m not certain he even knew himself.
The week after the events I recorded in “Paul”, I decided I needed to do something to make amends as best I could with Jill Hunter, largely, because, contrary to what I had told Paul, I really was still hopeful that something “would work out” between us. I decided that the best plan would be to take Craig with me to their weekly sing-a-long, so that she could see that I also associated with “better quality folk”. So I asked Craig if he would be willing to go along with me and maybe, if the occasion arose, put in a good word in my behalf. He said that he would be glad to, so off we went.
Jill greeted me warmly, as she always did, and seeing that I had brought someone with me asked me who he was. I responded, “This is my roommate, Craig Johnson. He like Paul is on the ball-room dance team, but he’s nicer.” I quickly added.
“How could he not be?” she said laughing.
Well we had a great time. We began by introducing ourselves and then moved over to the piano where we began the customary sing-a-long, with Jill playing. Craig, of course, shined. He was not only a remarkable dancer; he was also a great singer with a very mellow, appealing baritone voice. We had sung about 4 or 5 songs when Jill turned the playing over to one of her roommates and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, one of Jill’s roommates went into the kitchen to answer the phone and came out saying, “Is there a Craig Johnson here?” Craig said that it was him. “You’re wanted on the phone, it’s in the kitchen,” the roommate continued. Craig disappeared into the kitchen and the rest of us continued with the sing-a-long. As we did so, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Who on earth could have called Craig. I didn’t know that we told anyone that we were coming.” Then it occurred to me that it was probably Paul, who knew where we were going. After a few minutes Craig returned and a few minutes later Jill came out with the customary cookies. We sang a few more songs and I said we needed to go.
“Already?” Jill said in a disappointed voice, “You just got here.” I made some excuse. The truth was, I was really curious to know what was so important that Paul would call us at Jill’s. The only reason I could think of was that he felt obligated to warn Craig to keep a close eye on the hatchet and if Jill started to move in that direction to make a very hasty exit.
“What did Paul want?” I asked after we had left the house.
“It wasn’t Paul.” Craig said quietly.
“It wasn’t Paul? Who else knew we were at Jill’s?”
“It was Jill.”
“Jill! I don’t understand. If she wanted to talk to you why didn’t she just do it there?”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind, but you did say that you were all over her. She went next door to use the phone so she could ask me to her ward dance without you hearing. Like I said, since you had told me that you were over her anyway, I agreed to go. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all”, I said very sincerely, because I realized with that, that I was indeed “over Jill”. It was like a large weight had been lifted from my back.
Craig went with Jill to the dance, but I am afraid that honesty forces me to tell something else about Craig. Of course, his was a weakness that all of us must confess up to. Well, not really “all of us”, because of course, there are some of us who have never been asked out by a girl, but most of us have and when we are, we are generally faced with the challenge that courtesy requires that we reciprocate. Now, if my memory serves me correctly, I personally failed to reciprocate only twice—once in the 9th grade and once when I was a senior—but the one when I was a senior shouldn’t really count because the girl was from out of town and I didn’t know her phone number—of course, someone could argue that I could have—maybe, even should have, gotten her phone number, but that is merely being nitpicky. I will have to admit that if looked at from a percentage standpoint, I still am in no great position to criticize having been asked out (again, if my memory serves me correctly) only 4 or five times altogether, so obviously, I am not being severely critical of Craig, but only somewhat critical when I point out, that I don’t think he reciprocated by asking out all the girls who asked him out. Naturally, he knew he was supposed to, and, speaking in his favor, I am bound to say that I think he always intended to and always planned to and always said he wanted to, but I think time just got away from him and he felt, after several weeks, embarrassed and simply let it slide. Of course, when a fellow is being asked out almost every weekend, sometimes it is tough to reciprocate as etiquette requires and still have a dating life of your own—or, at least, it seems to me that could possibly be a legitimate excuse—unfortunately, I wouldn’t know. I happen to mention all this, not because I wish to shatter anyone’s image of Craig, but just to point out that I don’t think he ever asked Jill out again after their first date. Of course, he might have taken her to a school assembly or met her on campus for lunch, which I would not know about and I’m not sure that would really count as reciprocating anyway.
Well, I digress. What happened next—or, at least, what continued to happen is that Craig and I would hem and haw and stew every weekend about who we should ask out. Of course, I had to hem and haw and stew a great deal more because, as pointed out above, I usually had to fill two weekend nights with dates, and he had to fill only one—in fact, if he had always reciprocated, he would not have needed to hem and haw at stew hardly at all.
At the start of the second semester we went to church (we always went to church during the first semester too, but I am about to describe what happened the first Sunday of the second semester). During Church it was announced that a new girl had moved into the ward who wanted to form a church choir and that those wishing to sing in said choir should stay after church for practice. Well, both Craig and I did.
After we got home from choir practice, Craig began to wax eloquent on how attractive and commendable in every other way he could think of the choir director was. He said, “Merrill, I wonder if she would go out with me, if I asked her.” I said, “sure”. Which I honestly believed but it puzzled me a great deal, because to my way of thinking she was not all that attractive. In fact, I was pretty sure that she would even go out with me if I asked her. In order to understand all this I think an explanation is in order. It will help with the explanation I mention that her name is “Barbara”. I don’t remember her last name—I think it might have been “Johnson” but possibly could have been something else. I hope that I am not giving too much away when I state that I know for a fact that it is “Johnson” now.
The attractiveness issue requires an explanation. At BYU at that time the girls wanted, for the most part, at least, to be considered attractive and the best way to be obviously attractive was to look like someone. Now the “someone” that it was most popular to look like at that time was Julie Andrews. The “Sound of Music” was the most popular movie and all the girls who could wanted to look as much like Julie Andrews as possible—and, I must say right off, that some of them were quite good at it—of course, perfect candor forces me to admit that many were not. Naturally, for most, looking like Julie Andrews was simply not in the cards. In that case, they would try to look like Audrey Hepburn, or Rita Hayworth or even Mary Tyler Moore or someone like that. Well, the girls that Craig normally dated, especially, the ones on the ballroom dance team that asked him out all looked like one of those movie stars. The problem, it seemed to me, was that Barbara didn’t look like any of them—or at least, if she did look like a movie star, I missed that movie—and being not very imaginative (i.e. always taking my dates to movies) and being required, as described above, to go on two dates a week—I didn’t miss many.
There were, however, two things about Barbara that I think strongly attracted Craig. First, she had perfect, incredibly perfect posture—even, unlike Janet Bush (if you remember her from an earlier essay)—when she sat down, and I suspect, that posture is always important to a dancer. And second, she had the most winning smile. Of course, all the girls smiled at least occasionally, when they thought circumstances required it, but with Barbara it was spontaneous and natural and almost constant.
To make a long story short (it really wasn’t all that long anyway), Craig got his date the very next weekend. After that he simply turned down all the other girls and before you knew it (this is a trite expression that I felt obligated to use—I knew it long before “before you knew it”) they were engaged. And it wasn’t too much longer after that that they were married.
Several years later, after I was married, Craig and Barbara and several children happened to be coming through Salt Lake and asked if they could stay with us. At the time we had no children (which means that it was very soon after I was married), and had one of those couches that fold into a bed so we were glad to have them. I mention this because Craig was, if possible, even more mild-mannered and affable than before and Barbara more smiley, which at the time did not surprise, or even impress me. It was only after I had a few children of my own that I realized what a remarkable achievement that was.
In my minds eye, I can see Craig driving somewhere in Arizona, behind a rather inattentive driver who comes to a 4-way stop and, for whatever reason, fails to move forward when it is his turn. I can see Craig pushing open his car door, throwing his fist into the air, and almost yelling when he suddenly remembers that Barbara and some of the kids are in the car. Pulling his arm down, I can see him rather quietly climbing back into the car and rather sheepishly saying, “I felt a need to stretch”. I can see Barbara flashing that wonderful encouraging smile of hers, quietly laying her had on his knee and saying softly, “its ok. It bothered me too.”

Addendum to Paul

Addendum to Paul

In the interest of total disclosure, I have to add this caveat to the story of Paul. A few years ago Jill Hunter’s daughter moved in up the block from us where she lived for about a year while her husband completed medical school. The result was that we got to see Jill at church every now and then. Just before her daughter moved I got Jill’s address and wrote up the story about her and Paul, thinking that she would love it. In fact, I could actually picture the family—her children and grandchildren--gathered around the fireplace on Christmas eve and one (or several) of them saying—after they had read the Christmas story—“Mom, please read us the story about you and that boy that you chased with the hatchet.
Well, a couple of weeks after I mailed her the story, I ran into Jill (now Jill Tingey) at the BYU Creamery. “Did you get my the story I mailed you?” I asked expectantly.
“I did,” she said in a very frosty tone of voice, “and I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t like it.”
“Oh,” I said in a disappointed tone of voice as the vision of her family gathered around the Christmas tree listening to my story went up the chimney with the rest of the smoke.
“It certainly didn’t paint a very flattering picture of me,” she continued. For one thing, I’m sure that I never in my life chased anyone with a hatchet.”
I was about to protest. I was about to point out that I distinctly remember the wicker basket by the door with the neatly stacked pile of wood with the hatchet lying on top. I was about to point out that she could ask anyone, she could even ask my wife, if I would ever in a thousand years remember such a thing if it was not deeply impressed on my mind. And it was deeply impressed on my mind by the memory of her stooping down and picking up the hatchet before she charged out the door with it.
As I say, I was about to mention all this, but I remembered that you only argue with a woman if you are running against her in a political contest and even then, only very very carefully, so I refrained.
I mention all this by way of admitting that the above story has not gone entirely unchallenged, especially the detail of the hatchet, and, of course, without that detail, the story is hardly worth telling.
I also added this note because I suspect that many, when I tell the story of my roommate, Craig Johnson, will suspect that I made the part relating to Jill Hunter up, or, at least, telescoped the time. But I did neither. I am much more certain of those events even than I am of the part in the previous story about the hatchet, and, I am quick to add, I’m pretty certain about the hatchet. And, finally, it not only happened, but it happened exactly one week later.

Great Lovers I have known--IV--Paul

Great Lovers--IV--Paul

While we were together in the army, Craig Johnson and I had agreed that we would room together when I got out. Since he got out a year before I did, he had already found a place to live. On my return, he warned me that of the two roommates who were going to share our apartment, one, Paul----, was rather different. Of course, having been at school already 4 ½ years, I was used to “different” roommates so that didn’t bother me at all.
I actually met Paul the day before school when we were both walking to our new apartment from campus. He informed me that, although he realized that the apartment was small for four fellows, that he would need to install a rather large safe in the apartment. I immediately protested. To say that the apartment was small was an understatement. We were paying only $25 a month, but we were getting no more than we were paying for. Our bedroom consisted of the two sets of bunk beds and exactly enough space for one person—one rather thin person--to walk between them. At one end on the room were two sets of dresser drawers, at the other a small closet. The living room consisted of a small table, a couch and two chairs. The kitchen was so small that only two of us could sit at the small table at the same time. The bathroom was situated in the unfurnished half of the basement which the landlord used as a storage room.
“Maybe you could put your safe in the landlord’s storage room amongst the old boxes and shelves of bottled raspberries and peaches,” I suggested, trying to be helpful.
“Too dangerous,” he responded. “I need the safe to store my gold and anybody could go into the storage part of the basement and steal.”
“Your gold?” I asked incredulously. “What are you doing with gold at school? If you have that much gold, why don’t you leave it in the bank at home, or even here?”
“I need to have immediate access to it. That’s what I do. I buy and sell gold.”
It turned out that he was convinced that he would soon be a millionaire selling gold. It turned out that Paul was so sure that he would soon be rich that he had registered for only one class—ballroom dance, so he, along with Craig could be on the ballroom dance team. But in order to do that he had to be a full-time student, so he had paid full tuition and registered for 16 hours of audit credit. I soon learned that our new roommate was definitely different than the average student. It soon became apparent that our soon-to-be-a-millionaire roommate was exceedingly tight with his money, so much so that he was always last to pay his share of the bills and complained the loudest at having to pay them at all. But it was in his dating that he was the most different and to understand it, I must digress for a moment..
Before I was drafted I had dated (very briefly) Jill Hunter. I was much enamored of Jill, but so were many others and it was very difficult to get a date with her. When I returned, she was still unmarried so I resumed my courtship—or, more accurately, attempts at courtship--where I had left off, and with even less success than I had before going into the army. This discouraged me but I did not give up. The one thing I could always do with Jill was to go over to her apartment on Sunday afternoons. There, along with all the other would-be suitors and her roommates’ boyfriends, we would sing songs, chit chat and usually, one of the girls would bring cookies for treats.
But, of course, being almost 30 years old and still not married, I felt that it was incumbent on me to date, at least once, and preferably twice on every week-end. Craig felt the same way. So early in the week we would begin stewing, moaning, and asking ourselves and anyone who would listen, “who can I ask out this week-end?” I was a little puzzled why Craig would ask that, as I will explain in the next segment dealing more with him, but basically, it was because he was on the ballroom dance team and there were, therefore, plenty of girls he could ask out. In fact, on most week-ends he had at least one date with a girl who had asked him out.
When, however, I would ask Paul who he planned to ask out, he would simply reply, very flippantly, “I never think about it until the night I want to go out.”
“But,” I protested, “you can’t do that. All the sharp girls will already have been asked out by then.”
“I simply tell them to break their dates and usually they do,” he responded, with what seemed to me was a bit of overconfidence—even a bit of—and maybe more than a bit of ego. But after a few weeks, I discovered he wasn’t kidding. He really would call a girl up, usually less than an hour before the intended date and say something like, “Hi, Babe. Tonight is your lucky night. I need a date to the movies, so naturally I thought of you.” If he got a response like, “Who is this?’, he, in turn, would respond with, “You’re kidding, of course, but just to humor you I’ll tell you that this is Paul.” After the obligatory, “Oh hi, Paul. I’d love to go but I can’t. I already have a date.” He would say, “Cancel it. This may be your last chance to go out with me.”
Of course, I had always heard that there were those types of lovers—or, more accurately, daters—out there, but I assumed they were pretty much confined to the movies or TV shows. The fact that there might be a real person out there that actually talked and acted like that had never occurred to me. And I would have assumed that this was all merely the same sort of braggadocio that assured us that within the year he would be a millionaire except for two facts. First was the fact that on at least some occasions this approach actually worked, albeit, not always, and I don’t think, from what I observed, even most of the time, but occasionally, it did. The other, and more critical, convincer, for me at least, that Paul actually did work some sort of charm over women, was the fact that Patty Duke seemed not only to like him, but to be crazy about him. Patty was in our home-evening group and was easily the cutest and most vivacious girl in the group. What was more to the point, for me at least, was that she was a junior, and, therefore, I felt, a dating possibility. But, she exhibited little interest in me, and a great deal of interest in Paul, so I decided that there must be something more than mere braggadocio to his self-affirmed charm. (Parenthetically, I must say, that well into the semester, I asked Craig why he did not ask Patty out. “I am not in the habit of asking 16 year old girls out,” he responded. “Sixteen!” I exclaimed, “how could she be sixteen? She’s a junior.” ((It turns out that by the time I asked she had actually just turned 17)). He explained that she had graduated from a private school in Canada and had started college at an unusually early age.)
At any rate, I was beginning to think that there was more to Paul’s ability to attract women than I could readily see.
Well into the semester I had just asked Jill Hunter out for the umpteenth time and been turned down and was, therefore, obviously in the dumps. Paul said, “I don’t understand it. Why do you keep asking that girl out the same way. You need to change your approach. Treat her like I treat the girls I ask out. Don’t ask her several days before the date. Call her up an hour before you want to go out with her and just tell her you’re coming over to take her to the movies.”
“That wouldn’t work,” I responded, “she would already have a date by then.”
“So what?”, he said forcefully, “Tell her to cancel it and that you’ll be over to take her out.”

“That may work for the girls you date,” I said, implying that his dates were somehow “easy”, “but it wouldn’t work with Jill.”
“My eye!” he exclaimed. “I’ll bet I could get a date with her any day of the week at a moment’s notice.
“I don’t think so,” I said skeptically.
“I tell you what,” he added helpfully, “when you’ve pretty much given up on that girl, I’ll go over with you on you Sunday afternoon visits, meet her, and within an hour or less, I’ll have her licking my boots. That will give you an opportunity to see how it’s done with the next girl you’s like to date.”
Well, of course, at first I rather declined to be involved with that kind of an experiment, but after a few weeks of being turned down and listening to Paul’s subsequent tauntings, I threw in the towel.
“Alright,” I said, “why don’t you go over with me this coming Sunday night?”
“Now you’re sure you won’t be bitter or angry when she falls at my feet and begs me to take her out?”
“No,” I assured him. “I’ve finally given up with her. Besides, I really would like to see you in action. Maybe I could pick up a few pointers.”
So it was agreed that on the following Sunday I would take Paul with me to the weekly sing-along at Jill Hunter’s house. It wasn’t really her house in the sense that it was where her family lived, but she and about four other girls were renting a rather nice house on 5th East between 4th and 5th North.
After we knocked, Jill answered the door. “Oh Merrill,” she said enthusiastically, “We’re so glad you came. We always like it when you come over. And who is this that you’ve brought with you?”
“This is Paul, my roommate,” I said as we stepped into her front room.
“Why on earth did you bring him?” she asked almost disdainfully. I was shocked. In all the years I had known Jill she had never said anything negative about anyone and to make such an unkind remark was absolutely baffling. It was also very embarrassing because it seemed almost like I had warned her that Paul had boasted that she would be licking his boots after just a few minutes of contact. But I had not said a word to her about him, or even told her that I was bringing a roommate. I had brought other friends before and she had always been the very soul of kindness and even enthusiasm that I was bringing a friend over. It was most puzzling.
After a few minutes we gathered around the piano, as we usually did, with Jill playing and the rest of us singing. After a few bars Jill stopped playing, turned around a said to Paul, “You sound terrible, sing softer—much softer—or preferably not at all.” Again, I was floored. It was so completely out of her character, or at least, as I had always known it. After singing for a few minutes, Jill left the piano playing to a roommate and disappeared into the kitchen. After a few minutes she came out carrying a plate of cookies. She handed them around and offered me some and Paul reached over to take one.
“You can’t have any, “ she said pulling the plate away from him.
“Why not? You gave them to everyone else, “ he demanded to know.
“You don’t deserve any, “ she responded cruelly and walked out of the room with her plate.
“I think we better go, “ I said. “I really don’t understand it,” I continued, “She’s never been like this with anyone before.”
“I agree we should go,” he said, “but this girl is weird.”
“I think we better go,” I said when she came back into the room.
“Already?” she said in a surprised voice. “You just got here. But know that you are welcome any time, but don’t bring him with you next time,” she added pointing to Paul.
“That does it, “Paul exclaimed as he planted himself directly in front of her. “Since I got here a few minutes ago you’ve been nothing but rude and mean to me and I demand to know why!”
“You know very well why,” she said putting her hands on her hips and looking defiantly at him.
“That’s crazy. I have never seen you before in my life. If you think I’ve ever done anything to warrant the kind of behavior you’ve exhibited toward me, you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
“You and I were together at Ron Smith’s party last night.”
“I was at Ron Smith’s party but I don’t remember seeing you there. I’m sure I didn’t speak to you, much less do anything to justify the kind of behavior I’ve been subjected to here today.”
Jill grabbed her hair, which was long, flowing almost to her waist, and bunched it up on her head. “ I was wearing my short-hair wig so I looked at little different,” she started to explain but before she had even got that far, Paul was pointing at her excitedly.
“You, You! You!” he gurgled excitedly and then without saying anything else, he made a mad dash for the door, threw it open and ran out without bothering to close it behind him. In the same instant, Jill was after him, pausing only to pick up the hatchet laying on top of the wood stack at the door. She raised the hatchet over her head and ran after Paul like an Indian on the war-path pursuing someone with the intent to scalp him,
The front porch was a three-quarters waist-high enclosed that required a fast left turn in order to go down about 5 steps onto the sidewalk. Paul didn’t make the turn. He simple leaped over the porch railing and ran into the night. Jill, unable, or unwilling, to leap the railing ran around the side, descended the steps and chased him into the night.
The rest of us, Jill’s roommates, the other boyfriends, and I remained in the house looking through the open door dumbfounded. Shortly, Jill came back.
“He got away,” she announced with obvious disappointment. “Merrill, where on earth did you pick him up anyway?”
“He’s my roommate,” I repeated from the introduction.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Well don’t ever bring him back here again.”
“But, I don’t understand,” I said, more baffled than ever. “Whatever could he have done to cause you to act that way toward him?”
“Last night we were at a party together. He kept coming up to me and saying things like, ‘Hi tots, why don’t we hang out together’. When I told him, very politely, that I didn’t care to he kept saying things like, ‘you know you’re dying to get to know me better’. I told him to please leave me alone, but he kept bothering me. Soon he was trying repeatedly to put his arm around me and when I pushed him away he simply refused to give up but kept trying to put his arm around me so I decided that the only way to get rid of him was to bite him. So I did. He is a first class jerk. I don’t ever want to see him again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I had no idea.”
She assured me that she still liked me and that I was welcome to come over anytime and I took off. About a block or so away from her house, I saw someone lurking behind a tree in front of me. I was a little nervous but I decided to proceed bravely forward. As I got close to the tree I heard a loud whisper, “Merrill, is that you?” It was Paul so I relaxed.
“What happened at that party?” I asked.
“Oh Merrill, you are well rid of that girl,” he said vehemently. “She is a witch if ever there was one. I was at a party last night. I was doing absolutely nothing, just minding my own business, when out of the blue, she comes up to me and for no reason whatever, she bites me!”
“That is strange,” I acknowledged, refraining from repeating her side of the story.
“Strange? That girl is a witch if ever there was one.”
We continued our walk home in silence, with me with some effort suppressing the desire to remind him of his boast that she would be licking his boots.

Great Lovers I have known--III--Tom Allen--2

Great Lovers--III--Tom Allen--2
After Christmas vacation Tom actually wrote Beverly a few times but he simply was not much of a writer and I assumed that the whole affair had more of less died a natural death. Of course, under normal circumstances, Tom could have used leave time to visit Beverly in Provo, but Tom’s circumstances were not normal. Apparently, he had somehow agreed that he would trade in his leave time for cash to pay off creditors, so effectively, at least, according to him, he had no leave time.
Somehow, and I don’t really remember how, I learned about something they have in the army called "Religious Retreat". This is a program whereby, if your chaplain approves, you can take up to three days off to attend a religious function of some kind. I was getting a little homesick for BYU, so I proposed to Tom that we apply for Religious Retreat" to attend General Conference. He was excited about it, since apparently his leave restriction did not apply to "Religious Retreat." Accordingly, I applied and the chaplain, who was glad to get rid of us, granted our request.
When I told Tom that our request had been granted, he became really excited. I was amazed. He didn’t seem the type to get all that excited about General Conference and since he had never been to BYU, he couldn’t be that excited about going there either. After a bit it became clear that the real reason for his excitement was that he saw it as an opportunity to date--i.e. wine and dine--Beverly for three whole days.
He wrote her immediately saying that he would be there and hoped that she would reserve the evenings for him. She wrote back responding that she would be happy to see him and that she would indeed reserve the evenings for him. Tom was ecstatic.
An integral part of his plan was to present her with the new, and greatly improved, i.e. much lighter, Tom. He had become convinced that one reason that her enthusiasm for their dating had seemed to diminish a bit toward the end of the Christmas vacation had been his bulk. He was, admittedly, a little hefty. The result was that he determined to lose as much weight as he possibly could in the six weeks or so of preparation for our trip.
He had read a book, or pamphlet describing what he called, "The Grapefruit Diet". The idea behind this diet was that, unlike other food, grapefruit did not add to the calories you took into your body, it somehow subtracted from them. In other words, if you ate enough grapefruit, the grapefruit would actually begin to melt fat away from your body. So when I would eat with Tom, usually the evening meals in the mess hall. He would have mostly grapefruit, in fact, fairly often nothing but grapefruit. Tom was able to do this because he had for some time cultivated a friendship with the cooks--formerly, so he could get extra helpings. But now that paid off in getting extra grapefruit--quite a lot of extra grapefruit. Grapefruit was always an option--not a very popular one, from my observations, for breakfast at the mess hall, but my guess is that after Tom began his grapefruit diet that the cooks had to triple or even quadruple their orders of grapefruit. It speaks well for Tom that they were willing to do it.
Of course, it wasn’t just grapefruit dieting. Tom was so sure that the new sleek, suave Tom would so enamor Beverly (in just three days) that provision needed to be made for a more permanent relationship and that would require money. That base was also to be covered--as always, with my help, i.e. me furnishing the capital. Tom’s scheme this time was to become a middleman for glass figurines made by the glass blowers of Juarez. Tom was sure that when the various shops in Provo saw some of these they would jump at the chance to market them and we would make a fortune. Since this seemed like a scheme with somewhat more possibility than Tom’s usual offering, I agreed to advance him $50 to buy samples in Juarez.
Finally, the big day came. We were off to Provo carrying a little luggage and a box of glass figurines. Tom was always telling me all the things he planned to do with Beverly (on the $50 I advanced him for that purpose--also to be repaid out of the profits from the glassware business). I pointed out to him that he needed to spend at least some time promoting his glassware scheme, to which he assured me that that was right at the top of his list of priorities.
I had a great time. I watched the conference sessions in the Wilkinson Center and spent the what free time that left me visiting old friends--especially girl friends, and getting applications for my master’s degree which I planned to begin work on in June when I got out of the army. I saw little of Tom. The one or two times I did run into him, he assured me that the glassware scheme was going great. All the merchants he had talked to were, he claimed, enormously excited about selling this stuff. In addition, things were going great with his courtship of Beverly.
On Sunday, after the final session of conference we headed back. The whole way back, Tom could talk of nothing but Beverly and how well everything had gone. He was busy figuring out what I, as the best man, should wear at the wedding. Where we should have the reception--at her home in Las Cruces or on the base. He was working out the details of the honeymoon and planning to check out married housing on the base. Fortunately, I was spared the details of his whole future happiness with Beverly by the fact that, having had almost no sleep in the previous three days, he fell asleep for the rest of the trip.
The next day at dinner it was back to the grapefruit regimen--apparently, Tom wanted to present Beverly when she came home in a month, with an even sleeker Tom than his already sleek self. Two days later, however, I was surprised to see Tom come to the table with two large steaks (something that only someone who had greatly ingratiated himself with the cooks could get away with), a large, separate plate of mashed potatoes and two deserts.
"What’s this?" I asked. "You temporarily abandoning the grapefruit diet?"
Rather than reply, he merely handed me a sheet of beautiful stationery containing a very neat hand-written note in purple ink.
The note was dated Sunday night and said: "Dear Tom, It is clear from the attention you have paid me the last three days that you are much more serious about our relationship that I am. I am sorry but I can only think of you as a good friend, so when I come home, I think it best that we not date, but that we can still see each other at Church and Church activities and be good friends. Your good friend, Beverly."
"Looks like we came on a little strong," I commented with a laugh handing him back the letter.
"You laugh," he muttered. "You can’t even imagine how hard getting this letter has been on me."
"Having gone through it several times, " I commented trying to be consoling, "I can tell you this--its a lot easier getting this kind of thing as a letter rather than going though it face to face."
"Well, you won’t think it quite so funny when you find out that I’m going to have to ask you for $50."
"$50!", I exclaimed. "What on earth for?"
"For the chocolates," he explained.
"The chocolates? I don’t understand," I protested and then it hit me. "OH no!" I exclaimed.
Our Elder’s quorum, as a fund raiser, was selling cheap boxes of chocolates for $3 each. I had agreed to sell 3 boxes, which I had taken to work and promptly sold to people at work. Tom, thinking of himself, as always, as the supersalesman, had agreed to sell 16 boxes of the chocolates.
"Don’t tell me you ate all those choclates!" I cried. "In one night?"
"I was depressed", he explained. "When I got that letter I decided that I am going to eat and eat until I get so fat that I can’t move. Then I am going up to Beverly and say, ‘See what you’ve done to me.’ She’ll feel terrible--but not as terrible as I feel."
"Yes, I’m sure that will certainly make her sorry that she dropped you all right. Very smart move. Besides," I added, "if you are so fat you can’t move, how are you going to go up to her?--in a wheel chair?"
"I haven’t worked out all the details," he went on whining. "All I know is that I will be so fat that she will be sorry she ever did this to me."
Well, when I left the Army in June, Tom could still move, but he did gain most of, if not all of, the weight he lost on his grapefruit diet. We more or less quit going to Las Cruces and he quickly consoled his great loss by dating girls in El Paso--as usual, at my expense.

Great Lovers I have Known--III--Tom Allen--I

After I graduated I was promptly drafted with the purpose of fighting in Viet Nam. After basic training I was sent to White Sands Missile Range to learn how to do COBOL on army computers. The idea was that after a couple of months of training I would be sent to Viet Nam and the soldier who trained me actually was sent to Viet Nam, but I, and the soldier sent after me, for me to train, never were sent there. Then they quit sending soldiers. Although we were still in Viet Nam, the force was being reduced and it was clear that we would soon withdraw our troops altogether.
So I spent my two years in the Army at White Sands. When I first arrived, there were six of us single LDS enlisted men. Most of them had been to Viet Nam and were sent to White Sands to finish out their enlistment. Within a couple of months, there were only three of us left--Craig Johnson, about whom I will write later, Tom Allen and myself. After a year, Craig was discharged and returned to BYU, leaving Tom and me to fend for ourselves.
The nearest towns of any size to White Sands are Las Cruces , New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. We would go to both to attend social functions, but Tom favored El Paso, I favored Las Cruces. That is, Tom favored El Paso until he met Beverly. We were supposed to attend Church in Las Cruces, which we generally did, but the first year I was there, Tom always wanted to leave church quickly and get to some social event in El Paso. How Tom missed Beverly all that first year is still a mystery to me, after all, she was in our ward. But anyway, he did. It may have had to do with Craig, who also favored El Paso. Craig had gone on his mission to Mexico, so he really enjoyed socializing with the Hispanic people in El Paso. At any rate, Craig left in the middle of the summer and it was in August that Tom first asked Beverly out. She accepted and Tom was smitten. He took her out as often as he could, seeing as how he had no car and was, therefore, dependent on me for transportation. Tom’s lack of a car was a result of his lack of any money, which I will explain forthwith.
Tom had been a very successful salesman, and had, he claimed, been the proud recipient of an income in excess of 6 figures, which in those days was a considerable sum, somewhat akin to a quarter of a million dollars per annum today. But as so often happens with salesmen, or at least has so often happened with the few successful salesmen I have personally known, they have two problems. The first is the assumption that they will always earn what they earn at their peak. The second is that even if they could in some miraculous manner earn that much, they can always spend more--usually a great deal more. Both of these problems afflicted Tom in spades, to the point that he got so deep in the hole that he finally decided that the only solution--or, at least, the only somewhat honorable solution— was to volunteer for the draft, which he did. He had avoided being drafted outright by being overweight, but faced with the possibility of forfeiting on his debts--some of which were to people who, again, he claimed, were the type of characters who, when presented with a bankruptcy decree, would ignore it and attempt collection using brass knuckles, he knuckled down himself and brought his weight within acceptable limits. The result was that Tom’s creditors were forced to accept what payment they could get, and Tom was forced to give up his entire paycheck except for about $25 a month, to pay off debts.
At any rate, Tom began dating Beverly as much as he possibly could using my car and my money. Since I was rather chintzy with both, Tom only got off two or three dates before Beverly was off to BYU. After she was gone life settled more or less back into the old routine with Tom pressing to go to El Paso as often as I would agree to go.
During Christmas break, however, Tom really hit his stride. For one thing, he had a little more money. He was still, of course, restricted to his $25 a month allowance from the army, but he was always thinking up schemes to make extra money. Some of these actually paid off in a very minor way. He always claimed that they would pay off in a major way if I would simply break loose with the capital to make them major money makers, which I generally refused to do. My favorite scheme--possibly my favorite, because I saw through to the problems and refused to donate so much as a dollar to it--was his "great kool-aid bonanza". He came to me one day greatly excited, telling me he had the perfect scheme to make a small fortune. If I would loan him $50 I would double my money in a matter of days. When I demanded to know how this was going to happen, he was reluctant to tell me (as he generally was) claiming that it was such a fool-proof scheme that I would want to do it by myself, thus cutting him--who had thought the whole thing up--completely out. To this I replied that, not being much into money-making schemes, he need not worry about me. In this instance, he finally agreed to tell me the scheme, since it was clear that no money--at least, no money from me, would be forthcoming unless he did. It turns out, he explained, that the PX had decided to put their sugarless kool-aid--normally 10¢ a package--on sale for only 2¢ a package! If we--or, more accurately, he, using my money--bought up $50 worth, he was sure he could sell the stuff in a few days for 8¢per package, thus being able to double my $50 and still have $50 left over for himself.
"And who," I asked, "do you propose to sell all this kool-aid to?"
"Are you kidding?" he demanded in an incredulous tone of voice. "People will be scarfing this up all over the place. They will be getting normally 10¢ packages of kool-aid for only 8¢. People will be buying all we will sell them and pleading for us to sell them more."
"Well, all I want to know is, who are these people?’
"For starters, the guys in the barracks."
"The guys in the barracks!" I said with a laugh. "The guys in the barracks shop at the same PX you shop at. I doubt very much that they will be jumping at the chance to buy kool-aid at 8¢ a package when they can buy it at the same price you paid for it."
"Well, I can always sell it to the people we know at church, both in Las Cruces and El Paso."
"The people in church!" I laughed hollowly again. "I take it you are going to pass a note up and down the aisles saying something like, ‘Would you like to buy a package of normally-10¢-sugar-free-kool aid for a mere 8¢?’ That should go over in a big way."
"Listen," Tom said impatiently, "how I sell it is not your concern. All you need to do is give me the $50 and then collect the extra $50 in a couple of days."
"I’m sorry, Tom," I said trying to sound sincerely sorry, "But there is a good reason why the PX has put the stuff on sale. I don’t know what it is, but my guess is that you will be able to buy kool aid at 4¢ or 5¢ a package anywhere. They probably made way too much of the stuff and are giving the PX the first shot of getting rid of the surplus." Of course, it turned out I was dead wrong. In a couple of days you could not buy sugarless kool aid--not legally, at least--at any price. The government had banned cyclamates, the principle ingredient in the stuff--and required kool aid to withdraw it from the market. The PX had gotten a few days warning and tried to unload their supply.
But the important point was that I had saved my $50. I was not always so lucky. Nevertheless, sometimes Tom’s schemes would actually pay off--as I said--in a minor way and he would have a few extra bucks to spend.
Well, during the college Christmas break, while Beverly was home, he made the most of those few extra bucks and anything and everything he could get out of me. The result was that he was dating Beverly several times a week.
Beverly’s father, who during the summer had assumed that, since Beverly would soon be safely away at BYU, the whole thing would die a natural death, became concerned. I knew he was concerned because he called me into his office. He was the chief chemist at White Sands, or, at least, if not the chief, very close to it. He had a large spacious office--which my boss did not have (he shared it with two others)--a private secretary, and several workers down the hall.
Before the holidays were over he called me twice into his office to talk to him. The first time he explained that he and his brother had always loved chemistry. They had played with chemistry kits all the time they were growing up. All the time he was explaining about his childhood, I was asking myself, first, why he had called me over, and second, what I was going to say to my boss, who I was sure would ask me why the head chemist had asked me to come to his office. I wasn’t sure he would believe me when I told him that he had called me over to explain what a great time he had had as a boy playing with his chemistry sets.
Of course, it soon came out what the real purpose was. It became clearer when he explained that, although, both he and his brother had loved chemistry from their earliest days, only he had actually gotten a degree. His brother had taken lots of chemistry classes in college but had never actually gotten a degree. The result was that his brother, who according to Beverly’s dad, was always inventing new and important chemicals for the small companies he worked for, it didn’t do him a lot of good because as soon as he invented these marvelous new chemicals, his small company would use the new chemical as a leverage to sell out to a big company who would promptly lay off the brother. Thus, although a chemistry genius, because he had never gotten a degree, he was mostly out-of-work and broke. Beverly’s father, on the other hand, because he had a degree, was chief chemist at a major army installation and was securely earning a good income. Mostly so I would have something to explain to my boss, I asked him what the chief chemist at White Sands actually did.
"I always have a goal," he responded, "and I’m working toward it constantly."
I decided from that rather evasive answer that his goal was pretty much the same as my boss’s goal, which was pretty much the same goal as most of the upper level people at White Sands and that was to always have something in mind so you could look busy in case a general happened to walk through your department. Beverly’s father actually called me over two more times while I was there and it was clear that he was not going to waste any effort on the goal of looking busy on a mere Spec 4.
"Do you see what I’m driving at?" he asked after explaining about always having a goal.
"You feel that it is important to graduate from college." I said after a pause. I was still thinking about what I was going to tell my boss and thinking that the idea that the chief chemist called me over to tell me about the importance of college graduation was not much more believable than that he called me over to tell me what fun he had as a boy with his chemistry set.
"Precisely!" he exclaimed hitting his fist on his desk for emphasis.
"That is very helpful," I said, "and nice to know and all that, but, actually, I’ve graduated from college."
"I know that. But your friend, Tom, hasn’t. How much college do you think he has?"
I responded that I really didn’t know but I doubted that it was very much.
"Well, I do know. I had a friend look it up in his personnel file. Exactly zero, that’s how much. That’s why I called you over here. I want you to somehow put the kibosh on his dating of my daughter. I also learned that he is so deeply in debt that he hardly gets any money to spend. I don’t know where he is getting the money to date her at all."
Of course, I was not about to supply that bit of information. I simply told him that the holidays were almost over, and, I felt, that the romance would probably die a natural death which I really did feel, knowing that Tom was unlikely to carry on a courtship by correspondence.
This proved to be the case. After Beverly returned to BYU, Tom wrote her once, or possibly twice, and then life seemed to return to normal. But, as it turned out, the flame was turned down, but it was by no means extinguished, as I was about to learn.

Great Lovers I have known--II-Gary Jensen

Great Lovers I have Known--II--Gary Jensen
Unlike most of my roommates, Gary Jensen was strikingly handsome--so much so, in fact, that frequently when girls first met him, their mouths would simply drop open in wonder, or admiration, or longing, or something like that. However, after they had actually talked with Gary for a couple of minutes, their mouths closed right back up--and usually pretty quickly, at that. Gary was a psychology major, and we all pretty much agreed that he chose that major so he could, hopefully, figure out why he was so different. But it didn’t seem to help much, or at least, in so far as we could observe. Of course, we all agreed that a great deal of the problem was that he was so good looking. He was not only good looking but he was tall and had a beautiful head of blond hair to boot. You can’t possibly have all those advantages and expect to be completely normal--and he wasn’t.
Of course, I will admit that sometimes Gary would show sense that somehow surprised you. Like the time, for example, that one of the roommates came home with a deck of cards--which he claimed to have picked up off the street--with normal face cards on one side and pictures of half-naked girls on the other. Gary took one look at one card and muttered with disgust. "You get mixed up with that stuff and you will lose your taste for real girls. My advice is stick with the real." Now he couldn’t have picked that up in psychology class.
He had no trouble at all getting dates and normally had no trouble getting a second or even a third date with a girl, but at that point they would start to balk. Admittedly, he did have girls who would gladly have dated him longer, but they were a bit strange themselves and he soon dropped them.
His troubles in dating greatly increased during the second semester he lived with us. He had started taking karate lessons. Pretty soon he began banging his fist--and sometimes, even a foot, into the walls and the doors. The idea, apparently, was to swing against the wall with the hand, or foot, going at incredible speeds and then, at the last fraction of a second, pull back so that he actually hit the wall with only a feather touch. Well, at first he wasn’t too good at it and he slammed into the walls and the doors pretty hard, although, I will say, he never actually went through them, which is more than I can say for Dan Tonks, about whom I will tell later. But after awhile, he got so he could go at the wall so fast that you were sure he was going to put his fist through the plasterboard, but pulled back at the last instant so he hardly touched the wall. The problem was that having pretty well mastered this trick, he could not resist trying it out on real people, including his dates. He, of course, tried it out on us, his roommates, first and I can assure you that after the first experience we kept ourselves at a considerable distance from him. It is a bit (and maybe even more than a bit) disconcerting to see a fist flying at you at a rate of at least 90 mile per hour and be sure that your sojourn on earth is over and then have the fist actually come to a halt at the point of your nose with only a slight flick. As I said, however, having once experienced it, none of us wanted to experience a repeat performance--afraid, no doubt, that Gary might become suddenly distracted as his fist careened toward our nose.
Being unable to practice on his roommates, Gary was naturally always looking around for other possibilities and who more possible than his dates? Having been on a couple of double dates with Gary and seen him in action, I was surprised that he never seemed to learn that having a fist fly at you at an incredible rate of speed is not a pleasant experience. The first time he would do it with a date, he would do it as a complete surprise and I can say that I have seldom seen anyone look so terrified. But I think Gary actually expected after he had proved that he could stop his fist just in time to deliver only a slight touch that the date would say something like, "Gee, that was neat! How did you do that?"
What they actually said on the occasions when I was present was, "Don’t you ever, ever, do that again."
But, of course, that never discouraged Gary. He seemed somehow certain that if he almost punched them in the face, or on the ear, but didn’t quite, that they would come to realize what a remarkable thing he had done. The result was, that while earlier, he could always get a second date--and usually a third or even a fourth--with a girl, he now almost never got even the second. I tried to tell him that I thought it had something to do with the repeated karate chops, but he only laughed. He was sure that if he delved deep enough into his psychology books, he would come to understand it all.
Well, Gary graduated and having done so and, consequently having joined the working class, i. e. those with money, he got himself a better apartment, but we continued to see him. The reason was that his boss had hired him to teach karate. The shop in which he did his stuff was just down from Knight-Mangum hall. At that time there was a sort of a strip mall of little stores where now there is the Campus Plaza parking lot and a service station. Of course, normally when we left the campus, we would go home down 4th east, but occasionally, when we wanted to see Gary, we would go down 6th and stop in at his karate studio. Most of the time it was no problem because there was almost never anyone there. His boss, believing that with a karate studio so close to campus he would get all kinds of business, was disappointed to learn that most students had neither the money or the time to invest in karate lessons. So after a few months, Gary announced that his boss was closing shop and that he, Gary, was moving to Salt Lake in search of better opportunities.
Well, I didn’t see Gary for several months and then one day I ran into him on campus. He was with Wayne Peterson, who had lived the previous year in our apartment complex, but not in our apartment. It turns out that the two of them had opened an electronics store and were doing extremely well. A couple of months later Gary Mathews and I were together on campus and we ran into Gary Jensen again. We asked him how dating was going and he announced that shortly after he and Wayne had launched their store, he had married a girl he had met in the singles ward.
I suspect taking pity on us--me for my "lean and hungry" look, and Gary who always managed to look hungry without being lean--he invited us to dinner at his place in Salt Lake, so we could meet his wife. Eagerly, we accepted.
Accordingly, about a week later we found ourselves at Gary Jensen’s home just off Redwood Road north of North Temple. It was a charming little home set in a large lot with very big trees both in his yard and the neighbors. Most surprising was the fact that his wife was not only very attractive, but remarkably charming. She had a personality that can best be described as infectiously merry. She had a delightful little laugh that she must have known was pleasing because she did it often. It was also clear that she was very much in love with and very proud of having married Gary.
I told Gary that I very much his admired his situation. He had a beautiful and delightful wife, and a very nice home. He responded with. "Well, of course, I agree about my wife, but as soon as I can afford it, we’re moving."
"But why?" I asked surprised. This is a nice home and the yard is delightful. It’s like living in a forest in the middle of the city."
"It’s the neighbors. They’re weird. The other day Sue (Gary’s wife) was in the backyard sun-bathing and my neighbor to the north climbed up into a tree to ogle her. He fell out of the tree and broke his arm. Serves him right the old coot."
Gary’s wife, who had been in the kitchen until the last comment protested, "I’m sure that that nice Mr. Smith was not ogling me. He was just up in his tree trimming the branches."
"You don’t use binoculars to trim branches," Gary retorted quickly and with some vehemence.
She laughed that delightful little laugh of hers and said softly, "I had forgotten about the binoculars."
At any rate I tell all this just in case you happen to be a little strange and have gotten a degree in psychology and it has not helped. There is still hope. All you have to do is get your black belt in karate, open a karate studio that fails, and then open up an electronics store and all will come out for the best in the long run, even if in fact, especially if, the psychology degree doesn’t do the trick.