Summer legends

Crossed legs, pudding brains, and bloody hooks

by Jerry Fraser

Summers before we became teen-agers we sat under the deck at Barnacle Billy’s in Ogunquit and smoked cigarettes, tide permitting.

The tide came and went around small concrete piers that underpinned the restaurant, and at mid-tide we could navigate between them in skiffs.

High tide would flush us out, but there was never any trouble going somewhere else for a smoke — along the Marginal Way, or out in our skiffs.

Still, we liked it under Billy’s, because Perkins Cove was our world. We spent almost every waking moment at the cove, and to sit there smoking while tourists chatted a few feet above us and fishing boats came and went was a heady experience.

For the most part, we smoked whatever anybody had stolen from his older brother. Marlboros and Winstons were the cigarettes of choice, although for a while there was a brand called Paxton (if I remember right) that came in a plastic “humidifier pack” suited to our environment. But Paxtons never really caught on. I think they were menthol, and everyone knew that Salem, another menthol, was the “international recognition signal” among homosexuals.

It’s possible that some of our cigarettes may have been stolen from stores — “hooked” as we said, or “lifted” — but most of them came from our homes. (In my case, however, there was no older brother, and my mother smoked Kent, which, like Parliament, no one had any use for, so people preferred to supply me with cigarettes, rather than vice versa. Eventually I began baiting lobster traps for Red Bridges, and he paid me a dollar a day and let me take a few Winstons when we came in from fishing.)

We weren’t much on women at the time, or cars, but we never ran out of things to talk about, even when we weren’t talking about tuna fishing, and in the cool, damp air beneath Billy’s deck we first began sharing Maine’s urban legends.

I learned, for instance, that if you popped a blister, the liquid inside was a deadly poison, and if you so much as touched one drop of it to your tongue you would die instantly.

And it was here that I learned that if a girl crossed her legs during sex the boy would be unable to pull out. This made sense, because we knew that dogs got stuck together all the time. And it turned out to be true: One of our number’s father was a state trooper, and he had to put a blanket over a teen-age couple from Wells when he brought them to York Hospital so doctors could pry them apart after the girl crossed her legs while they were screwing in the back of the boy’s car.

As it turns out, another horny Wells girl was there the same night; she’d been using a hotdog in place of a guy and let go of it, and now she couldn’t get it out. We thought she was pretty stupid, because if she hadn’t let go, the hotdog probably would have broken anyway. Then what would she have done?

Whether the debacle was a result of her crossing her legs we never ascertained.

Some of the stories were more involved, like the one about the man with the hook for a hand who broke jail and headed for Ogunquit. These two teen-agers from York were parking on Bald Head Cliff when the radio station interrupted the music with a special bulletin warning about the break. The girl got scared and wanted to go home, but the guy was hotter than a mink so he tried to talk her into staying and making out some more. Finally, she said, “Take me home!” and he knew she really meant it, so he drove her home. When he got to her house he went around to the passenger side to let her out, and hanging from the door was a hook, with blood all over it.

And then there was the motorcycle rider (in upstate New York, actually) who had a head-on collision with a delivery truck. The whole thing was caught live by a TV news crew, and no one could believe it when the motorcyclist actually got up after the crash. The news crew rushed over and began interviewing the guy. They asked him to take his helmet off so that his friends and family could see who he was and marvel that he was all right, but when he did, his head turned to pudding and ran down over his shoulders like slush. His only hope for survival, doctors said later, would have been leaving his helmet on for the rest of his life — there was nothing else holding his brains in.

The victim’s family knew Gov. Rockefeller, and he barred the TV station from replaying the tape. But we knew a kid whose brother had a friend who went to Cornell, and he had been watching when it happened.

The connection left us feeling like witnesses to history.

Sometimes at night we would climb up over the banking and find our way to the busboy’s room at Billy’s. You had to be 13 to be a busboy, and we envied them. It seemed to us that they got to spend a lot of time hanging around the busboys’ room telling stories of their own, and, whatever we thought about fishing, when we were hanging around Billy’s we wanted to be busboys. If the restaurant was very busy, Scotty West or Billy himself would run us off, but it was okay to come back the next night and see what was going on. Besides, most of us had to get home.

Since then, most all of us have given up smoking. It just wasn’t the same.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com.