Margo Christie's Blog - Posts Tagged "coming-of-age"

In small town America in the 1970s, gas stations were called filling stations. Locally-owned franchises where you could get a tune-up as well as a fill-up, they employed full-time attendants known as "gas jockeys" and a mechanic you could trust - You knew they guy, his wife and kids and where he lived. He knew what was under your hood as well as he knew what was under his.

In Catonsville, the small town outside Baltimore where I grew up, one local filling station was Inglewood Amoco. More than just a place to fill up or get your brakes re-shod, Inglewood Amoco was a meeting place; a place where friends gathered to hear the latest gossip over a 15-cent can of Coke from the machine.

Inglewood sponsored a car, Number 95, in the stock car races every Saturday night at Dorsey Speedway. A blue '55 Chevy with "95" on the doors and "Inglewood Amoco" emblazoned down the rear quarterpanels, it was commandeered by Will, their head mechanic. One summer evening, my next-door neighbor, LouAnn invited me to go with her to Dorsey.

At first I wasn't sure. I liked LouAnn okay. She was fine company on our quiet street, where there wasn't much going on; but she was geeky and pudgy: a big kid. Her sisters made fun of her for playing with Barbie dolls at her age, 18. Plus, Dorsey Speedway was rundown. Situated in a clearing at the end of a rutted dirt road in the poorest part of Howard County, it consisted of a rickety stack of bleachers, one lousy concession stand and a packed dirt track. When things really got going, cars roaring and crashing into each other on the dusty track, a noxious haze hovered in the glow of the overhead lights.

But the phone wasn't exactly ringing off the hook for me. Earlier that school year, I'd lost all my friends, having to do with a good-looking, big-mouthed guy named Angelo and something we'd done under a railroad bridge - Teenagers can be so cruel. So I decided to give LouAnn and Dorsey Speedway a go.

Turned out it was fun, whooping and hollering as souped-up shells of cars went 'round and 'round. Will white-knuckled Number 95 with ease, and ended up finishing second.

After the races, I followed LouAnn to the pit, impressed that here at Dorsey, she seemed to know exactly what to do. There, Will, surrounded by swooning women and awestruck men, went about the business of loading Number 95 onto a trailer. Chewing a toothpick, he paused now and again to wink at the women and laugh with the men. This reminded me of a song, "Rapid Roy," from an album in my Dad's collection, "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" by Jim Croce. Dad and I having played that album to death, I knew all the words to every song. As Will flirted with pudgy LouAnn then tossed me a conspiratorial wink, I knew, without even thinking about it, that he, like Rapid Roy, was a charmer.

Off to the side lingered a baby-faced guy LouAnn had introduced me to in the stands. Bobby was Will's brother-in-law, a junior at Catonsville High, where I'd be in a year. He was cute, though not in the way I'd found Angelo cute. With bushy hair and a slouching stance, he was awkward and kid-like, like LouAnn. As he continuously shifted to make room for the older, better-looking others, I felt sorry for him. Later, when it seemed no one was looking, I slipped him my number.

Before long, we were an item: high school sweethearts.

Bobby was a gas jockey at Inglewood Amoco. Three nights a week and all day Saturday, he pumped gas and cleaned windshields, for two-fifty an hour plus customers' nickels and dimes. He was 18, LouAnn's age, but in eleventh grade, having been held back a year. Far from a scholar, he got bad grades and couldn't spell. I didn't care about that. After a year of getting ignored by my so-called friends, of avoiding the lavatory and the cafeteria for fear of the whispers that seemed always to follow me, I now had what most girls my age merely wished for: a boyfriend with a job.

In his '68 Ford Custom, Bobby and I made the rounds of Catonsville's hangouts. For fries with gravy, there was Mr. G's Drive-In; for cheese steak subs, it was the Tiffany or Ciafalo's. Always on Saturdays, it was Dorsey Speedway and, when Smoky and the Bandit hit the big screen, there was the Edmondson Drive-In, where we delighted to watch Burt Reynolds wheel a black Trans Am as effortlessly as Will wheeled Number 95. Always, at some point during every date, we wheeled into Inglewood Amoco, for just a Coke and to see who was hanging out.

No longer the de facto president of the lonely hearts club, I now had things to do, places to go. This was important, for at the time, my parents' marriage was falling apart. Dad drank a lot and slapped Mom around. She spent a lot of time out. Supposedly she was in classes at CCC but, listening to cheating songs on the Country station in Bobby's car, I got a feeling there was more to their fights than Dad's constant drinking.


Sometimes Dad got so drunk he accused everyone in the house of lying to him. That was when I'd spend my evening with Bobby at the Inglewood. While he raced between the pumps and the cash register, I kicked back at the bulky metal desk where Bill Schraff, the owner and also a mechanic, wrote estimates while shouting jokes to Will, in the bays.

I spent all of ninth grade and half of tenth thinking I'd graduate high school and marry Bobby. We'd get a house and have some kids and spend the rest of our lives in our small burg outside Baltimore. That didn't happen and, for the best. Mom and Dad were lousy parents. I likely wouldn't have been much better.

Within a year of those steamy summer nights killing time with Bobby at the Inglewood, Mom left. My sister quit school and married a guy who abused her, and I, following in Mom's path, starting looking around for something better than what I had.


Kenny was cooler than cool. Ten years older than me, he had a Harley Davidson and a stripper ex-wife. I moved into his apartment at a roach motel of a complex called Meadow Lane, known to those who lived there as Ghetto Lane.  One day, he took me to a notorious former burlesque strip in Baltimore known as the Block, and I became a stripper, too.

It was 1978. The country was in the throes of a gas crunch. Cars formed snaking lines to fill up at record high prices. To save money, people pumped their own. But the Harley didn't burn much gas, and I had a job making way more than nickels and dimes.