Sweet Sixteen Parties

 

Another bright note of my sophomore year was that I continued to sell programs at Tulane Stadium and started sleeping Uptown at my friend Stephen Ehlinger‘s house. 

Stephen introduced me some of the girls that attended Louise McGehee School. It was the year that the McGehee girls in our grade started having Sweet 16 parties, and I ended up getting invited to the parties because of my friendship with Stephen which, in turn, reopened the Uptown door for me, and the McGehee girls were indeed very cute. I remember thinking how cool and sophisticated Meg Alverson was because she drank scotch. I mean, no one drank scotch and she was so dang cool.

But the problem was I couldn’t get Uptown as much as I wanted, so I stayed out in Metairie on the weekends in the Spring. I worked at a series of jobs, mostly retail sales at either Clearview or Lakeside shopping malls, to try to save money for a car, but I usually would spend it on drinking or buying clothes. From time to time I could get one of the neighborhood kids to drive me Uptown to go to either Valencia or The Fly, always with the promise of me introducing them to girls, which we would indeed do, but that would quickly get old, especially if I was the only one who would end up kissing the girls.