The Weekly Screed (#932)

A mundane mile of Monona Drive

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — A modest building called the East Side Club was the venue last month for what Sharyn — my crack publicist — and I, decided to call a “book party,” to mark “officially” (I actually don’t have an office) the initiation of my publishing enterprise, Last Kid Books. Among the cheap thrills attendant upon the event was seeing my name dyslexically displayed — “DAIVD BENJAMIN” — on the club’s Monona Drive marquee.

Whoa! Monona Drive.

When I moved to Madison at age 13, from tiny Tomah “up north,” Monona Drive became for me a sort of social lifeline. After surviving ninth grade at LaFollette High, I was adjusted to the big city but short on friends. The kids who might qualify for the job lived near school, which was a three-mile, twenty-minute bus ride from my fourplex rowhouse on Simpson Street. Pedaling my one-speed Montgomery Ward bike, the trip took twice as long. But my options were clear. So, one day in June, I arrived uninvited at a house on Buckeye Road, up the hill from Monona Drive and said “Hiya, Dick.” Dick said “hi” in return with a look of mild puzzlement. But he didn’t tell me to get the hell out of there, which was enough permission to insinuate myself into the Albright family for the next three years. Dick’s mom became by surrogate mother, feeding me at least a hundred meals and treating me with no more cordiality than she afforded Denny, Dick, Lois or Ronnie. Dick’s house was also the neighborhood grocery, where a hood named Reeve, one of my classmates, confessed to me fifty years later, that he used to swipe candy from Dick’s dad. It was also the store where, now and then, Sen. William Proxmire dropped in for a loaf of bread. 

But I never bumped in any senators. Nor would I have noticed if I had.

That cozy, noisy home on Buckeye Road — where Dick and I built a golf course in the backyard and pondered the physics of ski-jumping off the garage roof — became one of my life’s landmarks. Nowadays, when I drive past its remnants — Larry’s grocery is a memory and renovations have rendered it unfamiliar and unwelcoming — I feel a pang of loss for my adolescence and a reminder of love for Dick’s merry and mordant mom.

The East Side Club also whispers to me whenever I pass. Right after high school, we had a riotous Class Party there on a June night (and the next morning) in 1967, when the mortal cloud of Vietnam hung over every male graduate, but especially those who were not college-bound and had no access to a precious, life-giving 2S Deferment. That party gave off an ominous scent that blended Miller High Life with English Leather and a whiff of carpe diem.

The club in those days was called the East Side Business Men’s Association (ESBMA), and it was notorious for its monthly teen dances, which drew kids from three East Side schools. All the schools had their dances, but the ESBMA affairs were special because there were no chaperones — not one teacher, vice-principals or parent volunteer. On ESBMA nights, parents didn’t know where we were. Allegedly, a few members were there to monitor the goings-on, make sure kids didn’t smuggle in any booze and to see that there was no actual copulation transpiring among the (also allegedly) hoody boys and slutty girls dancing dirty in the middle of the rock’n’roll throng. But who could tell? And who could have stopped us?

And besides, by Monday morning back in school, all the kids (especially the ones who hadn’t been there) at East, LaFollette and Monona Grove knew in lubricious detail exactly who had done what with whom — right out in the open! — on the ESBMA dance floor the weekend before, even if hadn’t happened at all. This was high school. We needed legends. 

Since those days, I’ve been back to the ESBMA for high school reunions, where I connected with friends I thought I’d never see again, and bumped into nemeses I never wanted to see again. The joint holds more significance for me than I’d ever afforded it, insinuating itself into my psyche somewhat after the fashion in which I imposed myself into Dick’s family.

Across the street from the East Side Club is a landmark that no one can see. It’s gone now, except in the minds of every kid who passed it a thousand times on Monona Drive and patronized it whenever, on a Friday night after the game, there was just enough cash in his jeans (or her purse) to afford a burger and a shake. Somewhere on this outpost, there was a sign that identified it as, I think, the “Monona Drive-In.” The name might have been something else but it was irrelevant — no matter what — because of the neon sign that thrust itself out onto Monona Drive and, irresistibly, into the consciousness of every passerby. The sign cried out, in small but brilliant red-orange lettering, “HUNGRY?”, after which, in medium-size brilliant red-orange letters, “HUNGRY?” Of course, at its climax, which occurred every ten seconds all night long ’til midnight and beyond, it asked the insistent, crave-inducing question in letters that seemed sun-bright, blood-red, hysterical and strangely sexual: “HUNGRY?”

“Yes, yes, I give in. Feed me. FEED ME!”

Between my high school and the ESBMA is a house where I went to worship. Linda lived there. She was two years my senior in high school. I loved her desperately and torturously from December to June as only a romantic sophomore boy can love an unattainable goddess with a smile that could melt the tabs on your sneaker laces. Gracefully, Linda evaded my bestowal of goddesshood, tolerated my infatuation and cultivated my sense of humor so wisely that our parting, one summer day on Monona Drive, was a healing benediction rather than a knife through my heart. She gave me a book of poetry and made me promise to never stop writing. The moment sealed our friendship forever, and stuck me in the least lucrative career I could possibly pursue.

At my “book party,” Linda was there, of course, with her husband Stan, who has been truer, kinder and more unselfish toward Linda than ever I could have been.

As I welcomed friends, mostly old and a few new, I realized how many of my life’s landmarks are concentrated in this mundane mile of Monona Drive. Somewhere along here, not far from MG High School, I broke up foolishly in tenth grade with a vivacious and beautiful girl named Toni because I thought she wasn’t smart enough for me. I’m still beating myself up over that. One of the apartment buildings near the ESBMA is where my mom took us — big sister Peg, kid brother Bill and me — to meet one of her post-divorce beaux (soon discarded in an onset of Catholic guilt). There I heard, in stereo hi-fi, my first note of Dave Brubeck, to whom I’ve been true ever since.

The ESBMA sits adjacent a grand lakeside sward called Olbrich Park. In the summer I lost Linda, I was at the Olbrich beach with Dick, Keener, Blumreich — the usual suspects — and we saw a girl. She was the younger sister of a classmate, only 15 years old. I’ve forgotten her name, if I ever knew it. She was blonde and golden and completely filled-out, in the smallest bikini you could find in 1965. She was, I think, too young to be self-conscious of the effect she could have if she were to slip a finger beneath the strand of fabric on her hip and tug at it, just long enough — barely an instant! we were alert to these things — to suggest the gently curving flow of her skin all the way from breast to ankle. 

Which she did, as she swayed away from us through the sand. We all watched. 

And I’ve never forgotten.