The Goofy Girls

The Winters used to be tougher, eggs used to sell for 14 cents a dozen, I used to be told to eat up and get a little flesh on my bones, and there was a different kind of girl then.

Whatever happened to the goofy girls?

The goofy girls were wonderful. They used to have names like Flip and Bootsie, they said things like, "You tell 'em kid, I stutter," they used to roll their stockings and leave their galoshes unbuckled, they used to giggle and sign their letters by lipsticking their mouths heavily and pressing them to the bottoms of letters written in green ink with little circles instead of dots over the i's. They never had dresses without lots of little bows and hooks and eyes and catches all over them. They drank -- but never, in your presence, enough to justify the long and harrowing hangovers they talked about.

They broke dates with other fellows to go out with you, and they broke dates with you to go out with other fellows. Sometimes you were their late date and sometimes you were the one they latedated after. They could dance like fools and they always wanted to dance one more dance after the last dance, and you never felt silly circling the silent and empty dance floor with them while the band was packing up, while you sang Under a Blanket of Blue in each other's ears.

To my knowledge there are only two goofy girls left in the world, and I am saving them up. For myself. They are married and I am married -- not to a goofy girl -- but the way the world is shaping up, prohibition is bound to come back and any day now it's going to be time to climb into a rumble seat with somebody else's girl and get cracking out to the Canoe Place Inn, or the Glen Island Casino. I am looking for my saddle shoes and believe me brother, I am saving up these two chicks for my very own.

The wonderful thing about the goofy girls is, first, that they were girls. They were not women, or ladies, or young ladies, or wives, or divorcées, or fiancées. They were girls. They were not devoted to getting jobs, or getting married, or fulfilling themselves, or being helpmeets or modern women or socially useful females. They were devoted to dancing, the consumption of gin-and-ginger-ale and chicken salad sandwiches, the writing and receiving of letters, to necking, to falling in and out of love, the collecting of Russ Columbo and Ambrose and Reginald Forsythe and Leo Reisman records, to the losing of compacts and lipsticks and eyebrow pencils, to riding in cars and pulling up stockings, to smelling nice and looking pretty.

And, of course, to being absolutely nuts about me.

You see, I was a sad bird all full of cosmic ideas and social and suicidal theories and flap-doodle, and if there was one thing a goofy girl liked, it was a premature wreck like me. They used to elbow each other all along the starting line trying to be first to bring a smile to my careworn countenance. They vied to pry my chin from the bar table, to scrape me loose from the floor; they made me stop drinking and took me for long sobering-up walks in the snow; they made waiters in speakeasies bring me lots of black coffee; and they, from time to time, took me home. They often took me home with them and sometimes they took me to my own home, and called up in the morning to see if I was still among the quick.

Why they liked Weltschmerz-sodden fellows like me, I never knew, but I did know enough not to queer the pitch. The goofy girls like the sad birds, and if being a sad bird was going to get me a goofy girl, I would be the saddest of them all.

Of course, not always. A lot of the time, after I decoyed one of these confections, I managed to get a little goofy myself, and we did things that still seem to me the height of euphoria.

Like playing the drums in the band.

Like doing the rhumba the way (this girl kept telling me) they did it in the back alleys of Panama, like telephoning old friends in Richmond, Virginia, at 12 o'clock at night in order to meet them in Baltimore at three the next day when we were in Utica, New York, having driven up from Port Washington, Long Island.

Like hot footing it over to the Savoy to tell Chick Webb there was a hell of a girl who'd won the amateur night at the Apollo, big girl named Ella Fitzgerald.

Like going to the place in Central Park where we could hear, from the Casino where we didn't have the money to go, Eddie Duchin with Leo Reisman's band playing Sam and Delilah, and dancing on the rainy footpath. Necking, on the rainy bench, later, to Let's Do It. And, sometimes, doing it.

That was another thing about the goofy girls. They were used to having passes made at them. They knew what you were doing when you made a pass, they were fairly sure in their own minds what they would do when a guy made a pass, and there was something soothing about all that. When you suggested a little going down to the beach and taking off your shoes and going wading, they knew in advance whether it was going to be just wading, and if they had figured on just wading, it was made manifest to you, and in the wonderful way they had, you believed you had just meant wading. What I mean, they made even the wading fun. You came back, not mad, but full of the wonder of wading.

And then, of course, if it wasn't just wading... They used to laugh and giggle even then. I don't imagine girls do that very much any more. They probably talk about Togetherness and decide it would be more sensible to spend the money on a foam rubber convert-a-bed instead of an engagement ring. The goofy girls would have perished without engagement rings. They never kept any one ring very long, but they had always one. At least one.

They always had at least one secret tragedy, too. There was always some misty fellow who had done, and continued to do, them wrong. Every six months, all of a sudden they could not go anywhere with you. They were very solemn over the phone, full of dark hints and when you met them on the street, they wore a different kind of dress and some odd color lipstick. They were very peaceful looking, and very sad. A week or so later, they would call you and ask you to meet them somewhere, and for the first half-hour you were with them they would still be sad and tell you at great length not to ask them any questions at all. You would not, and pretty soon they would start giggling again and you would go for a ride on the 125th Street Ferry, and the next time you saw them, usually the following night, they would have lots of little bows and shiny things on, and be playing Joan Crawford in the first half of Our Dancing Daughters and all was as before.

Like I say, there are no more goofy girls left, except two that I have stashed away. They are both married. They both adore their husbands, and neither of the husbands has the slightest notion of what a treasure he has.

Very soon now, the stock market will crash, Prohibition will be back, people like Elvis Presley will go back to their hillbilly haunts, bands will start playing Shanty in Old Shantytown, and I will recall the exact proportions of crème de cacao and alcohol -- to cut the taste of the alky, baby -- and one of these girls and I will be sitting in the rumble seat of a Model A.

She will be saying, "Was it ever an evening! I mean to tell you." "The bee's knees," she'll say, and giggle, and I will be back with a goofy girl.

John Held JR.

John Held JR.