I seemed to be able to make her laugh, and she was quiet but very sweet. She would stroke my face a lot. We talked about family, a little-how my mother had died of cancer two years ago, and my father had recently remarried, a woman I didn’t like much, a stone bitch but I wouldn’t have said that then. Joni was from a large family and they didn’t have much and her factory-worker father had been abusive (which I thought meant he hit her, but much later it occurred to me he’d been fucking her).

Frankly most of it is a blur. When I met Joni, I was a near virgin-I’d been with one girl in high school, my senior year-and the heady sex included things I’d heard about but never expected to experience…I said “heady” sex-get it? All of those memories exist in snippets, a parade of still photos interspersed with little movies of sweetness here and sensuality there, as if the films playing in my mind were scratchy old drive-in prints, kind of grainy with missing frames and garbled sound.

I remember only two conversations in some detail. One we had at a drive-in outside La Mirada (she had a little blue Marlin, a pretty slick number for a Rambler) where I was doing my best not to make a mess of a chili dog, and she was having just fries, which was the way girls dieted back then.

“I envy you,” she said.

“What for?”

“You had a normal life. You had a loving family.”

“Not really. Lonely being an only child. My mom was nice but she was sick all the time. And my dad barely spoke to me.”

“Why?”

“He was on the road a lot. In his day, he’d been a real jock. I lettered in swimming, but that wasn’t football. I read books. I liked movies. We got along okay, I guess. But maybe I wasn’t macho enough for him.”

“And now you’re a Marine!”

“He was a Marine, too.”

“So you thought that would impress him? Make him really think you’re a man?”