"I have not the foggiest notion."

New Mexico Oil Field at Sunset.  Photo by Dr. Jerry McLaughlin

      Remembering the Famous Café brought back a lot of other memories.  We were up there two summers, 1956 and 1957.  In 1956, we were finished with our freshman year at Tech, and I still retained some level of innocence.  I wouldn’t dare drink a beer or date a divorcee.  By 1957, I had pretty much outgrown those silly ideas.

      In the summer of 1956, Bill Sparks, Clinton Smith, Neil McMullen and I went to Farmington, New Mexico, to work in the oil fields and save money for college.   We rented a two bedroom apartment in the basement of an older couple’s home,   and the lady of the house more or less adopted us.  She clucked around us like an old hen with her chicks.  She and her husband were Mormons, and two of the nicest people I ever knew.

     Our lives soon became routine---we got up at five-thirty each morning, walked to the Famous Café where we had breakfast and bought a sack lunch, then mounted crew trucks that delivered us to the oil fields.  After work, the trucks dropped us off at the café and we walked back up the hill to our apartment.  We showered and shaved, fixed dinner and went to bed by nine.  I usually read myself to sleep.

      In the fields, we worked as roustabouts; entry level, common labor.  Hard physical labor.  We dug ditches, laid small-diameter pipelines, built fences, poured concrete or painted storage tanks and piping.     We worked outside in the hot, desert sun all day.  We all were deeply tanned and healthy.  Bill Sparks and I were allowing our beards to grow.

     One problem spoiled the summer.  We were teenage boys and there were no teenage girls to spend time with.  We didn’t really expect sex---we wanted it, but hell, truth was, we didn’t get that from the girls back in Lubbock.   Just a girl to talk with would have been nice.  We missed the fresh, clean, teenage-girl smell of Lifebuoy soap and Ipana.  We missed the warm laughter, the silly giggles, holding hands at a movie, the thrill of a goodnight kiss.  We missed girls.

     On our weekly day off, we explored the surrounding area, drove up to Durango, Colorado, or perhaps spent the day at Mesa Verde National Park.  Wherever we went, we were always on the lookout for girls.  Once we drove deep into the desert to see the ruins at Chaco Canyon.  In a tent camp there, we found some bearded, khaki-clad, scholar-types who smoked pipes and worked for National Geographic, but there were no eligible girls.  We looked.

     We looked around town also, but local girls our age didn’t date oil field trash, even oil field trash acting like clean-cut college boys with lots of money.

      One evening after work, I decided to go to the neighborhood mom-pop grocery for some bread and milk.  I had showered and trimmed my beard, and dressed in fresh, clean clothing.  Modest houses lined the street, and as I walked toward the store, the front screen door of one of them opened, and a girl came out and strolled to the sidewalk.  She was a vision, about seventeen and fully developed, if you catch my drift.  She glanced at me as I approached, then turned away and walked toward the mailbox, giving me a long look at what she justifiably considered her best side.

      The young lady was nicely tanned and wore a white cotton blouse over powder blue shorts, just tight enough to expose a hint of panty line.  She had my undivided attention, from her blond pony tail to her tiny ankles, and she knew it.

     “Ask her a question--- any question,” I thought.  My mind raced, and I came up with a dozen really dumb questions. 

      As she turned toward me, I blurted out, “Can you tell me where to find the post office?  I need to mail my transcript to Texas Tech.”

     I was so proud of myself---in one fell swoop, I came up with a sensible question and, at the same time, let her know that I was a college boy, not just plain oilfield trash.

     She looked me up and down and, with just a hint of a smile, said dismissively, “I have not the foggiest notion.”

     She turned, let me gaze once more upon what had suddenly become forbidden fruit, and strolled back to the house.   As she entered, she kept the screen door from slamming by allowing it to bump quietly against that lovely south end.  I envied that screen door.

     That encounter bothered me for years---oh, not the rejection---I’ve been rejected by hordes of pretty girls.  I just couldn’t imagine how a little town girl from Farmington, New Mexico, with a pony tail, nice jugs and a fantastic south end,  ever came up with the phrase, “foggiest notion.”