With all those new faces coming and going at my parent’s house in the ‘burbs it became numero uno party central for a couple of very decadent years during the mid-seventies. It helped that we had a basement equipped with a second-hand jukebox and a decent pool table. My mom got busy painting the concrete floor to resemble a big black & white checkerboard. Judy-O then painted the walls flat black and put up ultraviolet lights and some fluorescent posters. My dad made an L-shaped bar and installed it in the middle of the room right across from the jukebox. He’d already made them a new bedroom in the corner opposite the pool table, which he completed earlier that spring. That meant the dance floor and their bedroom were on the same end of our rectangular basement and adjacent to one another. When Tommie Dean built their bedroom he left a wide opening for their doorway from which my mom promptly hung long strands of plastic baubles she called ‘love beads.’ There was also a longer wall he constructed that separated the dance floor from their new bedroom. For some reason, my dad framed it in with a large, rectangular opening, kind of like a window. I presumed they were going to install something to fill in that space for privacy, but other than a couple of lava lamps which were almost always turned on and behaving mellifluously, they never did. I now know why the opening was strategically placed along that wall even though I was clueless at the time.
That summer, my mom and dad had first shift day jobs during the week and we had the run of the entire place. The only rule was my brothers and I had to have it all ship-shape by the time our parents got home in the afternoon. It helped that we could blitz our tiny house in ten minutes to cover our bases.
When the outside temps soared, me and my friends almost always played in our basement, which was mostly underground and therefore pretty well insulated from the sweltering heat. We could also play the jukebox as loud as we wanted, since the subterranean cellar was naturally sound-proof. The jukebox held several dozen records at any given time. There were some killer tunes like ‘Brandy’ by Looking Glass, ‘Family Affair’ by Sly Stone, ‘Satin Sheets’ by Jeanne Pruitt, ‘Pop That Thang’ by the Isley Brothers and ‘Schools Out’ by Alice Cooper. Furthermore, my mom had lined the dance floor with dozens of fluffy pillows, which often became impromptu wrestling mats for my brothers and our friends.
Another reason my buddies in the neighborhood liked coming to my house was my parents always left their Playboy and Penthouse magazines lying around the way most of my friends' parents left out the TV Guide and Readers Digest. I overheard my mom mention that she thought it was healthy for her sons to be comfortable with the human body. Letting us ogle the Playmate of the month on a regular basis was her way of making that happen. Of course, me and my friends didn’t mind, but that was probably another sign, a foreshadow of things to come, now that I know what I know.
Earlier that year, my parents had already held a few large get-togethers at their place - maybe a half-dozen couples came over on each occasion. The women stayed upstairs and the guys hung out in the basement. I bounced back and forth enough to know that my dad’s buddies were helping with things like wiring in circuits for a fridge, replacing vacuum tubes in the jukebox and hanging strobe lights. My mom was posted up around our kitchen table where she played cards with all the girls, some of whom didn’t seem much older than me. A few of them enjoyed flirting with me while my mom watched it all with her new shag hairdo coiffed just right for those occasions. She never said a word to discourage her friends from seductively teasing her eldest son. Judy-O once tried to set me up with a girlfriend's younger sister. At the time I was too inexperienced to realize what was going on. I think my mom chalked it up to a failed experiment, but the details of that encounter are something I’d rather take to my grave. That girl was too young, even if she didn’t act like it.
It was about the same time I became drinking buddies with Chunk and Porky that my mom christened the newly completed party room in our basement. About six months earlier, during the holidays, my parents had moved from their master bedroom, on the back corner of the main floor, to the new one in the basement. My dad even installed a brand new waterbed. That also meant I’d gotten their old bedroom all to myself.
The way my mom named their new party room was by putting up a big, illuminated sign in the middle of the stairwell that led to the basement. In bold, cursive font were the words Lover’s Hideaway. It was a repurposed bar sign she’d stripped of its original logo and painted on the new moniker. If that name seems like a dead giveaway then fine, but I didn’t have a clue as to what was really going down in our basement.
Then they had one helluva celebration the evening before my twelfth birthday. I remember my mom told me that under no circumstances whatsoever could I venture downstairs once the party started. My mom allowed me to sit on the top step and that was as close as I could get. Up until that bash I was allowed to run around unfettered, but the party that was about to go down was next level stuff.
Over the course of the evening, a lot of people showed up - more than I could count. Out of curiosity I walked outside and stood in the street in front of our house and took a good look. There were cars as far as I could see with people still coming, most of whom I didn’t recognize. Many of them had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other as they followed the procession of partygoers towards the Lover’s Hideaway. After the sun began to fade behind the pine trees, I went back inside and took my spot at the top of the stairs. I could hear multiple conversations going on at once, along with sporadic bursts of laughter at whatever had happened, but I couldn’t make out anything being said. There was also a fair amount of smoke billowing up the stairwell. We didn’t have central air, so any rising cigarette vapor would linger along the basement ceiling until it made its way to the stairwell where it eventually rose and dissipated. This smoke didn’t smell like the Kools and Winstons that my mom and dad puffed on rather prolifically. It smelled kind of sweet and slightly pungent. I thought it smelled good. I figured my mom must’ve been burning some new incense or something. Otherwise I just sat there listening to the music emanating from our jukebox as I stared at the new sign adorning the entrance to our party palace. Sooner or later somebody would have to come upstairs since we still didn’t have a bathroom in the basement.
Before too long some of the ladies needed to relieve themselves. It was mid-summer in upstate South Carolina, so it was still sultry long after the sun had set for the day. Even though they were all down in the basement where it was always cooler than upstairs, there was still a lot of body heat. So when those young ladies made their way by me on their way to our bathroom, their suntanned skin was usually glistening. I thought they were lovely to look at since most of them were wearing nothing but halter tops and a pair of shorts. Some had on sundresses, but obviously not much else. They all looked happy and most of them were glassy eyed.
As the evening wore on, more and more of my parents' friends, many of whom I still didn’t recognize, were making the trip up and down the stairwell. A few of them began needing some assistance and I was eager to lend a hand. Because I was being so helpful, they started giving me tips in the form of pocket change. By the early morning hours as the party was winding down, I’d made over twenty bucks in loose coins. A few of the younger ladies in attendance began sitting down with me at the top of the stairs, probably worn out from all the shenanigans going on down in our basement. None of them seemed to care that their disheveled clothes were barely covering the more intimate parts of their anatomy. When a few of them found out it was my birthday, I began getting hugs and kisses in lieu of pocket change. I also got some longer-than-expected embraces from a few who were a bit more amorous. I even found myself at one point surrounded by a few young ladies, girls really, as one of them seductively slid onto my lap as I blushed.
By the time I went to bed, the early morning dew was settling outside and the majority of our party guests had long since called it a night. When I finally awoke, I made my way to our kitchen. There were some items left out that were obviously from the party, such as a couple of liquor bottles my dad hadn’t put away. There were also some dirty plates that had once held hors d’oeuvres. I noticed quite a few butts snuffed out in a convenient ashtray. I left those alone since I was over my fascination with cigarettes. Otherwise things looked normal. Any stragglers that had crashed on a couch or in a convenient chair had already gotten up and made their walk-of-shame to whatever ride was awaiting them. Later that day, since it was my birthday, we had my favorite meal of fried pork chops, rice & gravy, butter beans and some of those fancy pull-apart dinner rolls. My mom made a birthday cake with twelve candles. We always had to have a yellow cake with chocolate icing, no exception, because that was my dad’s favorite. I never got a present for my birthday, just a card with some cash, usually ten dollars. Both sets of grandparents always got me cards with five bucks tucked inside.
As for those parties down in our basement, they continued like that for another couple of years. Some were even more renowned than the one that occurred on my twelfth birthday. There were fights, smoky burnouts in the street as pissed-off boyfriends got the hell out, people puking in the backyard, you name it. More and more people continued to show up and sometimes the crowds would spill over to our den. I didn’t always stick around for those and kept to myself. Something about it, in spite of the cash tips and the not-so-unwanted advances from cute girls, felt indomitably dark and scary, but it was also fascinating to my pre-teen brain. No matter how much a part of me wanted to look away, I never could.
© 2023 Joseph Phillip Lister Sr.
Click here to go to the next chapter.