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Bill Ehnert is a teenaged baby-boomer whose odyssey into adulthood takes him across the United States, into the jungles of Vietnam, and finally to Australia.
The journey begins when Bill is drawn into a naive romance with a trailer-park temptress, but his rite of passage then takes a wrong turn and detours into a perverse affair with a housekeeper. Later, a hedonistic summer tour with a rock band is followed by an ill-fated liaison with an East German girl, charges of public indecency and lascivious conduct, and the choice of joining the Army or going to jail. After serving fifteen months in Vietnam, Bill returns home with his view of life radically altered. Frustrated by his inability to settle back into a life that was once familiar to him, he abandons his hometown and moves to Australia. In Sydney, he enters the underground culture of night-dwellers, joins a local rock band, and becomes the boy toy of a wealthy businesswoman. While struggling with the details of a complex life, he is too preoccupied to realize a young woman has been quietly stalking him as a marriage prospect. But on a vacation flight to Bali and far away from the diversions of Sydney, Bill discovers that his stalker is on the plane and sitting in the seat next to him.
Page Count - 225
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Green Apple Colic
I was six years old when I first heard about THE FARM.
The details came from a kid who lived on the corner of our block back then. He planted a seed of fear in all of us with a story about what happened to kids who got sent to the COUNTY WORK FARM. As he told it, the guards there beat the inmates with chains while they were wearing diapers. Sometimes they were wearing underpants; and at other times, nothing at all. When we asked our parents if that was true, they assured us it was.
But that was our block. Parents controlled their kids by scaring the crap out of them with horror stories that paralleled a child's worst nightmares. A popular story warned kids to stay out of the rain, because staying in the rain too long would result in a case of scarlet fever. The only cure was to be chained to a slab of ice for a year.
Another story that popped up every spring involved green apples, which if eaten would cause GREEN-APPLE COLIC. And once somebody had the COLIC, they would be taken to a place where people would stick needles in their arms every five minutes. We were never told how long we had to go through that, but we all assumed a year, because a year seemed to be the standard cure-time for an exotic disease.
The background music to the stories was our block's own symphony of unforgettable sounds - the tinkling, wind-chime melodies that emanated from cases of empty beer bottles, the lively whistle and crack of doubled-over belts waling on little behinds, and the shrieking of children desperately promising not to do it again, even though they couldn't remember what they had done in the first place.
Through repeated psychotic episodes, the kids on our block were trained to defer to the wishes of their parents, although we passively rebelled by staying out in the rain until our skin shriveled or by gorging ourselves on green apples until the neighbor's tree was picked clean. When the weather turned clear after the spring rains, and any apples still hanging on local trees had ripened, we turned our attention to formulating escape plans. But by the time we had reached our tenth birthdays, faith in our own judgment had been systematically squashed by the parents' collective: a group fronted by highball-swilling league bowlers and card clubbers working in conjunction with the PTA Gestapo.
In Sunday school, we were indoctrinated with a stripped-down, child-sized version of God that only provided us with enough insight to sustain our fear of Hell and Satan's merciless punishment of the unrighteous. While I memorized bible verses and prepared myself for the next life, I wondered if people in heaven could see through bathroom ceilings and were watching me every time I jerked off in the bathtub.
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