He was fun to be around. He liked to be in action, to have scams going. By this time my divorce from Van had come through. Mitch did not exactly move in with me, but he kept some civvies in my apartment and we were, outside of Jimmy’s, a couple. One of his games was to pretend to be my pimp. He would get young sailors to give him twenty dollars for a meeting with me, and then, after I didn’t show up, explain to them what an impossible bitch I was and somehow arrange to keep the money.

Mitch was also sexually adventurous. He taught me a trick or two—actually five or six— that I hadn’t known. I was myself never squeamish about sex; I enjoyed it. I suppose here I was a little ahead of my time. Anyhow it was after a marathon night of sex that he asked me to marry him and I, foolishly, agreed. I say foolishly because it should have been clear that Mitchell Hendrix, at twenty-two, was incapable of the least loyalty to anyone.

Not long after my marriage to Mitch I learned, from a long-distance telephone call from my mother, that Van Willis and his parents had taken my two little sons from her, and were going to court for permanent custody of them. I was twenty-three years old, with no money, working as a bartender, and six hundred miles away from Batesville. Mitch was no help. Neither was my father. I wanted to blame my mother for giving up the boys, but she was what she was, a weak woman, and it was probably my mistake for leaving them in her care in the first place.

Van and his parents won their custody case uncontended. I was given no visitation rights, nothing. While Van was still in the Navy—he turned out to be a thirty-year-career man—Donald and Allen lived with the Willises. My marriage to Mitch lasted all of eleven months, broken up by mutual consent when his three-year hitch was up, and he wanted to return to Montana without the extra baggage of a wife. I decided to return to Arkansas, not Batesville, which would have been too sad, and where I wasn’t likely to find work, but to Little Rock, ninety miles away. I was hoping that Van’s parents would allow me to spend some time with my kids.

I moved in with my sister Dottie and her husband Chester. I arrived at a time when Dottie was in the middle of a love affair with a married man named Lester Hoopston, who owned a laundromat in Little Rock. All my possessions were in a single suitcase, and I slept on Dottie’s couch in her living room. I was able to get a job as a waitress at a restaurant and lounge in the basement of the Hotel Marion in downtown Little Rock called the Garhole—called that because a garfish swam in a tank behind the bar.