A Shameless Teaser
“Would you like to lick them?” she inquired. [Ok, now hold that thought]
The Introduction
In 1972, puberty finally arrived, the Knicks lost in the playoffs, and McGovern dumped Eagleton after proclaiming, “I’m behind you one thousand percent!” I dropped mescaline for the first time, Nixon was re-elected, and Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) topped the hit parade.
It was a real mixed bag of a year, but now Christmas vacation had arrived.
The Back Seat
Head nestled on Karen’s warm lap, I stretched – a 16 year-old virgin – out upon the back seat of a station wagon speeding down the New York Thruway. Gazing up, transfixed, confounded and adoring, at two, soft, sweater-moulded breasts, looming like sweet, heavy pears above my nose, I hurriedly offered up my soul to any divinity or entity willing to grant certain reasonable concessions.
Karen was the 19 year-old best friend of my sister with whom I had shared my dwindling bag of sopers – the term Northeasterners then used for Quaaludes (possibly deriving from “sopor,” defined as “somnolent, lethargic: stupor” ). Shared without any expectation or hope of return, because that’s just the way I was raised: a giver, a believer in the golden rule, a Johnny Appleseed with my private drug supplies. Stop! Let’s not start with lies and equivocations...I offered Karen a soper – miracle, muscle-relaxing, sex barbiturate of the seventies – without the expectation of return, but hope? – oh, dear Sweet Lord, yes! Hope springs eternal; hope was all that kept the randy, twisted, adolescent soul alive. Jeez, I miss hope now, but that’s another story, which would only bring us down.
Beyond mere supine hopefulness, and because God helps those who help themselves, I had sprawled languorously across the back seat, then groaned with the laborious effort of sitting upright when Karen made to climb in with me.
“That’s OK, Henry, you can put your head on my lap.”
“Well, all right, if you’re sure. Oh yes, that’s quite comfortable, thanks.” Nice and warm. I squirmed my head around luxuriously. It was a five-hour drive to New Jersey!
The Background
Three days earlier, four of us had rendezvoused at the small, upstate mill town on the Mohawk that had been my home until the preceding year: Karen, then attending Julliard; my older sister Alice; Gwen – Alice’s new friend at college – and me. Karen and I had known each other for years, but I had always been her best friend’s little brother, and that’s pretty damn low on the totem pole. Three years younger, and when last seen, five inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than she was, while Karen was a strong, self-assured, varsity-gymnast Valkyrie, I had been a squeaking, longhaired, junior-high-school runt. Social divides yawn no greater.
On one summer morning of golden memory, going over to her house with my sister, I was astounded to glimpse Karen sitting out in her back yard, practicing the clarinet, but wearing only a diaphanous pair of pale blue panties. The first women’s panties I’d ever seen worn (discounting the unfortunate pool house episode with Uncle Thad), and the beginning of a lifelong enchantment. In those days, my “rapier-like” wit had provided entrée, as a kind of court dwarf, into the rarified society of my jaded elders (high school juniors and seniors). But once, upon cracking too wise, Karen had punched me so hard in the stomach that I had slunk off, bent over, into the den to throw up and die. (Few appreciate the trembling, net-less tightrope on which the smartass performs his frantic jig for love.)
But after Karen had gone off to college, little Henry had crossed puberty’s mystic border: his voice had deepened and body lengthened, his loins and armpits had sprouted long-awaited curlicues. I was outrageously skinny, but biologically at least, I had become a man.
Back to the Back Seat
Lick them? Oh, yes, thank you, very much so. I’ll give it a try. Honestly, I’ll lick anything you’ve got until my jaw seizes and my tongue falls off.
The third-string linebacker jogged out onto the field as the crowd roared. The understudy stepped out as the stage curtains opened. A rare set of circumstances – being the only male in the car with a libido-spiraling young woman of deliciously burgeoning sexuality (not to mention the temporary state of egregiously depressed inhibitions) – had miraculously transformed callow boy into sultry Valentino. I was ready as I’d ever be. I danced into the ring without fear or regret. Karen pulled up her sweater, I lifted up my mouth – like a trout eager for the hook.
And I’ve been thrashing at the end of that line ever since.
The Background Continued:
The Days Immediately Preceding the Back Seat
After our initial upstate rendezvous, the girls and I had split up to our different social circles. I reconnected with old friends – Gypsy, Bullhead, the Johnstons – to get stoned and then decamp to suitable local bistros to appease our raging munchies with greasy, Carroll's club-burgers and oozing jelly donuts. On a bet, Gypsy stuffed a donut as big as mango into the pie hole of his thin Portuguese face -- not being able to quite close his lips, he bore an uncanny resemblance to an astonished, fat-cheeked hamster trying to whistle. And then raspberry jelly began to leak out. In the resulting deranged hilarity, he almost choked to death. I ask you: Is there anything more civilized than camaraderie, weed, fine dining and convivial company? What more could one want? But when a local entrepreneur pulled into town with a trailer load of cheap barbiturates, we discovered we wanted them too.
I purchased a bagful of forty at 25 cents apiece and later regretted my niggardliness. (I’m warning you: I won’t stand for any ignorant foolishness about the word “niggardly” which derives from a Scandinavian word meaning "Mr. Stingy".) Sopers were the teenager’s perfect vacation drug, sweet antidote to a dismissive and demanding world. Soon, they were spilling from parka pockets, rolling and crunching underfoot at the burger doodle. At parties, they filled the chafing dish between the Peanut M&M’s and Jiffy Pop.
Adolescent society slowed to the pace of warm taffy. Sopers melted body and soul into a hot, sensual, grilled cheese infused with a ferocious delight in physical sensation of any kind. We lay sprawled and heaped on couches and carpets like iguanas in the equatorial sun. Like drunks, we staggered and slipped on icy sidewalks to disappear into snowbanks, poof! At the big party of the vacation week, I recall rocking slowly in an extra-mellow state of great contentment, enjoying the scene, the music and other party-goers’ urgent, uncoordinated stumbles to the bathroom. (Downs and alcohol don’t mix, but try telling that to the kids.) I said something to the languid gentleman on my right (“Oh man, I feel good!”), passed him the joint and then closed my eyes to fully appreciate the complex profundity of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. Opening my eyes to reclaim the doobie and resume the dialogue (“Oh man, like, you know, I feel real good!”), I was startled to find myself speaking to an empty couch in a dark, silent room, the party having ended some hours earlier. That was kind of spooky.
I was fortunate to awake without a raw egg or two sliding around my underpants, this being a popular divertissement commonly inflicted upon the passed-out. Perhaps it was too much effort for my stupefied compatriots to undertake. Or they never noticed I’d lost consciousness in the first place.
After three days of non-stop drug abuse, I reluctantly bid adieu to friends, popped a soper for the ride home, gave one to Karen and climbed back into the station wagon. Soon thereafter, she posed the life-changing question about licking her breasts.
Backseat Dénouement
As one thing led to another. Choogling down the tracks of biological imperative, Karen and I coupled in a molasses-soaked marathon of dream-like concupiscence. For propriety’s sake, we made vague attempts to stay beneath an old, ratty, car blanket, but, actually, totally oblivious would be a more accurate description the hermetic bubble of our sexual enthrallment (though I did look up once or twice into the bemused faces of toll takers). Heard, but not particularly attended to, were Gwen’s front seat exclamations of “Hey! Quit kicking my seat!”
My Thruway odyssey provided the first inkling of my one, heretofore unsuspected, superhero-like attribute, namely...a large tongue of extraordinary enthusiasm, dexterity and endurance! Synthesizing cause and effect at an immature age (she really likes this! I like it too!), I laid the foundation of a precocious philosophy that would substantially enhance future relationships with the fair sex: the wise lover gives his paramour an orgasm (indeed, preferably multiple orgasms) before effecting penetration (where one’s endurance is not always, ahem, quite so dependable). Believe me, this allows – nay, incentivizes – women to overlook a great many of one's personality defects and annoying peccadilloes.
Everybody’s a bundle of pluses and minuses. I made the decision to accentuate the positive. You can too! (My wholly feigned enthusiasm for the reader’s limitless human potential is simply a bone thrown to my agent, who sells mostly mid-list self-help books.)
I am only moderately well-endowed south of the border. However, as Hemingway famously advised Fitzgerald, one's penis appears larger when viewed in a mirror -- he seemed to think it had something to do with sight angles. (And it is true: it does look bigger, a lot bigger! Which is the Truth with a capital T, I wonder?) I feel wretched about Ernest's suicide, but assume that even with a funhouse mirror, his pecker was never quite big enough for his own satisfaction -- a not uncommon psychological disease of the human male. (“God grant me the serenity to accept...the courage to change...the wisdom not to buy penis enhancement products on the Internet.”) So if the opportunity presents itself -- and indeed solely for the sake of the ladies' optical exhilaration -- I try to maneuver events so that we disrobe and ideally fornicate before a looking glass. "Look at that monster," I might whisper.
[Note: since the female bottom may be comfortably surveyed by its owner only through the use of the same aforementioned size-enhancing reflective device, women have an opposite relationship with the mirror. This may be why they always think their butts are too big, no matter how many times one expresses one's heartfelt appreciation. ("Baby, I love your ass more than the moon and stars!") Oh well...small dicks, big asses: we are the world.]
Sometime past the four-hour mark, somewhere in Passaic county, Karen fell asleep and I tenderly covered her with the tattered blanket. My darling girl, sweet dreams and God bless you! Upon arrival home, I staggered like an astronaut exiting the space pod, up to my bedroom to roll a joint, turn on the black lights and put on the Moody Blues. I was feeling pensive and had a lot to mull over.
Which is when Gwen slipped into my room.
Girls have their ungovernable desires and I my dwindling bag of sopers (“the fundamental truths apply...when we get high”) Despite, or perhaps because of, the seat kicking, Gwen had glimpsed something that tickled her carnal sweet tooth, and then had the gumption to go out and get it. Christ, I respect that! So we gulped more tablets and happily coupled all night long, half-lit under the nuclear shadow. (This bit about the nuclear shadow is a shameless attempt to inject pathos into my jubilant, non-stop sexcapades. I understand critics and Europeans, in particular, like that sort of thing.) Comely Gwen was in spring bloom, radiant with young, supple life! Swedish blood, you know. However, she wasn’t very adventuresome sexually, which provided my poor tongue a much-needed respite.
A couple days later, the girls left to spend New Year’s Eve in NYC, with sister Alice, unreasonably peevish about recent developments, adamantly vetoing any consideration of little brother’s participation. Before their departure, Alice gleefully detected a single eight-inch hair dangling from my chin – puberty is such a cruel joker – and spitefully dubbed me “Fu Manchu.” I still await the appropriate opportunity for payback.
And that, dear reader, is how I lost my virginity. I know...you fumbled, squirmed and grunted for a one or two sordid minutes with your second cousin on the well trammeled dirt behind the compost bin, and I spent seven ecstatic hours with two of the most gorgeous college girls on the planet. One - or more exactly, you - can only cherish the unlikely hope it will all be evened up in the sweet bye and bye.
Henry E. Panky
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