The Shameless Teaser Line
“Would you like to lick them?” [Ok, now hold that thought]
The Introduction
In 1972, puberty 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, The Illustrated Joy of Sex was published, Nixon was re-elected, and Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl), My Ding a Ling, and the especially odious Saturday in the Park 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 above my nose, I hurriedly offered up my soul to any divinity or powerful 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 selfless lover of the golden rule. Wait! 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.” I squirmed my head around luxuriously. Yeeee Hawww! 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 and liked 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), that earth-shaking epiphany marked the beginning of 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 (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 mystical border: his voice had deepened and body lengthened, his loins and armpits had sprouted long-awaited curlicues. 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. 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 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 local establishments suitable to our palates to appease the resulting munchies with club-burgers and jelly donuts. Is there anything more civilized than camaraderie, fine dining, weed 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 one 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”.) Sopers were the perfect teenager’s 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 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. Kids fell down stairs simply to enjoy the ride. We lay sprawled and heaped on couches and carpets like iguanas in the equatorial sun. 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’ 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 I feel real good!”), I was startled to find myself speaking to an empty couch in a dark and silent room -- the party having ended some hours earlier. That was kind of spooky.
I was fortunate, nonetheless, 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 historic, life-changing question about licking her breasts.
Backseat Dénouement
As one thing led naturally to another, 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 passion (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 “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 man, grasshopper, gives one’s mistress an orgasm, indeed, preferably multiple orgasms, before effecting penetration (where one’s endurance is usually not, ahem, quite so dependable). Believe me, this allows – nay, incentivizes – women to overlook a great many personality defects and peccadilloes.
Everybody’s a bundle of pluses and minuses. I made the decision to accentuate the positive. You can too!
[Note: my wholly feigned enthusiasm for the reader’s supposedly limitless human potential is simply a bone thrown to my agent, who sells mostly mid-list self-help books.]
To face facts, I am only moderately well-endowed south of the border. Fortuitously, however, as Hemingway famously advised Fitzgerald, Mr. Wiggly appears substantially larger when viewed in a mirror. (And he does look bigger, a lot bigger!) I feel wretched about Ernie’s suicide, but assume that even with a funhouse mirror, his penis was never quite big enough for his own satisfaction. (“God grant me the serenity to accept… the courage to change…and the wisdom not to buy penis elongation products on the Internet.”) In any case, for the sake of the ladies optical exhilaration, I now suggest that the privy dimensions be contemplated only via the looking glass.
[Note: since the female bottom may be comfortably surveyed by its owner only through the use of a size-enhancing reflective device, women have an opposite relationship with the mirror. This is one reason why women usually think their butts are too big. Small dicks, big asses: we are the world.]
Somewhere past the four hour mark, Karen fell asleep and I tenderly covered her with the tattered blanket. My darling girl, God bless her! Upon arrival home, like an astronaut exiting the space pod, I staggered 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 shrinking bag of sopers (“the fundamental truths apply as 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 made sweet love 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! 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. You fumbled, squirmed and grunted for a one or two sordid minutes on the well-trammeled dirt behind the compost bin, and I spent seven ecstatic hours having my innocence stolen by two of the most gorgeous college girls on the planet. One can only have faith in the ultimate justice of the Lord, or … blame it on the bossa nova.
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