1. PUBICS


This didn't happen to me, but it did to this friend of mine.

He's pretty old now, but he says that this fairly amusing and embarrassing encounter happened in the late 60s or very early 70s, when he would have been in his late teens.
As was the tenor of those days, teenagers had become sexually adventurous although in certain moneyed suburban circles you also had to have much luck to boot.

My friend did, and plenty of it. On the other hand, perhaps he had plenty of bad luck, because he married the girl at the heart of this little reminiscence, in essence based on the absurd notion that being able to accomplish lengthy and mutually satisfying sexual congress equaled adulthood.

My friend had his own car, which helps when you're in high school. His girlfriend's mom thought it enlightened that she'd buy wine for them so that they wouldn't drink and drive. Instead, they guzzled the rotgut vino and went for a walk. The walk was always the same one: around the corner of the house and then through the shadows to the un-used apartment over the carriage house.

Jesus! Carriage house? But yes, thats what it was, built as a two car/buggy garage from native Pennsylvania serpentine with servants quarters upstairs, behind a vast four-story house, built late in the tens two centuries ago. This is where my friend and his young lovely would go for a walk to: the servant's quarters, where they had hidden a nice chunk of thick upholstery foam rubber, blankets, candles and a bag of the reef. Fucking ensued, after their mere mouths had lost the thrill of the brand new

It was like chewing gum, I guess. I'm prone to Juicy Fruit... sometimes I still chew it long after the sweet's done gone.

Anyway, the same sort of cunt-lapping and cock-sucking happened inside the big house many times as well, but generally late at night, or early in the morning when my friend would pick his beauty queen girlfriend up for school. It was a precious secret kept from his future in-laws that my friend had already been expelled once and for all. My soon-to-be-in-laws were pretentious people who put on airs (why, I truly don't know) and fell for my tweedy and scholarly act like the giantest of redwoods, but being kicked out of high school would have also meant getting kicked out of their precious daughter. That's what my friend said.

So this one morning, future pop-in-law was off somewhere pretending to have a job and some get-right-down-to -it hunching had commenced up on the third floor, in my friend's girlfriend's bedroom, They didn't hear her father pull in the drive, didn't hear anything at all until the front door smashed open and he bellowed my friends name. He also said something along the lines of You better not be where I think you are! and it was plenty easy to hear him bounding up the stairs.

Being on the third floor didnt give my friend any time to hide nor to get dressed, but it gave him about 10 seconds to think.

Thinking is our friend.

My friend's shoulders were being clawed in frozen fear by his girlfriend while the booms of her father's footsteps got louder. Still mighty deep inside her, he said, "Pull the sheets over your head and don't say anything no mater what. Trust me."

And then Jack's angry father's fists hit his sacred virgin daughters bedroom door. I walked fairly quickly over to the door (praying to the penis God not to lose the throbber yet) and I opened the door full wide.

Although his soon-enough-to-be father in law was plenty ready to continue his horrified and betrayed screed, the sight of a kid-looking teenager, naked, sporting a grown-up boner gave him pause and he stepped back, rather stunned. My friend spoke first, quickly and simply:

Jack, I know you'll probably never be able to forgive me, but for Gods sakes dont tell Gail about this.

He was already plenty ready to turn away from my friend (it occurs to me almost 30 years later that very few grown men have ever seen another grown man physically ready for love and have no idea what to do with such a sight nor where to put the memory of it) and he stomped down the stairs saying through gritted teeth, "I'll be back in 15 minutes. Make sure you and your whore are gone by then."

I left my keys to the tall house on his desktop and we parked the car behind First Presbyterian so we could sneak into the carriage house the back way.

It was pretty swell, I more than vividly recall. Her fear was gone as quickly as it had arrived. And her father afforded me a respect he never had before.


2. RUBE

Many years later I told this story (minus the obvious, playful, ironic "friend" business to a woman I was in red hot pursuit of. We had had a full, fiery inferno of an almost purely platonic love affair for quite a stretch of time. She had a husband, I had a wife. She had two children and so did I, although her's were small and mine full grown. Her husband was nice. So was my wife. Neither prevented us from speaking of where we'd go, where we'd live.

She was a blonde-haired and startlingly blue-eyed. Perfectly demure and possessed of a lust which embarrassed her but couldnt be hidden.

But she didn't think the story nearly as funny as I expected her to; she said she found it one of the most romantic things she'd ever heard. I believe I used my flat voice and my expressionless face well to my advantage and I asked her why she found it so.

Oh! Well, everything! Her parents trusted you enough to have a key to the house, you protected her at your own shame. And you married her anyway! It's beautiful.

She might have been right, although for me, the beauty remains in the shadow of lying convincingly and quickly.

Love? If its merely clever, It'll pass. And so a joke ends with a tiny prayer and then, goodnight friends.

praise jesus thank god
that you wouldnt quite
have me back then. for
now, where could we be?
praise jesus thank god
for what might have been
then miraculously wasn't,
wasn't at all, mercifully.