There was that one time at Beth’s, before she’d set her sights on Ryan, when I went to do some yard work for her dad. A real gentlemen trying to make the right impression on her family. The kind of guy that would hope her parents, maybe just maybe might help encourage going out with me. The inability to just ask Beth out provoked me into all sort of encumbrances of this sort. “What do you want to get paid?” her dad asked me. Well I couldn’t say I would do it for free because that would be an instant tip off that I was obviously just there to try and get my dastardly clutches on his darling little damsel. “What if you see how I do and pay me what you think it is worth?” My first lesson in the art of negotiation received a failing grade.

In late November, the roads were wet with a light snow that had melted into a cold juice that the bike’s wheels spit up into a stream of muddy water up your back. Sheer misery made more pathetic by the muddy stripe branded to the crack of your ass. Then add to that I’m wearing gloves that are not quite thick enough to keep off the chill. Soon going downhill is just as miserable as coming up since the increased wind chill on my fingers is agonizingly cold. The cars careening past are even more dangerous than in summer as they try to avoid puddles that may or may not also be icy. Each swerve inspires me to philosophize over the tenuousness of life but that gives way to numb hatred. I raise my voice to kindle the fire only to realize the utter futility and uselessness of that. “Goddamnit, watch out” just gets blown out in the rushing breeze and doused with the next splash of a car going through a puddle speeds past. The sentiment floats out about as menacing as the last leaf falling from a tree in winter which hits the wet pavement and disintegrates soon thereafter.

By the time I was getting close to Beth’s house, the sun had finally burnt off enough of the chill in the wet clouds that the pain of the ride seemed to evaporate and blow away. The case could also be made that worrying so much about making a great impression on her family and a greater impression on Beth was generating enough friction to heat a house. I was practically sweating from the strain of trying not to sweat as I pulled in and jumped of my bike. Mr. D was already outside working. He looked at me like he might fire me before I even started working.

“There’s a rake and some bags in the garage. Go ahead and get started in front.”

I looked at the yard. Who in the hell waits until this time to rake their yard? This late in the season the leaves are usually so wet and heavy that just scraping them up requires herculean strength but then bagging them without the bags ripping – that’s Sisyphean. I looked at the yard. I checked out the garage. I looked at the house and hoped that Beth would be inside looking out, at me, admiring the just and chaste knight that would ever so gallantly rake her yard.

She didn’t appear to be home.

My body needed no directions, and my hands were mapping the areas never previously navigated without getting lost. I was ready to go where no man had gone before.

In the days before I had completely blown it with Beth, trying to make a cute and adorable reference to puppy love with a dog collar around my neck which came across like a twisted bondage S&M psychosexual perversion to a girl that hadn’t even kissed a guy much less tied him up and indulged her sinful whims on him, my friend Ryan and I had ridden our bicycles up to Beth’s house. Her parents were gone which was fantastic because her Dad was the kind of father who liked to intimidate horn dogs like us coming to sniff at his daughter’s garden gate. He would stare at you with a grimace on his face, with one eye squinting like he was looking down the barrel and through the sites of a big gun ready to blow your head off. When that look finally made you uncomfortable enough to start sweating he would ask some sort of intimidating question like “What are you doing for a job?” Then, before you could answer, he would let you know “You guys don’t work hard enough – I have some chores around here you can do. You kids don’t know the meaning of work.” If he asked about what sport you played then if you said soccer, then he would say why football was better. Say lacrosse, then baseball was better. And he would always yell at Beth from somewhere deep in the house where we could not see but only hear him, “Beth tell those guys to get out of here now!” Then you could hear him grousing but unintelligibly, like an angry growl from a large carnivore into whose cave you have accidentally stumbled.

With him gone though the flirtation was unchecked. Beth wore a tank top that was tight enough to tantalize by just barely revealing the shape of her bra. Brian and I were both competing for ways to get our hands on her any way possible, almost in tandem, taking turns by sharing tickles and tackles with her during a pillow fight. Suddenly, I found myself sitting down on the couch with Beth draped over my lap. My hands were chasing hers away from the places that would make me shiver and jump, then my hands gripped her waist, and my hands moved up, rib by rib, my hands kept moving closing in from her side until one hand cupped the curvaceous outline of her ample bosom. Then I saw that same look for the first time that I recognized again with Kathy, the realization in the eyes of what could happen next. My hands froze. I became conscious of my erection. My brain finally caught up with my hands. I excused myself to get a drink of water.

Ryan didn’t miss a beat. As soon as I had jumped up then he had resumed the game of grab ass touchy feely and by the time I got back, having tamed my boner back into the crevasse of my underpants, my moment was lost. My hands were empty. Brian was not hesitating to touch her there or anywhere else for that matter. My hot jealousy mixed with my icy indecisiveness to make a tepid broth that offered zero nourishment or satisfaction for a hunger that was growing faster than mold. I only found out after I made a fool of myself with the dog collar that Ryan had actually begun to go “steady” with Beth. I was mad, resenting the fact that he had made a move which I was paralyzed to make. I didn’t show it though. That might have meant not getting to hear about what it was like for his hands to touch those perfect breasts, or how much work he was doing for Beth’s dad.

Now, with Kathy my hands were once again in motion. Somewhere, somehow, my brain was still trying to catch up and get my hands to address the “what-ifs”, but luckily I was able to cup her boob over her shirt which layered over her bikini top – still that was close enough to feel like I was getting somewhere without thinking about where I was going to the point that I would never get anywhere.

We had joy we had fun. We had seasons in the sun.

Just like the sun, our kisses were swirling, exploding hydrogen, infinite fiery stars to help navigate a vast black eternity of uncertainty. I might not have had a clue what I was doing but whatever I was doing was propelling me onward rocketing in zero gravity. For what could have passed for billions and billions of years I was lost in the space of her embrace, transfixed by the shimmering universe of her lips, twinkling lights caught and reflected in her cherry flavored lip gloss. Then a black hole loomed with intense irresistible force and pulled me in. I was powerless to pull away, move forward or back, compressed, helpless, weighted down with the gravitas of the moment. My first kiss.  Kissing the girl I didn’t want to like me while the girl I wanted to like me sat and watched. Was she sitting in judgement?

That is when everything imploded into a dense explosion of “what ifs”. Every “if” since the moment I first realized “what if I touch… myself… down there… which by all accounts is something that has been happening all along since I floated like a baby astronaut inside the liquid universe of the womb. What if touching her breasts was disrespectful? What if she felt my erection? What if Denise was not impressed with my kissing prowess? What if Kathy was? What if being so damn chained to every possibility no matter how minute was going to leave me no possible action to dignify myself by or commit every reaction to “what I should’ve done” afterthoughts. What if you could never know and finding out was next to impossible. Every “if” was an exploding supernova of immense power able to snuff out a universe; when ways of being yourself in varying orbits and proximities, like planets, called initiative, intuitive, mercurial, and down to earth suffer such a cataclysm then there is little hope for a sex life… out… there.

This was not really the kind of thing a man who reads Playboy probably even had to ask or even remotely consider. So obviously I couldn’t turn there for an answer. There wasn’t any sort of gadget or doodad or knick knack or whirly gig one could find in the Sears catalog that would help relieve the stress or inspire sensible recourse and certain deliverance from the difficulties before me. Every suave phrase practiced to perfection as I imagined and meditated on through the inspiration of masturbation yoga lost its sense of timing and deemed retrospectively to be incredibly accurate evidence of my idiocy and ineptitude.

In spite of all that, things weren’t so bad. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.

Our embraces flourished in the summer sun, first the kiss planted and sprouting into a bouquet of embraces with limbs intertwining and finger touches as delicate as flower petals blowing in a spring breeze. Then the tongues rooting in each other’s mouths nourished with spit and cherry lip gloss. Finally, the dense, fecund, innate realization of what could… or could not happen next in that fertile soil, dirty, dirty, dirty dirt called sex.

When something comes at you from that far out of left field and the sun is in your eyes and all you can see are the silhouette outlines of black shapes framed in blinding white light then you know it is hard to be on the ball. All you can do is turn your face and squint and reach out with your glove and hope that you have caught the drift, been in the moment, at the right place at the right time, with enough time to react and make the play. You know any error could mean that the game is lost, go home, you suck.

The way my street was set up was at one end there were all the old Ridgefield houses where all the truly rooted Ridgefielders lived, but at our end it was all the transplants, the executives uprooted from management positions in the City, boxed up, and moved to places like White Plains and Norwalk. Naturally a rivalry developed between the old and the new, the haves and the have-nots, the kids from that side of the tracks vs. this side of the hill. Sometimes the battle was waged with acorn fired with a whizzing sound and a hooking shot from a rubber banded sling. Other times it was settled more civilly, we would play street baseball… in those “good ol” days playing in the street was not only accepted but encouraged… until some sort of foul play would turn us back to sling shots and acorns.

Right before realizing I needed glasses, the baseball, or the tennis ball, or the soft ball (which is not exactly the most appropriate name for it) would get smacked up in a pop fly. I would call the catch and make a beautiful run under it. Unfortunately, too oftentimes the ball would smack me right in the face. Then I got the glasses and though they were supposed to help the glasses only made matters worse since I would not only get hit in the face but the eyeglasses would dig into the bridge of my nose. The quickest way to beat me up in a fight was to crack me in the face so my glasses would gouge me; my eyes would tear and anyone near would instantly call that a loss.

Sitting there and turning my face toward Kathy was like expecting one of those pop flies to hit me in the face at any second. Like knowing what to expect but having no clue what degree it will come in; could make the catch with luck, or take a hit that just makes you want to cry and run home. I had only a second to react. Not enough time to think “what if I blow it with Denise forever?” Not enough time to ask “how would Hugh Hefner handle this situation?” Not even enough time to adjust to “what if I don’t know how?” Just enough time to take a first kiss, tender lips, sweet breath, a light tickle of a tongue, enough teenage hormone dynamite to blow up ten cities on the East Coast.

At least it was a hot day and jumping off the sand dune a few times was ample reason to be hot and sweaty. However, confronted with the choice of playing hot and heavy flirt or cool and determined suave guy I went with the latter. So began a lifetime of having my body go one way and my mind another. This essentially meant trying my hardest to keep my mouth closed and be thought a fool rather than open my mouth and remove all doubt that I had no idea what to say to Denise or what not to say to Kathy lest she think I liked her more than Denise. We sat on the edge. Denise on one side. Kathy on the other. I did my best to be a simply a conduit for their conversation. Occasionally, I would nod or smile like a valve to open or close a point being made between them.

The possibility seemed more than highly likely. Earlier in the school year I had made a complete fool of myself when I tried to woo the affections of Beth Dellmanis. She of course had a crush on my friend Brian because that is one of the curses of youth that no sacrifice will suffice to change. Someone always liked someone else who wasn’t interested because someone else was only interested in somebody that didn’t even know that anyone liked him or her. Any couple that did manage to connect and take it to the “going steady” stage of affairs seemed sort of inhuman basking in the glow of a happy couple haven. Couples glowed, dripping with the warm honey suffused light of teens on fire burning embers afterglow, unfiltered, undiluted, un-evaporated, unabated, unabashed, and unknown to me in any foreseeable future.

Especially after that Beth Dellmanis incident.
 
Granted, I really should have thought it through a little bit more. But I didn’t. Not when I was coming up with it in the first place and not when I was putting it in my book bag and bringing it to class and definitely not when I was putting it on. I walked up to her. I tried to hand it to her but she wouldn’t take it. Beth just looked at me with a squint and her lips curled tightly like one who has just looked down to see and smell dog crap on one’s shoe. The idea of wearing a dog collar and trying to hand her the leash just didn’t communicate the right message at all.

What if it happened again? I started sweating just thinking about it and I honestly don’t think I have stopped sweating since that day.

In those days, enthusiasm and dedication could be measured in an easy equation. Multiply the number of revolutions of a bicycle wheel by the number of miles spanned then divided by the amount of hills climbed. In this case, we were talking eight miles and four and a half hills of eagerness.

On the dreaded three speed bike, click, one for hard, click, harder, and finally, click, hardest, I sweated and strained to climb the hills. Curse the bike. Hate the hills. Despise people in cars. Every invective was another log to throw in the furnace of young passion powering steamy desire. Automobiles and especially trucks stampeded past terrifyingly too close for comfort. The narrow country roads were paved and painted well before the idea of bicycle lanes stretched an invisible fence of false security across the hills and valleys of townships like Ridgefield. At any moment the possibility of certain death or imminent maiming injuries was an intense concern. But I pressed on, every turn of the pedal, rolling forward and seeking to finally, hopefully, one day, maybe if the stars are right, cross the Great Divide that separates the boy from the girl.

 Kathy had invited me but the only reason I really went was because she was with Denise. Dark, mysterious, prone to few words, but with black eyes that I thought at the time spoke volumes until I realized later that they were more like the dull innocent void of a doe’s eyes. Still? What kind of kid is going to even remotely consider something so vague as retrospect at a time like that? I was crazy for Denise and any chance to somehow get her to like me was critical. A decision always had to be made; be cool and quiet which seemed to work for some guys or sly and mocking which worked wonders for others. Work the humor or play like I don’t care. Stop. Go. Which way to turn when every turn might mean you were careening straight off a cliff and falling into stony mutterings trying to figure out what not to say. The terrain of being around her was every bit as treacherous as the ride to get there. What if I were hit by my big stupid motor mouth and crashed into making a fool out of myself.

A blossoming figure in a thirteen year old body, in a white bikini, Kathy walked with a swerve and a sway that left much older men sweating from the strain of trying not to look like they were looking. At the pond were our family went swimming while we were stillon the waiting list to get into “the Lake Club”, my mother asked “How old is Kathy?” I clued her in, “Kathy? She is thirteen”. My mother looked strangely horrified. “She looks like she is twenty two”. I am not sure why it annoyed me so much to hear her saying that. I was already well aware of being attracted to older women, women that seemed to know more, women obviously no longer hiding behind the veil of virginity. Perhaps, because Kathy was actually in my class at school, and liked to flirt with me, she suddenly was cast into a role that I found difficulty playing opposite to. Was she the pure and sweet virginal girl who would giggle with her girlfriends and want to talk to me at recess or was she already a woman possessing a key to sensual wisdoms and so many erotic sophistications that would take me a million years to catch up to?

What to do. What to do! What if she already knew how to fuck?

Coming to grips with that meant a wrestling match between what I felt on the inside and how I thought I should behave on the outside. During the super seventies, instead of being swinging hipsters since my parents felt they were too late in the game – one taste of marijuana at a party – firmly convinced them of that. “I just don’t like to not be in control” my mother had confessed while my father scoffed at it, “doesn’t compare to a good scotch”. However, my mother was tuned in and turned on enough by the Women’s Movement and ERA to drop it on us like hammer in the hands of Rosie the Riveter. “Respect women. Don’t be like your father’s generation. Respect women. Hold up your end of the housework. Respect women. Your father can’t even boil a pot of water so you better learn to cook. Respect women.” I got the point but somewhere along the line the whole respect thing twisted me into a knot about what would be the most polite way to advance from one base to the next hoping some day to hit the almighty home run.

How would I ask “Can I kiss you there? Or, will you touch me here?” The mere thought of asking seemed to be an impolite therefore disrespectful tact to take. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could just show me what to do? Kathy and her friend Denise asked me to come meet them at the town dump. This was not as crazy as it sounds, well yes it is, but the thing was that on the weekends no one was there. Also there were these huge sand piles that were used in the winter time after snow storms to grit up the road to make for safer driving conditions. Back then, kids could get away with jumping off the tops of the piles without much hand wringing from parents so it was a popular place to hang out since it was also within walking distance of the movie theatre and the Caldors Mall. I was nervous to go because at the time I had a huge crush on Denise, though she seemed just as reticent about that as I was about Kathy’s constant eagerness to engage me with taunts and tickles. Still, no matter how nervous I was, as long as those butterflies in my stomach didn’t burst forth from my ass or my boner get too pissed off having to hide in my trousers and rip through my zipper like a voracious beast then I was going to go and accept whatever fate lay in store.

When I was growing up, Ridgefield Connecticut was a peeling paint and broken gutters sort of drab New England town that was a little blue around the collar but more blue around the balls, and kind of blew in relation to the surrounding painted and perfect townships that comprised Fairfield County. New Canaan, Darien, Wilton, Greenwich, all those were full of rich executives from places like IBM and Xerox who had gone “countrified”, leaving New York City for new offices in White Plains and for huge houses with sprawling lawns behind the shady oaks and maples of New England. Here, they could be closer to their country clubs and not have to pay so exorbitantly to park their Mercedes. Ridgefield was sort of notorious as being a place where mobsters went to retire before all the WASPs came in to look down their noses pointed like stingers at anyone with a vowel on the end of their name.

During the Revolutionary War, the Brits had pretty much just marched over it and left a cannonball or two, one of which remained lodged in tavern I assume to let people know that they should get back to work and stop being black marketers, scoundrels, and ruffians. Going back there recently I could tell that this piece of history had certainly repeated itself since the town had been run over by white collars every bit as stiff as those Brits from centuries past. The mobsters of a bygone era were gone and a new guard had pretty much done away with any modern assembly of scoundrels, ruffians, and black marketers. This time around instead of leaving a few big cast iron cannonballs parked in a tavern they left big black beemers here and there down the main street of town.  Otherwise it was business as usual since obviously any form of revolt had long since moved elsewhere. Looking at it today gives one a sense of what if the British actually won the Revolutionary War though.

When I was growing up in Ridgefield though, I wasn’t tough enough to be any sort of ruffian, nor was I deviant enough to be a black marketeer, so I guess since I knew there was no way I was going to tread the Tory line I had to vaguely pursue the life of a scoundrel. My first step to following that course of action meant finding those that could teach me some wickedness, specifically sins of the flesh, but unfortunately I had no means of figuring out how to ask for what I wanted much less figure out who could set me on the path to finding it. That pretty much changed when I got my first girlfriend, or rather she got me.

Kathy, wouldn’t you know it, also had a vowel on the end of her name.

But what if you have a boner in a skimpy little suit that has incredibly stretchy fabric that no matter how incredible it is, no matter what miracle of science created it, can only stretch so far. For all practical purposes,  that is not far enough to accommodate in any reasonable fashion a strapping, raging hard on from a young teen hopped up on hormones in a pool full of blossoming nearly nude girls whose suits leave little to the imagination anyway. You look around to see if you can scoot out and make it across the tiles before anyone can glimpse a profile of your erection as it actually snaps out of a pike and into a pole. You wish the water was cold enough to put out the fire down below. You try to keep eye contact with people so they don’t look down and see that the little monster has not crept up to peek out from behind the slim veil of a cage. You kick and squirm to adjust this way and that but nothing works and you know it is just a matter of time before someone is pointing and all the girls are snickering.

So you hope and pray that it will go away before you have to confront anyone with it and have to find words to describe why your dick is so desperately trying to raise a flag that says “Look at me now”. Well, you can run, but you can’t hide a hearty erection.  They are simply too insistent and yearning for attention. All you can do is wait it out and hope for the best or try to find some solid ground, a sanctuary, where you can beat the hell out of it until the darn thing submits, no matter how briefly. Unfortunately, public places like YMCA swimming pools rarely offer such place. There were no doors on the bathroom stalls. No hidden places to hide out and resolve matters in a private and dignified way. At times like these, the only way to make do was to sit, bide my time, wait it out. Hope that I would have to go pee because that was the one and only way to convince my penis to take a break and chill out.

Far from a cure, but this was enough of a remedial to make getting out of the pool possible.  Of course, sometimes I had to wait to get out. This became an issue one time when I didn’t want to get out of the pool at the end of a swim meet warm up and was yelled at by another coach for delaying the start of the meet. Sadly, this event marked my turning point for wanting to continue in the world of competitive swimming. I simply could not control the beast unless I got out of the damn pool once and for all and hung up that puny little suit. Of course, my mom the coach was not happy with that decision, which I had to translate into a simple “I just don’t want to do it anymore” rather than put it in a more explicit language. For all the difficulties of maintaining my “cool” at the expense of appearing oftentimes foolish, the fact that I would not be able to ogle all those bathing beauties any more in wet tight suits was a bit of a tragedy. Fortunately, I was able to recover and find solace elsewhere…