Reminiscence 1: Drama Club Party

"My sister doesn't like you."

* * * * *

It was a Drama Club party at the home of a graduating senior at my high school. I was a sophomore, it was May, and I was miserable. All of my friends were in the senior class, and they were all about to graduate and leave, and I was going to be alone for the next two years.

We'd just finished the final performance at our Catholic high school and the cast was gathered at this girl's somewhat upscale house. She hadn't actually been part of the controlling Drama Club clique which I was so proud to be a member of; she joined so she could have something to put on her college applications, or so the whispers went. Anyway, she was tolerated and given a small part in the play, which was a predictably awkward staging of Pygmalion.

My "girlfriend", C., had played Eliza Doolittle during the run, while I got the thankless role of Col. Pickering, mostly because I could do an old English colonel-type accent, the product of many hours of slavish devotion to the Monty Python broadcasts on the LA PBS station. I was perpetually jealous because A., who played Higgins, got to kiss my girlfriend on-stage.

See, I didn't get to kiss my girlfriend on- or off-stage. She was the 3rd daughter of a turbo-Catholic family dedicated to preserving the precious hymens of their daughters against all onslaughts of modernity, including rock music, boys, movies with R ratings, and dances not held on the school grounds and chaperoned by nuns & brothers.

Anyway, C. is a whole series of stories in herself. This is about someone else.

I don't remember the name of the girl at whose parent's house the cast party was held. It was in the "good" part of Oxnard, hilarious as that may sound. Anyway, this girl volunteered her house, and we all dutifully trooped over.

For some reason only her mom was there; was their dad dead, maybe? Divorce? Something. In any case, I remember that it was mom and three daughters: our Drama Club senior, a little girl probably in the 2nd or 3rd grade, and the middle sister.

We were not a rowdy crew, the Drama Club. Almost nobody drank at all when we even had a chance, and absolutely nobody did any drugs at all. In a word, we were dorks. We had a lot of fun at parties, though, and danced a lot, and did a lot of spontaneous recitations of Python routines (surprised?), and listened to Beatles records backwards (this some 8 years after the band broke up and several years after it had been well established that Paul McCartney was, sadly, very much alive). The next year I would discover punk; that changed a lot, but at this point, it was innocent in a way that seems unimaginable considering that it was the 70's.

C. was in her glory, having finished her triumphant run as Eliza, and was anyway in a period of not wanting to give me the wrong idea about the status of our relationship by doing anything so untoward as paying attention to me at parties. I was, as a result, sulking around miserably, trying to avoid the attentions of J. (surely to be the subject of future Reminiscences) because I feared C.'s jealousy.

We were running out of Coke and somebody said I should look in the laundry room.

"Down the hall, past the kitchen, on the left; the door's closed to keep the dog in, so slide in and don't let the dog out."

I went, probably wondering if C. was going to give me a ride home or not. I spent the majority of my time in those days wondering about how C. felt about me and whether or not she loved me, wanted me, would let me kiss her, would let me touch her breasts, would want to keep seeing me after she graduated, etc.

I opened the door, slid in, carefully closed the door, and turned to begin looking for additional Cokes and other soda. About 15 seconds later, I heard the door open and then quickly close.

"My sister doesn't like you."

It was the middle sister. I don't remember her name either. But I remember some things about her, very, very clearly.

She said her name and repeated that her sister, the senior, didn't like me, and she wanted to know why. She was about 4'10'', shockingly blond, with the oozing layers of lip gloss that young girls wore back then. She had on the de rigeur skin-tight blue jeans of the time, no shoes or socks, and a white T-shirt that stretched credulity. How she got this tiny thing stretched over her outsized breasts I could not fathom then or now.

She was in 8th grade, as it turned out, and I gathered that she'd kind of picked up on the fact that boys liked her tits, because she stood there before me, blocking my path to the door and the party, with her hands laced together behind her back, thrusting these gravity-defying mounds out at me like a Junior Miss Jayne Mansfield.

In retrospect, it was probably a pretty grotesque performance, actually, though it certainly didn't strike me that way at the time. I remember a lot of lip-biting and head-swaying cum hair-tossing, with repeated sallies about how very much her older sister didn't like me, followed by questions about my opinion on certain bands, certain of her sister's friends, did I like the appetizers, because she did most of the work, not her sister... All the while the back remains arched, she moves closer, the breasts thrust forward...

Then she started laughing about something I said -- overly loudly, artificially -- and then she touched me. Nothing outre, just a hand on my arm. But she gave me this challenging look, chin down, sort of out from under her eyebrows, and even though I'd never seen it before, I immediately knew it meant something and I had a pretty good idea of what it was.

And ever since, even when I've played dumb or been too intimidated to believe what my eyes were telling me, that look from a girl or woman has always meant the same thing: I want you to do something to me, but I don't want to have to ask you for it, so kiss me, or touch me, or grab my ass, or gently caress my breasts, or pull my hair and force me to my knees, or call me a whore and tell me to suck your cock. The 'something' is different for different women, but the look is usually the same.

Are-you-receiving-this-good-now-do-something-to-me/take-me/I-want/I-need-but-I'm-not-supposed-to-so-we-have-to-play-this-ridiculous-game-so-I-have-to-pray-that-you're-smart-enough-to-get-this-and-decode-it-quickly-and-accurately

I think this 8th grade girl was the first to give me this look, and in the 27 years since then, I've gotten it in a variety of contexts, including once at an S/M party when the look (I later learned) was intended to motivate me to grab a handful of a woman's hair, slap her face, force her to her knees, and shove my cock in her mouth, without saying a word.

This sort of atmosphere and expectation places a premium on correct decoding of the message.

There is, I fear, no happy ending. She was a little overpowering for me, to be honest, which is saying something. I was a relatively normal sophomore boy in high school, she was an 8th grade girl, but she was much more overtly sexual than I was, and it freaked me out. I got very nervous and actually ended up reaching around her for the door after 15 increasingly tense minutes alone with her.

What did she really want? Probably just to make out with one of her sister's friends, I imagine. Hence the "my sister doesn't like you", which might have been true for all I know, though I don't remember any serious animosity, but the point would have been the sibling rivalry and the encounter on the field of sexuality.

She almost certainly didn't want anything really outrageous or genitally sexual. Kids then just weren't that advanced at that age. Nobody I knew, male or female, lost their virginity before the age of 15.

But she wanted something from me, something to do with sex. And I just couldn't do it.

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Confession 1: I still think about this scenario from time to time (obviously). I still regret not having done....something. I was a virgin at the time and would remain one for nearly two years, so we're not talking about much here. I could have kissed the Bonnie Bell root beer-flavored lip gloss-encrusted lips, fondled the proudly-proferred breasts, held her against me while the Beatles or Queen or Boston or whatever it was played in the background.

Confession 2: I've found pictures of women while trolling for porn on the 'Net that remind me of her; I've saved them for that reason and have later masturbated and replayed the scene in my head. In these versions, I'm a bit more receptive to her advances. Sometimes she ends up on her knees in that laundry room, giving me enthusiastic 8th grade head. Sometimes she ends up tied to an unspecified tree, with all kinds of unpleasant things being visited upon her ridiculously over-ripe young breasts in expiation for some unspecified offense... No sense to any of these, of course.

Confession 3: Now, in my 40s, the concept of "enthusiastic 8th grade head" is more alluring to me than it ever was then. Only as a twisted fantasy, I hasten to add, but still. Then, I was purely panicked. Now, it's so distant and remote that it's somehow perversely available for fantasy, like sex with a green alien woman from Star Trek. In the fantasy, it's not the 40-something me, more like the teenage me. But still.

Confession 4: I resent that I feel the need carefully to explain right here and now that I would not, have not, and will not have any kind of illegal sex. It bothers me that I've internalized the censor and that my own fantasies come with this automatic interpellative shortcircuit. I resent that I cannot summon the courage to flaunt this even here.

Confession 5: I'm more ashamed of the failure of courage noted in Confession 4 than I am of the fantasies & revelations in Confessions 2 & 3.

Confession 6: I'm proud of this shame.

Unsurprising personal revelation: Dostoevsky has been one of my favorite authors since I was a junior in high school.

Confession 7: I've returned to re-edit this a few times because I got scared that it was too brashly stated, possibly more provocative than the demands of truthful representation required. More shame about cowardice.

Confession 8: I told my girlfriend (NB: in her 30s) about this event and she thought it was "hot". This made me feel lame and conflicted. I suppose women understandably get a bit more leeway in these matters.