This is a sequel to
You Got to Lose to Know How to Win
and
I Try to Look at the Big Picture.
The two main characters, both recent college graduates, have been set up on a date by their families. This is taking place in 1977.
************
All I had to offer Janet Pankin in the way of privacy was my 1967 Chevy Impala. It was a typical General Motors product, a big, faded green sedan with black vinyl seats. For driving purposes, I would have preferred something like a Volkswagen Dasher, but I couldn't afford one. However, my big old car did have four doors and plenty of room in the back seat. Now all I needed was a place to park the damn thing with us in it.
Teenagers of course had been parking in cars practically since the first ones hit the roads. I think there is some line in
Back to the Future
- which of course at that time was still
ahead
in the future - in which Lorraine Baines says something like, "I've parked with boys many times before." Of course, knowing her, what she did in there was probably on the sedate side. Also in the future, Bob Segar got a lot more explicit when singing about what he did in his '60 Chevy.
But we were both twenty-two, and no longer teenagers. (Although automobile sex was always there for people of whatever age who needed it.)
There were plenty of "hot sheet" motels available in New York, which were about all I could afford. The Bronx seemed to have quite a few of them. I hadn't completely ruled them out but they seemed wrong - way too scuzzy - for the moment. At that time I couldn't pay for a better hotel.
It was Janet who had suggested the Impala idea, more than once. Thus on this Friday evening in early October, I had brought the car over for a date. During the week we had met each other's families and had dinner at their respective houses. Both sets of relatives seemed pleased that this new relationship, after just two dates, seemed to be going well.
Around 9:30 PM on that Friday, I picked her up at her house in Inwood in upper Manhattan. We kissed for a bit and then I drove few blocks and parked on a side street. I turned the engine and lights off for the moment. We looked at each other as we sat there. She was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, and her skirt was loose-fitting but a bit on the short side. I could see that her legs were bare above her sandals. A thought occurred to me that of course I didn't express:
she's wearing that skirt so that I can have easy access to her crotch.
She spoke first, "I have something here that should calm me down a bit." She had a pint bottle of whiskey in her purse which she opened and sipped from. "Would you like a bit yourself?"
"No, I have to drive tonight."
"I'm not surprised; you would be the kind to be a stickler about that." Maybe she saw me squint or make some other expression because she laughed a bit and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give you a hard time." She moved across the bench seat, put her arm around my shoulders, and kissed me.
There was an issue we both suspected about each other but which we hadn't explicitly discussed before. That was, at the age of twenty-age, our complete lack of any kind of sexual experience for both of us. Tonight we'd probably have to deal with that more directly for the first time. Perhaps we could talk around it a bit without getting into all the details.
What am I thinking? We probably would be actually
doing
some of those very details tonight.
I asked her, as casually as I could, "Are you a bit nervous right now?"
"Yeah, I am. I assume you are too?"
I still tried to continue my nonchalant attitude, although I wasn't sure I was too successful at that, "Okay, I admit - yes, I am a bit."
Her face was right next to mine, "Look, Paul, we can take our time, we don't have to get it all done in one night. Try to relax a bit." It must have been obvious that I didn't quite know what she meant. She seemed to take a moment to get her courage up. "What I meant was, we should start off by pleasuring each other orally."
I blurted out, "I've seen that in Danish porno magazines."
Janet surprised me, "Well, I've seen it in magazines too. English ones, usually. And since they're English, they often feature a lot of spanking too."
That seemed far beyond anything we'd deal with tonight, but I filed it in my memory anyway. I assumed, that like me, that she had some friend who had found or bought these publications from somewhere. Probably that was one of the qualities I liked about Janet. She was thoughtful, and she was trying to make it as easy as possible for me to deal with the situation.
At that moment she looked a bit concerned, as if thinking,
am I saying the right things to this guy?
I put my arm around her shoulders and said, "Janet, you need to relax a bit yourself." I almost said,
and without too much whiskey
, although it didn't seem appropriate to say that.
She smiled at me, "Okay, I get that."
Anyway, now it seemed like time to get into logistics. "Now all we have to do is find someplace to park in this green whale."
"It can't be that hard, millions of teenagers do it every night."
"Yeah, but not in the middle of New York City."