Ah, the fabulous fifties. Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, gays were in the closet, tail fins were all the rage and "good" girls didn't go all the way until marriage. Boys did, but only if they could find a "bad" girl willing to go there.
I wasn't one of those boys, and neither were most of my horny, sex-starved high school buddies. We were all from upper-middleclass, church going families and the girls we dated—and I use the verb dated loosely—might let us cop a feel or two in the backseat of a car or on the sofa when parents were away. Being a socially awkward, shy, nerdy lad, I rarely got that far. In truth, I rarely had a date. More often than not, Saturday nights found me lounging in front of the TV watching Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke and a late night horror movie.
So you can imagine from the following why one specific Saturday night in late spring of 1959 is forever etched in my memory.
My parents had gone to a party, leaving me, my sister Beth and Marla Sue, her sleepover guest, in the house. The girls were in their second year of college. I had just turned eighteen, looking forward to my own college experience. Unlike me, they were socially precocious and sexy as all get out. Marla Sue was Sandra Dee to Beth's Natalie Wood, or so people said. Marla had the blond, blue-eyed, girl-next-door looks, with her cute turned-up nose and perfect little bod. Beth, in contrast, was a tall, athletic brunette. She had pouty lips and beautiful eyes—big, brown and seductive. "I wouldn't mind humping your sister," was a common refrain I heard from my friends who couldn't take their eyes off her long shapely legs and a face that did indeed bare a subtle likeness to the iconic Natalie. In truth, I'd have humped her too if we weren't related, not to mention the blond Marla Sue.
Well, on that Saturday in question, I was in my room, doing nothing in particular. Sis was in her room with Marla Sue playing records. Buddy Holly's voice mixed with shrieks of laughter. I sang softly to myself, adding a slightly different lyric: "I love you, Marla Sue, with a love so rare and true, oh Marla, my Marla Sue..." To this day, Beth denies she heard me. Even so, not a minute later, she and Marla Sue popped open their door, came down the hall and barged in without knocking. Both girls were barefoot and in short-shorts, influenced perhaps, by the 1957 song of the same name. Beth said they were bored playing records, and Leave It To Beaver, a show we all watched, didn't come on for another half hour. She then suggested we play spin the bottle, a game I was just vaguely familiar with, having never played it before. From what little I knew, it involved spinning a bottle and then kissing the person the bottle pointed to.
"Come on, it'll be fun," Beth said, seeing my hesitation. "Besides, you might learn something other than what they teach you in school."
"She's right, Jonathan," Marla Sue chimed in, "you wouldn't mind kissing me, would you?"
Kissing Marla Sue was an exciting prospect, exciting but also scary. She had experience; I didn't, and anyway, Beth's presence would surely be an inhibiting factor. "Well, I don't know," I said.
"Oh, don't be a party pooper," Beth argued. "It's just a game. You aren't afraid to kiss a girl, are you?"
Beth was pushing the right buttons. She sensed that I'd be hard pressed to turn down her challenge no matter how tentative I felt, and she was right. In fact, for the past few months, I'd been lifting weights to pack meat on my bony frame, working hard to shed my nerdy image. "Of course I'm not afraid," I insisted, flexing my budding biceps against the sleeves of my tight-fitting T-shirt. "Let's play," I said finally, knowing that refusing would subject me to more teasing.
Beth smiled triumphantly. "That's the spirit. We can play in the den while watching Perry Mason until the Beaver comes on."
The den was my family's favorite room in the house. It held the big Zenith TV we got the previous year, plus my dad's new stereo. Wood paneling lined the walls and squares of a cork material covered all floor space. A huge picture window, facing east, let in bursts of sunlight during morning hours. Built-in bookshelves over the Zenith held volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia, classics like The Great Gatsby and Gone With The Wind and some of my dad's medical journals (he was a pediatrician). There were just two pieces of furniture, a new sofa upholstered in tangerine orange that sat against the wall opposite the big window and, in a corner next to the window, a black leather armchair. A spider clock, a turquoise and black thing that used turquoise balls dabbed with black dots in place of numbers, hung on the wall above the sofa. "Tacky," my dad once called it. "Sometimes in marriage you have to make concessions," he told me when I asked why he kept it and the pole lamp he also wasn't too crazy about.
Perry Mason and his secretary Della Street were discussing a case in Perry's office as we sat cross-legged on the floor with an empty Pepsi bottle in front of us. Beth's first spin landed directly in front of me. Showing no inhibition whatsoever, she leaned over, pulled my head forward and planted a kiss right on my lips. I brushed the back of my hand across my mouth.
Beth laughed. "Oh, come on, that wasn't so bad, was it?" I shrugged and smiled, trying not to appear too embarrassed.
"Your turn," Marla Sue said, pointing at me. "We're going clockwise."
My spin landed directly in front of Marla Sue. Our kiss was brief but it was enough to stir my young cock, well hidden beneath my underwear and jeans. As the game progressed, I loosened up more, letting my lips linger longer on Marla Sue's with each turn.
"Little brother is trying to French you," Beth teased.
Marla Sue laughed. "I don't think he knows what that means." She was right, I didn't, but was too ashamed to admit it. Marla Sue looked at me sympathetically. "Do you, Jonathan? Do you know how to French kiss?" I shrugged and looked away. "Just as I thought. Here, I'll show you."
Brushing the bottle away, she took my head in her hands. "Jonathan, you are about to learn the art of French kissing. She then proceeded with the confidence that could only come with experience. I couldn't help but wonder how many lessons she'd had under her belt, how many boys she'd done this with. In seconds, I learned that the process involved the tongue as well as the lips. It felt very weird, the slimy feel of someone else's tongue rubbing against mine, the exchange of saliva. At least she smelled good, like baby shampoo, and she tasted good too, like the popcorn she and Beth had munched on earlier. My cock was starting to press hard against my clothing.
Glancing at the TV, I watched Perry Mason grilling some woman on the stand, breaking her down as he normally did to those whose guilt was finally exposed at the episode's climax. Meanwhile, Beth proposed to take our innocent little game to another level. Instead of being kissed, the player on the receiving end of the bottleneck must shed a piece of clothing. "Sort of like strip poker only you play with a bottle," she explained. "The first one brave enough to get totally naked wins." Beth claimed she'd played before but never with boys. Marla Sue said it was a first for her also.
Of course, everything we had done thus far was a first for me. I was a virgin wading into virgin territory. My cock stiffened with the anticipation of seeing Marla Sue naked, though the thought of the girls seeing me that way tempered some of my enthusiasm. I relaxed a little knowing that the Beaver would soon be on, figuring the game would end by the time we got down to our skivvies.
Beth got up and peered into the darkness through the picture window. "We don't want anyone spying on us," she said. She drew the curtains, then switched off three of the four globes on the pole lamp, leaving the room in a pallid glow.
Marla Sue hit Beth on her next turn, prompting sis to slip off her blouse. Through the years, I had caught glimpses of my sister naked. But not lately, not since she entered junior high. So now I was staring at her in bra and shorts, getting turned on in the process and feeling somewhat guilty about it. Giving sis a brief peck on the lips was one thing; seeing her this way—and anticipating more—was something else.
"Things are getting very interesting, little brother," Beth said, just as our show's theme music and voiceover came on. "...starring Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver..."
"Aren't we going to watch this?" I asked.
"Of course," she said, "while we finish what we started."
