by Dave Hill
Once we were safely docked, my new friends and I made our way back to shore where I noticed a handful of clothes-loving landlubbers loitering near the dock.
“Guess what. We were all just totally naked out there on that boat!” I wanted to yell out to them. “Butts, boobs, johnsons, hoo-has, everything!”
But in the end, I thought better of it. Sure, it would have been awesome, but it might not have been cool, especially with me being a serious journalist and all.
Before we went our separate ways, the earth mother, the guy with the dangling earring, the woman with the shaved infield, and I all exchanged business cards. They wanted me to get in touch with them as soon as my story came out and I wanted to see if their business cards said anything about how much they are totally into getting naked all the time (in case you’re wondering, not even a mention. I know. I thought it was weird, too).
A couple days after my sexy night at sea, I received a coquettish e-mail from the earth mother.
“My polyamory group has regular outings to the beach. We have a bonfire and lots and lots of fun,” she wrote. “You should really think about joining us sometime.”
That was two years ago. I’m still thinking about it.
Loving You Is Easy Because You Live Pretty Close to My Parents’ House
Love—it’s a funny game, isn’t it? One minute you’re terrified you’re going to die alone, the next minute you’re pressing a stack of twenties into someone’s hands just to finally get them out of your life once and for all. And yet we keep coming back for more, don’t we?
My earliest memories of romance go all the way back to kindergarten. But as I sit here typing this, a for-the-most-part grown man, it occurs to me that chronicling my once burning desire for a five-year-old girl might come off as a little creepy. So—in the interest of preserving a modicum of decency in these pages—please allow me to skip ahead a bit and start things off by telling you about a twelve-year-old girl I once had the hots for.
It was a Friday night back in the seventh grade and I was spending it, as I did most weekend nights, sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the family room, trying and mostly failing to get the attention of my sisters’ friends, who had come over for a bit of television watching and important girl talk. Suddenly, the phone rang. The odds of it being for me weren’t great, but I went ahead and answered it anyway.
“Hello, Hill residence,” I said. “This is the king speaking.”1
“Dave?” asked the voice on the other end.
“Hey, Marla,” I said, recognizing the voice as belonging to one of the few girls in my grade willing to address me directly.
“I have a question for you,” she said. “Who do you like?”
“Christina,” I said without hesitation, naming the object of my burning desire since the third grade.
“Oh, uh…” Marla stammered. “Well, who else do you like?”
“Abbey.”
“Who else?”
“Jessica.”
“All right, what about Mary Jean?” Marla asked, cutting to the chase.
“Sure, she’s cool,” I told her.
“Would you ever go with her?”2
“Sure.”
“Okay, hang on a second,” Marla said. “I’ll put her on.”
“Hello? Who’s on the phone?” yet another voice on the line said. “I need to use the phone this minute.”
“Mom, hang up, I’m on the phone!” I yelled.
It turned out my mom had picked up the upstairs extension—as she often did—just as soon as things were getting good.
“Hurry it up,” my mom said before slamming down the receiver.
A couple of seconds later, I heard another voice come on the line. It was Mary Jean. Finally.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered.
“What are you doing?”
“Just sitting here mostly. What are you doing?” I said, trying to sound about as sexy and coquettish as a twelve-year-old was legally allowed to at the time.
“Nothing,” she answered.
“Cool.”
“So, what do you think?” Mary Jean asked, subtly addressing our possible romantic future.
“Uh, um, yes, I would like to go with you,” I said brashly.
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in school on Monday.”
“Okay. Bye, Mary Jean. See you Monday. Say bye to Marla for me.”
By seventh-grade standards, shit was totally on. I showed up to school the following Monday with a bit of extra swagger in my step and some added attention given to my hair, which at the time I wore short, sometimes parting it on the right, other times parting it on the left without warning in order to let everyone around me know that I was a guy who had no time for rules.
As you can probably imagine, word spread pretty quickly around the seventh grade that Mary Jean and I were officially an item. Since she was pretty and a member of the “popular girls” clique, going with her gave me an instant bump in social status. And since I was neither good at sports nor school, Mary Jean gained herself a bit of street credibility by going with a fucking outlaw. Raising the stakes on things was the fact that Mary Jean and I weren’t even in the same homeroom—risky circumstances that forced us to seize opportunities for romance wherever and whenever they came along. It was like something out of West Side Story only with less knives, dancing, and ethnic conflict. Most days, we had little choice but to express our love during class changeovers.
“Hey,” I’d say to her as we passed each other in single-file lines between lessons, lingering for as long as possible without stopping the line in its tracks altogether.
“Hey,” she’d say.
“How was history?”
“It sucked.”
“That sucks. I’m … really sorry to hear that,” I’d respond in an effort to let her know that I cared about her in a way that went way beyond just her good looks.
It wasn’t much, but we made the most of it, like amorous dogs sniffing each other briefly before their owners jerk them apart and continue down the block. We rarely exchanged more than a few words in person, instead saving them up for our sometimes twice-weekly phone conversations, during which we’d talk about the important seventh-grade matters of the day until my mom insisted I let her use the phone. They were pretty good times. I was young and in love and I felt like anything was possible. One day, however, just a few weeks into our scorching-hot romance, everything changed.
“Mary Jean wants to talk to you,” Marla said to me one day at recess.
I stood waiting anxiously on the small strip of cement in between the boys’ area and the girls’ area of the playground as Mary Jean cautiously approached. Right away I knew something was wrong. That familiar flicker of youthful romance I had come to know so well was suddenly gone from her eyes. Her skirt hung at a length that the nuns at our school would have had absolutely no problem with. And her hair, well, frankly it was like she wasn’t even trying anymore.
“I … need to talk to you,” she said.
Even at the age of twelve, I already knew it was never good to hear a woman say those words.
“I don’t want to go with you anymore,” she said.
“What? Why?” I whimpered.
“It’s just not working for me anymore,” Mary Jean said, staring into the distance.
“Is there … anything I can do t-to … ch-change your mind?” I sputtered.
“No … I-I’m sorry,” she said before scampering away like a siren in some old French film.
And so it ended. Mary Jean and I were a thing of the past, a footnote in the long and sordid romantic history of my Catholic elementary school before we had even had a chance to share an awkward first kiss or hang out in front of the deli up the street from school or anything. It would be a long time before I could even think about loving a woman again.
The following year, I entered the eighth grade a changed man menta
lly, emotionally, and—perhaps most important—physically. I noticed similar changes in my classmates, particularly the girls, and, seemingly from out of nowhere, felt ready to love again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any takers, which was especially hard on the thirteen-year-old me as many of the other kids in my class seemed to already be living out a lot of the stuff I saw happen in Fast Times at Ridgemont High on cable at my friend’s house one weekend, at least according to cafeteria rumors anyway.
“Dude, Joey got to second base with Monica for, like, two hours straight this weekend in one of the upstairs bedrooms at Billy’s house while his parents were out of town,” a friend would say.
“No. Way,” I’d respond.
“Way.”
“Way?”
“Way!”
One Friday, I decided to join a bunch of my fellow eighth graders for something called “ski bus,” a chartered coach that showed up in the parking lot after school and took seventh and eighth graders skiing at one of Northeastern Ohio’s several nonthreatening ski resorts. We’d all hit the slopes for a few hours together, bundled in colorful ’80s ski attire, and then be dumped back off in the school parking lot just in time to beat curfew. For reasons I still can’t comprehend, there was no adult supervision on the bus aside from the driver, so naturally the ski bus quickly transformed into a caravan of raging, barely pubescent hormones, a veritable rolling Club Hedonism for twelve- and thirteen-year-old Catholic school children.
“Do you want to play Seven Minutes in Heaven, Dave?” Marla, pretty much my romance broker at that point, asked me as I sat shivering in long johns and jeans that were soaked from repeatedly falling into damp Midwestern snow for two hours straight.
“Huh?” I responded.
“Seven Minutes in Heaven,” she huffed. “You pick out a girl and then you both go to the back of the bus for seven minutes and do, you know, whatever.”
I was still confused until I turned around to discover that the back of the ski bus was a sea of slobbering lips and clumsily roaming hands.
“Whoa,” I thought. Suddenly I was standing at the outskirts of Makeout City and I wanted desperately to become mayor.
“Sure,” I said to Marla, playing it cool. “Why not?”
Marla dragged me a couple of rows over to where four or five Catholic school girls were lined up like Thai prostitutes during Fleet Week.
“Which one do you want?” Marla asked.
At that point in my life, I would have settled for just about anyone recognized by the medical community as female, so to actually have a choice in the matter was almost too much for me to handle. And thanks to the social Darwinism of the ski bus, all the girls in question were at the very least pretty cute by elementary school standards, so I couldn’t lose.
“I’ll take Jenny,” I said, pointing at the one girl who definitely wasn’t taller than I was.
“Okay, head to the back,” Marla said. “Your seven minutes start right now.”
What happened next is still largely a blur, just as it had been immediately afterward. There I was, a thirteen-year-old boy still trying to piece his life back together after having his heart squashed all over the playground a year earlier, now totally about to make out with an actual girl for the first time in his entire life. Fortunately for me, Jenny had totally made out with someone before and guided me through the process, as I imagine most Thai prostitutes tend to do with their first-timers. As soon as we settled into one of the pleather-lined benches in the back of the sexy, sexy ski bus, Jenny wrapped her arms around my neck and shoved her tongue in my mouth, something I somehow never saw coming, not even after having seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High at my friend’s house that one night. Taking my cues from Jenny, I shoved my tongue in her mouth and held on for dear life. My technique was crude, brash, and desperate—perhaps even more so than it is now. Fortunately for Jenny, exactly seven minutes later, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Time’s up,” Marla said, looking down at us like a tired and impatient madam who’s seen it all.
I politely peeled myself off Jenny and dizzily stood up. Having passed what felt like a major milestone in my life, I was both exhilarated and relieved, at once thrilled to have the whole thing over with while severely disappointed that an entire seven minutes could fly by so quickly.
“Thanks, Jenny, that was really fun,” I said before returning to my seat. “And thank you, Marla, for making it all possible. You’re doing important work here.”
After the bus dropped us back off in the school parking lot a short while later, I walked home through the icy suburban Cleveland snow as a man for the very first time in my life, dried slobber from both mine and Jenny’s mouths glistening on my lips and cheeks like stardust in the pale moonlight. It totally ruled.
As much as I thought that anything-goes night of fun on the ski bus was just the beginning of my molten-hot love life, one that would involve making out with eighth-grade girls whenever I felt like it and maybe even a few seventh- and ninth-grade girls when I was feeling a little nuts, too, things cooled off pretty quickly afterward. In fact, it would be three long years before Lady Love would darken my doorstep once more.
Sheila was the older sister of Julian, one of my hockey teammates. We met after a school football game during my sophomore year. She had jet-black hair and olive skin and was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my whole entire life. And since she lived over a half hour away from me on the other side of town, she was also exotic, a temptress even. The only problem was that at the time she was dating some other guy in my class, so—to shield myself from heartache—I tried to forget she even existed. Then one day during my junior year, she sauntered back into my life, as temptresses so often do.
“Sheila was asking about you at the football game this weekend,” my friend Todd told me at school one Monday morning.
“What?” I responded. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “She was just acting all weird and asking everyone where you were.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know, dude. That chick’s a weirdo anyway. Why don’t you ask her brother Julian what the deal is?”
Todd was right—Sheila was a weirdo, if by weirdo you mean exotic superfox that I was now officially hell-bent on making my own. I ran into her brother Julian, a freshman, in the school library the next day.
“Sheila says hi,” Julian said, beating me to the punch.
“What do you mean? What’s going on?” I asked him while trying to keep myself from doing that thing where you grab someone by the collar and press them up against a wall in order to get them to start answering some tough questions.
“I dunno,” Julian said. “I guess she likes you or something.”
“Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?”
“Not anymore. Why don’t you call her?”
“Maybe I will,” I said nonchalantly.
Since Julian was a whole two years younger than me, it would have been socially unacceptable of him to be protective of his older sister and not just go ahead and hand over his family’s home telephone number (remember, this was all happening in pre–cell phone times), so he scribbled it down on a piece of notebook paper and sent me on my way.
I was officially freaking out. In case you couldn’t tell, kissing Jenny that night on the ski bus was just physical. Sure, it was great and all, but feelings never really came into play. But knowing that Sheila actually liked me, Dave Hill, a not particularly cool kid from all the way on the other side of town, was practically making my heart explode.
That night, I snuck down into the basement of my family’s house to call Sheila from the phone we kept in the laundry room, the most private place in the whole house since everyone in my family absolutely despised doing laundry.
The phone rang a few times. “Is Sheila there?” I asked the lady who answered.
“Just a second,” the lady said.
It turned out the lady was Sheila’s mom. And
the twenty or thirty seconds I had to wait for Sheila to pick up the phone felt like an eternity.
“Hello?” she said, probably not trying to sound sexy at all but still sounding totally, totally sexy to me.
“Sheila?” I squeaked. “This is Dave Hill.”
“Hi.”
It was refreshing that Sheila didn’t hang up as soon as she heard it was me, as that tended to be most people’s reaction back then. In fact, it sounded like she was actually glad to hear from me. “Weird,” I thought.
“How’s it going?” I asked, trying and failing to sound like the coolest sixteen-year-old of all-time.
“Great,” she answered.
Of course it was going great. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole world. Why wouldn’t it be?
“How are you?” she continued.
“I’m really great. Thanks so much for asking.”
I hadn’t necessarily thought I would get that far into an actual conversation with her, what with Sheila being an actual girl and all, so I wasn’t sure what to say next. Angel that she was, however, she took the reins of the conversation and I somehow managed to have a breezy, delightful discussion with her that—since my mom was at the grocery store at the time—lasted ten, maybe even twelve minutes as we chatted away about everything and nothing at all, finishing each other’s sentences, and laughing hysterically at whatever hilarious thing one of us had just said. When my mom finally came home, I even managed to play it reasonably cool after she picked up the phone in the kitchen and demanded I hang up immediately.
“Sure thing, Mom,” I said. “It was nice talking with you, Sheila. I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.”
I’m not sure where I got the moxie—nay, balls—to throw in that last line, but I actually did end up calling Sheila the next day and the day after that, too. And by the time the weekend finally came around, Sheila and I were hanging out. Together. We met up at my high school’s football game like we had for the first time ever the year before, only this time instead of being there with some guy I wanted dead, she was there with me. It felt like the most important moment in my life thus far. When I walked into the football stadium, it could not be debated—I, Dave Hill, was there not only with a girl, but with the most beautiful girl of all-time. I felt like a champion, a champion of love, the best kind of champion. My hair looked good, too.