“I got something to say-ayyy!!!”
Metallica’s signature cover of the Misfits’s “Last Caress/Green Hell” sends the crowd into a chorus of frothing-at-the-mouth shouts. The careening, paralyzing, manic headbanging is a perfect accompaniment to the song’s affirming themes of killing babies, raping mothers, and cold, sweet death.
Mom and Dad gave me a free pass for the night. Knowing the concert wasn’t supposed to end until midnight, they said, “Call us sometime later just to let us know you’re okay, and be home before we wake up in the morning.”
My parents’ misplaced trust stems from my grades—straight As for the semester, again. Tonight is their reward for me “keeping my head in the game despite everything.” Logic dictates a kid that smart can’t simultaneously be that stupid. But then again, logic has nothing to do with drinking a six-pack of beer and most of a fifth of whiskey, followed by three joints and a hit off an opium pipe administered by a biker chick who wanted to take my “cute little ass” home with her.
Van Halen squeezed out an anticlimactic twelfth-hour encore that sent us home mute, deaf, drunk, and stoned. Kent Hagen invited us to his apartment for a post-concert party, his invitation made more enticing by the fact that Neff and I were too fucked up to argue or consider our other options. That, and our car was parked in front of Kent’s apartment.
Kent’s party is like any high school party in which you don’t know anyone, hovering between cool and alienating. Kent used to live in Empire Ridge, but he moved up to Indianapolis after his freshman year. Some of Kent’s Indy friends have been there all night—a couple of freakishly tall black dudes from the North Central High School basketball team, and a handful of girls way out of my league. Kent and Neff and their feathered heads of parted-down-the-middle hair entertain from behind the bar, serving weak drinks and even weaker jokes. As if a half-day of their music wasn’t enough, a Kingdom Come-Dokken-Metallica-Scorpions-Van Halen mix tape plays on the stereo.
I’ve been alternating between waters and Diet Coke for at least an hour. I’m still pretty drunk. I think I already called my parents. I know I called somebody when I got here.
There’s a knock at the door.
Kent turns down the stereo. “Who is it?”
Another knock.
Not a one of us in the apartment is eighteen, let alone twenty-one. I remind myself that this is the west side of Indianapolis, a place where underage drinking ranks somewhere beneath armed robbery, drive-by shootings, and good ol’ fashioned homicide on the list of things cops have to worry about.
“It’s Laura,” the disembodied voice says. “Is Hank here?”
Kent throws me a look, his feathered bangs, furrowed brow, and thin mustache running in almost parallel lines across his face. He opens the door. “You about gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry, Kent.” Laura sees me over his shoulder and flashes me a dimpled smile. She’s wearing her favorite white miniskirt with a teal off-the-shoulder sweater, matching teal socks, and white flats. Her hair, its Florida gold taunting me still, is teased out to her shoulders.
Laura approaches me. “So you’re the one I called?” I say, smiling a little too hard.
Her lips are on mine before I know what’s happening. Our kiss is long, wet, and tactless, right there in the middle of the living room. Laura kisses me hard, her teeth biting and pulling my bottom lip as she backs away from me. She smells of peach schnapps.
“Yeah, I’m the one you called.” She kisses and bites me again.
Kent slams the front door. “Get a room, you two.”
We force a laugh but keep kissing.
“No, seriously.” Kent pushes us toward the stairs. “Go to my room. Top of the stairs. Second door on your left.”
I turn to Kent, letting go of Laura. “Thanks, Kent, but we’re fine right here. Aren’t we, babe?”
I look up and notice my girlfriend is gone. She’s already at the top of the stairs.
Laura locks the door behind us. The room is dark. We feel our way to the corner of the room and start to sit down on what I hope is a bed. I hear a cracking sound and jump up, startled. “What the hell was that?”
“Your back pocket.”
“My what?”
“Something’s in your back pocket.” Laura walks behind me, her left hand on my shoulder. She stands between me and the bed, pulling Scorpions’s Savage Amusement cassette out of my back pocket.
“Shit,” I say.
“No worries.” Laura holds the cassette up to me for inspection. “You just cracked the case. Tape is fine.” She throws the cassette on the bed. In one fluid motion, her lips are on my ear and her left hand drops down the front of my pants.
Laura runs her hand up and down between my legs. She rubs it a little. I don’t know what to do next. I push her down toward the bed.
“Not so fast.” She bites me for a third time, this time on the ear. She grabs my Scorpions tape, walks around me to the stereo on the opposite corner of the room. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness. A mini-blind wraps Laura’s silhouette in horizontal stripes of moonlight. She pulls off her shirt and reaches back to unfasten her bra with one hand, her back still to me. She pops in Savage Amusement, presses play, and spins on the ball of her right foot to face me, bare-chested. Her breasts seem to stare at me, but only briefly. She crosses her arms in front of her chest from force of habit—hiding what she regards as more blight than beautiful.
I acknowledge and counter her insecurity. “You’re hot, you know that, right?”
“You’re just trying to get in my pants.”
“Maybe, but you’re still smoking hot. I hate to break this to you, but I’m very superficial. If you were ugly, I wouldn’t go out with you.”
That gets a smile out of her. She drops her arms by her side. “You know just what to say to a girl, don’t you?”
Her breasts are staring at me again, like the cover of Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer. For a second, I see only my longtime headless companion. Things seemed so much easier when she didn’t have a face.
My cock is so hard it hurts. Same with my balls. At this rate, I’m not going to even get the damn thing out of my pants.
“Are you sure, Laura?” I ask.
“Yes, Hank,” she answers. “I’m sure.”
Laura approaches the bed to the tune of “Don’t Stop at the Top,” the first song on the Savage Amusement album. One of my favorites. She is already stripped down to her cotton panties and her teal socks. In my drunken and bumbling state, I’m still clothed from head to toe.
“Allow me,” Laura says. She grabs the bottom of my Monsters of Rock T-shirt, then pulls it up and over my head. She leans down and kisses me hard on the lips, even harder than before, her tongue daring mine to put up a fight. She bites me for a fourth time, this time concentrating on my left nipple. Just when the sensation is about to become more painful than pleasurable, she opens her mouth a little wider, soothing the nipple with a dozen quick flicks of her tongue.
Laura then guides my hands down the front of her panties. I slide my middle and index fingers in and out of her, our lips biding their time with soft kisses on one another’s necks. Laura’s hands find their way inside my boxer shorts.
“I want you inside me.” She says this in a decibel just below a whisper, so quiet I almost think I’m hearing things.
“What?” I feel my pockets, looking around the room like a contractor who just misplaced his tape measure. “But, Laura, I don’t know where my wallet is. I don’t have any…”
“Protection?”
I’m thinking “experience,” but I run with it. “Yeah, I didn’t bring anything.”
“You don’t need it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m due to start my period any day now. I’m okay.”
She slinks onto the bed and rolls over to her back. She spreads he
r legs. I crawl on top of her, naked and engorged, eager. My arms are on either side of her—straight, extended, like I’ve just finished a pushup and am about to go down for another.
Below my waist is the comic relief part of the exercise, my naked white ass bouncing in the air as my penis tries in vain to find my girlfriend’s vagina. I’m like the guy who refuses to get directions. “The key is to act like you belong here,” Dad likes to say whenever he gets us lost on vacation, which is every vacation. I don’t care if I belong here or not, but somebody needs to give my dick a map.
Laura reaches down and clasps me in hand. “It’s okay, Hank, I can do it.”
She clasps me in her hand, pulls me inside her. I push for the first time, but way too hard. “Ouch,” she says under her breath. “Careful.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay.”
I reenter her as “Don’t Stop at the Top” segues to “Rhythm of Love.” I try to be gentle this time, cupping Laura’s left breast in my right hand and propping myself over her with my left forearm to her side. Our bodies move in an awkward harmony, forgiving one another’s missteps. I can already tell positioning myself higher is more pleasurable for her, less so for me, and that when I drop my torso below hers, the reverse is true. My lips get carried away on her left nipple, remembering Beth’s sharp teeth and maybe returning the favor with a little too much relish.
“Easy, Hank.”
“Sorry.”
“Just relax.”
Easy for her to say. She’s not the one about to unleash sixteen years of pent-up hormones and testosterone into the world. As Klaus Meine serenades us with “Passion Rules the Game,” I move my arms around Laura’s body, reaching down to dig my fingers into her bare ass. I lift her into me. Laura arches her back and moans.
I shudder, releasing myself inside her.
I stay inside Laura for what seems like forever. Or at least, I wish it was forever. Holy shit, this is awesome. For the last five years, I’ve chosen masturbation over this? I’m a fucking idiot.
We stare into each other’s eyes, panting and sweating. I pull out and roll off her only after my wrists go numb. We both try to catch our breath as the guitar solo kicks in for “Media Overkill.”
“You practically made it through four songs,” Laura says.
“Is that good?” I ask.
“I would think four seconds is impressive for a sixteen-year-old.”
“I might have masturbated earlier in the day.”
“When?”
“Whenever. Keeps me sane.”
“So you do it a lot?”
“Define a lot.”
“Two or three times.”
“In a day? Yeah, that’s about right.”
“I was thinking in a week.”
I lean in, kiss Laura on the cheek. I can feel the room starting to exhale.
“I take it everybody knows then?” Laura asks.
“That I masturbate two or three times a day?”
“No, dumbass. That we’re back together.”
“Yeah, I told everyone Monday morning before school.”
“How’d Beth take it?”
And the room puckers up one more time. “Why do you care what Beth said?”
“Well…” Laura says. “You know.”
“I know what?”
“She and you were…”
“We were friends,” I say. “We are friends.”
“Friends with benefits?”
“Jesus Christ, Laura. Can we just enjoy tonight?”
“Time’s up, lovebirds!” Kent pounds on the door.
We turn on the lights. I watch Laura get dressed. I see her naked back and the curve of her ass in full view for the first time.
“Are you sneaking a peek at me, Mr. Fitzpatrick?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Are you going to stop being a jealous hose beast?”
We snuck back into Kent’s room and had sex two more times that night. I attended the greatest rock concert of my life, and yet, of the five bands and twelve hours’ worth of music, aside from a vague image of a choreographed human pyramid involving Scorpions’s Klaus Meine, Rudolf Schenker, and Matthias Jabs during the intro to “The Zoo,” I can’t recall one song from the show. What’s more, I don’t give a shit. My amnesia is glorious. My smile is so big it hurts.
Virgins have no fucking clue how good life can be.
Chapter sixteen
Laura meets me at the door wearing cutoff jean shorts and her white bikini top. She pulls me into the house, standing on her bare tiptoes. She kisses me while squeezing my ass. Her aggressiveness surprises me. I push her away.
“What’s wrong?” Laura asks.
“No ‘hello,’ or ‘I’ve missed you’ first?”
Laura smiles, grabs me by the front belt loops on my jeans and pulls me into her. “And here I thought I was the one who needed to be romanced.”
“What about your parents?” I ask, our lips nearly touching.
“Gone for the weekend,” she answers.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“So we have the whole house…”
“To ourselves.”
I stare at her eyes, then at the area in question below her waist. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re free and clear to, uh…”
“Hank…” Laura unzips her shorts. “I’ve been open for business since Friday morning.”
Losing your virginity the day before your girlfriend starts her period is like winning the lottery and being forced to wait a week to cash in your ticket. Contrary to popular belief, “blue balls” is not a figment of a teenage boy’s imagination, much less some psychosomatic last-ditch effort to get some action. I did the research after Dad’s vasectomy reversal. There’s a medical term for it—epididymitis, defined as an inflammation of the epididymis, or scrotal sac. Blue balls occur, more or less, when the scrotal sac is stopped up with sperm that left the testes but not the penis. The vas deferens is the conduit for the sperm from the testes to the urethra, and whenever it’s blocked it feels like someone is wailing on your balls with a Louisville Slugger.
Laura leads me by the hand into her bedroom. The walls, bed linens, and window treatments are all pink. Pictures line various bookshelves, bedside tables, and a lone tall dresser on the wall to the left of her bed. Parents, brothers, grandparents, classmates, and various younger incarnations of Laura stand shoulder to shoulder, angling for a better view.
Today is nothing like last Saturday. Last Saturday we were drunk. It was dark. Even now, a week after having sex and some seven odd months into our relationship, we’re in a way still alien to one another. For today, at least, there’s a reckless immodesty to us both. Two windows stand perpendicular to one another, one on Laura’s north wall and the other on the west wall. Laura doesn’t bother drawing the shades. The sun pours into the room. We strip each other naked, pausing after each discarded piece of clothing, as if we’ve never seen bare skin in the light of day. As Laura slips out of her panties, first her left foot then her right, she rests her head on my chest. We sway back and forth, synchronizing our breaths, each of us getting used to the feel of the other’s skin against our own.
We walk over to the bed. Laura wants me on top again. I fumble with the condom, trying to put it on inside out.
“Here, let me get that.” Laura pulls off the condom, flipping it over. With her right hand she reaches down and unrolls the condom in one adroit motion.
I climb off Laura and sit up on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry.”
Laura sits up, sweating. She seems to appreciate my endurance more than me. She kisses my bare shoulder. “Oh my God, Hank, what the hell are you apologizing for?”
I silently curse myself for m
asturbating twice before I got here. “For taking so long.”
“I should be thanking you.”
“Why? Did you, uh…” My eyes dip below her waistline. “Have an orgasm?”
She smiles. “Damn straight I did.”
I smile right back at her. “Well, that’s good, then. It just felt a little weird on my end. I think it was the condom.”
This is my first subtle admission to Laura that I’m new to this. She doesn’t pick up on the hint. “It’s just one of those things you get used to again, right?”
I play along. “It’s been awhile. I guess I just forgot.”
Laura wraps her arm around my waist, resting her chin on my shoulder. “I once heard a stand-up comedian say that having sex with a condom is like eating a delicious steak with a balloon on your tongue.”
I laugh. “That’s fucking hilarious.”
“But true?”
“Hell, yes!”
Laura stands up. She walks across the room in the nude, and there’s something about her—something more tender than sexual. Her footfalls are soft, like she doesn’t want to disturb the moment. She presses the balls of her bare feet against the ground, her calves contracting. The bottom curves of her ass jiggle, like two smiley faces. She reaches down and grabs her pair of jean shorts off the floor. She slips her feet into the shorts, first her right foot, then her left.
I approach her, white bikini top in my hand. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Laura encases her breasts within the cups of her bikini top, pulling it tight and around her back. She turns her back to me. “Can you fasten me?”
I reach for the bikini and hook the two ends together. I kiss her on the neck. “Let’s not make a habit of me helping you put your clothes on.”
“Deal.” Laura kisses me on the cheek. “I’m starving. How about you?”
We sit at the kitchen table while splitting a Diet Coke and a plate of microwave nachos. My side of the nachos has jalapenos. Her side is plain. I notice a stack of college applications on the kitchen table.
“You hear from Bucknell yet?”
“No, not yet.”
Laura has been trying to get into Bucknell University for about a year, taking and retaking her standardized tests. Her father went there, and she’s been counting on the legacy angle to offset her above-average-though-not-quite-excellent academic record. She’s on the waiting list.
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