I went outside and jumped into the car that was smoking, which was a fluorescent turquoise Plymouth something or other with vinyl interior. I was flying so high from my victory, I decided to compliment him on the car.
"I love this color, Dad."
My firm yet supple seven-year-old ass had hardly touched the vinyl when my own father sucker-slapped me. Right on my nose. I was in pure, titillated horror. I couldn't even respond with words. I thought for sure my nose was broken, but then the tingling sensation died--just when I was starting to enjoy it.
"You thought you were gonna get away without a smack, didn't you?" he said.
I instantly broke down and cried like a little girl. I knew, of course that I was a little girl, but I did not like acting like one. And I was both hurt and angry at having to drive to school with someone who just smacked me. I felt like such a moron for thinking I could outsmart my father with some lame compliment about his piece-of-shit car. This was definitely a feeling I didn't like then, or the hundreds of times I've felt it since.
I didn't say anything the whole ride. When we reached the school, I got out and slammed the door. He drove away with some sort of car part scraping the sidewalk, possibly the muffler.
Now when I look back at that experience, I realize that maybe walking in on my parents in all their glory was what led me to embrace my own sexuality. The way those two were enjoying themselves made me realize there was more to life than macaroni and cheese and The Brady Bunch. I wanted in on that action and didn't appreciate having to wait another ten years to get the real party started.
I wiped my tears, picked off a Lucky Charm that was stuck to my skirt, tried to recapture some semblance of dignity, and headed inside the school.
Obviously, I would need to tell all the first graders about seeing my parents have sex.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
MANY PEOPLE FEEL like a one-night stand is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. I disagree. There are many ways to get to know someone, and my personal favorite is seeing them naked in Happy Baby pose.
I also feel it is important to have sex soon after meeting someone in order to find out if you have sexual chemistry together. Otherwise, you could wait two to three months after you start dating someone only to discover that your new boyfriend is bad in bed, or even worse, is into anal beads and duct tape.
I can remember my first one-night stand like it was yesterday. Well, maybe not the first. Or the second . . . or the fifth. I'll just begin with what I can remember and not concern myself with order.
It was a starry summer night at the Jersey shore. Picture violins and a harmonica. Now picture the harmonica up my ass. I think it's safe to say that the Jersey shore, specifically an area called Belmar, isn't what pops into mind when thinking of romance.
I was around eighteen at the time. It's hard to say since I started lying about my age as soon as I got my boobs. My girlfriend Ivory and I had just graduated from high school and decided to celebrate by the water. Ivory and I had met freshman year and had been close ever since. Her parents came to America from Cuba long before Ivory was born. They had since tried to prove their loyalty to America with every child they'd had. Her brother's name is Cincinnati and she has a sister named July, presumably after the fourth. Somewhere along the way, they also converted to Judaism.
We were discovering the Jersey shore for the first time and felt it was our duty as Jersey girls to really pay our respects to the Garden State. We were tired of sleeping around with the average Joe, Dick, and Harry. A challenge was in order.
We were in the mood for dancing, so we found a loud, dark bar with music pouring out of it. I had her pick out the hottest guy in the bar and I fearlessly approached him. It was very empowering to go up to a babe like him and be received so well. I thought, Wow, I must be really good-looking. Until I started dancing.
I don't know if you've ever seen a Jewish girl who's been self-diagnosed as tone-deaf cut a rug on a Jersey shore dance floor before, but it definitely resembles someone whose motor skills haven't fully developed. In my state of drunkenness, I was fueled by delusions of being an original cast member of the play Chicago. I decided to do the number where I rub my ass into my partner's crotch while my arms grab his neck behind me. When in doubt, ladies, this move will always guarantee you at least a slice of pizza.
I decided on two slices instead of one; I'd burned a number of calories during my Flasbdance number and wanted to reassure my guy that I wasn't one of those girls who didn't eat. We had a great time eating and watching my best friend Ivory make out with her score for the night. Her guy was a real piece of Jersey trash, and they ended up tearing off in his banana yellow Camaro. I went back to my guy's house and proceeded to have some of the best sex I can barely remember.
What I do recall is turning his ceiling fan on "high" (there are two things in this world I cannot sleep without: a fan and a silk set of eye shades), ripping his clothes off, and looking at one of the finest bodies that our ecosystem has ever created. The next morning I was walking with a considerable limp and wasn't able to deduce if this was a result of the dancing or the sex. After catching a glimpse of my hair in the mirror, I considered scheduling an audition for the lead in The Lion King.
I dated this beautiful hunk of flesh for the next eight months. His looks overrode his personality for the first couple of months, but after a while it became harder and harder to ignore. We would go out to dinner, and the minute he was done eating, he'd put his fork down and ask for the check. The summerhouse he rented with four other guys had hot water for only the first ten minutes and then it would become freezing, so he insisted on taking showers before me, because I was his little "trouper." This was also someone who wouldn't let me borrow his toothbrush on an occasion when I forgot my own, for fear of mouth germs. I liked his roommates better than him, so I would hang out with them during the day and then go up and have sex with him at night. I'd turn up the music loud so we wouldn't be tempted to talk.
Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come and watch. "Fun for who?" I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink. I gently explained to him that I would rather sit at home and staple my hand to a wall than watch someone wearing a wet suit wipe out every thirty seconds. Besides, my ass didn't look so good in a bikini after a summer of margaritas, and I thought it was time I found someone farther inland.
I realized that summer that a one-night stand is called just that because it should only be for one night.
DUMB AND DUMBER
ONE SUMMER, MY girlfriend Ivory and I decided that after all our hard partying at community college, we deserved a vacation. My parents' summer home in Martha's Vineyard would be empty until mid-July, so Ivory and I generously volunteered to look after things.
We had many rules that summer. After a long conversation about money and responsibility, we both agreed that a job would add too much pressure to our very hectic drinking schedule. At one point during that summer, when we were really broke, we were left with no choice but to join a cleaning service. It only took fifteen minutes of scrubbing the inside of a toilet for me to realize that the only time I felt comfortable facedown in one was after a hard night of margaritas. It was then that we resolved it should be men's responsibility to pay for our alcohol and whatever small amount of food was required.
Our other rules were that we were both required to lie in the sun with nothing higher than an SPF 2 and for no fewer than three hours per day. I explained to Ivory that you could get better color while actually in the ocean, but even with Cuban parents Ivory had never learned to swim. I wasn't a good enough swimmer to teach her, so instead, I bought her a pair of yellow water wings.
Ivory and I had taken enough pot to the Vineyard to last us through the end of the month. I fancied myself quite the pothead. We ended up getting so high on the drive up, however, that
we rolled each and every morsel of it into finely rolled joints, then proceeded to smoke our entire supply the first night on the island. I had a similar experience with macaroni and cheese once. I haven't had either since.
One of the more enjoyable rules we came up with that summer was to photograph our victims of sexual abuse. We took pictures with every guy we brought back to the house.
One night we were at a bar playing pool with two guys. Ivory and I were on the same team and hadn't shot a single ball into a pocket when I picked one up and stuffed it in a side hole. The guys took my lead, and it turned into a game of handball with all of us throwing balls in every direction we saw a pocket. Unfortunately, I don't have the best hand-eye coordination, and in an attempt to corner pocket one of the balls, I sent it reeling over the pool table straight into the wall behind it, where it stayed. Shortly after, the bartender asked us to leave.
We took our cue and went back to my parents', got wrecked, then took our men to our respective love lairs. As I was rolling around in the bed I was probably conceived in, I ripped off my guy's T-shirt to discover a completely hairless chest. Since there were no burn scars, I had to assume that this young man had done this to himself voluntarily. There was no hair anywhere on his body. Not in his pants nor on his legs.
"Where's your hair?" I asked him.
"I shave," he told me.
"On purpose?"
I was instantly nauseous and may have thrown up a little, which ended up working to my advantage in orchestrating my escape.
"Are you okay?" he said.
I blushed and said that this had been my very first night of drinking. "I guess alcohol is not really my thing," I lied.
He said it was okay and maybe I'd feel better in the morning.
"Maybe," I said, "but you won't be around to find out."
Unfortunately, I had to break up Ivory's party in order for her to drive my guy home. She wasn't thrilled, but it turns out her guy was missing a few hairs too. The ones on his head. As they were rolling around on her bed, his toupee came flying off and landed on the curling iron that was left on for what could very well have been the entire summer. Ivory liked older men, but not old enough to have no hair. Apparently, this guy really got the short end of the stick in the looks department. How he did in the other stick departments, we would never know.
Later on that summer, I started fooling around with a guy named Turtle. This was to become a common theme of mine--dating men nicknamed after animals. Later on there was Chicken, and for a brief two-week absence of mind, there was a boy named Rooster. Chicken got his name because he could outrun anyone, and Rooster got his because he got up every morning at the crack of dawn. Needless to say, my relationship with Rooster didn't make it past our first sleepover. Chicken and Rooster were not related.
I liked Turtle. I had met him when I stopped at the gas station where he worked. There was only one bathroom, and as I was leaning down to cover the seat with toilet paper, with my pants around my ankles, the door flew open.
"Whoah! Sorry about that," he apologized hastily as he shut the door.
When I walked out he was waiting next to the door with an embarrassed look on his face.
"That's not really my best angle," I told him.
Both our faces were red with embarrassment and we started laughing uncontrollably. To the point where I had to use the bathroom again.
"Did you leave me any toilet paper?" he asked as I came out of the bathroom the second time.
"Yeah, there's a little left on the seat."
Turtle and I got along great. He was the type of blue-collar alcoholic that you could have a really solid fling with. Turtle was more laid-back than the Dalai Lama. He was the perfect prototype for a summer fling; a cute, flirty island boy, but not the type you'd miss in the fall. He fixed bikes at the gas station for the summer, and he definitely didn't go to college. He had a vocabulary that could battle my six-year-old nephew's.
Turtle had an uncle named Marty whom Ivory immediately took a shine to. He owned his very own gas station, and Ivory loved the smell of gas.
So there we were, two middle-class Jewish girls from Jersey hangin' tough at the gas station where our paramours worked. Our parents would have been so proud. We'd go by there from the beach for about a month straight, refill Ivory's water wings at the air pump, and watch our men fix cars. Joey Buttafucco--style. We'd sit around sipping our Mike's Hard Lemonade waiting for the boys to finish working so we could head out to some dive bar that accepted fake IDs. We each had our favorite pair of cutoff Levi's that we wore low on our hips and ripped up the sides. Sometimes we wore a shirt, but if we skipped eating that day, we'd also skip wearing shirts and just sport our bikini tops.
"This is like the prime of our life," Ivory said to me one day as we watched our men work and I had just finished pumping a customer's gas.
"Yeah." I smiled as I lit up a Marlboro Red. "It really doesn't get any better than this."
Marty and Ivory got into a big fight one night at a bar that had a lot of wood chips on the floor. He made a comment to her about not drinking anymore and she started screaming, "Oh, so now I'm an alcoholic, is that it?" Marty was mostly soft-spoken, but I think he and his liver had just had enough. The four of us had been hanging out for a month straight, every night.
Being the supportive friend I was, I decided to storm out with her. Unfortunately, I lost my footing, ended up sliding out the door, and got a splinter right below my right butt cheek. I fall a lot, but other than that I can pretty much control my liquor. Ivory's the kind of girl who gets drunk and immediately starts slurring. I have a lot of friends like that, and I think it's because it makes me look "more together."
The next morning Ivory told me she wanted to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Great, I thought. Just what I needed. The summer was going so well. I had to sit down and explain to her that AA was for quitters, and that "alcoholic" was one ugly word. You spend one night in women's prison, and all of a sudden people want to label you! I told her I didn't think she had a drinking problem, and besides, they don't have AA in Martha's Vineyard. After all, it was an island. Any normal person wouldn't have believed me, but Ivory loved hearing me lie, especially when it meant she didn't have to do something she wouldn't be good at anyway.
Marty called the next day to apologize, for what I don't know. This happened with all of her boyfriends. They would somehow convince themselves overnight that they were the ones who were wrong. It was too late, though. Once Ivory made her mind up about a guy there was no turning back. She never whined or complained after a breakup; she just moved forward. She had just come back from her morning jog where she met her new boyfriend, deciding we were done with the whole "blue-collar" thing. I was fine with that because I was getting tired of hearing myself scream the name Turtle in bed.
"We're moving on to Latin America," she told me.
"Salud," I said, holding up a glass of Slim-Fast. "Finally, we can get back to your roots."
Her new boyfriend, Jorge, didn't speak a word of English, and luckily enough, he had a friend who didn't either. Beautiful Latin boys. They were our sophisticated Latin lovers, who would cook for us at my parents' house for the next two weeks. They introduced us to salsa, sangria, and communication via the ojos.
My guy's name was Hector, which he pronounced "Heeeeector." We couldn't really communicate, but he seemed nice, and he was a good swimmer. We would make out for hours at a time, but that's as far as it went. The one time he tried to initiate sex, we were in the shower. I was on the edge of the tub where there's a little area to sit, and he grabbed my hands to bring me closer to him. As I got up, my feet slipped out from underneath me and I went flying through his legs, landing on my back and hitting my head. The last thing I had tried to grab onto for balance was his penis. After that, we decided to keep things more casual.
Jorge, on the other hand, really fell for Ivory and actually proposed marriage to her. She had this thing where guys would propose to her a
ll the time, which I never understood. Every guy she dated was absolutely in love with her. I mean, Ivory was very attractive and funny, but men acted like her vagina had some sort of potpourri shooting out of it.
Anyway, Jorge proposed and Ivory accepted like she always did until she sobered up and realized Jorge probably just wanted his visa.
The next day we received a phone call from the Martha's Vineyard Police Department wanting to know if we had any idea of the whereabouts of a Mr. Jorge Menendez, who was wanted for grand theft auto. No wonder they were cooking for us at home.
I told the police my parents weren't home and our gardener's name was Alejandro. Other than that, I didn't know anyone of Spanish descent.
I explained to Ivory that our summer of love was over and we needed to vacate the premises. We packed our bags, called home, and told our parents that we were homesick. That's slang for "on the run."
We discussed our future and decided since we were both twenty and hated college as well as New Jersey, it was time to broaden our horizons.
"How does California sound to you?" Ivory asked. "You could be an actress and I'll get a real job."
"Finally," I moaned. "Now you're starting to make sense."
And off we went.
GUESS WHO'S LEAVING THROUGH THE WINDOW?
"SHVARTZER" is the term my father uses to refer to black people. It is a Yiddish slang word that basically means "black," "colored," or "Negro." My father will argue with you until the sun comes up that he doesn't have a racist bone in his body, one of his favorite defenses being, "Are you kidding? I love the blacks, they make great employees. Plus, they can run like bell." This is the same man who went to a cocktail party in the late eighties with my mother and upon seeing the only black couple there, approached the woman and asked her if she would be interested in cleaning our house.
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands Page 2