February 18, 2006--Saturday Story: "Hiding to Get Laid"
Hiding to Get Laid
If I were honorable, I would begin this with the familiar disclaimer—“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental”—and change Ellen Goodman’s name to Elaine Goldstein and obscure the fact that we laid naked together every Thursday at noon, entwined in each others arms, under the daybed in her parent’s apartment, hiding from her brother Morton, who had come home from school for lunch to the “empty” apartment, to eat the sandwich his mother had left for him, singing to himself, unaware of our presence, and flagrant condition, just ten feet from where he was chewing.
But since these Thursdays were the most exciting times of my life, ever, because I was getting closer and closer to getting laid for the first time, and since this is not a work of fiction, cad that I am, I will call her by her true name, Ellen Goldman.
How did Ellen and I get to that place? Literally? I cannot speak authoritatively for her, but for you to understand the full extent of my excitement, I have to take you back a bit in time to when it was exciting if a girl would allow you to put your arm across the back of her seat when you went to the movies together. To be clear, I am not talking about your arm or hand actually touching her shoulders much less her neck; I am saying you were making progress in the relationship just by having your arm resting on the back of the chair. Knowing all the while the risks you were running to be able to reach along her chair back while straining not to do any touching--you needed to so contort that arm that you were in danger of having it yanked out of its socket or developing gangrene.
Less physically threatening were the opportunities available during the walk home. It might be possible to think about using that same arm, if it was still functioning, to circle her waist. Again there would be no arm touching back, but the arm might surround her back, an inch or so away from it but close enough so that the tips of the fingers at the end of that arm might actually touch lightly the puffed-out hem of her tucked-in blouse.
And then at the door, there could be the chance to hold for a brief moment just one hand and attempt a squeeze.
With our current sensibilities I know you are screaming, “Enough!” This to you sounds more like the mating rituals among the Trobriand Islanders than the frisky youth of Brooklyn. But I insist on saying to you, before moving on, that what I have told you thus far is the virtual truth from my many months courtship of my first crush, Dorothy Bloomberger, when she was sixteen and I was fifteen but claiming to be sixteen. Getting away with the deception because of my great height, or her interest in the movies.
But I have heard you, enough!
I do, though, have to add that what I have just described was what one expected when going out with “good” girls. From the perspective of those of us who were perpetually over-wrought and desperate, sadly the overwhelming majority. It was reported, and I emphasize reported, by the likes of Donny Friedman that there was a group of very different kinds of girls, much, much smaller in number, girls referred to in politeness as being “fast.”
Donny Friedman had stories to tell of his times with one or two of these--in the coat closet with the Siegel Twins, in the balcony of the Rugby Theater with Muriel Berlin, and one not-to-be-described experience with Becky Sharfstein where he claimed they “went all the way.”
Ellen Goodman began very much as a member of that much larger classification of girls; but, as the result of my fevered relentlessness and whatever she was desiring, wound up in a category of her own—my first love.
To be continued next week. . .
If I were honorable, I would begin this with the familiar disclaimer—“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental”—and change Ellen Goodman’s name to Elaine Goldstein and obscure the fact that we laid naked together every Thursday at noon, entwined in each others arms, under the daybed in her parent’s apartment, hiding from her brother Morton, who had come home from school for lunch to the “empty” apartment, to eat the sandwich his mother had left for him, singing to himself, unaware of our presence, and flagrant condition, just ten feet from where he was chewing.
But since these Thursdays were the most exciting times of my life, ever, because I was getting closer and closer to getting laid for the first time, and since this is not a work of fiction, cad that I am, I will call her by her true name, Ellen Goldman.
How did Ellen and I get to that place? Literally? I cannot speak authoritatively for her, but for you to understand the full extent of my excitement, I have to take you back a bit in time to when it was exciting if a girl would allow you to put your arm across the back of her seat when you went to the movies together. To be clear, I am not talking about your arm or hand actually touching her shoulders much less her neck; I am saying you were making progress in the relationship just by having your arm resting on the back of the chair. Knowing all the while the risks you were running to be able to reach along her chair back while straining not to do any touching--you needed to so contort that arm that you were in danger of having it yanked out of its socket or developing gangrene.
Less physically threatening were the opportunities available during the walk home. It might be possible to think about using that same arm, if it was still functioning, to circle her waist. Again there would be no arm touching back, but the arm might surround her back, an inch or so away from it but close enough so that the tips of the fingers at the end of that arm might actually touch lightly the puffed-out hem of her tucked-in blouse.
And then at the door, there could be the chance to hold for a brief moment just one hand and attempt a squeeze.
With our current sensibilities I know you are screaming, “Enough!” This to you sounds more like the mating rituals among the Trobriand Islanders than the frisky youth of Brooklyn. But I insist on saying to you, before moving on, that what I have told you thus far is the virtual truth from my many months courtship of my first crush, Dorothy Bloomberger, when she was sixteen and I was fifteen but claiming to be sixteen. Getting away with the deception because of my great height, or her interest in the movies.
But I have heard you, enough!
I do, though, have to add that what I have just described was what one expected when going out with “good” girls. From the perspective of those of us who were perpetually over-wrought and desperate, sadly the overwhelming majority. It was reported, and I emphasize reported, by the likes of Donny Friedman that there was a group of very different kinds of girls, much, much smaller in number, girls referred to in politeness as being “fast.”
Donny Friedman had stories to tell of his times with one or two of these--in the coat closet with the Siegel Twins, in the balcony of the Rugby Theater with Muriel Berlin, and one not-to-be-described experience with Becky Sharfstein where he claimed they “went all the way.”
Ellen Goodman began very much as a member of that much larger classification of girls; but, as the result of my fevered relentlessness and whatever she was desiring, wound up in a category of her own—my first love.
To be continued next week. . .
posted by Steven Zwerling at
1:16 AM
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