December 14, 2012--Chapter 18: Going All the Way

Thursdays at noon, entwined in her arms, I lay naked with Ellen Goodman under the daybed in her parent’s living room, hiding from her brother Morton, who would come home from school for lunch to the “empty” apartment, to eat the sandwich his mother had left, singing to himself, unaware of our presence and flagrant condition, sitting at the kitchen table, just ten feet from where he munched on his tuna on rye and sipped his chocolate milk.

I cannot speak authoritatively for Ellen, but for you to understand the extent of my excitement, I have to take you back in time to when it was exciting even if a girl would only allow you to put your arm across the back of her seat when you went on a date to the movies. To be clear, I am not talking about your arm or hand actually touching her shoulders much less her neck; I am saying one was making progress in the relationship just by having an arm resting on the back of the chair itself.

Also exciting were the few, call them carnal possibilities available during the walk home—for example, to think about using that same arm to encircle her waist. Again there would be no arm-touching-back, but it might be possible to surround that back, an inch or so away from it but close enough so that the tips of your fingers might be able occasionally to touch the puffed-out hem of her tucked-in blouse. 

It was that kind of an era.
Given current sensibilities and practice I understand that what passed for bliss then sounds today more like the courtship rituals of Trobriand Islanders than of the frisky youth of Brooklyn. 

Frustration was the most that one could expect when going out with “good” girls. But the likes of Mel Lipsky alleged that there was another category of a very different kind, much smaller in number, girls referred to in politeness as being “fast.” About these girls the likes of me could only imagine; and I spent many hours during lonely nights doing just that, imagining, and things at the moment I prefer not to describe.

True or not, Mel had stories to relate that we pulsated to hear of lusty times with girls of this sort—gropings in our classroom coat closet with the Siegel Twins, furtive French kisses in the balcony of the Rugby Theater with Marion Berlin, and one not-to-be-surpassed experience with Becky Sharfstein, with whom he claimed to have gone “all the way.”

*   *   * 

Ellen Goodman began as a member of that much larger classification of good girls; but, as the result of our mutually unleashed desires, wound up in a category of her own—my first love.  

We met on Lonely Street.  If not down at the end, for sure still there.  

Dicky Traub’s girlfriend Margie had a new 45-RPM phonograph that I was eager to see and hear.  Dicky told me that she also had Elvis’ latest, Heartbreak Hotel.  I knew Blue Suede Shoe and liked its smutty appeal; but like everything else potentially erotic in those days, one had to interpret to uncover the smut: 

You can do anything,

But don’t you step on my blue suede shoes. 

To be in nubile Margie’s bedroom, to see her new record player, and to hear Elvis Presley there lured me out of my perpetual sick bed. I had pretty much recovered from a winter-long case of the grip, and so I raced over and for the first time heard Elvis in hi-fi and saw Dicky and Margie grinding away at each other, pelvis to pelvis, dancing to that smoky song.  And on Margie’s bed, almost buried in a froth of crinoline, was Ellen Goodman, who would before too long change my life. 

Dicky and Margie had been going steady for about a month, the first of my friends to establish such a relationship.  This meant that he gave her his ARISTA honor society pin to make the arrangement official; that they would go out together every Friday and Saturday night without the formality of his asking her for a date; he would call her all other evenings during which time they would review the day’s events (“Did you see what that Sheila was wearing today?  What a tramp”;  “Can you believe it, Mr. Gatti taught his class all day with his fly open”; “My mother won’t let me buy saddle shoes.  I’m dying to get a pair.  I don’t know what I’ll do”); and most important, on Saturdays only, back at Margie’s house, Dicky would be allowed to slip his hand under her brassiere without too many preliminaries. 

Ellen was Margie’s best friend.  I had never met her.  She lived on the other side of Brooklyn; up near the border with Queens.  I had heard about her from Dicky who told me that she was cute and a good dancer and didn’t have a boyfriend.  

Though I was desperate for Margie to introduce me to some of her girlfriends, Ellen didn’t seem like a realistic possibility since she lived so far away—at least two bus rides distance--and since I was the opposite of cute much less handsome (six-feet-two, only 140 pounds, and already sprouting a crop of pimples), I thought her cuteness coupled with my wretched state would by definition rule me out of boyfriend contention. 

In spite of this, when I saw her curled up on Margie’s bed, moving on the mattress to Elvis as only a good dancer could, I was smitten.   Tortured soul that I was at such an early age (I was a prodigy in the field of unhappiness), smitten as I was, I was overwhelmed with anxiety.  Though I was attracted to the dancer part, I had two left feet and would inevitably be clomping on hers if, improbable as it was, she were to get up off that bed and wanted to join Margie and Dicky on the bedroom dance floor.  However, there was still a glimmer of hope because she was between boyfriends and from what I could see, she was as advertised--cute. 

I knew from Dicky, who was obviously more advanced than I in these matters (just look at what he and Margie were up to), that it was essential to have a good opening line when attempting to attract girls.  

So I tried one of my best, one I had rehearsed in the privacy of my room, and in an attempt to be more attarctive pulled myself up out of my usual slump, “Margie tells me you’re good at algebra." 

Still moving her hips on Margie’s quilt, she said, “Actually, it’s geometry that I really love.” 

“I haven’t taken that yet.  I’m not sure I’ll like it.” 

“Well, if you’re good at drawing or art it helps.” 

“I’m not very good at those either,” quickly realizing that maybe this was not going well.  How could I be impressing her if I was already managing to bore myself?  And how, I am sure you are wondering, could something that began this ineptly lead to my lying naked with Ellen, stifling giggles, under her parent’s day bed, just six months later? 

For some reason Ellen, during that initial mess of a beginning, seemed interested in me.  Perhaps she sensed that I might serve as a bridge to more suitable boyfriends.  Maybe because she wanted to take me on as a reclamation project—if she could turn the frog that I was into something attarctive (forget prince) maybe she would get some satisfaction from that, or at least some good material for her and Margie to laugh about. 

So she quickly and thankfully steered us away from any more talk about geometry, fearing as I was that my lack of conversational skills was pointing us toward trigonometry, and remaining where she was on Margie’s bed, though now sitting up against the headboard so I could see more of her emerging from her swollen skirt, she asked what I thought about Elvis. 

It was clear that he literally moved her and thus I realized that what I would say back to her would determine our . . . fate.  Or if there would be any at all.  

Quivering with nervousness, I somehow managed to blurt out, “My favorite thing about him is that he makes my parents crazy.  When he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, they wouldn’t even let me watch.  They want me to listen to Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher.  I hate Eddie Fisher.  Do you know Mona Lisa?  The one that goes, ‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.’  I know it’s number one on the Hit Parade but I hate it.  Give me Elvis the Pelvis any time.”  

To this day I have no idea where this was coming from.  I couldn’t even carry a tune and there I was singing Mona Lisa to Ellen and making up all that stuff about my parents--in truth we watched Elvis together and I didn’t get him any more than they did.  I can only speculate that this outpouring from me might have been inspired by my first real surge of hormones (I had recently begun to sprout clumps of  body hair) or perhaps Elvis was getting through to me more than I knew or the sight of Ellen, now extracted from Margie’s bed and heading in my direction, inspired me.  

She sashayed toward me just as Elvis was mumbling the last bars of Heartbreak Hotel--  

Just take a walk

Down lonely street

To Heartbreak Hotel 

--and when she got to within a foot of me, as if in a dream, reached up to place her hands around my neck. 

Without intending to, I lifted Ellen off the floor as I straightened in surprise and excitement.  And, in spite of the bulk of her crinolines, with my arms now somehow finding themselves around her waist, she pressed herself against me with such animal force that I could feel some body parts beneath all that fabric. Her breasts, prominent and firm, penetrated my chest, which, bird-like and translucent, was structured to receive them. 

Another 45 slid down the stack and plopped onto Margie’s turntable—wouldn’t you know it, Blue Suede Shoes.  Ellen let go and, dropping to the floor, squealed, “I love this one.  Come on, let’s dance.”   

And with that she gripped me around the waist, took my left hand, pulled me to her, moving in to grind herself right up against me, swinging me in a tight circle.  And somehow, in a miraculous moment of transformation, I became a dancer—with both a left and a right foot.  And a pelvis, if not quite like Elvis’, at least it managed to integrate itself with hers.  As they say, we became one.  

And as was typical of my life thus far, at this same instance of transcendental exuberance and belief in a future, I simultaneously experienced total humiliation as I, how else to say it, for the first time with anyone else present, came in my pants.  So explosively that it wet right through so that I needed to pull away from Ellen for fear of who knows what. 

But Ellen wouldn’t let go of my hand and insisted we keep dancing together, though at a dry distance, until the final beats.  Smiling at me all the while, with both humor and understanding. 

She made it all all right.  Including that song, which in that instant became my lifelong favorite.  Tune, performance, and lyrics.  All of which now made perfect sense.  Don’t you, don’t let anyone step on your blue suede shoes.  Or step on anything for that matter—literally or metaphorically.  I’m a dude, so get out of my way.  I have a life. 

*   *   *

And that life then began to unfold.  When I left Margie’s that miraculous day, with my coat tied around my waist, back to front for obvious reasons, Ellen suggested that we talk on the phone later, after my two-bus ride home. That I should call and maybe we could arrange to go to a movie or something.  There was a new Rita Hayworth film she was eager to see.  She winked, saying maybe we could sneak up to the balcony. 

So I danced home through the streets, almost getting hit by the Utica Avenue bus, and raced up the steps and into my bedroom where I quickly changed my pants, thinking all the while, “How long do I have to wait before I call?  Would fifteen minutes be too soon?”

We did go to the Rugby Theater the next Saturday and did manage to elude the matron whose assignment it was to keep anyone younger than eighteen out of the balcony, ostensibly because that’s where smoking was permitted but in truth because that’s where “adults” went to neck.  Which we proceeded to do even before the coming attractions had ended.

There was no limp-arm-across-the-back-of-the-chair charade.  No loss of circulation and resulting numbness of an arm suspended for an hour in space.  Just the tingle of anticipation as Ellen slid as close to me as the chair arm would allow, threading my arm not just across her shoulders but also guiding my hand down into the valley of her neckline so that the tips of my fingers came to rest on . . . flesh.  A place where those fingers had ever on another person been. 

I do not remember much of the movie.  Except that it was set somewhere in the tropics and Rita Hayworth was always glistening with sweat—from the heat and her obvious passion.  I have just a remnant of memory cloaked in the smoke from the real adults in the balcony and the lingering hint of Ellen’s musk and trail my fingers took down below the rim of her blouse into the hidden warmth of her perfect breasts.  

I came in my pants again before the third reel had ended.  This time with her head on my pigeon chest and her hand exploring the wetness she had caused. 

“I’m so happy,” she whispered.  Which didn’t even begin to express what I was feeling.   What, I wondered, was beyond happiness because that’s where I was then living. 

We spent endless hours on the phone, which was difficult to negotiate because my family had just one phone line that all four of us shared.  So I needed to get home from school early, before anyone else was there, skipping basketball practice by feigning various exotic and undetectable injuries to ligaments and tendons.  That athletic part of my life was ending quickly, replaced by love and lust. 

Though our conversations were as banal as an old married couple’s—more about the details of how the day went than anything intrinsically exciting, just to be on the telephone with her for all that time, to take in her voice, to imagine her curled up in a chair, to think about what she might be wearing or how she would be playing with her hair, this more than compensated for the missed wind sprints up and down the gym. 

After two more hallucinatory Saturday nights in the Rugby balcony, Ellen suggested that maybe, later in the week, I could take those two buses to her apartment.  I should get there by ten Thursday morning, she said, because by then both her parents would be at work at her father’s pharmacy and her brother would be in school.  Until at least noon when he came home for half an hour for lunch.  Though this plan would require us to cut classes, that additional transgression added immeasurably to the illicit excitement. 

Waiting for Thursday, never did time pass so slowly; and when at last it arrived, I packed up my school bag, told my parents I had to get in extra early for a study period, and left the house at 7:00, thinking it could easily take three hours for the two buses to get me to Ellen’s on the other side of Brooklyn.  In fact, I got there in two.

To kill time, I wandered around her neighborhood, one I had never been to, for that frenzied hour, up and down Putnam Avenue, steering clear of the bodegas that were beginning to crop up as the German population abandoned the old neighborhood for Long Island and New Jersey and the newly arriving Puerto Ricans were taking over and establishing places of their own.  These streets did not feel safe to a fearful Jewish kid from East Flatbush so I avoided the street corner hangouts as I shuttled about, worrying about what I would tell my parents if they got a call from the police that I had been knifed to death, not at school, at 9:30 in the morning, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, two hours away from our East 56^th Street shtetl. 

But I came through my Bushwick wanderings unharmed and at 10:00 a.m. rang the Goodman bell, and was buzzed into the gold-painted and linoleum clad lobby of their five-floor walk-up apartment house.  They lived on the fourth floor, and I was panting by the time I got there.  Less from being out of shape but more from the delights that awaited. 

Ellen was standing silhouetted in the open doorway down at the end of the hall with the flat morning light arching behind her.  She was so radiant, all five feet of her, that I felt like crawling the last ten yards as if to a shrine.  And when I reached her door, she pulled me into the apartment, which looked on quick glance as if it has been furnished and painted by the same person who had decorated the lobby.  

She too had a record player and from the sound of That’s All Right Mama filling the apartment, it was clear that she had placed a full stack of Elvis 45s on the spindle.

We danced our way toward the living room, with Ellen again in the lead.  All the while, as my heart pounded at cliché intensity and my penis immediately stiffened, I kept thinking—“It’s ten o’clock on a Thursday morning; I cut school for the first time in my life; I lied to my parents; I took two buses to get to a neighborhood I had never been to and for an hour risked my life walking through streets full of Puerto Ricans; I came to a strange apartment; I am dancing with Ellen to Elvis; and we are alone.” 

Somehow this time I managed not to come in my pants and Ellen, sensing that, danced my toward her room, which was more a walk-in closet than an actual bedroom, where we fell together, still embracing, onto her cot-like bed.  On which Ellen continued to dance, horizontally now, as she had done that first afternoon at Margie’s months ago.  But this time with her arms and legs wrapped around me.  With her guidance, as on that initial day, I instantly mastered the art of this unique kind of dancing.

And over the next few weeks, since we agreed to carve out Thursday mornings for these lessons, I became quite expert at it.  Including doing what we came to call the Thursday Shuffle, on her bed, to Elvis, with both of us totally naked. 

For the first three Thursdays we were careful to get me dressed and out of there and back on the street well before her brother arrived for his lunch.  But on the fourth Thursday, we found ourselves so involved with the Shuffle and our anatomical explorations that we realized it was already noon when we heard Morton humming in the hall while fumbling for his keys. 

Unflapped, Ellen leapt out of the cot, gathered our clothes, and stuffed them under her bed.  She dragged me, still very naked and trembling, into the living room where she pulled me down to the floor; and together we slipped under the day bed, pulling the dust ruffle down to hide us just as Morton got the door unlocked.  Still humming to himself.  Where, as I previously reported, we remained undetected, until he finished and left. 

This then meant we had a few more hours alone before her mother came home.  But I was so shaken by what had happened, the peril we had confronted, plagued by these imaginings, I couldn’t resume my concentration on Elvis or the Shuffle or even Ellen’s perfect body.  

I was that kind of person, still fearful of the potential consequences of everything.  My imagination, fueled years earlier by my immersion in True Crime comic books, detective shows on the radio, and my family’s brooding, pessimistic stories of the dangers lurking in the world, that dark imagination took hold of me, pulling against the carnal opportunities literally spread beside me--what if Morton, later that day, would think that something strange had been going on when he was home for lunch and what if the old his parents that he thought maybe an intruder was in the house?  

Riddled with these fears, I recovered my clothes, dressed, and left quickly, without saying much—perhaps mumbling I had a test the next day I needed to study for--feeling diminished and pathetic.  Especially since after Morton had left Ellen seemed even more excited and ardent than earlier.

All the way home, and it took forever since the buses were always slow after the morning rush hour, I feared that Ellen would never want to see me again—there would be no more Saturdays in the balcony and certainly no more Thursdays.  I would, as I had suspected originally, turn out to be one of her transitional boyfriends.

But the phone was ringing as I dragged my humbled self up the stairs.  It was Ellen, saying she was sorry to have lost track of the time so let’s be careful about it next Thursday. 

Then there would be more Thursdays and life would continue.  I could breathe again.

There was a cousin’s Bar Mitzvah Saturday that Ellen had to go to so we didn’t have our usual movie date.  If my previous waits for Thursday had seemed endless, waiting for this one felt eternal.  It was good that I in fact had a couple of tests to study for, so that helped pass the time.  I even reconnected with the basketball team but found myself, in spite of the workouts that the Grind represented, quite out of shape and realized my career in sports was over—I would need to find something else to do with my life when not with Ellen.

I knew Thursday would be special since I made the bus connection without any waiting and therefore got to Ellen’s by 9:15.  No need to wander the neighborhood because I knew Morton and her parents were already out of the apartment.  I rang the bell, was let in, and ran right up the stairs.  Unlike all the other times, that day Ellen was not waiting in the doorway.  The door though was clearly unlocked and partly open, resting on the latch.  This change in our routine stopped me for a moment.  Worry again took hold of me--maybe something had gone wrong; maybe Ellen wasn’t there, that it was her mother or someone waiting for a delivery; maybe there was a burglar in the apartment.  

With a heart throbbing more with trepidation than anticipation I decided I would risk whatever the consequences and proceed.  I pushed the door open two inches, then half way so I could see down the length of the entrance hall.  

There I saw, not unlike Rita Hayworth in that first movie we had seen together, with one hand against the wall and one leg crossed before the other, leaning into that arm, again as I will always remember her, with light behind her, there was a naked Ellen, wearing only a straw summer hat, tipped at a sultry angle.   Would this mean that, like Mel Lipsky, we would do more than the Grind?  On this day would we be going all the way? 

Ellen had Johnny Ray on the turntable-- 

If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye

It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry . . .

To Johnny Ray we needed to do a slower dance, both in the hallway and in a few moments on Ellen’s bed.  To dance to Elvis required exuberance and optimism; for Johnny Ray we needed to find moves that were more about loss than possibility.  Cry would in fact turn out to be the song I always associated with Ellen, not only because we did go all the way, in truth we carried out an inept and spasmodic version of the real thing, but because we moved to that song on that day, which was to be both the most memorable of my life thus far but also the beginning of the slow decline and decay of our what we had together.  But that is for another story. 

I didn’t even attempt to leave by noon that day.  Morton came home and we got though that half hour uneventfully, under the day bed, and then returned to Johnny Ray, attempting to try a second time to go all the way, the right way.

We did do it a little better, but then disaster struck.  

We heard the key in the lock again.  Did Morton forget something?  Was he sick and coming home from school early?  Whatever it was we needed to try to get under that day bed.  And just in time we managed to hide ourselves.  But it was immediately evident that it was not Morton but Mrs. Goodman.  She was coming home early from the pharmacy.  She would not be there just for half an hour.  She was home.  And we were trapped. 

We heard her stirring about, unpacking some things she had bought at the grocers, opening and closing her bedroom, turning on the radio in the kitchen to The Fitzgeralds, making a phone call to her sister, we thought saying she had come home early with a headache. 

“What are we going to do?” I whispered while Ellen’s mother was on the phone and wouldn’t hear me. 

“Just shut up and wait,” she snapped, “Don’t be such a baby. If she has a headache she’ll go to bed and then we’ll figure out what to do.” 

“But we’re naked!"

“And that’s exciting isn’t it?” 

I wasn’t looking at it that way.  I could take only so much excitement in one day.  Being under the bed with Ellen while her mother was in the kitchen talking to her sister wasn’t yet my definition of an exciting afternoon. 

But Ellen was right: her mother did get into bed and before too long we knew from her breathing that she had fallen asleep.  So it was safe to emerge, dress, and slip away.

                                                        *   *   * 

We did have a few more Saturdays at the Rugby and two more Thursdays.  But they had lost their magic.  I knew Ellen had become disappointed in me—she was ready for a man and I was still very much a boy.