Sit down - No. 3
Dear Harry:
When I was in 7th grade, there was a school event in the wintertime called the “Variety Show.” It was held on a Saturday evening, like many of the school dances.
I got together with a couple of my neighborhood friends, Ed and Chip, and we got their parents or maybe mine to drive us down to the school (2 or 3 miles). After the mom or the dad – whichever it was – pulled away, we were about to go in when Ed said, “C’mon let’s hang out for a while outside.”
There were several other kids in the parking lot already doing just that, so Chip and I grunted, “Uh, okay.”
This was in the days before schools checked closely to be sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing, plus it was January or February, so it was already dark, so there was nothing to prevent our doing as we pleased. Also, it must have been unseasonably warm, or else we would have gotten uncomfortably cold after a while and that would have made us go inside.
But I know we never did go in and see that show, because there’s a great big blank in my memory when it comes to the kind of acts it featured and whether they looked and sounded polished or just amateur. Also, I have no memory of it in 8th or 9th grade, and I know why. For some reason, they didn’t stage the event at all, the next two school years. (Maybe because of certain students who chose to hang out and not attend.)
Anyway, as you have probably observed in your own school experiences, some of the guys in 7th grade already had girlfriends. So, milling around outside the school, there were three kinds of groups: those composed of guys (like my two friends and me), those composed of girls, plus a few guy-girl couples. Again, probably not much different from what you have observed.
Well, as the evening wore on and everyone had a chance to catch up on conversation with everyone else that they wanted to catch up with, people naturally had a tendency to look for new and interesting ways to express themselves. At the same time, nobody wanted to ruin a good thing by attracting too much attention. So, we didn’t start up any football games (which can be fun when girls are playing), and we avoided bothering people in the surrounding houses and apartment buildings (no Halloween-type pranks).
What probably would have worked: clandestine use of prohibited substances, but I don’t recall much of this going on. Of course, my lifelong ability to remain oblivious to things going on right in front of me makes me wonder if just possibly there was some drug/alcohol use occurring on the part of some of the other kids standing around us in little huddles that night.
Leaving that question aside, that brings us to the other major form of self-expression going on in the little “huddles.” This was something that even I could not fail to notice. In my particular huddle, it was carried on by Kevin and Lydia, who, I quickly found out, were “going together.” One moment, Kevin was talking with us, and the next, he had dragged Lydia into his arms and was kissing her. Then, after lingering in this mode for a while, they would unwrap, and Lydia would start talking. This seemed to go on and on. (Or at least that’s what my memory is telling me.)
This all seemed rather daunting to me. Several issues perplexed me. First of all, how did Kevin, in only the few months since September, get to know Lydia “so well?” They had not attended the same school previously. Second, where did he (and she) learn to kiss like that? Whenever the subject came up in the TV shows I watched, or in old movies, discussion seemed to focus on who was “a good kisser.” This, to me, implied that kissing was rather an art form, something to be learned, like pitching a baseball. And, come to think of it, I was already having enough trouble with pitching, after years of trying, so now I was supposed to learn kissing?
And then there was, of course, the question of what Lydia and Kevin would do next. Not that they were going to do anything more right then and there, in the school parking lot, but what happens after kissing? At what point does it happen? How is this done?
So daunting did it all seem that I chose not to think about it, which meant that I also didn’t do anything about it. And I pretty much persisted in that course of inaction right through high school until I began my senior year. (Except for a brief interlude in 8th grade that I have already described to you.)
So that brings us to senior year, when I suddenly sprang into action. Actually, that’s overstating it a little bit… maybe overstating it a lot. What really happened is that, as in 8th grade, certain girls let it be known that they “liked” me. In the first such instance, someone whom I had known since 1st grade, and who later was voted Senior Prom Queen, began sitting near me at basketball games. She would even make sure she was entirely alone. Even if I moved, she would reappear nearby after a suitable interval. All of this was to no avail. With someone as thick headed as myself, mere gestures were hardly enough.
So, a few weeks later, a girl who I’ll call Lucy got one of my friends to simply come right out and tell me that she was an admirer of mine. She was on the swim team, and she specialized in diving. Her father was reputed to be a member of a very conservative political society that was determined to rid the country of Communist sympathizers, but dating the swim team’s star diver seemed pretty glamorous, so …
Anyway, she got results: I steeled myself, picked up the phone, and asked her out to a movie. Of course, she welcomed this opportunity, and I drove the family car over to pick her up on a Friday evening.
While driving to and from the show, there was a problem: what to talk about? I had no idea what to say. Worse, I felt that there was no excuse for my ignorance. After all, I was a Senior, wasn’t I? I was supposed to be experienced now, supposed to know what to do. The fact that I had avoided these moments for all those years since I saw Kevin and Lydia kissing, that was no excuse. Lucy would be expecting me to be everything a Senior was supposed to be: experienced, mature, poised.
Sitting next to me in the car, she would say something about herself, and I would wait for her to finish, worrying all the while about what to say in reply. I was so preoccupied, that I never really heard what she was saying. Each time she finished with what she wanted to tell me, I had no idea what she had been talking about.
So, I filled the empty conversational space with descriptions of my friends and what I hoped were funny stories about them (probably including stuff that my friends would rather I hadn’t said, but I was desperate for material).
Anyway, after the movie, while I was in the midst of worrying about whether I had said too little or too much (but never even thinking about whether I had been a good listener), all of a sudden, the car was rolling to a stop in front of her house! Oh, oh: what do we do now? Oh dear, she didn’t get out of the car. She seemed to be waiting for something. In fact, she was turning toward me!
Not having the faintest idea what to do, I leaned toward her. Our lips touched. They remained touching for a long series of moments, immeasurably long though in fact probably brief.
We parted, and she smiled. But now I was really worried. In fact, I was in a state of anguish. Was this is a good kiss, or an amateur kiss? I had no way of knowing, since I had never done it before. But I was a Senior, and I was supposed to know all about these things.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why? It was really nice,” she smiled.
“But nothing happens!” I exclaimed (thereby sealing the fate on that particular relationship).
Why on earth did I say that? Because I had gotten the idea that people got turned on from kissing. Hadn’t I seen just that sort of thing happening in umpteen things I’d watched on TV? They started kissing, and they became more and more passionate. It had to be turning them on, right? It was inconceivable to me that when two people touched lips that’s all that happened – just the lips touching. So, when nothing happened (besides feeling her lips touching mine) I thought something was wrong. We were supposed to be getting turned on.
Where did I get ideas like that? That’s easy, all you have to do is go back to Kevin and Lydia. The only things I “knew” were the things I had mulled over for myself (sitting at home in my room) or seen others do. I had no first-hand knowledge, not even of kissing (not counting giving my mother a kiss good-night, which I knew wasn’t supposed to turn anybody on).
To forestall confusion about these things, my mother (at the suggestion of another friend’s mother), had tried to do her part by giving me a book that purported to explain it all. After seeing Kevin and Lydia, I went back and read that book a second time, but I never found anything in it that made it clear just what happened when people were kissing. Of course I wouldn’t, because nothing happens.
But then, in another sense, things do happen when you start kissing someone. You do become more passionate, if you are able to relax and let it happen. But that’s just what was missing. Never having done anything like that before, I was anything but relaxed. Somehow, my brain addled by anxiety, I developed the expectation that touching lips was going to immediately result in arousal. Oh, well.
To make up for this disaster, I called her the next morning and asked her out again on Saturday night (to another movie, of course). She consented, but suggested I simply come over to her house.
When I arrived at her front door, she ushered me into the front hall, where I stood with her while she introduced me to her mother, who was sitting a few feet away in the living room. (Thank goodness, her father wasn’t there.) Then, she escorted me downstairs to the basement, and we settled on a game of ping-pong. (Shades of 8th grade!)
After awhile, we had had enough swatting at the little ball and retrieving it from the far corners of the room, so we stopped. Just like four years before, suddenly it was quiet. Upstairs, in the living room, the noise of the paddle hitting the ball must have been noticeably absent.
But now we were Seniors, so, even in a very conservative household, there could be no question of Mom intervening. We were on our own, and this realization hit me like a cold blast.
We had seated ourselves on a bench beside the table, and once again, Lydia turned toward me and looked up at me. I was petrified that her mother, or worse, her father, would suddenly bound down the stairs, find us kissing, and manhandle me straight out the front door.
Or was I? I don’t want to make it sound like there actually was a good reason not to kiss her. Any red-blooded male would have done it, right? But instead, I started telling her another crappy story. She listened patiently, but when I concluded she suggested that perhaps it was time to say goodnight.
There’s one more memory of that evening that doesn’t need to be part of the story, but I think I’ll put it in just to emphasize how hopeless your old man let himself become as a teenager. Back upstairs, in the front hall again, I turned to her as she held open the door, leaned toward her and planted a kiss – on her cheek.
“Oh, how sweet,” she commented.
I believe that was the last thing she said to me that year (or any year, for that matter). A few days later, when I called to ask about the coming weekend – having vowed to myself that, this time, I would redeem myself – it seemed that she was “busy.” I tried again a couple weeks later, only to be given the same excuse. After that, what did I do? Yup, that’s right – I gave up.
So ended my one-weekend relationship with the school’s star diver.
When I was in 7th grade, there was a school event in the wintertime called the “Variety Show.” It was held on a Saturday evening, like many of the school dances.
I got together with a couple of my neighborhood friends, Ed and Chip, and we got their parents or maybe mine to drive us down to the school (2 or 3 miles). After the mom or the dad – whichever it was – pulled away, we were about to go in when Ed said, “C’mon let’s hang out for a while outside.”
There were several other kids in the parking lot already doing just that, so Chip and I grunted, “Uh, okay.”
This was in the days before schools checked closely to be sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing, plus it was January or February, so it was already dark, so there was nothing to prevent our doing as we pleased. Also, it must have been unseasonably warm, or else we would have gotten uncomfortably cold after a while and that would have made us go inside.
But I know we never did go in and see that show, because there’s a great big blank in my memory when it comes to the kind of acts it featured and whether they looked and sounded polished or just amateur. Also, I have no memory of it in 8th or 9th grade, and I know why. For some reason, they didn’t stage the event at all, the next two school years. (Maybe because of certain students who chose to hang out and not attend.)
Anyway, as you have probably observed in your own school experiences, some of the guys in 7th grade already had girlfriends. So, milling around outside the school, there were three kinds of groups: those composed of guys (like my two friends and me), those composed of girls, plus a few guy-girl couples. Again, probably not much different from what you have observed.
Well, as the evening wore on and everyone had a chance to catch up on conversation with everyone else that they wanted to catch up with, people naturally had a tendency to look for new and interesting ways to express themselves. At the same time, nobody wanted to ruin a good thing by attracting too much attention. So, we didn’t start up any football games (which can be fun when girls are playing), and we avoided bothering people in the surrounding houses and apartment buildings (no Halloween-type pranks).
What probably would have worked: clandestine use of prohibited substances, but I don’t recall much of this going on. Of course, my lifelong ability to remain oblivious to things going on right in front of me makes me wonder if just possibly there was some drug/alcohol use occurring on the part of some of the other kids standing around us in little huddles that night.
Leaving that question aside, that brings us to the other major form of self-expression going on in the little “huddles.” This was something that even I could not fail to notice. In my particular huddle, it was carried on by Kevin and Lydia, who, I quickly found out, were “going together.” One moment, Kevin was talking with us, and the next, he had dragged Lydia into his arms and was kissing her. Then, after lingering in this mode for a while, they would unwrap, and Lydia would start talking. This seemed to go on and on. (Or at least that’s what my memory is telling me.)
This all seemed rather daunting to me. Several issues perplexed me. First of all, how did Kevin, in only the few months since September, get to know Lydia “so well?” They had not attended the same school previously. Second, where did he (and she) learn to kiss like that? Whenever the subject came up in the TV shows I watched, or in old movies, discussion seemed to focus on who was “a good kisser.” This, to me, implied that kissing was rather an art form, something to be learned, like pitching a baseball. And, come to think of it, I was already having enough trouble with pitching, after years of trying, so now I was supposed to learn kissing?
And then there was, of course, the question of what Lydia and Kevin would do next. Not that they were going to do anything more right then and there, in the school parking lot, but what happens after kissing? At what point does it happen? How is this done?
So daunting did it all seem that I chose not to think about it, which meant that I also didn’t do anything about it. And I pretty much persisted in that course of inaction right through high school until I began my senior year. (Except for a brief interlude in 8th grade that I have already described to you.)
So that brings us to senior year, when I suddenly sprang into action. Actually, that’s overstating it a little bit… maybe overstating it a lot. What really happened is that, as in 8th grade, certain girls let it be known that they “liked” me. In the first such instance, someone whom I had known since 1st grade, and who later was voted Senior Prom Queen, began sitting near me at basketball games. She would even make sure she was entirely alone. Even if I moved, she would reappear nearby after a suitable interval. All of this was to no avail. With someone as thick headed as myself, mere gestures were hardly enough.
So, a few weeks later, a girl who I’ll call Lucy got one of my friends to simply come right out and tell me that she was an admirer of mine. She was on the swim team, and she specialized in diving. Her father was reputed to be a member of a very conservative political society that was determined to rid the country of Communist sympathizers, but dating the swim team’s star diver seemed pretty glamorous, so …
Anyway, she got results: I steeled myself, picked up the phone, and asked her out to a movie. Of course, she welcomed this opportunity, and I drove the family car over to pick her up on a Friday evening.
While driving to and from the show, there was a problem: what to talk about? I had no idea what to say. Worse, I felt that there was no excuse for my ignorance. After all, I was a Senior, wasn’t I? I was supposed to be experienced now, supposed to know what to do. The fact that I had avoided these moments for all those years since I saw Kevin and Lydia kissing, that was no excuse. Lucy would be expecting me to be everything a Senior was supposed to be: experienced, mature, poised.
Sitting next to me in the car, she would say something about herself, and I would wait for her to finish, worrying all the while about what to say in reply. I was so preoccupied, that I never really heard what she was saying. Each time she finished with what she wanted to tell me, I had no idea what she had been talking about.
So, I filled the empty conversational space with descriptions of my friends and what I hoped were funny stories about them (probably including stuff that my friends would rather I hadn’t said, but I was desperate for material).
Anyway, after the movie, while I was in the midst of worrying about whether I had said too little or too much (but never even thinking about whether I had been a good listener), all of a sudden, the car was rolling to a stop in front of her house! Oh, oh: what do we do now? Oh dear, she didn’t get out of the car. She seemed to be waiting for something. In fact, she was turning toward me!
Not having the faintest idea what to do, I leaned toward her. Our lips touched. They remained touching for a long series of moments, immeasurably long though in fact probably brief.
We parted, and she smiled. But now I was really worried. In fact, I was in a state of anguish. Was this is a good kiss, or an amateur kiss? I had no way of knowing, since I had never done it before. But I was a Senior, and I was supposed to know all about these things.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why? It was really nice,” she smiled.
“But nothing happens!” I exclaimed (thereby sealing the fate on that particular relationship).
Why on earth did I say that? Because I had gotten the idea that people got turned on from kissing. Hadn’t I seen just that sort of thing happening in umpteen things I’d watched on TV? They started kissing, and they became more and more passionate. It had to be turning them on, right? It was inconceivable to me that when two people touched lips that’s all that happened – just the lips touching. So, when nothing happened (besides feeling her lips touching mine) I thought something was wrong. We were supposed to be getting turned on.
Where did I get ideas like that? That’s easy, all you have to do is go back to Kevin and Lydia. The only things I “knew” were the things I had mulled over for myself (sitting at home in my room) or seen others do. I had no first-hand knowledge, not even of kissing (not counting giving my mother a kiss good-night, which I knew wasn’t supposed to turn anybody on).
To forestall confusion about these things, my mother (at the suggestion of another friend’s mother), had tried to do her part by giving me a book that purported to explain it all. After seeing Kevin and Lydia, I went back and read that book a second time, but I never found anything in it that made it clear just what happened when people were kissing. Of course I wouldn’t, because nothing happens.
But then, in another sense, things do happen when you start kissing someone. You do become more passionate, if you are able to relax and let it happen. But that’s just what was missing. Never having done anything like that before, I was anything but relaxed. Somehow, my brain addled by anxiety, I developed the expectation that touching lips was going to immediately result in arousal. Oh, well.
To make up for this disaster, I called her the next morning and asked her out again on Saturday night (to another movie, of course). She consented, but suggested I simply come over to her house.
When I arrived at her front door, she ushered me into the front hall, where I stood with her while she introduced me to her mother, who was sitting a few feet away in the living room. (Thank goodness, her father wasn’t there.) Then, she escorted me downstairs to the basement, and we settled on a game of ping-pong. (Shades of 8th grade!)
After awhile, we had had enough swatting at the little ball and retrieving it from the far corners of the room, so we stopped. Just like four years before, suddenly it was quiet. Upstairs, in the living room, the noise of the paddle hitting the ball must have been noticeably absent.
But now we were Seniors, so, even in a very conservative household, there could be no question of Mom intervening. We were on our own, and this realization hit me like a cold blast.
We had seated ourselves on a bench beside the table, and once again, Lydia turned toward me and looked up at me. I was petrified that her mother, or worse, her father, would suddenly bound down the stairs, find us kissing, and manhandle me straight out the front door.
Or was I? I don’t want to make it sound like there actually was a good reason not to kiss her. Any red-blooded male would have done it, right? But instead, I started telling her another crappy story. She listened patiently, but when I concluded she suggested that perhaps it was time to say goodnight.
There’s one more memory of that evening that doesn’t need to be part of the story, but I think I’ll put it in just to emphasize how hopeless your old man let himself become as a teenager. Back upstairs, in the front hall again, I turned to her as she held open the door, leaned toward her and planted a kiss – on her cheek.
“Oh, how sweet,” she commented.
I believe that was the last thing she said to me that year (or any year, for that matter). A few days later, when I called to ask about the coming weekend – having vowed to myself that, this time, I would redeem myself – it seemed that she was “busy.” I tried again a couple weeks later, only to be given the same excuse. After that, what did I do? Yup, that’s right – I gave up.
So ended my one-weekend relationship with the school’s star diver.
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