My First Date

My very first "proper" date was with the boy I bought tampons from at my local CVS. I'll skip over date number 1 which involved pouring rain, my date jumping out of my car to move a live telephone wire in the middle of the road---with his bare hands, my car catching on fire (completely unrelated to the telephone wire), and my parents picking me and my Jerry's kid date up at the Silver Diner.

I'll also skip over date number 2 which involved me
a) Driving into DC with a boy who wanted to be a country-music singer
b) Going to Planet Hollywood (a place where I ironically ended up working for 3 weeks in New Orleans...but that's a different story)
c) Getting lost in Anacostia
d) Being pulled over by a cop because I was going 65 in a 30 in a desperate attempt to get home before my curfew.
e) Having the cop hand me back my license after running it through telling me "I'm just going to give you a warning. Pretty sure you are going to be in enough trouble when you get home."
f) Not knowing what the cop meant until I got home (30 minutes past my curfew), where I discovered that my father had called the cops on me. Twice.

Which brings us to James the Drugstore boy.

I liked to go the drugstore a lot when I was 17. A) it was an excuse to drive B) I liked to eat Gobstoppers for breakfast and C) I was obsessed with exfoliate and pregnancy tests.

James was a very good-looking guy. He had really beautiful eyes. I had this whole romantic notion about him coming from "the wrong side of the tracks," working at a drugstore to save up money for college after which he would buy his family a new house in the "right part of town," and I would be by his side the whole time, being supportive and we would live happily ever after.

When he picked me up at my parents house in a Jaguar, I was thrown a bit.

I was thrown even further when we got to the movie theater (we were going to see Snake Eyes starring Nicholas Cage, also from the hit classics "Valley Girl," and "Face Off"), and he took 5 full minutes stroking his car, whispering in "her" rear-view mirrors that we would be back soon and not to worry.

During the movie, he held my hand and made little circles on my palm and that was the first time a guy had touched me that way and it made me feel real funny and squishy inside. I started to forget about the car incident.

Until we exited the movie and he dropped my hand and went running toward the Jag. (She had a name, but I don't remember it).

He didn't exactly throw himself on the car, because obviously that might have scratched the paint and hurt "her" feelings, however he sort of grinded up against the fender, settled in, and rested his cheek on the hood. He splayed his hands over "her" hood, and gave "her" a kiss. Now, I was only 17, and so this surprised me only because I had yet to see a man hump one of my stuffed animals. That would happen later when I was 22.

He tells me that his parents are out of town, so we should go back to his house to hang out for a bit. We're driving and we're driving. And I'm expecting that we are going to pull up to one of the low-income apartment complexes...until all of a sudden, I realize that we are in one of the richest parts of town. We pull up to the biggest house that I've ever seen.

Now, this is getting too long, and since I've had about 3 glasses of wine since I started this post I'll wrap it up. This is what happened:

a) We played a duet on his grand piano
b) He brought me home
c) He kissed me
d) If you can call it a kiss
e) He was biting my lip off
f) Seriously, he was gnawing on my lips.
g) I went inside my house thinking "oh, god, I haven't been missing a thing"
h) I find my father waiting in the kitchen with his arms folded and the phone book out.
i) I discover that my dad had not only called the cops on me again (thrice), but had also tried to call James the Drugstore boy's parents.

Luckily, they were on a cruise in the Bahamas.