Confessions of a Transylvanian (38 page)

Instead it was...mechanical. Passionless, really. I had never been with a hooker, but I could
n’
t help but think that this is what sex must be like when yo
u’
re doing it with someone you were paying for the privilege. It was as if kissing me was her
job
and she was
n’
t all that thrilled to be punching in for her shift.

After a few seconds of this, she abruptly jerked her tongue out of my mouth, stepped back and—in one fluid motion—yanked off her top. Just like that,
fwip
, and I could tell that she was standing in front of me in the darkness without her shirt. Not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable, I followed suit.

Without waiting for me to reach out for her again, she decided to jump ahead a few steps. I distinctly heard, but again could not see, as she went through the various motions of removing her bra, pants and underwear. After she had disrobed, she made her way over to my bed and lay down, waiting for me.

If it was a race to get naked, I was falling way behind and it took me a while to catch up. I stripped off my jeans, pulled off my underwear and fumbled my way over to the bed. She was reaching up for me when I arrived.

I tried to kiss her again, but apparently that part of the opening ceremony had come to a close and was
n’
t to be revisited. Instead, she put her hands on my hips and guided me to the proper position over her as she lay back on my pillow. Then, sliding her hand down my stomach, she grabbed my full attention and made sure I had the proper aim.

A moment or two later, I was inside her and she was busy reaching around, getting a good grip on my ass and pulling me as far inside her as she could manage.

It was a land-speed record, at least in my experience. Front door to carnal intercourse in less than five minutes. Bing. Bam. Boom.

The actual act lasted longer than it should have, simply because it was so devoid of...anything. Here I was, a 17-year-old boy with a pretty, young girl lying naked on my bed, practically forcing me to hump her repeatedly and I felt...zip-a-dee-doo-dah. In fact, I realized in that moment that I would rather have been almost anywhere else than deep inside that young lady.

“So,” I thought. “This is fucking.” And it was. I had heard the term my whole life, but never really knew what it meant. Now I knew. “Fucking” was the act of inserting yourself into a person
for whom
you have no affection,
with whom
you have no connection, and
from whom
you are receiving no exchange of emotions whatsoever.

Dorothy and I were fucking. And, frankly, I could
n’
t wait for it to end.

Eventually, mercifully, it did. We both made the appropriate sounds of pleasure and fell back on the bed, pretending to be completely satisfied by the experience.

We did
n’
t talk. We did
n’
t even touch. We just lay there.

Less than a minute later, she was on her feet again, feeling about on the floor for her clothes. I thought I should do likewise and joined her, pawing about for my shirt and underwear. It could have gone a lot faster if w
e’
d turned on the light, but I do
n’
t think either one of us was much in the mood to look at each other.

Finally, we were dressed and we made our way back to the living room. Dorothy did
n’
t pause, she headed straight for the door. Opening it, she turned to me briefly and, for just a second, her brain signaled the muscles in her face to turn up the edges of her mouth into what is generally considered to be a smile and she said, with no inflection at all: “That was fun.”

“Yeah, it was,” I lied to this girl. This girl who I had fucked. “It was really nice.”

She nodded as if our business had been concluded in a proper and professional manner. “See ya,” she said. And she started for her car.

“Yeah,” I called after her. “See ya.”

I watched her get in the car. I saw her light up a cigarette. I heard her start the engine. I watched her drive off.

I never saw her again.

17

Rose Tint My World

T
hat fall, I started my senior year of high school.

This was an exciting time, obviously, but not for the usual reasons one would associate with entering on
e'
s final year of school. Like a lot of seniors, I was both looking forward to and dreading my graduation day. But my reluctance to head off into the wild blue yonder had less to do with leaving the comforting confines of school and embarking on life in the great unknown. My trepidation was based in something far more selfish than that: I simply did
n’
t want this Rocky experiment to come to an end. I was having way, way too much fun.

But I knew: Once I graduated and went off to college, that would be it. My Fridays and Saturdays would quite suddenly be sadly, tragically, horribly...

...free.

Theoretically, of course, I could have avoided this eventuality by applying to colleges in South Florida. If I chose to go to, say, the University of Miami or Florida Atlantic University, I could have enrolled in college
and
continued doing the Rocky show.

This solution, however, was never on the table. Not for a minute.

I had grown up with the fixed goal in life of finding the exit out of this place. Ever since I was a kid, I had looked forward with great eagerness to my last sweltering day in the Swamp and had dreamed of little else than escaping this tropical maximum-security prison. I was, therefore, not going to spend a single second longer than necessary in this godforsaken rathole. I was going to get the hell out.

How serious was I? Her
e’
s a clue: The only colleges where I applied were in New York. Nowhere else, just New York State. In this way, I guaranteed that when I went to college, it sure as hell was
n’
t going to be FAU. And you could bet your ass I was
n’
t going to be a Hurricanes fan.

No. Fucking. Way.

But this choice, this completely intractable choice, meant that at some point in the next twelve months, I was going to bid this Rocky world goodbye forever. It would, I imagined, be the only thing I would miss about life in the Swamp.

To be absolutely clear, at this point in my life I had almost no serious connection, emotionally or otherwise, to my high school. School was nothing more to me than the place where I spent my non-Rocky hours. That was it. “School spirit” was a concept I grasped only in the abstract.

By that fall, the only friend I had in the entire school was Dean. Everyone else might as well have been crash test dummies for all I cared. And despite the fact that Dean and I had been close buddies for years (and remained so until 3:00 every afternoon), we almost never saw each other after school hours and I had never, not once, invited him to see Rocky.

So if you want to know the reason
why
I would have chosen to throw my hat in the ring and run for Student Council President, I really could
n’
t tell you. Certainly, if yo
u’
d have asked me when I was a junior if I would have considered running for student government the following year,
I’
d have laughed in your face. (Or maybe I would have been polite about it and simply said, “No, I never really thought about it.” Who can really say what I would have done?)

In any case, for reasons that remain murky to this day, about three weeks after I went back to school that fall, I found myself picking up the nominating petition and scrawling my name under “President.” Maybe this unusual move was the result of spending nine months or so with the Ultravision gang. I was becoming, to my great surprise and for the very first time in my life, impulsive.

My rival for the position of Student Council President was a girl named Rose. I knew her really well because, as I may have let slip, my graduating class was not exactly something that you would classify as huge. But the entire high school was electing us, not just the senior class, which meant that Rose and I would have to address the student body—all of them—at an assembly the day before the election to try to persuade them to vote for us. These speeches would determine everything.

Rose, thankfully, went first. And she gave a very nice, understated and completely commendable address on why she was a good choice to pilot the student government in the coming months. She made a number of excellent points. She was extremely clear and very informative. All in all, she did a really fine job.

Then I got up there and mopped the floor with her.

I stood before the assembled students of Zion Lutheran Christian School and pretended to look at a handful of note cards that I had brought with me up onto the stage. Then I dramatically tossed the cards into the air as if I was abandoning my prepared remarks and wanted simply to talk directly to the students as equals.

It was unbelievably contrived. Theatrical. Overdone. Ridiculous.

And, naturally, it worked.

I leaned over the podium, looked them in their collective eyes and promised them the best year of their lives. I was
n’
t going to get them better grades or make sure that everyone got dates to the school dances, but by God I was going to make sure that the 1982-83 school year was the best in history.

The first step:

Homecoming.

I laid it on the line: Elect me and yo
u’
ll have the best homecoming any school has ever seen. It will blow your doors off. Guaranteed.

The crowd went wild. I walked off the stage in a blaze of glory.

Poor Rose. She never knew what hit her. It was a landslide.

Traditionally, the homecoming dance had been held in some lame, off-school-property dance hall or Shrine
r’
s club that regularly hosted this type of event. The school itself budgeted a couple thousand dollars to rent the place, put up decorations and hire a band. The way it worked was: The date was set, tickets were sold and the students showed up. Lousy music was played, the attendees had a crappy time, they went home. That was that. The formula could not have been simpler to follow.

I decided to change things up a bit. I went to the principal and proposed that we hold the dance on school grounds. In fact, I suggested, we could hold it outside. In the quad. The space, I argued, was perfect: a big open area with a raised stage at one end and plenty of room in the middle of the grounds for the dancers to congregate. The weather was
n’
t really an issue. It was Florida, after all, and it did
n’
t rain often enough to pose a serious threat.

My thought was that we could take the money we usually spent renting the hall and use it to hire a really
good
band, rent some tables and chairs and cater the living
shit
out of it.

The principal had no objection to my master plan (he had better things to worry about) so he signed off on it without a second look.

After that, I took the homecoming budget and started moving money around. And the line item slated to get the biggest boost in cash would be…the band. For Go
d’
s sake, we needed a good band.

I had absolutely no idea, until I started holding auditions, that there were so many tiny little four-piece bands in the world simply
begging
to perform at high school events. If you, in your naiveté, ever dare to announce that you are scheduling a school dance and are in the market for a musical act, prepare to be inundated with the most diverse group of...well, I ca
n’
t say “performers” because half of the groups I saw had no business attempting to play organized music to begin with. A few of these combos sounded as if the
y’
d met in the hallway and decided to stroll inside and play “Do
n’
t Fear the Reaper” in whatever key happened to strike their mood.

In the midst of this audition fiasco, a completely unexpected group of musicians came in the door to try out. It was my friend Dean, followed by a group of three or four other students who had, like everyone else in the state that week, formed their own band and wanted a chance to perform at the homecoming dance.

My heart immediately dropped through the floor. This was truly a nightmare come to life. I was now faced with not only having to endure their audition performance, but then, once they had erupted in pure suckiness all over the room, I would be forced to turn them down flat, thus alienating my best friend in school
and
his friends.

And I ran for this position for
what
reason exactly? Oh, right.
Impulsive
. Great.

They got up on stage and plugged in their instruments. And I gritted my teeth, anticipating the worst.

I know what yo
u’
re expecting me to say here. Yo
u’
re expecting me to say, “But, through some miracle, they were wonderful! They began to play and the clouds parted, and the Lord Jesus himself appeared and accompanied them on rhythm guitar.”

Sorry. Did
n’
t happen. They sucked. I wish I could report otherwise, but there you are.

The good news was, they sucked the
least
of anyone else who had showed up that afternoon, so they got the job. So, happy ending after all.

However, before I extended the offer to them to play at the dance, I had one tiny request. Just a minor requirement, really. I placed my little caveat before them and awaited their response. The band members looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and appeared to come to an agreement.

“Okay,” said Dean. “Sounds good to us.”

“Great,” I said, smiling. “Yo
u’
re hired.”

Four weeks later, homecoming night and I was dateless. I did
n’
t really mind. I was the designated emcee, after all. I did
n’
t really have time for date-related pleasantries. Or so I told myself.

The quad was awash in decorations: crepe paper, streamers, balloons, the works. It looked like a million bucks. Okay, five hundred bucks. But still.

Even better news: The weather forecast was unbelievable. Not too hot, not too cold, no rain, no wind. I would have been happy with “mildly sweltering.” But this kind of mild, pleasant weather was nothing short of astonishing down in the Swamp.

Ticket sales had been brisk. We were sold out and anticipated a standing-room-only crowd. The tables and chairs had been delivered on time. The caterer had shown up when he said he would and, to my great relief, the food actually looked edible.

Finally, everything was in place. The band had performed their soundcheck. The chaperones were readying their nightsticks. And the crowd started to arrive.

Naturally, I knew everyone in attendance and most of their dates as well. Some students were dating other students, but a lot of them showed up with dates from other high schools. And two students, Holly and Jill, showed up with dates who were
n’
t in high school at all.

Jill walked into the dance with Russ. I had known he was coming and had been looking forward to seeing him at this dance for a month. The minute he arrived, I knew that he was going to live up to all my expectations.