No Time to Get Cute

Then I looked up at her face. She opened her mouth as if to say something but instead she shook her head and looked away. I was suddenly embarrassed by my nakedness below the waist and I quickly pulled up my underpants. My thought now was that it was up to Janey to speak first and set the tone for the next steps.

What she said was, "Would you get me a glass of wine? She's got a bottle of white open in the fridge."

I didn't understand why she would want another substance on top of the Jamaican Cream Puffs but I was instantly solicitous of her needs. I jumped up and started to pull my pants together, "Of course, sure thing." I was suddenly grateful to have some task to distract me.

The windowless kitchen area was towards the front of the building. I found the wine easily enough but it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to deal with the glasses. There didn't seem to be any wine glasses around so in the end I just took two water tumblers.

As I walked the few steps back into the living room she told me, "I said get me some wine, not for you to have one too." She then elaborated, "It's time for you to go now."

"Why?" is all I could say.

"Because I want it that way, that's why."

I handed a glass to her and I stood there assessing things. She was hunched forward on the couch, looking dazed and tired. I noticed a detail: her underpants were no longer on the floor. I assumed that they were back on her ample hips.

Yet I wasn't ready to give in and leave just yet. I stepped around to her right side where I had been before and reclaimed my place on the couch. After sipping my icy wine I said, "Hey, are you all right?"

Janey leaned back on the cushion and sighed, "Yeah, I'm fine."

She didn't look fine, however. My previous years of fantasizing had always been about sex, not the full details of sexual relations. If anything I thought she'd be happy and affectionate with me. I hadn't spent much time visualizing that, but it seemed the plausible next step.

Music, that would help. "How about I flip the record over? Or maybe something else?"

She waved her hand, "Don't bother," and then she drank deeply from her wine tumbler. She was already stoned and now it appeared that she was going to get drunk too. The queasy thought came to me that she preferred doing this instead of interacting with me in any way.

This was different from my fantasies while working through Playboy's Girls of the Top Ten. Purdue cheerleader Erin would conveniently remove her blue panties while I lowered my corduroy bellbottoms and banged her in a hayloft. Then I would take her for a ride to Dairy Queen in my imaginary Mustang convertible.

Instead of driving through the Indiana countryside I was sitting here in a quiet room with this suddenly sullen Janey girl. I speculated about sliding over and comforting her with hugs but I was getting no feeling that I would be welcome. She gazed at some copper pots hung over a brick fireplace.

"Isn't there supposed to be a cat here?"

"He's probably sleeping downstairs."

"Is there a TV down there? Do you want to watch something?"

She hesitated for a moment, "No, I've already said it's time for you to go."

I had no back-up plan, no tactic to deal with this. I couldn't say, Janey, I love you, because I didn't. Maybe I would at some point, but not yet. At that time my only opinion was something like, it sure was generous of her to spread her legs and let me come in her, but I wasn't going say that. In fact I had nothing to say at all.

I looked around for something to comment on, something that would be a distraction and maybe an excuse to delay or defer my departure.

"That cowboy statue sure is strange." It was strange: a two-foot tall metal sculpture with an exaggeratedly thin body. Anne had placed it to the right of her fireplace.

Janey did respond, "I swear I've seen its head move at times."

"Oh come on, you've been smoking Jamaican in here before, haven't you?"

"I don't know, when this was a boarding house, a guy hung himself, right here in this stairwell. I dreamed about it once when staying overnight."

What was the point of all this spooky stuff? A ploy to make me leave quickly? I was indeed getting a case of pot-induced jitters now. Then she said, "You were leaving, remember?"

I imagined myself as a good guy and I thought about offering more sex to give her that missing orgasm. Dummy, whatever is bugging her, that's not it. That would go over like the proverbial lead balloon, Led Zeppelin, whatever.

I felt my first real annoyance of the evening, "Okay, if that's what you want, I'll do it." I got up and said, "I'll leave the rest of the joint for you."

"No, keep it, don't bother." That was the second "don't bother."

I put it in the ashtray, "I'll just leave it here anyway. I've got the other one, maybe we can share it, I don't know, soon."

When I was in the foyer I half expected her to call me back. I'm sorry, she'd say, I shouldn't treat you like that. I looked over and said, "I'm going to be at the paper tomorrow; I'll see you then?"

She didn't look at me as she glumly said, "I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow."

I stepped forward for a last chance to negotiate, but I sounded needy and whiny, "I know I should be nicer, let's talk about it . . ."

She did look at me now, "Will you get the hell out of here, or should I call my dad and have him take you out?"

I was struck by her nastiness and her use of a threat against me and I gave up.

I let myself out and went into the Manhattan evening. I decided to smoke some of my back-up joint in the playground down the block. I stood there puffing, thinking about how Bogart must have felt leaving a tryst with Lauren Bacall. He must have felt a hell of a lot better than I did.

I knew I'd be completely wasted after a few more drags so I used my remaining brainpower to analyze what had happened to my own tryst, why this long-anticipated event was followed by such a letdown. But my mind was slipping further and all I could do was imagine a 1950s public service film. "The Perils of Marijuana and Dating," I'd call it. "Campus sweethearts Jake and Susie's use of the evil marijuana weed is a mistake. It turns their first date into a bout of unwanted coitus in the back of Jake's Bel Air." I thought, well, for Jake it wasn't necessarily unwanted.

I got a case of the giggles creating the script of this movie. The narrator would continue intoning, "afterwards Susie's underpants are soaked with Jake's seminal fluid. She worries that her mother will find the encrusted garment in the hamper on laundry day."

As the audience for this I speculated, so why doesn't she just rinse them out in the sink herself?

Then I left to cross Second Avenue and then Third. In my daze I could imagine these streets filled with cops, civilians and soldiers during the Draft Riots 111 years earlier. The troops came all the way back from Gettysburg for that; the rioters had armed themselves with weapons stolen from the old armory on 22nd Street.

After that I lost all coherent thought. I had something of a blackout on the way home; I remember the roaring subway and then I just appeared at my front door. That Jamaican weed or hash or whatever it was: it certainly was potent stuff.

Some lines from the last song I had heard came to me at that moment, "Oh mama take my hand and walk with me down Broadway, I'm a young man and I talk real loud, yeah baby, walk real proud for you." It seemed to be such a poignantly sad song.

*****

I went to school the next day thinking positive thoughts: Jane is a nice girl and she's going to be a great girlfriend.

However she wasn't at the paper that day. In fact, she never was there again. Within a week she had joined the rival Campus, the "conventional" publication and the semi-official paper of record since the early 20th Century.

I didn't have her phone number and no one I knew seemed to have it either. In the next two weeks I ran into her between classes and again in the hallway outside The Campus office. Both times she said little beyond her party line: she "didn't want to talk to me."

The second time I tried to argue more and get into some detail about our encounter. I said, "You were the one who unzipped my pants."

She responded with something like, "That's not the point."

"So what is the point then? It's that grass; we shouldn't have smoked so much of it."

"There was just some very bad judgment on your part. I don't know how I could rely on you after this."

"I haven't done anything wrong and frankly, you didn't think clearly either."

"We've already been over this; I have nothing more to say to you."

In my mind, I really believed I hadn't done anything wrong. In fact, I had been planning to be Janey's loyal boyfriend, probably at least until graduation which was as far in the future as I could imagine. Perhaps I had been a bit - feckless, that was the adjective I seized upon. It was that damn overly strong ganja. If we hadn't been so mind-fucked, we would have taken things at a more reasonable pace. And yes, Janey has to own-up to that too.

It had been too abrupt, perhaps, but it was also a new era now. A '70s college guy like me was supposed to be able to drop his corduroys or blue jeans and get it on with liberated girls who removed their panties and wanted it as much as he does. That's normal and healthy, that's common knowledge. Even the New York Times Magazine would agree.

Much later I could guess what Janey had been getting at. We were supposed to be equals but it was also my manly duty to watch out for her. I had gotten us way too stoned on what was our first date and then we had let things take their course. We both had regrets afterwards but I thought the situation could be salvaged while she decided it couldn't. Perhaps she wanted a do-over but it would be a new start with someone else. I didn't see that as completely fair but as a later girlfriend said to me, "It takes two people to make a couple but only one to end it." In 1974 I was starting to learn one of the world's hard truths.

I did feel sorry for myself for the rest of my sophomore year. It turned out that liberated girls with removable panties were in shorter supply than I had hoped for. The ratio of guys to girls at my paper was about six to one, and the women in my commuter school classes seemed to scoot out before I could talk to them. When I was in a particularly frustrated mood I would pick one of them to imagine for a stand-up masturbation session in one of the campus rest rooms. There were times when plump Janey was the one I fantasized about.

During the summer of 1975 Janey transferred to another City University division, Hunter College on the East Side of Manhattan. The word was that she had gone there for the shorter commute and the safer neighborhood, reasons that seemed plausible to me. I was relieved that I had no chance of running into her again during my later years at CCNY.

******

In 2015 I found Jane on Facebook. She was using her maiden name as a middle name and a casual search found her easily enough. By then she was living on the Jersey Shore with a guy who was into motorcycles. He looked a bit like Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler and governor of Minnesota. They had two kids who were already into adulthood.

I sent a message, "You probably remember me from City College and I certainly remember you."

Her reply was puzzling, "I remember you from The Salient. Why did you contact me?"

What I wondered was why she had responded at all. I had hoped for a nostalgic reminiscence about our long-ago sexual misadventure. Her reply seemed to be some kind of defensive move, a warning more effective than silence.

If we hadn't understood each other forty years earlier we wouldn't now. Indeed I couldn't say why I had contacted her so I disappeared back into the digital ether.

*******

A note on story category: Did the female character give consent? Based on what she did and said later I think she herself believes she did although she regrets the results.

No one seems to be clear about exactly when McSorley's was established or how long it's been at its present location. It definitely from the mid-19th Century.

The title of the story is from Bruce Springsteen's "New York Serenade."