Scanner by Sarah Hepola Today on Hooksexup's culture blog: Celebrity MadLibs offer an adjective tale of noun and verb. Also, Tokyo's penile spa treatments.
I'm thinking my first boyfriend might have been gay. Not because he wouldn't have sex with me — well, yeah, ultimately that did add to my suspicions — but because of everything else. The dolphin shorts, the gay bars, the perfect body, the limp penis, just to name a few indicators.
But in my defense, before you decide I'm a total idiot, I had a good excuse for my denseness: I was fourteen. Fourteen and had never been kissed. Fourteen and more than a little stunned at having such a fierce boyfriend.
The relationship started a bit like a gay porn, except my character would be played by a young nubile man-child with just a little peach fuss on his chin and hairless abs. Instead, I played me, a budding teenager who still wore braces and had finally got her unibrow under control. My scrawny body was just beginning to hint ever so slightly of something other than a bony ass, though the serious T&A wouldn't kick in until I turned sixteen.
promotion
So there I was, threading pipe. My father was a plumber, and I was his assistant for the summer. We were working in a spacious loft in the plant district. The owner, a Broadway actor, was demanding and fussy about his fancy marble fixtures, including the bidet. I first met his son, Byron, as I was bent over a work bench (commence bad porn Musak now). I was in overalls, pink patent leather construction boots, hair down to my butt, probably in braids, and as I said, I was threading pipe, back in the day when you had to do it by hand with a pipe threader. I was perspiring. Suddenly, through a beam of light on the floor that shimmered through the factory windows, a pair of long, golden bare-footed legs sauntered by. I froze. Did a naked man just walk by? Should I look? My imagination immediately started cranking out possibilities. Another Broadway star? Someone from Oh! Calcutta! Maybe Raul Julia? A scraping sound high above my head startled me. I turned my whole body in slow-motion (cue theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), and saw Byron up on a ladder, strapping, naked, except for a pair of tiny red dolphin shorts with white piping, his long Atlas arms stretched high above him scraping paint off the windows, his back muscles rippling, his hair lighter than blonde, almost white, parted in the middle, feathering back, David Cassidy shag, skin like Tupelo honey. Holy crap.
I'm from Queens. They don't even have blondes in Queens. I had yet to speak to a boy, I was a virgin, never played spin the bottle, I was a dork and here was this Adonis.
He was nineteen, almost twenty. He smiled at me.
We went to Unity Church on our first date. What a nice guy. He wore a blue-and-white seersucker suit that showed the outline of his GI Joe-shaped back when he walked into the sunlight: perfect V. He smelled of Aramis. I was a wreck.
I was in junior high, barely had boobs, I thought I had a crush on a green-eyed Puerto Rican ninth-grader, but now I had this man-creature. Would I get to touch the man-body? Which part? I wanted to squeeze him like a Nerf ball.
He proudly showed me off to his friends. He seemed to adore me. He called me every night. He critiqued my ensembles.
Our relationship flourished. We went to movies, good restaurants, he had rich friends who lived in UN Plaza. He proudly showed me off to his friends. He seemed to adore me. He called me every night. He critiqued my ensembles.
Maroon T-shirts: yes.
Barrettes: no.
Jeans with pink wedges: yes.
Jean skirts: no.
Dingo boots: yes.
We kissed on our third date just as we got off the 7 train. I wasn't prepared, I was chewing gum, I shoved it behind my back molar. He stood in a wide stance to shorten himself and bent his head toward me and stuck his tongue in my mouth. How did I get so lucky?
