Getting Caught

My first real boyfriend pool was a group of underemployed guys in their mid-20s who let me and my slutty friend Jenny watch them play Vampire: the Masquerade between the time junior high adjourned for the day and our parents came home from work. Jenny had seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, knew all the lyrics of “Punk Rock Girl” by the Dead Milkmen, and smoked pot with her mom, facts which marked her as essentially the most sophisticated person I had ever met.

Having been raised by parents who didn’t even drink, I was so mortifyingly naive about the important facts of life that I could hardly believe it when she chose me to accompany her on these after-school visits. We always dressed up, often in actual slips that we bought at thrift stores and wore as dresses. After slathering ourselves in 99-cent strawberry lipgloss that I bought at Eckerds drug store while Jenny stole the vanilla cigars that were the only smokable product not encased in glass, we would walk over to the modest suburban home that surely belonged to someone’s mother. There I would sit, carefully posturing myself against my natural tall-girl slump, watching as boys who had graduated high-school years ago rolled six-sided dice, tallied magic points, and discussed the merits of various kind of wizardry. It was dizzyling, terrifyingly arousing.

I couldn’t imagine greater sexual heights until the day that Jim showed up. Tall and thin with a scraggly, pube-like goatee and slightly pointed incisors that twisted and turned their way through his mouth like a confused motorist; he even wore a leather jacket. He got my attention immediately and for the first time my interest seemed to be reciprocated – he offered me drags off his Camel Wides and sips from his can of Dr. Thunder.

Although the other guys until that point had been more interested in hanging out with each other quoting esoteric movie lines and cackling at cryptic inside jokes, Jim obviously had a way with women. That is to say, he had had sex with one before. Older than the rest of the already-older-than-me group, it wasn’t outside the realm of imagination to imagine that he may have even fathered a few out-of-wedlock children. He was just that cool.

When he casually slung an arm over my shoulder on a day when I was wearing a particularly fetching piece of reimagined lingerie, I knew he was going to be the first guy to feel my boobs.

The first time we made out he told me although Jenny was the “hot, pretty, girl that anyone would want to sleep with,” he had been really drawn to me because I liked to read books. Even at 14, I was resigned to accepting these types of statements as compliments. I also took it as a compliment when he jammed his hands down my thrift-store Levis and left a ring of yellowing hickeys on my throat in distinctive enough pattern to make my explanation to my mother that I was hit in the neck with a basketball extremely unlikely.

Now that I was grinding Jim’s hand on a regular basis, the hours between school and my mother’s return from work seemed too few. So when Jim told me that his mother was kicking him out for the weekend so she could spend some quality time with her Pall Mall-smoking boyfriend, it seemed serendipitous. This is when I came up with the plan that made it possible for me to live with several boyfriends before moving out of my parent’s house.

Luckily, the kind of guys I dated were always getting evicted or kicked out for leaving their Skoal cups lying around or blowing the rent check at Hot Topic, so it was easy enough to give my too-compassionate parents a sob story about an irrational, borderline-abusive parent and get a free pass to dry hump with much more convenience and immediacy for a few weeks. Despite the fact that at least one of these guys had been driving since the Carter administration and was starting to lose his hair, my parents always believed they were 19. Apparently the casual way Jim strolled to my parent’s minivan, waving to the lovebirds canoodling on the couch with the TV Guide and a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20 also aroused no suspicion.

At the end of the weekend, Jim told me that his mother refused to let him back in the house and whether it was true or he just knew there were more awkward, chafing handjobs where those ones came from, me and my middle-aged boyfriend were now living in supervised sin.

“Remember not to get caught buying beer!” I’d kiss him goodbye like a white-trash, underage Donna Reed as he left for work mowing lawns with my father. On days when there was no landscaping to be done, we’d fool around in the bathroom that locked, with the sound of my little brother hollering and banging on the door as the soundtrack to our foreplay. Once, when my mother came home early, I grabbed a wet n’ wild eye pencil and smeared a rim of black kohl around his eyes as we hastily pulled our clothes on. We then exited together, laughing about how we’d decided to put makeup on him.

But the single greatest triumph for my pubescent libido came when my bedroom door broke. My family was notoriously lax about fixing things; the summer the air conditioner broke was the same one that roaches swarmed our dishwasher, turning it into a repurposed fort won in battle. So when the doorknob leading to my adolescent love-den stopped turning, we just learned to leave my door open a crack, or, if it was shut, to jimmy it open with a butter knife between the door and the frame. This, of course, was a noisy and time-consuming process that quickly alerted occupants of the bedroom to the impending intrusion.

We just “accidentally” shut the door a lot, then quietly had sex until someone was forced to either knock on the door or set off the butter-knife alarm, giving Jim plenty of time to pull out and lounge innocently on the other side of the room like we’d been playing board games all along. If I wore a skirt and we worked around his clothing, we could go from fucking to talking in less than 20 seconds.

Not that my parents weren’t suspicious; as ingenious as I thought my eyeliner explanation had been, sometimes my excuses were weaker. When my father came home to find Jim and I making out on his and my mother’s bed, I told him we were just wrestling. Deadpan, he responded, “Do I need to get my shotgun?”

There just wasn’t really any amount of vigilance that could have kept our hands out of each other’s pants. I was first experiencing a blossoming sexuality, and he was boning a 14-year-old. His penis was a heat-seeking missile and my crotch was on fire. When my parents went to bed on the opposite side of the house we’d retire to our own rooms, wait 20 minutes, then regroup in my pink-walled hormone cabana. Sometimes I’d wake up with Jim’s face in my crotch, unsure of how long I’d been asleep or if my mother had made her first night patrol from her room to the bathroom. Yet our timing in this arena seemed as inexplicably effective as our withdrawal method of birth control. The nights of endless suburban pleasure blended together, dreamlike.

Until one school-night, as I sprawled under Jim’s wiry frame around 2 a.m., there was a knock on the door. For a moment we stared at each other, frozen, his hard-on twitching nervously inside me. I expelled him from my vagina in the same instant he lunged for his boxer shorts. "Just a minute!" I called out, simultaneously shooing him into the closet parallel to the door, his clothes in hand. The closet was, unfortunately, doorless. Jiggling harder than I had been in bed, I set a new record for opening my bedroom door. My mother pressed her way inside despite my attempts to crack the door like I was signing for a UPS package, and immediately asked where Jim was.

"Isn't he in his room?" I asked innocently. From my vantage point I could see both my weary-looking mother in her robe and my naked boyfriend crouching on a crate full of stuffed animals, still sporting a semi like he’d always wanted to sit on a Care Bear’s face.

“No he’s not,” she looked at me penetratingly. One step forward and she’d be able to see the plush-y orgy currently underway underneath the dresses hanging in her 14-year-old daughter’s closet. “Maybe he went out,” I grasped. “The door’s locked from the inside,” she volleyed back. We stood eye to eye in a Mexican standoff. Jim’s eyes grew huge and his member shrunk considerably. I willed her not to come any further into the room.

She craned her neck to look over my head, her eyes sweeping the corners of the room with anger and suspicion. My short sexual life flashed before my eyes, about to be over before I even mastered being on top. She lifted a foot and I wracked my brain for any kind of desparate, last-ditch move to keep her from getting an eyeful of Jim's balls currently dangling just over my seventh-birthday present's plastic nose.

"DOESN'T ANYONE IN THIS FAMILY UNDERSTAND THAT I'M A LESBIAN!" I yelled with all the teenage rage I could muster, startling myself and, to my relief, my mother. Whatever door I had just opened, I had at least halted her forward motion. I watched her expression flicker from shock to confusion to a kind of weary acceptance I was to see on her face many times in the coming years.

"Well, at least you won't get pregnant," she said.

Then, to what will always be my great wonder, she turned around and left the room. The door clicked shut again and Jim was free to get dressed. As my boyfriend exited the closet, I pondered the fact that I had just done the same.