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Authors: Lisa Alther

BOOK: Kinflicks
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“Yeah, okay.”

The patrolmen got back in their cruiser and crept off on their mission of crippling young sex lives. Joe Bob climbed in and sat back, his feet planted well apart and his legs spread so that the wraparound skirt fell open across his lap. His cock was all shriveled and the condom hung on it loosely. I sat silent in my corner, encased in the letter jacket. After a couple of minutes, Joe Bob started groaning.

“What's wrong?”

“Blue balls,” he whimpered.

“Do
what?”

“Blue balls.”

“What
are
blue balls?”

“It's when you get all worked up but don't come,” he explained through gritted teeth. I realize now that Joe Bob was missing his calling by pursuing coaching rather than the acting profession.

“Do what? Isn't there anything you can do about it?”

He looked up with a sly expression.

“The cops said to get dressed and move on,” I reminded him quickly.

“We will,” he assured me, rolling off the rubber and tossing it out the window. He scooted across the seat and took my arm. My hand was lost up the giant sleeve of his jacket. He rolled up the sleeve until my hand appeared. He took it and placed it on his penis. “Rub it, please,” he begged.

I toyed with it half-heartedly, fighting the instinctive aversion that made me wonder during Psychology 101 at Worthley about the validity of penis envy. But God knows, I didn't want to be responsible for blue balls, whatever they might be. All my repressed Florence Nightingale tendencies flooded me with an aching concern for poor suffering Joe Bob, tormented because of his love for me. In addition, I didn't want it to get around school that I was a “cock tease” — any more than I relished the prospect of the nickname “Do-It' Babcock.” What was I to do, other than to stay home alone on Saturday nights while all the other girls in town administered hand jobs at the drive-in? As I grappled with this moral dilemma, wonder of wonder, the bundle of tissue in my hand began swelling. I knew instantly that I'd made a bad mistake.

Joe Bob reached up under his jacket and inserted a finger between my legs. With his free hand, he instructed mine in how to move back and forth on him. It was similar to milking a cow, which Clem Cloyd had taught me to do years before. There we sat, me engulfed in his letter jacket, my chin resting on my knees; and him, sprawled next to me in my wrap-around skirt, his huge furry chest bare, his head against the seat back, and his eyes closed. Our hands moved with the coordination of clockworks. I suppressed a yawn and pondered the topic of whether I even
wanted
to go to college, much less in Boston. After all, I could probably get a majorette scholarship to UT…

Joe Bob was twitching and gasping. He collapsed in a limp heap next to me, his finger slipping slowly out of me. I looked down at him with concern. Was he a closet epileptic or what? “Are you okay?” He lay there panting, without answering. I put my hand on his chest. His heart was beating frenziedly. This was just what I needed — to have Joe Bob Sparks have a heart attack, nude, in the back seat of the Major's Mercedes on a remote dirt road. I decided, if he
had
had a heart attack, just to throw myself into the Crockett and be done with it,

Gingerly I reached over and lifted one of his eyelids, and found myself staring at his eyeball “What are you doin'?” he inquired languidly.

“Are you all right?”

“Do whut?”

Eventually we sat up and sorted out our clothes. When he handed me my skirt, I discovered a damp stain down one side. “Sperm,” he said with his idiotic smile.

“Aargh!” I held the skirt away from myself between two fingers. My prior knowledge of sperm was based on an animated Walt Disney film shown in Physical Education class in eighth grade, in which wicked Sammy Sperm had tried to corner luscious Ellie Ovum, the sweet farm girl newly arrived in the Big Womb. I dropped my skirt onto the seat and began beating the spot with my fists. “Kill them!” Joe Bob grinned dementedly, thinking I was trying to be funny. The truth was, I feared sperm almost as much as I feared Communists.

“You look good in my jacket,” he said thoughtfully. “Will you wear it?” Unexpected delight at this, my reward for performing the unappetizing task of jerking him off, swept over me. The wearing of one's steady's letter jacket at Hullsport High was the ultimate in commitment, far more binding than a simple exchange of rings. Naturally, Joe Bob's jacket was the most remarkable one in the entire school, covered as it was with patches in the shape of basketballs and winged feet and crossed baseball bats and footballs, in addition to several large H's. It looked like the rear window of a Winnebago, with stickers from every state.

I threw the floppy jacket arms around his neck and hugged him. Seeing an opening, he charged into it, like the skilled tailback that he was, pinning me under him on the seat and reaching up under the jacket to twist one of my nipples as though tuning a radio.

“Training,” I whispered in his ear. He sat up quickly and started pulling on clothes.

The next evening after supper, the Major pulled me aside and said in a voice choked with anger, “Listen to me, Virginia. I will
not
have my daughter slinking around town like a cur bitch in heat. Do you understand me?”

“I don't know what you mean.” With a father like the Major, who needed Big Brother? His information networks would have put the CIA to shame.

“The hell you don't! I'd think you'd at
least
have the sense not to go out for your whoring in the only black Mercedes in town.”

“I wasn't — whoring.” I wondered if, like doctors, highway patrolmen didn't have a set of professional ethics to prevent their discussing their clients with the public at large. “Joe Bob and I were — uh — talking.”

“Like hell you were! Look, you give that idiot back that ridiculous bowling ball of a ring! And that jacket, too!” I had scarcely removed the letter jacket since Joe Bob had given it to me. The sleeves were a foot too long and I'd rolled them up. It hung almost to my knees. “You look like a goddam dwarf in it anyway. And if I
ever
catch you two together…”

“You'll
what?”

“If you're lucky enough to have inherited your mother's brains and your father's survival instinct, you won't wait around to find out!”

I whirled around with a contemptuous toss of my ponytail. But, after all, it was the Major who was keeping me in tampons. So the next day I returned the jacket and the ring to Joe Bob in the darkroom. I clung to him, bathing us both in tears.

The next thing I knew, I was holding his stiff cock in one hand as he lurched back and forth in front of me. I felt as though I were an animal trainer trying to lead a recalcitrant baby elephant by the trunk. But at least Doyle and Joe Bob's other friends weren't snickering and calling me a cock tease — or a Do-It Pruitt behind my back. The knife's edge of respectability made precarious walking.

“Joe Bob,” I wailed, as he collapsed against the wall gasping, “I can't give you up. What can we do?”

And at that point, a romance which would soon have lost momentum, left to its own motive power, gained a dizzying impetus from the interference provided by Coach and the Major. In the gym at lunchtime I sat with my girl friends, who swooned with pity for Joe Bob and me. Joe Bob sat with his male friends on the opposite side of the basketball court, and he and I gazed torridly at each other throughout the remainder of the school year. And of course there were the five-minute grapplings in the darkroom three afternoons a week. I would get a bathroom pass, race to the darkroom, signal my arrival by a secret knock. Joe Bob would turn on the photography club timer to four minutes so that I wouldn't be late in getting back. Then I'd roll up my sleeves, unzip Joe Bob's chinos, and, like an efficient housewife, jerk him off in the sink. Then we'd exchange half a dozen muffled endearments until the timer went off, at which time I'd race gasping back to my seat in study hall as Coach eyed me with generalized disaffection.

With the arrival of summer, the darkroom was no longer accessible. Cruising Hull Street every night, Joe Bob and I would pass each other going in opposite directions, me with my friends and Joe Bob with his. The drivers of our respective cars would slow down reverently while we panted at each other. One night Joe Bob leaned halfway out the window of the car in which he was riding to hand me a crumpled note. He gazed fervently into my eyes and squeezed my hand as he did so.

It read: “Wait on the corner of Hull and Broad tomorrow night at nine and watch for Doyle's Dodge.”

The next night on the appointed street corner I waved as cars full of cruising classmates drifted by. Shortly I saw Doyle's maroon Dodge — his mobile mattress he called it. Doyle was at the wheel and Doreen, his girl friend, was draped over him like a fox boa. No sign of Joe Bob.

Doyle pulled over to the curb. Doreen, her fluffy bouffant overpowering her small painted face, waved cheerfully. Doyle hopped out and walked around to the trunk. Leaning on it with one hand, he watched the passing cars.

“What's happening, Doyle? Where's Joe Bob?” He didn't answer and started whistling casually through his front teeth. A large black DeSoto crept by, and Doyle waved wildly with a big smile. It was Coach, scowling. His car slowed to a crawl as he passed us. Doyle leaned over at the waist so as to look in the window, and he waved again with just his fingers.

The window rolled down and a voice boomed out, “One hour and forty-eight minutes to summer curfew, Roller!”

“Right, Coach!”

When the DeSoto was well out of sight, Doyle glanced around furtively and opened the trunk lid. “Get in,” he ordered out of the side of his mouth.

“Do
what?”

“Get in!”

“I'll suffocate,” I pointed out. \

“No, you won't. Trust me, Ginny. I'm Joe Bob's best friend, ain't I? Get in. Quick.”

So I climbed in and found myself lying next to Joe Bob as Doyle slammed shut the lid. “Well! What do you think of my plan?” Joe Bob demanded proudly.

“Not much,” I assured him sourly, as I rearranged my limbs trying to get comfortable. He scooted over, his chest to my back, and wrapped his wrist-weighted arms around me, a hand molding each of my breasts.

“Is this any better?” He buried his mouth in my neck and nibbled my flesh. I decided to reserve comment.

The car was moving fast now. “Where are we going?”

“You'll see,” he answered mysteriously. I felt as though I'd been shanghaied into white slavery, which would undoubtedly require that I spend my days jerking off unending lines of horny young men. I could feel Joe Bob's inevitable hard-on prodding my kidney like a gangster's revolver.

“Oh, all
right
!” I reached behind me, unzipped his chinos, and went to work with a backhand stroke. In the ensuing months, I mastered backhand, forehand, overhand, underhand, according to our positions in the cramped enclosure. Anything to postpone the issue of intercourse, which loomed over me as had dust clouds from the approaching Huns over Rome in its last days.

After a while, we heard a car door slam. The lid of the trunk opened and Doyle hissed, “Quick, Sparks. Get out.” We scrambled out, and Joe Bob dragged me around to the car door and onto the floor of the back seat while Doyle glanced around frantically. Inside the car, a speaker was blaring, and I realized that we were at the drive-in. We scooted cautiously up onto the seat, slouching so that our heads were below the windowsills.

Doreen in the front seat swiveled her bouffant around and offered, “You want me to turn down this seat so's you can see?'

“Yeah, great,” Joe Bob said. As she leaned over from the passenger side, I noticed that she was already stripped down to her bra on top. “Hey, thanks for this, Doreen,” Joe Bob added. “I know it's not so great doublin' to the drive-in.”

“Oh Lord, Sparky, we're just real
thrilled
to hep you all out. Shoot, you'd do the same for Dole and me.”

Doyle let himself in the passenger-side door. The movie was
The Ten Commandments.
Mixed with the dialogue were various sighs and gasps and sucking sounds from the front seat, and blasts from car horns throughout the parking area as, in keeping with Hullsport High tradition, couples signaled that they'd gone all the way.

At a point in the movie at which a slave woman was about to be crushed on the pyramid construction site by a ten-ton block of stone, the front seat back slammed up abruptly. Joe Bob and I sat up straight so as to be able to see the fate of the unfortunate slave woman. It became apparent that a well-timed miracle would save her; the camera cut to a scene at the foot of a mountain, where the frenzied Israelites were dancing around the golden calf. We glanced down into the front seat and discovered Doyle and Doreen prostrate on it. Doyle's bare hips were pounding up and down, flashing white in the light from the screen.

Joe Bob and I looked quickly out the window, pretending not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Simultaneously, we hit the floor like soldiers throwing themselves into trenches during an enemy shelling. By the flickering light from the screen, where the Israelites were still busy with their revelry, we had seen the profile of Coach, a hand bringing popcorn from a cardboard carton to his mouth. He sat in his big black DeSoto two cars away.

Waiting discreetly until the thrashing in the front seat had ceased, and until Doyle had tooted the horn with his foot to indicate to his teammates that he had scored, Joe Bob whispered urgently through the space between the seat backs, “Dole! Dole! It's Coach! Two cars down!”

“Do whut? Oh Christ! He's everywhere. And it's eleven o'clock.” Clothes swirled like autumn leaves, front seat and back.

Doyle, on his knees in front, leaned over and said, “I don't think you can get back in the trunk with Coach there. You'll have to lie on the floor and pray.” Doyle spread a blanket over us, tucking it in. It smelled of stale semen, an odor I was by now thoroughly acquainted with.

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