the tease

So, really, the point of that pointless anecdote was not to have to defend Billy Joel, it was to reminisce about Mr Pizza Hut Manager and LL and think a bit about what that sort of little adventure meant in the grand scheme of the development of my womanhood. So now you're all just going to have to listen to another LL story. Sorry, that's just the way it goes.

LL and I got into a lot of sorta benign trouble together, which is all the more remarkable because at the time she was a virgin and not a drinker nor much of an illegal substance user. But she was a fun girl. I'll be grateful to her until the day I die for the simple fact that she was the person who taught me to pee standing up outside without getting my shoes wet, which, as a woman, is a valuable skill to learn. You menfolk have no idea.

Now, as mentioned previously, LL and I and frequent blog guest star L, were all high school and college friends. L comes from a big family. One day (I'm almost sure it was) the summer after we graduated high school, LL and I went to L's house looking for her. Ah, those mythical days before the invention of the cell phone. She wasn't home from work yet. In fact, of all her huge family, the only person around was one of her older brothers, P, who was working out in the yard. P was perhaps 4 or 5 years older than us and at the time quite good-looking. We, in fact, thought he was pretty damn hot, and on this particular day made the decision to hone our flirting-with-an-older-man skills some more.

LL was taking A&P at the time and she started in with complimenting P's musculature, using the proper anatomical names. Think "you've got great deltoids" and the like. I joined in, and P gamely tried to play along, delicately praising our "pecs" and so on. After awhile, when L still hadn't gotten home and neither had anyone else, we all went in, and down to the basement where P, who'd moved back home, was sleeping those days. And then we started playing strip poker.

LL and I cheated outrageously, not passing cards or anything, but, like, "Oh, I lost that hand, I'll take off...one of my rings." In no time, we had P down to his shorts and nothing else, and he was all kinds of shades of red, while we were both more or less not showing any more skin than we started out showing. I'll tell you, 28 years later, that I can still remember how turned on I was. Not just that this was erotic, and goddamn it was, but teetering on that edge between safety and danger, knowing that certainly P was too much of a repressed Catholic boy, not to say honorable, to actually do anything with his baby sister's friends, especially not in the basement when L or her mom or one of the younger brothers could come home any minute. But beyond that eroticism, and beyond that intoxicating whiff of safe danger, there was the heady sense of power. Knowing we had this "older man" blushing and sweating and really wanting us? That was the bigger turn-on than the turn-on.

Last fall when I was all depressed about my birthday and mourning my perceived loss of sexual power as I fall deeper and deeper into decrepitude, this is exactly the type of memory that brought it into sharp relief. Not that I would want to tease a man into drooling idiocy, pretending to hold out the hope of things that aren't going to happen, these days. (Never mind my more evolved sense of ethics in 2008 or that the novelty ship has come and gone; today I'm the cliched horny middle-aged woman who wants it.) But knowing that I couldn't pull it off anymore, if I did want to? Bittersweet, if not downright sad.

So what ultimately happened that summer afternoon in 1980? Oh, L's mom came home, P hurriedly got his shirt back on, and L was later bemused, because in her eyes? her brother? P? Are you kidding me?

xoxo