Barry, Chapter One, Part XXII

 

“I don’t know, but it’s more fun with boys and girls than just girls, isn’t it,” I begged.

“It changes the conversation entirely,” Melissa quipped.

“But it doesn’t have to,” I said, thinking a mile-a-minute.

“But we were talking about boys,” Lisa said.

“So keep talking about boys.  I know about boys,” I said, knowing they would never be brave enough to bring up sex anyway.  Among the boys there was a culture of mutually accepted lies that ranged from tepid to kinky via imagination…but how could you fool a tent full of girls?

“Then why is it that all boys want from girls is to have sex?” Sue asked.

I know I turned red all over, but I also know this was a defining moment in my chances to date or never date Lisa.

“I think it depends on the boy.  Some guys really love their girlfriends, and not just for the sex either.”

“Oh?” Sue said.  “I think they say they are in love just to get sex.”

“Yeah maybe, but then what? The girls have sex and later find out whether the guy is really in love or not? Or the girl can say ‘No, let’s wait’ to test the guy, risking he may run off. I mean I have no idea what girls think, but people end up sleeping together, even if there are different reasons why.  As long as no one gets pregnant, I figure sex is fun for boys and girls.”  Ah, I was in full swing now.  Those early days of proselytizing “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, But were Afraid To Ask,” off the balcony of my room paid off, and I didn’t have to lie!  Yet, at the time…:

(I so wanted this to be my final statement on the subject.)

Lisa: “But you said you had sex with Jeanne, but it wasn’t true!”

Me: “My God I’m the bad guy. I already apologized to Jeanne.”

Melissa: “That’s not the point, the point is, why are boys so hung up on sex?”

Me:  “And girls aren’t hot to trot?  What were you talking about before we showed up?”

Melissa:  “I was talking about Todd, not sex, or sex with Todd, but just Todd, you sex maniac.”

Me:  “So who do you like Sue?”

Sue: “Well I can’t decide.  I think one of them will ask me out soon.”

Me: “How can you be so sure?

Sue: “I have my ways?”

Me: “See, it’s these ‘ways’ you talk about , this is what boys like me are interested in.

Melissa: “The girls way is to get into the guy’s eyesight in as many different situations as possible.”

Lisa: “Well, it’s the way you present yourself to a guy.  It’s not just repetition, because a first impression can seal the deal.”

Me: “How many times has a seductive approach worked for you, or any of us though?”

Sue: “Boys are too shy, and you coujld walk up to them and hit them over the head with the frying pan of love, and they’d still miss it.”

The girls laughed.

Me: “But what is the goal? Dating?  Marriage? A Fling? Someone to hang out with? To go steady? I mean it’s confusing.  I think guys are less confusing, and take life as it comes.”

 

 

 

 

Barry Chapter One, Part XVIII

What the hell Barry, it could be any of these places,” Jerry chirped in the cool night air.  Canandaigua’s water only gets to about 67 degrees in a good August, so at night, the lake cools the air.

            “But I know their dock is square and they have a boathouse with a bedroom over it for guests.  Sure enough this place fits that, and I know I’m right.”

            “I hope, Thomas said in testosterese. “Throw me a line,” which he tied to a dock post in a hasty but accurate bowline.

            “OK boys, here we go, but if this is the wrong house, we just turn and run, right?”Jerry asked.

            “Right.”

            As soon as we got up the steps I knew I had gotten lucky because I recognized the compound which included two wooden houses carved out of a hill that led up to the tennis court.

            “You can hear them up there,” I said, pointing to the tennis court. At full pace we jogged up and Thomas yelled “We’re here ladies.”

Barry Chapter One, Part XVII

            “Well, “Cleo continued, “she’s having a sleep-over down the lake. “The girls have tents up behind the tennis court.  Why don’t you go down and have a panty raid,” she said, slightly tipsy, but matter-of-factly.

            The three of us, dumbstruck, looked at each other as if all our dreams had come true.

            Jerry “Thanks for the tip mum,” as if British, and we were off, out of there, sprinting 35 yards to the dock, firing up the inboard/outboard engine on a 16-foot Glastron, not checking the gas lever, nevermind that it was pitch black, I had only been to their house once, ,and I couldn’t remember whether it  was three or four points from Tichner’s Point  to (and beyond) Rochester Point.  Of course, Menteeth Point was first up as a landmark. But, at just around midnight, only points were a guide, and damn it, which came first Rochester or Seneca Point?  I knew Seneca was a much more dramatic outcropping, and guessed correctly that Rochester was before Seneca.  Even better, we didn’t run out of gas.

Barry Chapter One Part XVI

“It’s not surprising your father hasn’t called by now.”

And on it went.  Later that same summer my folks had a blowout fundraiser for Project Hope, the floating hospital.  My dad’s band from the 50s in NYC came up for a reunion.  Wild line-up of 15 layers including two pianos, basses and trombones which took turns making the lower-register melody lines that, I swear, were magic.  Never a guitar, and that says it all.  Most of the band had regular gigs in New York still, so many years after the fact.  Their hit was called “I’m Feeling Lucky.”  Dad knew a variety of stars from Johnny Mercer to Lana Turner to Charles Mingus.

On this fine night in July, about 300 were getting smashed, listening to one monster set of jazz out on the lawn, and, it was a year after the hitching-hiking incident, one of them was Dr. Cleo Alexander : the most flirtatious/pretty doctor anyone ever knew, or hoped to know.

So it was a big night, and here the mom of little miss sexy from the other private school up in Rochester saddles up to the three teenage bartenders…

“Boys, do you know my daughter Lisa?”

“Sure we do,” Thomas said. Thomas lived down at the other end of Trevor Court, and most of the time his family’s obsession with golf prevented them from buying a cottage at the lake, some 40 miles away from their investment in the Country Club of Rochester.  It was a rarity to have him down for the weekend.  Also handing out drinks that night was Jerry, the neighborhood basketball and soccer star.

Barry, Chapter one, Part IV

Thoughts, a mile-a-minute came into my head, as I had been given official license to do whatever I wanted.  I didn’t notice the walk home, past “Catholic row” where children outnumbered parents by an average of five to one.  I didn’t stop by to see Derek, Jim, John or David as I swung down Georgian Court, a road Mom called “The Gaza Strip.” She being resolutely ethnocentric and “World War II conservative.”

I hung a walking left onto Trevor Court, in a neighborhood (The Barnard Tract)n recently made famous in a book showing just how closed off one rich family was from the others, but this was never true for the kids, back in the 70s.  No. There were pick-up sports games in all three academic seasons.  Summer found us at Canandaigua Lake, visited by cousins, and many others.  The Martins next door got a summer spot near us at the lake also, but were not always at my parents big blow-out parties.  Then, in an act of coincidental synchronicity, the McQuaids bought the ranch house my dad had built by himself (minus plumbing and electricity) 25 years earlier.  It was south of us and on the east die of the lake, near Bare Hill, the Iroquois meeting place.