Home Run Page 3

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “What?” I shouted back.

  “Didn’t you get the note I left on your bed? We’re going dancing.” I closed my book and looked up. “You and me are dancing?” Kirk must have seen the look of alarm in my eyes. His voice became very calm. “No, we’re going to a dance club with those girls from Houser that we met at the pajama party. Remember? I think that girl Shauna likes you. Anyhow, she called and said a bunch of them were going to Butter and they wanted us to go with them, so I figured you’d want to go.”

  “Butter?”

  “It’s a dance club, they say, off campus,” Kirk explained. “And there’s no way I’m going there alone with all those girls. It’s too exhausting. Besides, I explained all this in the note.”

  “The missing note,” I said. “Fuji must have snuck into the room and stolen it.”

  “Actually, Fuji is coming with us,” Kirk told me.

  “Fuji? Dancing?” The idea was just too incredible. And if even Fuji was going, how could I just stay back and sit around the dorm?

  “The girls are waiting,” Kirk insisted. “Put on your dancing shoes and off we go.”

  Of course I didn’t have dancing shoes, but I did have a pair of deck shoes that would do the job. Kirk did have dancing shoes, kind of shiny ones with slippery soles that made dancing easier—or so he said. I also put on my one semi-cool outfit so that I fit in with the local club scene. At least I looked cooler than Kirk, who was dressed like he was going to a church youth group, kind of neat and squeaky clean. Some day I’ll have to explain to Kirk that squeaky clean has been out of fashion for a good forty years, ever since the days of Cary Grant. Then again, Kirk was cooler than Fuji, who wore a brightly coloured T-shirt and wrinkly pants that made him look vaguely like a fire hydrant. He told us it was his DDR outfit, based on some kind of computer dance game.

  The three of us went over to Houser to pick up Shauna and a large group of girls from her dorm—perhaps that would be a gaggle of girls. Certainly they were all giggling and gabbing like a gaggle of girls might do.

  I had spoken to Shauna a couple of times that week, but there hadn’t been much of a romantic buzz over the cell phone. She was cute, of course, but kind of giggly and kind of air-headed compared to someone like, well, Maggie. Then again, almost any girl is airheaded compared to Maggie, who even makes me feel pretty dumb at times.

  Nonetheless, Shauna looked just excellent that evening. She was wearing a tight, shiny shirt and some extraordinarily tight jeans that made her look very, very hot. Even so, Shauna couldn’t compare to the girl who had latched on to Kirk. That girl was a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty named Rachel who had a wonderful air of mystery about her.

  Kirk, of course, had paid no particular attention to her, even though she called him daily and actually got him over to their dorm one day to practise some ballroom dance steps. I believed Kirk’s mind was actually on higher things; unlike my own mind, which was always trying to crawl its way up from the gutter.

  So the gaggle of girls and the three of us got on the city bus and were deposited, twenty minutes later, outside a club called Butter. I wondered if there are people who specialize in coming up with club names. I mean, why Butter rather than Margarine or Extra Virgin Olive Oil? Perhaps these names are tested on focus groups, like TV ads, to see what they evoke.

  The bunch of us slid into Butter (pardon the pun) thanks to a collection of fake and real IDs. Inside, we found that the DJ was playing a strange mix of dance music. There were obviously couples who took this whole ballroom dancing thing very seriously—guys who looked like Richard Gere, and actually dressed to fit the image; girls who looked like Jennifer Lopez and stayed close to their boyfriends/dance partners. Then there were the usual club hangers-on: the tables of guys in baseball jerseys with pitchers of beer, the tables of girls with too much makeup waiting desperately for some male attention while, at the same time, trying to pretend that they were absolutely indifferent to any of the single guys in the room, and the tables of friends who were just looking for a fun night out. I guess we fell into that last category.

  Except for Shauna, who had an agenda.

  “I’m so glad you came with us, Alan,” she told me.

  There are various ways to deliver a sentence like that. For some girls, it would be deep and sultry, with a big emphasis on the so. For other girls, like my friend Maggie, it would be a simple statement of fact, as in, I’d rather be here with you than here without any guy at all. But Shauna decided to punctuate her phrasing in a very physical way. She pushed the side of her body quite persistently into my arm.

  “Well, I’m just glad to see you again.” I put my emphasis on the word you and Shauna responded by rubbing up against me even more obviously. It was as if our bodies were having their own wordless conversation.

  One of the other girls interrupted that conversation. “Alan, get over here. Kirk is going to teach you how to dance.”

  “He is?” I asked.

  “He is,” the girl said, emphatically, grabbing my arm to drag me away from Shauna.

  Kirk was surrounded by a semicircle of girls when I was dragged before him. He looked somewhat apologetic.

  “They thought I could show you a few moves,” he said, nodding at the half-gaggle.

  “Yeah,” cried one of the girls. “No more white-man’s shuffle.”

  Was I red in the face at this point? Fortunately the lights in the club were so dim that my skin tone would be hard to determine.

  “Can’t you get Fuji for this?” I snarled.

  “Fuji dances just fine,” Kirk replied. I looked over to see the human fire hydrant doing some kind of bizarre robotic dance, as if he were a pixilated character from a video game. Still, he was dancing with a girl and did seem quite confident in his moves—more than could be said for me.

  “So, Al,” Kirk began, “the key thing is this—you dance with your body, not with your feet. You’ve got to loosen up to dance. Now just try this.”

  Kirk did an artful little manoeuvre that seemed to wiggle his entire spine, one vertebra at a time, from his butt to his shoulders. The girls applauded.

  “Now you try,” he said. I believe he was attempting to be encouraging.

  I tried to wiggle, twisting first my butt, and then my midriff, and then my shoulders. I must have looked like a robot doing the rumba. The girls giggled.

  “Loose, Al, loose!” Kirk suggested. “Try it again.”

  This time Kirk put his hands on my waist, as if this laying-on-of-hands would somehow help me move more fluidly. Instead, the thought of how this would look to Shauna and the other girls turned me into a petrified stick of wood. I got worse. The girls hid their giggles, but I knew. I knew.

  “Okay, just try shaking everything,” Kirk suggested.

  This I could do. But I have to note a significant difference here. When a dancer shakes, it has a kind of effortless quality that is both limp and controlled. It looks, although casual, kind of artsy. When I shake, I look like some poor guy with palsy.

  It was Rachel who brought this torture to an end. “Al, not everyone’s a natural-born dancer, but at least you gave it a shot.” Then she turned to Kirk and gave him one of those sultry looks. “Let’s go dance.”

  One of the other girls took my hand and led me onto the floor. She smiled politely, then began doing some kind of dance routine that I might have seen once in a film. Fortunately, she required no assistance on my part. I did my white-man’s shuffle; she wiggled and dipped and cavorted around me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kirk and Rachel floating about the dance floor, looking like polished professionals right out of Shall We Dance? I half expected to see numbers pinned to their backs so the judges could give them a score: “And the prize for the two-step goes to couple number 43, Kirk and Rachel!”

  It was this thought that led to my muscles going strangely awry. My feet continued to shuffle, but somehow my chest pointed one way and my arms wav
ed the other and I lost my balance. I would have fallen to the floor, but Shauna came up and caught me from behind.

  “May I cut in?” she said to the girl who had been dancing around me.

  In a moment, Shauna was in front of me dancing a white-girl shuffle to the music. This fact alone made me think that Shauna was worthy of more attention. The more I looked, the more I realized that she was really quite attractive.

  “I think I could use a drink,” I told her when the song ended. Behind us, the remainder of the girls were begging Kirk for a dance while Fuji just kept on going as if he were powered by Energizer batteries.

  “Me too,” she said. And we headed over to the safety of the bar.

  I ordered two beers for us and raised one to my lips. Our dancing had given us both a sheen of sweat, a glow that seemed very attractive in her case.

  “Rachel’s got the hots for your roomie,” she said as our drinks arrived.

  “Well, good luck to her. He’s born-again, you know.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I was barely born the first time,” I said.

  “I’m so glad you were,” Shauna replied.

  By now, she was very, very close to me. Our faces were barely inches apart. I was looking deeply into her eyes, feeling the heat of her as she pressed into my chest. I could have kissed her. I wanted to kiss her. But I remembered some of Maggie’s advice, something about “Less is more,” so I held back. It was Shauna who made the move.

  “My roommate’s gone home for the weekend,” she said. “I’ve got the place to myself.”

  “Oh,” I said. Suddenly my throat felt very dry.

  “Why don’t we go back and see if my plants need watering.”

  5

  Sweet Words and Sour

  “WHY DON’T WE go back and see if my plants need watering?” might be among the sweetest words ever uttered in our language. Unlike Mae West’s old line—“Why don’t you come up and see me some time?”—these words have some subtlety. They might even rival the famous words of Keats, if I could actually remember what some of those famous words were.

  Regardless, I wasn’t about to say no.

  We managed to duck out of Butter without our exit being observed by either Kirk or the gaggle. For a passing moment, I felt a bit guilty for leaving Kirk on his own. I also felt a little regret over the waste of a ten-dollar cover charge. But the wonderful thing about raw lust is that it manages to overcome both guilt and regret in fairly short order.

  Huddled together waiting for the bus, my nose pressed into Shauna’s blonde hair, I realized that this might be the big one. Ultimate goal number one—end of virginity. Here was a lovely girl, pressing against me, smelling delightfully of some flowery perfume, obviously interested in me. If I just managed to avoid making mistakes, I might end up in the sack.

  I mentally reviewed all those pieces of advice I’d been given by Maggie two years ago, back when she was my dating advisor and not my girlfriend: Don’t push too fast, don’t grab, don’t fondle, don’t stick your tongue down her throat. I think those were all the don’ts. Now what were the dos? Do look in her eyes, do touch her gently, do compliment her, do make her feel beautiful and smart and important. So many dos and don’ts to think about all at once.

  The bus came and we gratefully climbed on board. The night had turned cool and the bus was pleasantly warm. We took a seat at the back and I kissed Shauna’s hair. Then she looked up and we began a gentle kiss that turned into something a little more frantic. In fact, all this might have led to serious making-out on the bus, but some old guy muttered “Get a room,” and that put a little damper on our growing attraction.

  I pulled back and tried to think of something we could talk about for the remainder of the ride. The problem, of course, was that I hardly knew Shauna. We shared no classes, had only spoken a couple of times either in person or on the phone, and had yet to discover anything we had in common. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know her last name.

  I panicked. Was I finally going to score a home run with a girl I hardly knew? After all these years of chasing, dating, and lusting after dozens of girls whom I actually knew and even liked, was I going to have sex with a girl whose name I only half knew? How could I do something like that? Is sex something so significant, or maybe so insignificant, that I could throw away everything I thought about relationships just to get this girl into the sack? Was I that shallow?

  Indeed, I was.

  Was I ready? I hadn’t brought a condom; I hadn’t even been thinking about sex when the evening began. I was reading Keats, thinking about nineteenth-century British landscapes and the sublime—whatever that is—and now my whole being was focused on one thing. Maybe Shauna would have a condom; maybe she was on the pill; maybe I should use a condom even if she was on the pill. I had a quick flashback to those STD videos they showed us in high school. No, not that, anything but that!

  But maybe I was getting carried away. Maybe Shauna just wanted to water her plants. Maybe she was a serious indoor gardener. Maybe she was growing some especially delicate orchid that required precise waterings at particular times. Maybe my fantasies were overtaking some simple and innocent realities.

  All these thoughts, all these troubling questions, flashed through my brain as fast as the little synapses up there could fire. But there were other words playing through my mind at the same time, words that overpowered doubt and guilt and thought. Go for it, Al. It’s time.

  So we travelled across town, Shauna saying something and me responding that her words were brilliant or lustrous or fascinating. Maybe they were, but I was only half listening. The rest of my mind was going through the dos and don’ts, the fears and the desires. At last we reached the school.

  “It’s our stop,” Shauna said.

  More magical words.

  I took her hand and walked with her across campus to Houser, cutting in through the side door and up three flights of stairs to her room. She unlocked the door and I stepped into a twin-bedded dorm room that Shauna obviously shared with another girl.

  “Pretty sweet,” I said, looking around the room.

  How much could I learn about Shauna from her room, her defined space on campus? I studied the walls, the posters, the notes. Shauna’s side of the room was clearly marked with a large letter S mounted over her bed. It was decorated in pinks and oranges, a colour scheme that went from the comforter on her bed to the mirror on the wall. There was a large IKEA bulletin board with cutout pictures and magazine snippets pinned on to it. She obviously had dozens of girlfriends, all of them with longish dark hair and a fondness for baseball caps. There were guys on the board as well, maybe brothers, maybe old boyfriends, and a few magazine models with bulging pecs and washboard abs.

  The magazine snippets might reveal something if I could interpret them: Hot Leprechaun, Ooops, First Year!, Party!, Downtown Me, Spring Break Fever!, Good to be Bad! From the absence of literary quotations, I guessed that Shauna wasn’t an English major, but there was nothing up on the wall to give a clue as to her larger interests or concerns. Or maybe there was: Party! Good to be Bad!

  Most important was what I couldn’t see. There were no plants! There was no delicate orchid that needed watering. This was not a gardening excursion. Shauna had brought me back for just one thing.

  “You know, I liked you the first time I saw you,” she said, slipping off her jacket.

  “Hmmm?” I asked, throwing my own jacket on hers.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re kind of cute and kind of thoughtful.”

  “And you’re just wonderful,” I sighed, “in every possible way.”

  Did I believe that? Of course not. I knew that Shauna was cute, that she had a good colour sense for decorating, and that she liked to make cutout collages. So “wonderful in every possible way” was a bit of hyperbole, but the words had good effect.

  In a flash, Shauna was in my arms. We were kissing again, frantically, and then we somehow slipped down onto her
bed. Shauna pulled back for a second, catching her breath.

  “Music?” she asked, somewhat breathless. “I think we should have some music. Now what would you like?”

  “Whatever you like,” I replied.

  “No, really,” she said, running one finger up and down my chest. “The Thinkertoys,” I said.

  “Your wish is my command,” Shauna replied. Then she climbed off the bed, looked through a CD rack, and put on a two-year-old Thinkertoys disk, Existential Epistles, one of my favourites. This girl is wonderful, I said to myself.

  “That should put you in the mood,” she said, rejoining me on the bed.

  “I’m already in the mood,” I replied, as we began making out again.

  The process of taking off a girl’s clothes is truly an art, and one that I have yet to master. There is, of course, the question of timing. How fast should the clothes be unbuttoned and cast aside? In movies, the rip-and-rut mode seems to work for couples who are overcome with mutual lust, but in real life the lust is never that obvious. A guy has to look for clues and signals; he has to interpret signs and sighs and gestures that might mean start or stop or yield.

  Shauna was quite wonderful at giving signals; in fact, all I had to do was follow her lead. She flicked open two buttons on my shirt, then began to toy with my rather hairless chest. I took this as an invitation to undo a couple of buttons on her shirt and, meeting no opposition, decided to continue this unbuttoning all the way down.

  This brought me to an important juncture. I could, for instance, continue moving down to unzip her jeans, but that’s both difficult (girls’ jeans are ridiculously tight) and sometimes leads to a dead stop. Conversely, I could reach around and try to unhook her bra, a task always fraught with difficulty. Still, the prospect of flesh-on-flesh contact made me choose the second course.