We never forget the flavor of our senses that pepper our first sexual escapade. We never forget the surrounding elements of the moment: what was in the air, the texture of the ceiling, the color of the carpet, the liquids on the skin.
I was lying in my friend Jeanne's bed after eating her mother's supply of brandied blueberries with my current boyfriend Joe. Joe was cornrow blonde and wore heavy metal sleeveless t-shirts. He sucked the tips of matches because he liked the tang of sulfur. He lit my first Marlboro Red that I actually inhaled and poured me tiny sips of Wild Turkey that helped form my aversion to hard liquor. He was three years older than me with a black and white checkered bandanna forever secured around his neck in my memory bank. The soundtrack to my deflowering will spin eternal captioned with the gutter seed words of AC/DC as they sang "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap".
I will never forget that Summer. Raised by a hard working single mom, I lived in a small town stigmatized by its poverty, meth amphetamine production, juvenile delinquents and loose, vulgar mouthed teenage girls. I attended private school which prevented me from having hometown friends and for the brief two hottest months a year I could mingle with the locals instead of being a mere white trash wanna -be in a guilty Catholic school uniform.
Everyday I would dress hopelessly in a blue Colorado River tee shirt that hung down over my skateboard scuffed legs and walk bra-less to the community pool where friends and I would whittle away the day. Our toys consisted of knives and pens for carving up park benches with the latest objects of our frustrated lust's names. Our ghetto blasters maintained a musical background as we frantically struggled to memorize the words to illicit sounding songs like "Shook Me All Night Long". I would open my mouth wide, inhale a nicotine puff and wait for my very favorite line. "Knocking me out with those American thighs…" I would sing it loud enough for at least one boy to notice and take heed of my legs. At that age I wasn't mature enough to comprehend the true complexities of sexual attraction but I could feel the power of a lyric's innuendoes.
I was wet with a blooming damp beauty that year. I was immersed in the lazy summertime lull of experimentation, bad flattery, wicked first attempts and latchkey freedom. I was excited by the seeds of arousal that threw my libido into the strange New World of puberty. When I look back towards that ironically innocent time when I'd yell "Big balls!" and jiggle along to Ace Frehley's manic strums, I realize that AC/DC was my introduction to the electrical taboos I felt tingle the pelvis and stab the brain.
Dirty Deeds, indeed.
Kimberly Nichols is a freelance writer and artist living in the California desert. She is co-editor of 3 AM Magazine and
SinglesFAQ. Her short stories have appeared in Feminista, Small Spiral Notebook, Alternative Arts & Literature.
