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In the spring of ’91, on a cool and clear evening, Jennifer came to my house in her summer-wear: Shorts, white tennies, and a tank top. She was in particularly good spirits, and took every chance she could to hand me tools. If ever I was to save a picture of her for my memory, it is her on this day. I was working on my car stereo, a passion of mine, when she came bouncing up and asked me to guess what, and began handing me tools as I asked for them. I said “Yes, precious?” but I knew her boyfriend was out of town for the weekend, or something to that effect. She would not hand the tools to me directly, but toyed around a bit. I couldn’t understand why until I noticed she left the constraints of a brassiere at home that day. I was all twisted under the dashboard when I finally noticed, and fell into an innocent stare. At that moment, she stopped swinging my screwdriver, and handed it to me, being sure to linger for a moment, dare my senses be deprived of Design. As far back as I can remember, I have never felt two larger, or more carefree smiles meet each other. With her hazel-eyes, peering through those blonde bangs, she told me that he was out of town for two weeks. My head spun in so many circles that I was drunk with the thought. We would have some real time together. With all that was rattling in my brain at the time, I needed a vacation. I had just started helping my close-friend from high school manage his Subway Sandwiches, after leaving the village. Mostly I closed the store, and was held up a gunpoint twice, but I had more days off than before. One of the managers of another store was a cocaine-man, and we always bought a case of beer for me, him, my friend, and two other employees to party at the store after we closed until the sun came up. My parents thought I was wasting my life away, not having been a college student for the past month.

The memory is a strange thing. I can never really recall what we were doing that night, but I know where it ended. We were going to visit the man who gave her most beautiful breast ink. In our discussions previous, I had been telling her that I really wanted to get a tattoo, and had almost decided what I wanted to get. I wanted to have the radiation symbol with a smiley-face in the middle, with a rose behind. It was to signify the two musical bands that influenced my poetry, and song writing: Erasure (smiley-faced radiation symbol from the back of the Oh Lamour 12 inch) and Depeche Mode (Rose from the Enjoy The Silence 12 inch). This was going to be the day I got it. And it really hurt. I was a man to the end, but with the baby-doll hazel-eyes to pamper me, I had to be a little bit of a pussy for the pity. We had some drinks for courage, got the tat, and went back to my parent’s house. I didn’t tell my parents, and Jennifer and I were watching movies in the living room, in our usual cuddly-fashion. She kept smacking my shoulder whenever my parents were around, in the hopes that I would wince in pain, but she knew I never would. By the time my parents went to sleep, I was past due on changing my dressing, and so we both went out to the garage. This was the smoking place for me, as I had outed my habit a few months previous. I was just tired of hiding it from my parents. Funny that I would continue to hide most every other aspect of my life from them until it was painfully obvious.

Since I had basically had a man drag a razorblade over my arm for about an hour and a half, I needed to redress my tatoo. Once in the garage, with a new dressing applied by the very lovely nurse Jennifer (thank you), we started talking as I had a smoke. I do not remember the particular moments that changed the conversation into one of my famous massages, but that is what began it all. It was a gentle enough of an offer, and something I had always given to her. As I was molding the stresses out of her shoulders, she coyly let one side of her tank-top drop off her shoulder. As I was behind her, she pulled the other side down, and waited. I was not sure what to do. Part of me believed that she was just doing that so I could really get into those shoulder blades. After about five minutes of me continuing to work her muscles, with her head barely hanging forward, I had to ask her if I could. Maybe it was a silly question after all, but I was not sure. That was how it all began. What I would later describe as the losing of my virginity, by design. We felt at each other for about an hour before she said it was time for her to go. When I tried to kiss her, she said she couldn’t, as she was very much in love with her boyfriend. It does not speak well of me that it did not matter.