When I was about four years old I had a favorite balloon - no time to explain, just accept the fact that I was an odd kid and go with it.
My parents, being the hippie souls that they are enjoyed taking drives, we never went "anywhere" but boy did my parents like the getting nowhere part. On one particular drive I brought my favorite balloon to keep me company (go with the odd thing) and as we traversed a mountain side somewhere in Central California my balloon went right out the window.
I demanded, as only a four year old can, that we stop the car and retrieve the balloon but my parents were having none of that - the balloon was gone and my mother told me that in time I wouldn't miss it so much.
She was completely wrong.
Once upon a time in a small apartment in a large city called New York there lived a girl named Rapunzel. Now would be the time to wonder about the odd name bequeathed to our young heroine and there is indeed an explanation for it.
Rapunzel's mamma was fifteen when her little blond baby was born, just a kid herself her wealth of worldly knowledge stemmed mainly from the story books she had been read when she was a little girl. Storybooks read to her by the various boyfriends her own mother, also a young mamma, would bring home night after night.
Rapunzel capitalized on her unique name however, not only was it a great way to start conversations she often imagined that her tiny apartment was actually the tower of imprisonment resided in by her fairy-tale namesake. At twenty-three years old the paycheck of a store clerk in New York City did not provide a young lady a castle by any means, and so, Rapunzel settled for a lower East Side Walk up and dreamed of the day she would move to Long Island and buy a house on the water. Until then she would dream about her prince scaling the moldy stairwell to whisk her away from the world she knew.
Rapunzel was a very good girl. Scared celibate by the stories of her mother and grandmother's teen pregnancy's Rapunzel proudly wore her band of chastity promising herself that even if she did not wait for sex until marriage that she would no doubt wait until she was in truly, truly in love (I know how you must feel reading that, it made me gag a little bit just to write it).
Time passed and Rapunzel grew older, she worked harder and she stayed motivated. Many young men (and really creepy older ones) took her out on dates but none of them really sparked her heart. At the end of each date the men would say, "Come on Rapunzel; Let down your hair, have a little fun". Rapunzel was true to her promise though and she never let her guard down and so her ring of celibacy and her panties always stayed firmly in place - although she often noticed on her way home that certain parts of her had really wanted to stay....
After ten years of hard work Rapunzel had moved from clerk, to salesperson, to manager to supervisor. She had a good salary and her tiny apartment and been traded for a larger one and then one just a little bigger until one day she was applying for a mortgage. It was not a house on the water, but it was in Long Island and it was a house... if only there was a prince (and preferable not one that had been blinded by a crazy thorn bush).
One evening as Rapunzel sat in a bar just outside of Brooklyn nursing a Side Car after work (her mother's favorite poison) when a very handsome man approached her. He had brilliant chestnut eyes and curly black hair and even without the liqueur Rapunzel was positive she was smitten.
One drink turned into two and then three and the next thing she knew the two of them were in the back of a cab lips locked hands wandering. Now just because she had never had sex, presidential or the regular kind, it did not mean that she didn't know what to do and besides she had fooled around all those other times, even if she had never really let down her hair.
The problem Rapunzel had run into as she got older and older still retaining the badge of virgin was that men got less and less interested in being the one to unpin the badge until finally it wasn't even Rapunzel deciding not to go all the way -- it was the men hitting the brakes. So Rapunzel decided she wasn't going to tell this guy what her ring meant - in fact she wasn't even sure if she was going to tell him her name, how about that for letting one's hair down?
When the handsome man placed his hand inside her sweater she did not stop him. When he placed his tongue deeper inside her mouth she simply spread her lips wider. When he took her hand and placed it on the throbbing bulge in his pants she did not slap his hand away - no sir - she slid down the zipper of his jeans to see what was really going on, all while still in the back of the cab.
Once in his apartment Rapunzel went for broke and then she went again, and again, and again and again. When it was all over she lay on his bed naked twisted up in his sheets waiting to feel guilty, waiting to feel like she had let herself down waiting to feel bad in some tiny way that she waited so long and then thrown it all away in the back of a cab, a cab going to BROOKLYN no less!
It turned out that Rapunzel did feel bad. She felt bad that she had waited so God Damn long to find out what the big deal was about sex. She had loved the feeling of him inside her, the taste of her own sweat running down her cheeks. She had loved the places he had asked her to touch and the places he had touched her.
Jesus Christ no wonder her mamma had gotten knocked up at 15.
In the morning Rapunzel did the walk of shame to the subway station - but she was not ashamed about her evening of debauchery, she was ashamed that she had not done it sooner.
Luckily for Rapunzel she had aged well and New York City was full to the brim with men of loose morals and low character; hopefully she would have time to find quite a few of them.
The End.
The truth is when I look back at the day in the car all I can think about is what I could have done to keep the balloon grasped more tightly in my hand. My mom was wrong in regards to getting over it, as I said I never did - I think I could have had a lot of fun with that balloon had it not flown away. It did teach me an incredibly important lesson however. I do everything I get the chance to do every time I get the chance to do it - you never know when someone may roll the window down just far enough for opportunity to fly right out of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment