Roxy Music

When we got back the next year, Tina and I started our slow mating dance anew. Fortunately, she was patient and determined, and didn’t take my hesitations personally. One night, she came back to my room for Open Room and I invited her to sit on my bed (no chairs besides desk chairs) while I found some music to play. Suddenly, all my usual choices seemed too loud or too puerile or too old or too noisy to listen to. I frantically scanned the stack, looking for something appropriate, and my eyes fell upon Flesh + Blood, and I had one of those eureka moments, where everything suddenly gets recontextualized and you understand something in a profoundly deeper and truer way than you ever have before. Of course! Wussy, new-agey crap! Perfect!

I put side one on, left the lever on the turntable up so it would repeat that side forever, and sat down next to her on the bed, nervous and wordless. A moment passed. I tried fruitlessly to remember even one word of the English language. Another moment passed. My mind was rapidly playing out different scenarios, everything from getting laid to getting slapped, but my body was completely paralyzed. Another moment passed, and Bryan kept singing in his best get-'em-out-of-their panties baritone. And then Tina fell over.

The only light in the room was Eric’s red lantern, and Tina wanted to see what it looked like from below (or so she said), so she fell back on the bed to look up at it. Finally the hint penetrated my brick-thick head, and I lay down on the bed next to her, just barely touching her side with mine. We pressed a little closer, looking up into the red bulb, and before long, we had both leapt back across the threshold and were delighted to discover that the card house was strong enough to support both of us. For the next half-an-hour or so, we kissed each other’s cheeks, slowly, imperceptibly, making our way towards each other’s lips. I was exhilarated, but in no particular hurry, and I savored the soft curve of her jaw and the impossible daintiness of her ears and the intoxicating smell of her perfume (Opium), giddy with delight.

The needle reached the end of the record, and the dying strains of My Only Love echoed around the room before the tone arm jerked up and crashed back down at the beginning of the record, and the stylized countdown of Roxy’s cover of the classic In the Midnight Hour began again. Under the watchful croon of Bryan and the seductive sound of Andy’s sax, we crept closer and closer to each other’s lips. I could feel the unbearable softness of her cheek on my lips and I wanted to simultaneously caress it as gently as possible and bite right through it and eat her up. The piano motif that opens Oh Yeah began at the moment the corners of our mouths touched. The shock was so great, I felt like I was kissing a wall outlet, and I practically leapt out of my skin. While Bryan murmured “some expression in your eyes”, I turned my head a few inches and met her mouth head on, lips barely open, while the electric eels of our tongues peeked out, fenced tentatively, and parted friends. I was (just) 17 (you know what I mean) and it was my first kiss.

Over the next couple of weeks, we carefully, thoroughly, and ever-so-slowly explored each other’s bodies. Because we were both new to this, kissing was satisfying enough, and we spent hours in lip lock, until our jaws ached. I spent an entire evening (Open Room was extended on weekends) exploring the curves of her glorious neck, the way the sinews stretched and arced, the divine architecture of her jaw, the slippery slope leading down to the mysterious promised lands below. I was ecstatically happy.

Which didn’t do poor Eric any good, as Eva broke up with him at the time of the pre-Christmas hook-up party. Feeling no pity, I soaked in my new love like it was Palmolive, and it wasn’t long before the room was awash with the opiated smell of perfume, dripping out of the notes that Tina left daily in my mailbox.