can feel the butterflies in my stomach. I’m nervous. “My friends and I call these Vagina Slimes,” I say, chuckling.
She doesn’t laugh, which makes me even more nervous. I fumble around with the cigarette, managing to get it in my mouth by sheer dumb luck.
“Please, allow me.” Mary holds the lighter to my face. With a quick roll of her thumb, a small tongue of fire ticks the end of my cigarette. She never looks at the cigarette, staring into my eyes and then down to my lips—textbook flirting. I stare at the cigarette—textbook avoidance.
Mary leans off the side of the bed. I hear the rattle of ice cubes. She produces another bottle of Heineken. The bottle is already open, like she was expecting me. “Beer?”
“Of course.” I take a quick swig. The beer tastes like canned corn, like all Heineken does in my opinion, but I pretend to like it. “Pretty fancy beer. Part of the parents’ stash, too?”
“Uh-huhhhh.” Her affirmative is more of a moan than a response. She sips her beer and then licks her lips. Her hand has somehow found its way onto my leg.
“Look, Mary, I—”
“You want to watch a movie?” Mary grabs my beer and sits it on the floor. She nods at the videos stacked on top of the television.
“Sure.” I cross one arm over my bare chest, squeeze my shoulder in awkward modesty. “Whatever.”
“Here you go.” Mary hands me my boxers and jeans but not my shirt.
“Thanks.” I pull my boxers and jeans on with my towel still attached at the waist. I stuff my wallet in my back pocket.
Mary is neither awkward nor modest in her intent. “Oh, you’re no fun.”
Mary suggested Peggy Sue Got Married. I suggested Hoosiers. Somehow we decided Crocodile Dundee was a good compromise. We sit on the floor in front of the bed. A half hour into the film, Mary has wedged herself under my arm, wrapping her right leg around my left leg. We are at the part when Sue Charlton tells Mick Dundee she can make it in the Outback on her own. Mick lets her go, but hangs back out of sight. Sue gets tired, takes a break by a watering hole, and undoes her pants. She’s wearing a black one-piece swimsuit, but with a thong back that’s all but swallowed up by her beautiful rotund ass.
As if that moment could have gotten any better, a crocodile lunges at Sue Charlton. Mary flinches, burying her face in my chest. She isn’t scared so much as looking for her opening. She runs her pursed lips up my chest, and then starts nibbling the side of my neck. She presses her chest against mine. I can feel Mary’s erect nipples beneath her shirt because she isn’t wearing a bra. Mary finds her way to my fly as Mick Dundee saves his lady-in-distress. She unbuttons one button, then two, then a third. She is inside my jeans and past the slit in my boxers before I even know what’s happening. We kiss, but just for a second or two before she goes back to work on my neck. She kisses my neck and then starts to move down my chest. She bites my nipples, licks my navel, then…
“Wait a second, Mary.” I push her away with my forearm and tuck myself inside my boxers, all in the same motion. “We can’t do this.”
“What?” Mary says.
The blood coursing through my drunk, engorged erection is equally taken aback with my decision. But this is not going to happen.
“I don’t know what to say.” I stand up, buttoning my fly. “I’m sorry.”
Mary folds her arms in front of her chest. She seems more sad than angry. “Is it me? Did I do something wrong? I thought this is what you—”
“Oh no, Mary, it’s not you at all.” I offer my hand to her. She takes it, standing. We sit face-to-face on the bed.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I scratch my chin. I grab the pack of cigarettes off the bed and pull out a cigarette. I offer it to Mary and light it for her. She takes a long, frustrated drag.
“My problem isn’t so much a what,” I say. “It’s a who.”
“A who?” Mary blows her Vagina Slimes disgust in my face. I wave it off, eyes squinting.
“Yeah, see, the thing is, I kind of have a girlfriend.”
“Fuck you, Hank!”
“Mary, wait. Can I just—”
“Can you just what?”
“Can I, umm, have my shirt?”
Mary slams the door behind me as I walk out of the bedroom. I put on my clothes, scanning my general vicinity. No one is upstairs. Hatch has disappeared, which is a good thing. I’m not in the mood for him fucking with me, not to mention I still have an erection. I see the bathroom just to my right. I walk in, shut the door, and lock it.
I test the door, making sure the lock is secure. I pull my wallet out of my pants pocket. Inside is a picture of a headless belly dancer.
I was casually introduced to the record album Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer in the nineteen-seventies, back when my mom took belly dancing lessons in Kokomo. Soon thereafter, the album went into exile until Dad invested an obscene amount of money in a new stereo system and pulled his dusty old record collection out of the attic to justify his new investment.
The year was 1983. I had just finished listening to the Urban Cowboy movie soundtrack, an album I played on a regular basis from when I was nine years old until the LP disintegrated sometime in the mid-eighties. I loved the album because it had the unedited version of the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and my parents let me get away with screaming “son of a bitch” during the song. Granted, it isn’t quite the glorious, profane karaoke experience of the Grease soundtrack and its signature song, “Greased Lightning,” which since 1978 has afforded me the opportunity to shout, without so much as a head-shaking reprisal, things like “you know that ain’t no shit we’ll be getting lots of tit,” “you are supreme the chicks’ll cream,” and “you know that I ain’t bragging she’s a real pussy wagon.”
For whatever reason that April day, only a few days after my twelfth birthday, I decided to stick Urban Cowboy toward the back of the collection rather than its usual place near the front with my parents’ favorites: Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits, Barry Manilow Live, Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Greatest Hits, Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits (And More), the original Broadway cast recording of Annie, and of course Dad’s prized Chuck Mangione albums. Aside from Urban Cowboy and Grease, some Jim Croce, the soundtracks to Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, a few Eagles albums, and exactly one Beatles album—A Hard Day’s Night—my parents’ taste in music sucks balls. When I slid my hand between the albums to make room for John Travolta in a black cowboy hat, a sexy headless belly dancer invited me into her world.
Even the album’s title was fucking sexy: Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer by Mohammed El-Bakkar and His Oriental Ensemble. A voluptuous belly dancer shimmied up the left side of the album cover, her hands raised above her head and her right hip thrusting out. The album’s title bar cut off the belly dancer’s face at the chin and her raised arms just above the elbows, giving her an air of mystery. A shadow covered half of the belly dancer’s body like a question mark, bisecting her creamy-white skin at the navel, running up from her waist, around the bottom of her left breast and then across her
