Saturday, July 7, 2018

Two One Six: Cruise

I've been using this space to archive stories from girls I've known over the years.

The last two years have been a bitter and depressing time, and so few people have had the energy to write about stories and encounters from the past. Nonetheless, even here as the American republic is imploding, there should be time to remember beautiful girls and their encounters.

It's probably too much to expect lovely friends to send me lots of new stories here, but there are still parts of the past worth archiving.

Years and years ago, a girl in Houston told me this story over drinks. Not a story sent me via letter or email, but one I'm trying to remember from a long conversation punctuated with tequila shots.

What I remember is that her name was Marta. She was a friend-of-a-friend, and I can't for the life of me recall how we ended up drinking at a rooftop bar on a spring night. I do recall her story, though.

Marta graduated high school, she told me, as a millennium girl, a graduate of the Class of 2001. Her parents had promised to send her to Europe that summer, but for some set of reasons, they ended up backing out of that--- probably worry that Marta would spend time in London and Paris partying and being debauched by foreign boys. So they took her with them on a cruise up the Alaskan coast. A disappointment to Marta, of course, who had been looking forward to expanding her horizons in Europe.

The trip itself began in Seattle and meandered up to Alaska. I've never been to Seattle or Vancouver, and I suppose I would like to see both cities. Alaskan landscapes might be lovely things, too. But I can understand how Marta was increasingly bored and restless. At some point she began chatting with some of the waiters and stewards. There were almost no people her own age on the cruise, and the waiters were at least sympathetic to her plight.

One night one of the waiters invited her to meet him later in the ship's gym. Marta went. He was Jamaican, in his later twenties, handsome, and had that accent.  The Jamaican part helped,  of course--- one more thing that would defy her parents' beliefs.  So Marta sneaked out to meet the Jamaican boy there amidst the gym equipment. It went pretty much like you'd imagine. They talked, laughed, drank from a bottle he'd brought. Smoked a bit of weed. Which led to making out on the gym floor and to Marta's shirt and shorts coming off and being flung away. Which led to her losing her virginity while on a gym machine bench. She was amazed that she was actually doing this, but even just out of high school she knew that while this wasn't a flat in Paris or London, it was pretty hot. This, Marta told me, was what whiskey and weed were for, for giving her the nerve to just defy her parents and do things none of her friends back in southeast Texas would do.

She did it again with the Jamaican boy the next night. She told me she loved sneaking back to her cabin, shoes in her hand, shorts barely buttoned, her long hair smelling of weed and sex. On the third night, the Jamaican boy brought a friend, another Jamaican. Marta told me that they listened to music on a boombox in the darkened gym, passed spliffs back and forth, and finally did a three-way thing. She wasn't scared, she told me. She'd pretty much guessed that the friend had come along exactly for a chance to join in. Years later, telling me the story, she told me that she'd almost laughed. The friend, she was pretty sure, had provided the first boy with the weed, and he was trading weed for a chance with the white teen girl. They were both handsome, she said, and it was her chance to finally do something in her life.

So there was a three-way. She recalled being bent over one the benches while the two boys took turns, and she remembered being on the floor with the new boy while he explored another entrance. That was Marta's phrase--- went in another door. I had to laugh at that. She said the major thing she remembered was that when she was bent over the bench , the two boys would shake their heads and whip her bare back with their long dreads. Years later, she remembered that as one of the great sensations of her life. She tried all the three-way positions as well as riding each boy and having her legs over their shoulders. She told me that she'd walked naked around the empty gym after sex, doing stretches. Being naked in a gym, being naked out in a risky place, she said, was actually easy. Her first Jamaican kept asking if she wanted her shirt, or at least her underwear, but Marta told them she was fine. She only wished there was a pool she could skinny-dip in.

Sitting there at a rooftop table, she tapped her glass on mine and told me that she hadn't made it to Europe until her last year at university, but that she had come home and told her friends, who were some mixture of appalled, amazed, and envious. She'd gone off to university at Austin in the fall and felt experienced and daring. I ordered more drinks for us and told her that I was very impressed. I did ask her my usual question--- after the three-way, when she walked home, was she wearing underwear? Nope, she said. She'd just left them in the gym. And the boys had had to urge her to put her shirt back on--- she'd wanted to walk topless for at least part of the way back to her cabin.

Am I as much of a wild girl as you hoped? she asked. All I could do was laugh and tell her that I was impressed. Very impressed.