Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Shiver Me Timbers
Growing up in the ‘burbs, my bike was my escape pod. If I pedaled hard enough I could clear my mind of petty complications and all the aching sameness in which I felt myself enmired. And if I was sufficiently goal-oriented, I might even get somepleace. But, since it was the valley in the 70s, there really weren’t very many places to go worth going: a bowling alley, the community college, a record store. If I pounded as hard as I could I could climb up to mulholland, but other than the famous view* there was nothing else up there.
(*: I have no idea whose pictures these are, but they are coming in very handy here. That Mulholland series was right along my standard training route when I was in high school, that’s just where I’d have been going if I wanted to bike as hard as I could. Which I usually didn’t.)
Really, if I wanted a destination worth visting, and reasonably within my range, my best choice was usually the mall. Fashion Square was an old-skool mall, built in the early ‘60s to provision a burgeoning postwar community. It had the requisite fawncy department stores at either end, a long arcade of botiques and specialty stores, and one run-down diner: the Jolly Roger. I was still pretty young when I realized that, other than its grinning skull-n-xbones-themed decor, the place was basically a washed-out dive with weak food, tired desserts and perfunctory service at best. The excitement and adventure implied by its name was an empty promise. Yet, I could get there on my bicycle without too much effort, and I could usually afford a dish of ice cream there if I was inclined to have one. Sometimes when the boredom overtook me, that’s where I went and that’s what I did.
So it came to pass one day when I was 14 or so that I hopped on the ol’ 12 speed and took a spin out to the mall for a little exercise, distraction and treat. I parked, locked up, walked up and down the bland selection of shops, and then entered the Roger, where I waited to be seated pursuant to a posted notice. And that’s when I noticed her.
I had seen women like her before, of course - just never in person. She had the sort of body that seemed destined to be splayed over a car hood wearing only 10w40. She had wanton piles of bright blonde hair that seemed to be a billboard for services available. Her shimmery blue druess was cut low and high, each where it counted, and her skin was pure honey. She even had a beautiful face, though her features seemed simply to be killing time between waves of rapture. And she was standing right behind me, idly checking a portfolio she held in her lasciviously long arms.
As interesting as she was to me, I was (and remain) constitionally incapable of not reading anything presented to my eye, so I voyeuristically peeked at at the materials she held. At the top of the stack, I saw a gentlemen’s magazine, its cover glossy, lurid and eyecatching. On the cover, nude and proud of it, the woman in line behind me was depicted displayng her considerable charms. Too quickly, she flipped to the next item in the stack - an 8x10 of herself, markedly less modest than the magazine cover. The rest of her materials were of an ilk with what I’d glimpsed already - hot nude shots of one of the sexiest women I’d ever imagined. And she was standing right behind me, looking over her own nudity. I stammered silently and tried to imprint her robust image on my retinas, large firm globes and toned fit loins and a casual availability just beyond my reach… without, of course, divulging my underlying callowness and fascination. I didn’t want her to know I was looking at her, that I knew she was carring an armload of images of her own flesh, that even without those images in her hands she was, all on her own, quite a bit more than I was capable of overlooking.... I feared that, if she knew of my sudden infatuation, my hormone-induced monomania, she’d turn away from me, hide those pictures and that body. I knew we didn’t have much time together, and I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my closeness with her while it lasted.
A waitress with no sense of timing or irony interrupted my imaginary tryst with my fantasy woman and led me to a formica table where I ordered ice cream and root beer. I slowly petrified on my leatherette bench, looking back discretely at the bombshell. She was standing in the featureless lobby of the vapid diner, bored and impatient. Her portfolio was a crisp secret she cradled over her inviting bosum. She stood alone, waiting, I guessed, to meet someone whom she hoped would hire her to display her naked body even further, perhaps to perform some usually private act for a semi-private audience. My frosty soda arrived and I took a long draw on the straw; the woman in the lobby just stood and waited, waited to flog her seductiveness and succulence and rich tan fullness to some assuredly undeserving stranger, the luckiest man in the world. Till it was time for the pitch, though, she was just… there. Standing in the lobby of the Jolly Roger. I was suddenly overwhelmingly sad, and, at the same time, furious at myself for not introducing myself, not even just shaking her lithe hand and feeling against my palm those fingers that had touched the golden hind, that had fondled the pieces of eight and doubloons I’d been seeking for years without hope of a lucky strike.
I never saw the person she was meeting; I looked up again and she was gone and I finished my dessert in silence and rode home again on my bicycle. I don’t think I ever returned to the Jolly Roger after that, but sometimes when those magazines leer at me from the newstand I remember that model and I get a sudden overwhelming urge to go off somewhere and eat a big sundae. With chocolate sauce. Shiver me timbers, and hold the nuts.
