Heavy Petting

Oh dear good readers,
I read back on my last post and thought, "SNOOOZE!" So while I'm still committed to providing the ODS updates for my own reflective purposes and also as written proof, I have instigated a self-imposed rule that there will be no ODS update posts without an accompanying "real" post, preferably about something other than my crappy marriage or, if it is about my crappy marriage, is something a little more narrative than "I washed J.'s socks for him."

This weekend J.,Bubba and I went back to our hometown (well, J.'s and mine, not Bubba's) to see my niece in her high school play. We went "home" Saturday afternoon and stayed overnight until this afternoon.

It was very surreal going back to our old stomping grounds. The play was performed in the town's Operahouse Theater, an old movie theater that was renovated while we were in junior high. Today it serves as the town's movie theater as well as a venue for school and community plays.

The Operahouse is a particularly "charged" zone from my past, in both good and bad ways. In high school, LilCherie worked there (see "Poop Stories: The Operahouse") so we often hung out there and talked while movies were playing. On weekends before the theater opened she would take me up into the projector room and showed me how she changed reels and whatnot. It was really interesting...we whiled away many hours there.

The Operahouse is also the scene of my first date -- ever, and with J.(both were the same event) on January 23, 1987. We saw "Stand By Me." After we'd become serious, LilCherie would let J. and me up into the balcony, which was closed off to the rest of the crowd, and we'd make out, etc., up there until just a few moments before the movie ended. We'd come down the stairs all flushed and sweaty and LilCherie would just laugh at us. (LilCherie, god bless her, also drove J. and me around many a night so we could make out in the back seat of her parents' brown station wagon. AND she let me give J. his first blow job in her bedroom closet while she and her family ate lunch downstairs. Have I mentioned what a great friend she is? Sheesh. I shudder with embarrassment at what we put her through).

One day after I'd started dating J., my father took me into the guestroom for a "serious discussion." I had no idea what this was going to be about until my dad told me that "someone" had seen J. and me "heavy petting" at the movie theater and thought he should know about it. And yes, he really did use that phrase. I would have laughed if I hadn't been scared so shitlessly at the time. I never found out who that "someone" was, and I often wondered if it was my father who'd seen us and whether he was testing me or not. I've never asked because I (and my father, I suppose) was so emotionally scarred from the discussion that we've never mentioned it again. Anyway...how else could a 16-year-old answer that question except to say no? After that, however, J. and I kept our Operahouse action to holding hands.

So it was odd last night to walk into this theater that hasn't changed at all since we were there back in the day, except that it does seem smaller. No wonder "someone" saw us getting it on. We sat down towards the front of the theater, and a few rows in front of us, in the very front row before the stage, was a group of innocuous but somewhat restless teenagers. In the middle of the group was a couple, who spent most of the evening entwining their fingers in each other's hands or hair and kissing sweetly now and then, obviously in the "can't not be touching each other" stage of the relationship. Watching them was bittersweet. I wondered if I was watching the beginnings of a marriage, wondered if in 15 years they'd be coming back to the Operahouse reliving their own youth, or whether this was just a fleeting high school romance that she'd barely remember in a few years.

As I sat there watching them, I couldn't help but hear a voice in my stomach that just wanted to shout to her: "Run."