AT THE MOVIES

 It’s the summer of 1968. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college. I’m 20. Suzy and I had been seeing each other at school which is a nice way of saying we had been fucking our brains out as only two novice adults, exploring the new world of sex could. You don’t nibble at your first buffet.

Suzy lived a couple of hundred miles away and was on the phone. We hadn’t talked since we’d left for home on summer break 3 weeks earlier. It hadn’t been a real talking kind of relationship, if you know what I mean. So, I was a little surprised to hear her voice. With no small talk pleasantries, she got right to the point.

“I’m late.”

To my credit, at least, I did not respond with the classic chestnut, “Are you sure?” Let’s face it, there are just not a lot of snappy rejoinders to the statement, “I’m late.”  To be perfectly honest, I can’t really remember what I said for most of the call. But the gist of it was she was two weeks late; I was the only one who could have been responsible and neither one of us had any plans to get married in the near future.

I do know that I stepped right up and said that I’d take care of it, having absolutely no idea of what that meant but knowing it was the right thing to say. I ended the conversation with a chipper, if somewhat feeble, “Everything’s going to be alright.” Yeah, right.

This being 1968, if you can believe it, abortions were illegal in the entire United States of America. And to make matters worse the only form of contraception readily available wasn’t readily available at all. For most Americans the Pill was just a dream, and you could purchase condoms, but only if you were a certified adult with a birth certificate that gave your date of birth as just slightly before the Punic wars, you were willing to fill out the forms in triplicate and you could survive the withering interrogation of the pharmacist as to just what you wanted a prophylactic for. Only then he would retrieve one condom at a time from his safe that was securely locked in the basement. Little wonder that most of us who could get our hands on a condom didn’t wanna to waste it on sex and preferred to keep it safely in our wallets so long that it would eventually leave a ring in the leather.

In reality, for our generation, the only truely two safe sex (no kids) options were what we nastily refered to as period poking, frighteningly self-explanatory, or sex that finished with a hopefully well timed and hasty withdrawl. It goes without saying that it appears that in our case, in the heat of the moment, my timing between coming and going, was all fucked up. And now it was time to pay the piper.

Through a friend of a friend, I got the phone number of someone who could “make things go away.” I was told to gather $750, put it into a plain brown paper bag, deliver it and Suzy to a downtown intersection I normally wouldn’t drive by in a tank, at noon on the following Thursday and pick her up three hours later at a different shady intersection. In the meantime, she would be picked up by someone in a red Camaro, blindfolded and driven to where the “Procedure” would take place. For her safety and those of the other felons involved, she would be blindfolded the entire time. The mind absolutely reals as to what this was going to be like for her.

But I made the arrangements, called Suzy and we decided she’d drive up on the following Wednesday. My parents were going to be out of town so at least we could do the deed without parental supervision.

Wednesday arrived and so did Suzy. Strangely enough, due to the circumstances, this was as emotionally intimate as we had ever been, and we didn’t quite know how to handle it. So, we reverted to form and spent the afternoon fucking. And for the first time in our relationship, we didn’t have to worry about her becoming pregnant, because she already was. So, no period poking, no withdrawals, just all the best manic pre-abortion sex we could handle. But the terror of tomorrow could only take us so far in bed. So, what the hell? We might as well try some other things we had never gotten around to doing together. So, we decided to go out to dinner and see a movie. What will those wild and crazy kids think of next?

We had dinner (I still don’t see what the big deal is about watching some woman eat) and guess what? A revival of Gone With The Wind was playing at the local theater. If Rhett and Scarlett couldn’t take our minds off of our present situation nothing could. So, there we sat, sitting together but actually miles apart in our minds while Atlanta burned to the ground, dreading the next day, resigned to our karmic comeuppance.

An elbow in my side brought me back to the reality of a screen filled with fire, smoke and thunderous music. Had she run out of popcorn? Good God, we’d just had dinner.? Didn’t she know I was psychically fragile just then? She was frantically saying something, but the music made it hard to understand. Then I noticed she was pointing urgently down to her lap. God don’t tell me she’s lost a contact! That’s all I need right now. With the red of the burning Atlanta filling the theater, it took me a second to realize what she was pointing to. Spreading across the ersatz velour of the theater seat, a red tide was spilling down her tan thighs, heading out from the hem of her mini.

Our heads both snapped up from her lap at the same moment, our eyes locked and then we stood and broke out into loud celebratory laughter. We were equally oblivious to the fact of Atlanta’s demise and the loud shushing emanating from our fellow theater goers as we embraced as only those who had just been given a second chance could.

Still laughing loudly, we exited the theater leaving a packed house wondering just what sick human beings found such merriment at the expense of others.

We didn’t even make it to the car before the true depths of our young relationship came once again to the fore. We took each other up against the wall of the parking garage. Period poking at its finest. We were still laughing as we finished, a little bloody but certainly unbowed. She drove home the next day, and I had myself spayed two weeks later. She transferred to another college later on that summer and I never talked to her or saw her again.

Ah, young love in the 60’s.