The first few weeks after we discovered this presumably magical portal, the four of us simply stood by the opening, squinting into the darkness on the other side, listening to the soundtrack that crackled off the screen: groans, gasps, cries and crescendos, all set to a kind of pulsing neo-rock music, played exclusively, it seemed through a wah-wah pedal.
Occasionally a snatch of dialogue would emerge amid the grunting; occasionally, the actual meaning of the words might be comprehended by one or other of us, but even if they weren’t, the sentence itself would soak into our collective psyche, to become a sort of in-joke secret weapon, to be deployed whenever the adult world grew too demanding.
“Did you finish your history assignment?” “Go lick it off your tits.” And I often wonder whether I was the only one of us who experienced a secret frisson of excitement at the very thought of doing just that…of raising one breast and lowering my head and then running my tongue through the thick pool of come that a lover had just deposited there. I don’t know, maybe I was. But when one of our number—I think it was Wanda—suggested that we actually pass through the door and watch instead of merely listening to the movies, I was the first to agree.
We were no strangers to “bunking” into the movies for free. Every movie-house in town had its weak point, be it a back door, a bathroom window or simply a turn-a-blind-eye manager, through which a stealthy form could slip and thrill to those quaintly X-rated flicks that no one at that time would ever have dreamed an impressionable teen should witness: Straw Dogs, Soldier Blue, The Night Porter, The Exorcist. If the marquee mandated twenty-one-and over, we were in there, and it was astonishing just how discriminating we became, able within ten minutes or so of knowing whether the movie was worth watching (bush, blood, tits and terror), or if we should up and march out and do something interesting instead.
This experience was different, though. You went in through the out door, down a smokily unlit passageway and into an auditorium that was scarcely the size of a classroom, with a screen no bigger than a bedsheet. The room seemed darker than the usual theater and the audience more restless. There were rustling sounds, mostly, interspersed with heavy breathing. “Someone,” Lisa whispered in my ear, “is having a quiet jerk-off.”
Only it wasn’t so quiet. And it wasn’t just someone. Judging from the rustling sounds, half the men in the room were at it.
A movie was already playing, a scratchy-looking black-and-white opus, whose plot—so far as we could distinguish one— was, how far could a cock slide up a fat woman’s asshole before it bumped tips with the other one, which was sliding down her throat? And that, we quickly learned, was one of the more erudite efforts. But to four girls who had only ever seen sex in a Hollywood production, where it’s camera work and angles that give the scene its sensation, even the crudest coupling was fascinating stuff.
By the time they hit their late teens, most girls are at least theoretically aware of the mechanics of sex. They know where “it” is meant to go, they’ve heard of the other places it can go, and they’ve already thought of one or two more where they’d like to think it could go. Even in an age in which Internet Porn, Prime Time Smut, and Cable Specials weren’t simply unheard of, they weren’t even dreamed up, popular culture had already built sufficient hints and clues into its makeup to enable a well-developed imagination to join up most of the dots. And if there’s one thing about a teenaged girl that is well developed, it’s her imagination.
What was taking place on that screen, however, went beyond anything we had ever thought up. The titles of the movies themselves are long forgotten; so, in terms of actual happenstance, are most of the “plots.” But the impression they left, the wonder they aroused, the excitement they provoked and the sheer sense of injustice that they left behind—why doesn’t that ever happen to me?—would remain long after we left the building that evening, through the never-ending week that followed and probably well into adulthood as well.
Had I ever seen a hard cock before? Never. Had I ever watched a guy come? Never. Staring at the screen that first afternoon, I realized that everything…every single thing that I had ever read, heard, seen or been told about sex wasn’t simply wrong, it was ridiculous.
There was no “romance” here, no hand-holding, no eyes meeting across a darkened room while electricity flashed between their souls. It was hunger, it was greed, it was naked animal passion. It was cocks and cunts and juices and jizz. Love didn’t even enter into it.