But, no luck. The air that night was still, and there did not seem to be any sort wind to speak of. Just a sticky, moist blanket of humidity, which quickly enveloped us, once the windows were down. Along with it came various aromas, wafting in; the dank, vaguely sulfurous smell of nature decaying part of itself, and the stench of men and their processes, working steadily to decay the rest of it.
I will have to admit, at that moment my mind was mostly elsewhere, and not dwelling much on existential ideas or the nature of decay, or of mankind’s role in all of it. I was seventeen years old, near the end of my junior year in high school, and I was sitting in the front seat of my car with my girlfriend. Her name was Liz, and she was
Liz and I had been hanging out in the West End earlier that evening. It was a weeknight – a school night – and after a time we determined that no one else in our peer group was out and about; so we rode around aimlessly for awhile, drinking beer and maybe smoking a doobie or two, listening to music on the 8-track player. I had picked Liz up around 7:00 that evening, after dinner. Her (single parent) mom thought I was just the greatest, a wonderful guy for her youngest daughter to be dating. I told her Liz and I were going to the library to work on a research paper, and she smiled widely and bussed me on the cheek as we went out the front door.
As always, Liz looked great when I picked her up that night. She was one of those girls who did not spend a lot of time on makeup or hair preparation or picking just the right outfit to go out in. But, she didn’t need to. She just looked good, naturally. She would hit the makeup a touch, drag a brush once or twice through her straight, shoulder-length brunette hair, and throw on something, whatever – on that particular night, flared Levis, white Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and an off-white, rather sheer peasant top, with (after we left her house) no bra on, underneath. She was of medium height, and slender, with everything else on her in even proportions. She had the nicest, heart-shaped backside, which I never got tired of looking at when she was lying on the living room floor watching TV or something. Liz was mostly of mixed British ancestry, except for her paternal grandmother, who was from France, a WWII war bride. So Liz had a little of that French thing in her, and … ooh la la. She always looked like a million dollars to me. We had begun dating midway through my junior (her freshman) year, and she would be my steady girlfriend through the rest of my high school days, and even for awhile after that.
I loved practically everything about Liz. She was mature beyond her years, and beautiful. Smart, and funny. Quite limber. She liked to drink, and get high. In other words, Liz had almost all the things one would want in a girlfriend.
About the only thing we did not agree on was music. I had and have a fairly wide range of music I will listen to, but at the time I was in my rebellious, teen-aged phase – a phase I have not entirely grown out of, to tell the truth – and my main musical focus was heavy blues rock, the Rolling Stones and all their various descendents. Meanwhile, Liz favored the sort of folky, sensitive singer-songwriter types. She would put up with my Aerosmith and Foghat and Trapeze and Savoy Brown and the like for awhile, and then I would in turn try to tolerate a moderate amount of Dan Fogelberg and James Taylor, etc. Or - another one I just now remembered - named Jimmy Spheeris. Kind of a folky hippie, a real navel-gazer. Boy, did he suck ass. I used to cringe when I heard him coming on over the stereo. But, I would hold my tongue and force a smile, while meanwhile trying to keep my brain from turning to mush. It is funny, how much really crappy music a guy will listen to, in the name of love. Or in the name of lust. Whichever.
The one area of truly common ground Liz and I had, musically, was Todd Rundgren. I liked Todd a lot, since his Nazz days; and I was pleased and surprised to find out Liz was a huge fan, too. There is no explaining it, but who cares? We had something we could listen to together, and both enjoy. Maybe Rundgren was our number one lowest common denominator?
Anyway, that’s what we had playing in the 8-track in my car that night. Todd Rundgren. Something/Anything? probably. We had it turned up fairly loud. Even with the windows down, we were unlikely to be bothering anyone with the noise. The place where we were was ground zero for taking one’s date “parking”, as it was called then. One of the main attractions was that the area was sparsely populated. Also, it was just outside the city limits; so while I guess it was still technically within the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the city cops, one hardly ever saw one out there. No county cops, either. Nice.
While we had Rundgren playing – hopefully something like “You Left Me Sore”, although I really don’t remember – we were meanwhile heavily engaged in the time honored sport of blind teen-aged lust, there in the front seat of my car. Without going into explicit detail, I will say we’d been at it for awhile, we were both somewhat less than fully clothed, and we were engrossed in attempting a difficult and rather complicated gymnastic maneuver, just about the time I looked up and saw the flashing red and blue lights out of the back window of the Skylark.
“Goddamn! Fuck!” That was all I could get out, but it was enough to spur us both into quick and furious action, untangling ourselves from each other while Liz got her blouse back on in record time, and I pulled up and zipped my jeans. Just then the Beaumont cop poked his head and flashlight into the driver’s side window, and asked us just what the hell we were doing.
I mumbled something about just talking and getting some fresh air, and I thought I saw the slightest sympathetic smile flicker across the cop’s face. I sure hoped so. All I could think about was the half gone lid of Maui Wowie in my glove box, and the half-drank 12-pack of Budweiser on the floorboard between my girlfriend’s feet. My 14-year-old girlfriend, that is.
The officer walked around to the passenger side and asked Liz to get out of the car. Sometime in the midst of the earlier goings-on she’d flipped her sandals into the back seat somewhere; but now, not wanting to draw any further attention to the interior of the car, she got out barefoot, and walked across the rough gravel and detritus on the road’s shoulder to back behind the car, where the cop wanted to question her. I watched her intently. She didn’t freak out at the prospect of being questioned, and she didn’t flinch at all walking barefoot across that gravel and caliche and roadside flotsam and jetsam. I felt a sense of intense pride welling up in me. She was very fucking brave.
Liz told me later the cop asked her some basic questions – her name and age, where we’d been that night, did she know me and was she there of her own volition, etc. After that she walked back across the rough ground to the passenger side and got back into the car. The cop came back around to my side. He said he could understand us just wanting some privacy to talk and enjoy the night air, and he appreciated it that we were good kids, and not out doing anything illegal. He said he hated to bother us at all, but up the road a farmer had a cow get out, and it was running around loose out there and had almost been hit by traffic a couple of times already, and had we seen any loose cattle going by?
“No sir, we sure haven’t,” was all I could come up with at the time. “Well, if you do, please report it,” he said. “Now, y’all have a good night.” With that, he walked back to his cruiser, got in, and drove off down the dark road, into the night.
Liz and I sat in silence for awhile, kind of stunned. Eventually, she told me how badly it hurt her bare feet, walking around out there; and I told her I knew it hurt her and I knew why she endured it, and I thanked her. I told her that cop was nice not to bust us, but I couldn’t figure out why he felt compelled to make up the story about a loose cow as an excuse for checking us out. He was almost apologetic about it. It was weird.
We went on like that for awhile, and drank some of our by then warm beers. I didn’t think either one of us would be in the mood for romance anymore, after all that. But after awhile, Liz moved over and got in my lap, and we began kissing. Tentatively at first, then more deeply. It wasn’t long before I was fully engaged again. I was thinking about how much fun Liz was, how most girls would have been completely undone by the cop’s visit, and would have asked to be taken home right away. Not my girl. I was thinking about this and just beginning to slide my right hand up under her blouse, when I had the strongest sensation we were being watched by someone, or something.
I don’t know where that sense comes from. My guess is it originates in the brain stem, where all the primal instincts reside. Anyway, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck. I don’t know if she sensed this or not, but right then Liz pulled back from me a little bit. I had turned a quarter-turn in the front seat, to the right, so that Liz could sit in my lap. The driver’s side window was behind me, but Liz was straddling me and looking directly at it. And her eyes got really big and scared-looking. All I could think about was the Zodiac killer, or that guy up in Texarkana they never caught. Either way, we were history, Liz and I. Two young lovers, alone in a car out in the sticks, just enjoying life and each other … only to have their lives senselessly snuffed out, by some mutated serial killer.
That is what I was thinking in the time it took me to wheel around and see for myself what terrible thing was at my window, come to murder me and my baby. My brain stem was in overdrive by then, and as I was turning I was also trying to figure out a way to put myself between whatever the horrible thing was and Liz, to find some way of sacrificing myself to give her at least a chance to get away. All this was going through my mind, along with a large jolt of adrenaline, when I turned around to confront our attacker.
And what I saw, of course, was a fucking cow. Or rather the big, stupid-looking head of one. Part of it was sticking through my window, and that bovine-looking motherfucker just stood there, looking bored, and chewing his cud or whatever, staring at us.
Just then, Liz let out a scream, or more of a yell, really. Either way, it startled the steer, and he banged his nose pulling his head back out of my car. Pretty goddamn funny, though I’ll admit it was a few minutes before I could come down off of my fight-or-flight buzz, and really laugh about it.
But I did. We did. After we watched the ass end of that cow as it clip-clopped on down the asphalt road into the darkness, following the same path the policeman had awhile before, off into the night … after that, we laughed. We laughed really hard about the events of that evening; we laughed together, from down deep. I don’t know what-all Liz was laughing at exactly, but in my mind it was funny on a couple of levels. Most prominently the visceral one – seeing that cow jerk his head out of my car in fear was really fantastic. But also, I was thinking that maybe some greater force, or existential being, or maybe even Jesus or one of those guys, was really, really determined that Liz and I would not have sex that night, and went to these hilarious, ridiculous lengths to ensure we did not. And, if so, he/she/it got its way, too. After that second jolt to the senses, we were done for that night, lustfully speaking.
But it’s the funniest thing, maybe the funniest thing … sitting there in my front seat together, collapsing in laughter into each others arms, laughing about this totally retarded thing that happened to us – I don’t think I ever felt closer to Liz than I did on that night. My feelings for her were deeper than even if we had actually made love. Soul deep.
It was too bad we didn’t get to reach the zenith of our mutual physical attraction that night in my car. Though there would be other nights, a lot of them, it was always a negative to miss the opportunity.
On the other hand, we got a terrific story out of the deal, one that I (and I am sure Liz) have told and re-told many times. Including me. Here. Now. So, one cannot say something positive did not come from it.
Everything has a bad side and a good side, I guess. Depends on how you look at it.
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