[Artie has managed to "date" the fabulous Penny Miller, and actually screwed up enough courage to kiss her - several times - on the lips - on the bench - a "soul kiss" or "French kiss" as we used to call it. This is where I lose Artie, because I knew a girl at our school who could have been the girl he calls "Penny Miller" and there is no way Artie could have gotten within a mile of her, much less touched her knee. Well, he says he had a "date." Yeah, right. So what. Anyway, Artie's "memoir" is about to get raunchy, so beware ... mpb]
We never formally dated again.
That year, we were both active at school in separate crowds. Penny Miller wrote short stories and poems for the school magazine and I was still involved with sports. My group of friends were mostly jocks and the girls who hung around them. Penny played flute in the orchestra. She worked on the staff of the “Sophomore Sing,” an annual musical show put on by the class. She wrote the “book,” a “Twilight Zone” take-off in which Ulysses finds himself transported to our school and runs into clever parodies of teachers and students there. It was a big success, and she won a prize at the year-end assembly.
Penny found the first excuse for us to get together without actually “dating,” at her house after school, supposedly to do homework and watch Dick Clark.
We opened the books, turned on the T.V., danced a little, and at one point, she looked at me with a peculiarly intense gaze, which I sensed to be a silent question — wanting something from me.
I was a novice in the arcane art of interpreting signals from females. That kind of look from a girl was like the mysterious look a cat gives you that may seem to be inviting a tender touch, but could just as easily be prelude to a nasty scratch.
My previous attempts with other girls had usually been faltering and often misfired. But somehow, despite the fact that Penny’s aura should have made her impossible to approach, I acted with almost complete assurance - as on our one and only “date.”
I pecked her on the cheek and she kissed me on the lips so hard our front teeth tapped painfully. I made a teasing joke about it and we kissed again. We continued to kiss and hug until her mother came home.
That day, while we did some homework and flirted out of the hearing of her mother, Penny began to tell me about what she called her “Life Script.”
I’d never thought farther than the next ballgame or summer job and was shocked at how thoroughly she had planned out the rest of her life.
She would go to an Ivy League college and teach English Lit. while she wrote intense poems and satiric short stories and tried to be published in avant garde journals. She wouldn’t get married until she had established herself as a writer, and that only after she had “really experienced life,” which is what “good writing” required. But once she had lived “fully” and written about it, she would have to marry because she knew it would be difficult to support herself and she wanted not just career, but home and family, too.
She expected to marry a wealthy guy from a good family who would support her dream and allow her to write novels in their home. They would live in the country and he would commute to The City and she would raise their children, educating them herself in art, music, and literature. She would write “realistic” novels and achieve a sort of limited fame in literary circles as an eccentric artist with a mysterious, tragic aura.
I didn’t know how to respond to Penny’s elaborate plan, but from the ardent seriousness of her description of it, I decided not to poke holes in the defects, or to criticize it in any way, but rather to support her ideas, which seemed to be very important to her, and which she seemed to want me to understand.
I viewed this development as an important breakthrough, though I didn’t really appreciate the significance of Penny’s sharing these thoughts with me, which in fact elevated us to another level of intimacy in her mind.
After that day, we began to weave a pattern without planning it. It sort of just happened by itself. We kept our separate group of friends and involvements apart from our friendship with each other, but we found time for what Penny called “a rendezvous” two or three afternoons every week. We made concentrated efforts to be alone, either at her house, or outside on park benches. We both felt the drama of what quickly became an addiction to the risk of our secret “affair.”
The next few times we found excuses to get together, our kisses advanced in intensity, grew longer, deeper, our tongues more adventurous, our hands wandering further each time. Later, when the weather warmed up, we rode our bikes to Prospect Park and made out on a blanket on the grass under a huge maple tree.
Once, we took the Coney Island Avenue bus to Brighton Beach, kissed on a bench on the boardwalk, walked on the beach near the shore. I dared her to follow me out onto the breakers, the huge slimy boulders that separated the beaches. We sat under turbulent clouds, with waves crashing, smelling the oily, fishy ocean, kissing and talking about Greek myths.
Over those months, this adventure evolved into an exciting secret life. None of our friends knew about us, and we didn’t talk to one another about what we did with our friends. We eventually stumbled onto a vaguely defined pact. We would each teach the other what we learned from other partners about “sex stuff.”
Because I had few real opportunities for other partners, I used some of the stuff in books my brother kept under his bed, like “A Stone For Danny Fisher,” which had some well worn dog-eared pages that I could use as a manual for borrowed experience.
Later, when I tried something new, Penny laughed, said, “Wait a minute, I read about that - I think it was in 'The Group.'"
I admitted using vicarious literary sources for inspiration and, to my great surprise and relief, Penny thought it was a terrific idea and admitted doing the same.
We then shared our reading material and openly discussed new discoveries. Penny and I would try these things out with each other. Remarkably, whatever I imagined and tried with her seemed completely natural and inevitable, not to say incredibly arousing.
Invariably, when a certain point was reached, we both sensed it had to stop, either because her mother might come home and find us, thereby ending any future for this pleasure, or because I was going to embarrass myself by spouting all over my pants.
At one point, Penny exuberantly referred to us as “Lovers,” no doubt influenced to hyperbole by her reading. I didn’t correct her, or scold for exaggeration or pretense, but the fact is that we were not lovers, in either the romantic or literal sense.
That is, we neither professed nor pretended love for each other; nor did we complete the circle with an act, whether it be defined in romantic terms as lovemaking, or clinically as intercourse. In the words of our parents, we didn’t go all the way. In the competitive terminology of my crowd, I never scored. Penny was not the kind of girl who put out and, horny as I was, I didn’t want to think of her as one.
I never bragged or even mentioned anything that happened between us to anyone, least of all my friends, who were accustomed to pre- and post-mortem descriptions of all sexual encounters, real or imagined. In fact, after our one and only date, we never appeared together in the company of any of our acquaintances.
Our mutually understood joint status was as trusting close friends, intellectual equals, who happened to be privately and innocently experimenting with each other’s bodies as a sort of a science homework assignment.
Truthfully, it didn’t seem like that much of a big deal at the time, at least in the beginning. I mean, it just seemed natural, not dangerous or anything like that.
Because we liked each other, and not more than like, there was nothing at stake, no chance of rejection or the heartache associated with such activities. It seemed that we had solved the adolescent problem of exploring the mysteries of the opposite sex without being burned severely in the process.
I accepted the arrangement willingly and gratefully because I never really expected more than a stolen temporary and superficial relationship with any girl like Penny Miller. From the moment she’d accepted me as an amusing school friend, I’d achieved more than I had a right to expect. When she then evinced interest in me for sexual purposes — even if it was in order to find a safe object for experimentation, which she would later put to use in the far more serious business of finding a boyfriend, lover, husband, or material for “realistic” novels — I was ecstatic.
Because we were not “in love” with each other, there was an informal comfort level to our involvement that made it delicious fun, in an almost childish, playful way. Because our playing was hidden from our friends and parents, it was almost unbearably exciting.
One warm Spring afternoon while we were cuddling on her bed - avoiding some stuffed rabbits and elephants that viewed the event with silent amusement - my hand on Penny’s breast under her blouse and bra while she rubbed my crotch and kissed my cheek, she croaked two magical words: “Let’s undress.”
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
Showing posts with label high school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label high school. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
"CHIMERA" - Artie Brewster's 'Memoir' - Chapter 1
Artie is an old high school friend of mine from Brooklyn. I haven’t spoken to him for 40 years. Somehow, he tracked me, and sent me the following in the form of an e-mail. He called it “Chimera,” which I had to look up.
Chimera N. Gr: chimaira Gr.Myth: 1. a fabulous monster; 2. An impossible or foolish fancy... Chimerical adj. 1. Imaginary; fantastic; unreal. 2. Absurd; impossible. 3. Indulging in unrealistic fancies; visionary.
I am guessing that means this “memoir” is mostly bullshit. But I’m going to publish it in my blog anyway, because bullshit memoirs seem to be acceptable -- these days. Here it is, only slightly abridged to clean up the dirty parts.
My Hebrew School rabbi insisted that the Genesis story about Creation was the emmis, The Truth. The way he told it, God, the Omnipotent King Of The Universe, created the world in six days. On the first day, He worked on the heavens, the earth, and the oceans. But The Know-It-All Genius was working in the dark, which apparently accounted for some of His screw-ups, like hurricanes, floods, and that slimy tarry stuff I always got on my feet at Coney Island. It wasn’t until the second day that He got the idea to flip the light switch.
I received this version of history with some skepticism, especially after catching the rabbi in the act of parking his car a few blocks away from the temple on Shabbas before he began to sneak up to the temple on foot. I had been ordered to walk the twenty blocks from my house after being caught by my grandmother pedaling my bike to Schul. I rode my bike every Saturday after that, hid it in an alley — until one Saturday, it was stolen.
The moral lesson revealed by that episode was not matched until my first day at Lafayette High School, which was spent on the basketball courts waiting for the teachers to end their strike. Was my duty to support the teachers’ struggle or to pursue my education?
Conflicted though I was between my father’s ardent unionism and my “socialization” as a dutiful Jewish boy, I’d tried to enter the imposing grey stone building on Benson Avenue in Bensonhurst. But some Bath Beach Italian guys, who wore leather jackets and carried argumentative switchblades, had taken a scrupled stance in support of the picketing teachers and, incidentally, extended summer vacation one extra day by blocking the entrances. That served as a practical solution to my own qualms — and taught me an important lesson. Moral choices should be delayed until events ripen.
And so it was that I had to wait until the second day for my first view of someone who almost restored my faith in some Greater Power. Penelope Miller, by the Grace of some unseen hand, was in my freshman English class.
In those days, Freshman classes were seated either alphabetically or by height; either way I was in the front and Penny Miller was near the rear. But I soon found myself twisting in my seat, and trying to steal looks at her, then quickly snapping my head away before she caught me staring. If our eyes met, I knew for sure that I would be struck dumb or turned into a pillar of salt or a slab of marble. The gulf between us was far greater than the five rows of chairs that separated us in Freshman English. There were volcanic peaks, shark infested oceans, and rivers of molten lava to cross.
It was immediately evident to me that there was something terribly amiss with this female type Thing. She was out of place in my world; she seemed to have descended from some etherial region of my imagination: a creature from mystic legend, science fiction, or a Hollywood inspired wet dream. Even at fourteen years old, I could tell at a glance that — if Penny Miller was human — all of my previous hormonal fantasies about girls had been childishly understated.
I couldn’t have described her then in words, and probably can’t now, so many years later. Using my slim fund of metaphoric knowledge as it existed the first high school year, I can say that the difference between Penelope Miller and all of the other females I had previously encountered was algabraic: If other females = X, then Penny Miller = X∞.
I should here explain that, sociologically, our school’s population in that era was roughly half American Secular Jewish, half Brooklyn Second Generation Italian. This produced an oddly compatible association of similar, yet unique sub-cultures co-existing in a bubbling stew of adolescent curiosity and fear.
I must admit that my instinctive preference was for the Italian, rather than the Jewish, girls. I believe now that this bias was due to my mother, who was Romanian, often mistaken by strangers for Italian. I shared her Olive complexion and jet black hair. My mother loved to flirt and tell naughty jokes. She danced and bounced her bosoms with frisky delight at family affairs. She loved to eat spicy food, and fancied herself a Gypsy. In the words of some forgotten comic, “Oedipus, Schmedipus, I loved my mommy.”
The more attractive of the Jewish girls I had seen tended to be on the standoffish side. They practiced a form of seduction which was so heavily encoded with barely audible innuendo that I was at a loss to figure them out. The Italian girls were less mysterious; they tended to be more blatantly erotic, at least in my fantasies, because they were more exotic, tantalizingly accessible, sneering with implied lust, and daring you to cop a feel.
The Jewish girls wore sweater sets and pleated skirts, white socks and “tennies.” They wore their hair in pony tails or bouncy natural curls. They were mostly named “Sharon” or “Eunice” or “Bernice.” The Italian girls wore sheer stockings and black pumps with straps that showed their heels, and tight skirts that showcased their asses, tight sweater sets that previewed their breasts — or at least their bras — in excruciating detail. Their hair was sprayed to a concrete immovable set, smelled strongly of alcohol and floral perfume. They were named “Maria,” “Gina” or “Marianne.”
In the first few months of high school, my hormones made few cultural distinctions. Stalking the halls, I might have been swimming in the warm Coney Island waters crowded with assorted females in bathing suits and hiding my boner.
Maria Mangeone’s stockinged heel as it lifted free of her shoe while sitting at her desk caused me strangling pain. A bra strap showing from Eunice Kagan’s sleeveless blouse was enough to give me cramps. The pink pilling that identified the forward curve of palm sized breasts hiding inside Bernice Moskowitz’ mohair sweater set me off. Gina Cappazola, sitting in the cafeteria across from Marianne D’Amato, freshened her lipstick while peering at her compact and my concentration was gone for the afternoon.
They were all attractive, at least in some particular. Certainly, it didn’t take much to attract me at that age. Some girls had one alluring feature or combination of features that I surveyed like a shopper while walking the halls or sitting in class: thrusting breasts, round firm tush, flowing hair, inviting full lips, teasing eyes.
But in my memory’s admittedly hyperbolic eye, Penelope Miller’s looks were of another species, a miraculous mutation, a monumental leap in evolution, a composite of all the best features I could have imagined in a girl — a superwoman. Her appearance was something I had never seen in real life and was totally unprepared for; I was unnerved by her flawlessness.
For one thing, she was neither definably Jewish nor Italian in appearance; I couldn’t fit her in with any of the other girls in the class. The phrase: “She looks like ____” (fill in the blank with any pitifully inadequate superlative, beginning with “a goddess”) could not be spoken without conscious understatement.
It wasn’t just that she had no particular “ethnic” features I associated with the other girls, some of which, in and of themselves were appealing. Neither was she my vision of some non-ethnic white bread paragon of the kind I had little contact with at that age, but had seen in movies and in magazines. She was neither comparable to Marilyn Monroe nor Audrey Hepburn, or any fantasy object in between. She was neither “Annette,” nor “Darlene” of the sexiest show on television, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” She was far above those shadows.
Penny Miller’s facial features were subtle and delicate, a perfect balance of sensuality, intelligence, and elegance. She was breathtakingly stunning, the kind you watch from a distance and avert your eyes as she nears, like oncoming high headlight beams. In repose, she exuded a sort of eerie calm, an unguarded innocent sense of assurance.
I have since seen many and known some of Penelope Miller’s genera of beautiful woman: who stand in elevators, ignoring awestruck stares with distant, icy mien; who with fresh wholesome American airs exercise in mylar, oblivious to the gasps they evoke; who enter rooms amidst stunned murmurs and whimpers. Penny Miller, as I remember her at fourteen, was something apart from even these exceptional beings I have seen during my long life of awareness of such creatures.
Beneath the dazzling symmetry of Penny Miller’s face, there was something even more unfathomable than mere striking beauty, a shell of mystery that separated her from others, even those girls I had written off as beyond my scope.
I had long realized that, to girls, I was destined to be categorized as “nonthreatening,” a boy who girls trusted, because I was clearly without any dangerous or sexy aura. Even in the unforgiving Darwinian blackboard jungle, this was considered a pitiable label.
Because I could be trusted not to overstep prescribed boundaries, there was a small sub-class of sympathetic girls (the sort who would later become social workers with the disabled) who ventured to invite me to their finished basements after school to dance, and then to make out on narrow sticky naughahyde benches beneath wood paneled walls. But humping was as far as I’d ever gotten in eighth grade; now I was a high schooler and expected to graduate to more complex and challenging activities. I had resolved to change the way girls thought of me, take more risks, no matter the likelihood of rejection. This was my primary goal in freshman year, that and making the baseball team.
Unfortunately, I’d discovered early that I was the kind of kid whose reach exceeded his grasp in both endeavors. My desires outdistanced my abilities by planetary measures. I knew this was a curse which had to be accepted as much as the bump on my nose, being left handed, and all the other immutable infirmities of my looks and abilities. In school, I was learning to adapt to my intellectual limitations, to promote strengths and manage weaknesses. Any subject that required comfort with numbers would always be a boring puzzle; if words were allowed, I could manage to get along. Accepting these realities would narrow choices for me, eliminating entire careers but opening others that might provide some “succor” (I used to like that word - it sounded dirty but isn’t), even while dashing childish dreams of becoming the next Oppenheimer or Chuck Yeager.
In the same way, I was learning that I would always struggle to be satisfied with the type of girls who went for me; to resist the trap of yearning for the girls whose pursuit offered only inevitable misery. I was beginning to suspect that this necessity to compromise, to settle, to accept mediocrity, was a constant that would trickle into all facets of my life; in fact, it would become the theme of my life. With a heavy heart, I gathered the sense to narrow my range, to accept the challenge of wanting those who wanted me.
Considering these truths, it was immediately evident that Penny Miller was so far beyond my grasp that it was nonsensical to even dream that she might have anything to do with me, in a sexual way that is, which was the only way that counted to me at that age. It took me until December 1st to build the courage to even speak directly to her.
By that time, she knew my name because I was a talker in English class, my arm always upraised to answer a question about the subject matter. In those days, I knew how to write a sentence within the rules, and could even spell, before spell checkers when spelling counted. I was such a nerd that I didn’t know yet that it was uncool to participate in class discussions much less to volunteer an insight, showing that I was bright and that I’d actually read and understood the material.
I was slow to realize that there was extreme social risk in seeming to curry favor with the teacher, who was required by the prevailing social code to sweat through his curriculum without student assistance. Luckily, I was also a smart ass, and occasionally made clever funny asides that made the class laugh and the teacher scold me. As far back as fifth grade, I’d stumbled upon the discovery that class clowning could be a route to a certain limited popularity for me.
A few of my wise cracks evoked tepid smiles from Penny Miller, as revealed by my frequent stolen looks for her reaction. But these blips were not enough to encourage me to take the plunge into the bottomless chasm that separated us.
Penny’s general indifference to my charm was a minor setback, completely lacking in surprise, even somewhat comforting. Once you know you can never have the most expensive toy, settling for second best becomes acceptable, necessary for mental health. I was used to hand-me-downs from my brother. My closet was full of damaged model airplanes, one-legged tin soldiers, flashlights with chipped lenses. Even my Schwinn had lost a fender. I could make do.
There were a few girls who showed interest in me in that first year. In my Algebra class, plump Gina Maione giggled at my jokes and allowed me — over a painfully long period of time — to persuade her to permit me to put my hand on her breast and then, after the glacial passage of eons, to move my fingers under her sweater and, eventually — with the coming of a new Ice Age — to slip a tip of a finger under her bra while we humped. All the while, I listened intently for the arrival of her parents, who would surely discover us, kill me and toss my hacked up body into the swamp near the school — or worse, would force me to marry Gina and to spend the rest of my life hauling garbage for La Famiglia.
For the most part, I smothered my hormones in sports. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between sports and sexual urges, but it was clearly more than a coincidence that freshman sports was very big for almost all the boys. To a kid in Brooklyn in the 50's, baseball was like the military to a Prussian lad, the first love and the dream for a life’s work.
Artie sent me a lot more of this garbage, which I'll post later, if anybody cares.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
Chimera N. Gr: chimaira Gr.Myth: 1. a fabulous monster; 2. An impossible or foolish fancy... Chimerical adj. 1. Imaginary; fantastic; unreal. 2. Absurd; impossible. 3. Indulging in unrealistic fancies; visionary.
I am guessing that means this “memoir” is mostly bullshit. But I’m going to publish it in my blog anyway, because bullshit memoirs seem to be acceptable -- these days. Here it is, only slightly abridged to clean up the dirty parts.
My Hebrew School rabbi insisted that the Genesis story about Creation was the emmis, The Truth. The way he told it, God, the Omnipotent King Of The Universe, created the world in six days. On the first day, He worked on the heavens, the earth, and the oceans. But The Know-It-All Genius was working in the dark, which apparently accounted for some of His screw-ups, like hurricanes, floods, and that slimy tarry stuff I always got on my feet at Coney Island. It wasn’t until the second day that He got the idea to flip the light switch.
I received this version of history with some skepticism, especially after catching the rabbi in the act of parking his car a few blocks away from the temple on Shabbas before he began to sneak up to the temple on foot. I had been ordered to walk the twenty blocks from my house after being caught by my grandmother pedaling my bike to Schul. I rode my bike every Saturday after that, hid it in an alley — until one Saturday, it was stolen.
The moral lesson revealed by that episode was not matched until my first day at Lafayette High School, which was spent on the basketball courts waiting for the teachers to end their strike. Was my duty to support the teachers’ struggle or to pursue my education?
Conflicted though I was between my father’s ardent unionism and my “socialization” as a dutiful Jewish boy, I’d tried to enter the imposing grey stone building on Benson Avenue in Bensonhurst. But some Bath Beach Italian guys, who wore leather jackets and carried argumentative switchblades, had taken a scrupled stance in support of the picketing teachers and, incidentally, extended summer vacation one extra day by blocking the entrances. That served as a practical solution to my own qualms — and taught me an important lesson. Moral choices should be delayed until events ripen.
And so it was that I had to wait until the second day for my first view of someone who almost restored my faith in some Greater Power. Penelope Miller, by the Grace of some unseen hand, was in my freshman English class.
In those days, Freshman classes were seated either alphabetically or by height; either way I was in the front and Penny Miller was near the rear. But I soon found myself twisting in my seat, and trying to steal looks at her, then quickly snapping my head away before she caught me staring. If our eyes met, I knew for sure that I would be struck dumb or turned into a pillar of salt or a slab of marble. The gulf between us was far greater than the five rows of chairs that separated us in Freshman English. There were volcanic peaks, shark infested oceans, and rivers of molten lava to cross.
It was immediately evident to me that there was something terribly amiss with this female type Thing. She was out of place in my world; she seemed to have descended from some etherial region of my imagination: a creature from mystic legend, science fiction, or a Hollywood inspired wet dream. Even at fourteen years old, I could tell at a glance that — if Penny Miller was human — all of my previous hormonal fantasies about girls had been childishly understated.
I couldn’t have described her then in words, and probably can’t now, so many years later. Using my slim fund of metaphoric knowledge as it existed the first high school year, I can say that the difference between Penelope Miller and all of the other females I had previously encountered was algabraic: If other females = X, then Penny Miller = X∞.
I should here explain that, sociologically, our school’s population in that era was roughly half American Secular Jewish, half Brooklyn Second Generation Italian. This produced an oddly compatible association of similar, yet unique sub-cultures co-existing in a bubbling stew of adolescent curiosity and fear.
I must admit that my instinctive preference was for the Italian, rather than the Jewish, girls. I believe now that this bias was due to my mother, who was Romanian, often mistaken by strangers for Italian. I shared her Olive complexion and jet black hair. My mother loved to flirt and tell naughty jokes. She danced and bounced her bosoms with frisky delight at family affairs. She loved to eat spicy food, and fancied herself a Gypsy. In the words of some forgotten comic, “Oedipus, Schmedipus, I loved my mommy.”
The more attractive of the Jewish girls I had seen tended to be on the standoffish side. They practiced a form of seduction which was so heavily encoded with barely audible innuendo that I was at a loss to figure them out. The Italian girls were less mysterious; they tended to be more blatantly erotic, at least in my fantasies, because they were more exotic, tantalizingly accessible, sneering with implied lust, and daring you to cop a feel.
The Jewish girls wore sweater sets and pleated skirts, white socks and “tennies.” They wore their hair in pony tails or bouncy natural curls. They were mostly named “Sharon” or “Eunice” or “Bernice.” The Italian girls wore sheer stockings and black pumps with straps that showed their heels, and tight skirts that showcased their asses, tight sweater sets that previewed their breasts — or at least their bras — in excruciating detail. Their hair was sprayed to a concrete immovable set, smelled strongly of alcohol and floral perfume. They were named “Maria,” “Gina” or “Marianne.”
In the first few months of high school, my hormones made few cultural distinctions. Stalking the halls, I might have been swimming in the warm Coney Island waters crowded with assorted females in bathing suits and hiding my boner.
Maria Mangeone’s stockinged heel as it lifted free of her shoe while sitting at her desk caused me strangling pain. A bra strap showing from Eunice Kagan’s sleeveless blouse was enough to give me cramps. The pink pilling that identified the forward curve of palm sized breasts hiding inside Bernice Moskowitz’ mohair sweater set me off. Gina Cappazola, sitting in the cafeteria across from Marianne D’Amato, freshened her lipstick while peering at her compact and my concentration was gone for the afternoon.
They were all attractive, at least in some particular. Certainly, it didn’t take much to attract me at that age. Some girls had one alluring feature or combination of features that I surveyed like a shopper while walking the halls or sitting in class: thrusting breasts, round firm tush, flowing hair, inviting full lips, teasing eyes.
But in my memory’s admittedly hyperbolic eye, Penelope Miller’s looks were of another species, a miraculous mutation, a monumental leap in evolution, a composite of all the best features I could have imagined in a girl — a superwoman. Her appearance was something I had never seen in real life and was totally unprepared for; I was unnerved by her flawlessness.
For one thing, she was neither definably Jewish nor Italian in appearance; I couldn’t fit her in with any of the other girls in the class. The phrase: “She looks like ____” (fill in the blank with any pitifully inadequate superlative, beginning with “a goddess”) could not be spoken without conscious understatement.
It wasn’t just that she had no particular “ethnic” features I associated with the other girls, some of which, in and of themselves were appealing. Neither was she my vision of some non-ethnic white bread paragon of the kind I had little contact with at that age, but had seen in movies and in magazines. She was neither comparable to Marilyn Monroe nor Audrey Hepburn, or any fantasy object in between. She was neither “Annette,” nor “Darlene” of the sexiest show on television, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” She was far above those shadows.
Penny Miller’s facial features were subtle and delicate, a perfect balance of sensuality, intelligence, and elegance. She was breathtakingly stunning, the kind you watch from a distance and avert your eyes as she nears, like oncoming high headlight beams. In repose, she exuded a sort of eerie calm, an unguarded innocent sense of assurance.
I have since seen many and known some of Penelope Miller’s genera of beautiful woman: who stand in elevators, ignoring awestruck stares with distant, icy mien; who with fresh wholesome American airs exercise in mylar, oblivious to the gasps they evoke; who enter rooms amidst stunned murmurs and whimpers. Penny Miller, as I remember her at fourteen, was something apart from even these exceptional beings I have seen during my long life of awareness of such creatures.
Beneath the dazzling symmetry of Penny Miller’s face, there was something even more unfathomable than mere striking beauty, a shell of mystery that separated her from others, even those girls I had written off as beyond my scope.
I had long realized that, to girls, I was destined to be categorized as “nonthreatening,” a boy who girls trusted, because I was clearly without any dangerous or sexy aura. Even in the unforgiving Darwinian blackboard jungle, this was considered a pitiable label.
Because I could be trusted not to overstep prescribed boundaries, there was a small sub-class of sympathetic girls (the sort who would later become social workers with the disabled) who ventured to invite me to their finished basements after school to dance, and then to make out on narrow sticky naughahyde benches beneath wood paneled walls. But humping was as far as I’d ever gotten in eighth grade; now I was a high schooler and expected to graduate to more complex and challenging activities. I had resolved to change the way girls thought of me, take more risks, no matter the likelihood of rejection. This was my primary goal in freshman year, that and making the baseball team.
Unfortunately, I’d discovered early that I was the kind of kid whose reach exceeded his grasp in both endeavors. My desires outdistanced my abilities by planetary measures. I knew this was a curse which had to be accepted as much as the bump on my nose, being left handed, and all the other immutable infirmities of my looks and abilities. In school, I was learning to adapt to my intellectual limitations, to promote strengths and manage weaknesses. Any subject that required comfort with numbers would always be a boring puzzle; if words were allowed, I could manage to get along. Accepting these realities would narrow choices for me, eliminating entire careers but opening others that might provide some “succor” (I used to like that word - it sounded dirty but isn’t), even while dashing childish dreams of becoming the next Oppenheimer or Chuck Yeager.
In the same way, I was learning that I would always struggle to be satisfied with the type of girls who went for me; to resist the trap of yearning for the girls whose pursuit offered only inevitable misery. I was beginning to suspect that this necessity to compromise, to settle, to accept mediocrity, was a constant that would trickle into all facets of my life; in fact, it would become the theme of my life. With a heavy heart, I gathered the sense to narrow my range, to accept the challenge of wanting those who wanted me.
Considering these truths, it was immediately evident that Penny Miller was so far beyond my grasp that it was nonsensical to even dream that she might have anything to do with me, in a sexual way that is, which was the only way that counted to me at that age. It took me until December 1st to build the courage to even speak directly to her.
By that time, she knew my name because I was a talker in English class, my arm always upraised to answer a question about the subject matter. In those days, I knew how to write a sentence within the rules, and could even spell, before spell checkers when spelling counted. I was such a nerd that I didn’t know yet that it was uncool to participate in class discussions much less to volunteer an insight, showing that I was bright and that I’d actually read and understood the material.
I was slow to realize that there was extreme social risk in seeming to curry favor with the teacher, who was required by the prevailing social code to sweat through his curriculum without student assistance. Luckily, I was also a smart ass, and occasionally made clever funny asides that made the class laugh and the teacher scold me. As far back as fifth grade, I’d stumbled upon the discovery that class clowning could be a route to a certain limited popularity for me.
A few of my wise cracks evoked tepid smiles from Penny Miller, as revealed by my frequent stolen looks for her reaction. But these blips were not enough to encourage me to take the plunge into the bottomless chasm that separated us.
Penny’s general indifference to my charm was a minor setback, completely lacking in surprise, even somewhat comforting. Once you know you can never have the most expensive toy, settling for second best becomes acceptable, necessary for mental health. I was used to hand-me-downs from my brother. My closet was full of damaged model airplanes, one-legged tin soldiers, flashlights with chipped lenses. Even my Schwinn had lost a fender. I could make do.
There were a few girls who showed interest in me in that first year. In my Algebra class, plump Gina Maione giggled at my jokes and allowed me — over a painfully long period of time — to persuade her to permit me to put my hand on her breast and then, after the glacial passage of eons, to move my fingers under her sweater and, eventually — with the coming of a new Ice Age — to slip a tip of a finger under her bra while we humped. All the while, I listened intently for the arrival of her parents, who would surely discover us, kill me and toss my hacked up body into the swamp near the school — or worse, would force me to marry Gina and to spend the rest of my life hauling garbage for La Famiglia.
For the most part, I smothered my hormones in sports. At the time, I didn’t make the connection between sports and sexual urges, but it was clearly more than a coincidence that freshman sports was very big for almost all the boys. To a kid in Brooklyn in the 50's, baseball was like the military to a Prussian lad, the first love and the dream for a life’s work.
Artie sent me a lot more of this garbage, which I'll post later, if anybody cares.
Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein
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