-- Siobhan Adcock

I am a jealous, covetous, unpleasant, grabby person. I want actual things other people have, like sturdy shoes and good furniture, but mostly, I want other people's experiences, their metaphysical stuff, because it's all so much cooler than mine. I want to be from Maine, where at an early age I might have overcome my irrational fear of lobsters. I want to have gone to Mexico, Peru, Taiwan. I want big breasts. No, I want small breasts. No, I actually want a penis, so I can stand in front of a mirror all day swiveling my hips back and forth and slapping my own thighs lightly with a sound like a pork chop hitting a Girl Scout. The point is I frequently pretend that I am people I am not. I'm lazy and anecdote-bankrupt and must steal other people's interesting doings for myself.

One thing I want to have done is something my boyfriend did. He doesn't like me co-opting his experiences, although I frequently try to. I'm not allowed to write about his life, because it's his life, and he tries to protect its juicy bits from my grabby, covetous, story-vulture self. I wish him luck. I really do. He is not safe from me. He's had an interesting life so far. And he lost his virginity in a car. God, would I love to have done that.

I'm perversely aroused by trembling, turgid teenagerhood. In particular, Late Night Backseat Cherry Popping, with all its attendant mythology and iconography, makes me feel like a frisky Cougarette out late on a school night. Everybody tells their virginity story the same way: shyness toggling with boldness and bravura. She was older. It was his parents' car. They drove to the beach and left the radio on; the dash lights glowed green on his furtive gropes and her triumphant strokes. Dashboard lights through fogged-up windows on a dark night make a car look like an alien fruit.

Think of the three of them: boy, girl, and car, rocking back and forth in the beach parking lot, the salty summer air outside, the radio playing something they're not listening to, but, because this is the early nineties, it's probably something rumbly and moody. Or else it's Dylan on the tape deck. Boys and Dylan. I just don't get it. Dylan is not sex music but every man who can pick out three chords on a guitar will try to convince you otherwise.

Anyway. Virginity and the car. The car as symbol of lost innocence and also the innocent running-over of innocent forest animals. How do you have sex in a car? With a girl? For the first time? How is that done? You have the lap-sitting, bouncing mode, but her head will be perilously close to hitting the ceiling with every upstroke. You could lie down, but that means pretending you're both about two feet shorter, and somebody's foot (hers, again; the discomfort is usually on the accommodator's part, is it not?) will be up in the back window. People driving past will know what you're up to when their headlights sweep across the illuminated hulk of your parents' alien fruit-looking car with the pale skinny foot of your conquest strangely propped in the window. Perhaps it too is rocking back and forth, perhaps it too looks like an alien fruit. Do you push the front seat all the way back and make yourselves two drops in the bucket? Do you position her facing the back window (on the lookout, one assumes, at that age) and busy yourself behind her, half-kneeling on the back seat, half pushing against the hard scratchy car carpet? What about your father's beaded seat cover? What could that be used for? Is that so sick? Is that so wrong?

I've never done it in a car. I didn't lose my virginity in a car. But my brain just lopes ecstatically around these and other logistical problems like a giraffe around a eucalyptus tree; I cannot, can not get bored teasing these problems out. To feel the supersoft velour of car seat against bare bottom. To bite down on the bitter salty reinforced silk of a seatbelt in a moment of passion. Pale skin glowing green from the dash. Glittering eyes and mouths in a dark, hushed, cramped, weirdly-textured cocoon of lust. Oh, to be a boy touching his first breast in a backseat. To be a girl with a stretched-out turtleneck sweater and a pair of panties dangling coquettishly from the gearshift. To discover your wet parts, your hard parts, your fuzzy and incomplete and unhappy and swollen parts in a car! It makes me long for jangling keys and Cindy Williams, it makes me wish I owned chinos or sat straight-faced through "Rebel Without a Cause." I want to be a Pink Lady when I think about it, shimmying into (and out of) Stockard Channing's pencil skirt, out too late on a warm night with a car battery going dead while my secrets go live.

That's the comic, tragic denouement of the boyfriend's virginity story, actually: they were out there so long in the green-lit dark, air conditioner battling the humid salty sea air, groping and panting and discovering and sleeking, that the car wouldn't start when it was time to drive the lady home. He had to walk out to the highway and, I believe, call his parents. Let he or she among us who has not suffered an equivalent level of mortification cast the first stone. Or rather, let them be similarly tortured so they know what it feels like. I don't laugh when I think about him anxiously galloping to the edge of the blacktop with a clammy quarter in his hand, because I'm thinking about her, sitting still and quiet in the useless shell of the car, realizing that hard objects with soft interiors are, maybe, always perilously easy to run down.

Back to CARS & GIRLS, baby!