As I drove into work today I was listening to Renel in the morning on Kiss FM and she put on Betty Wright’s “Tonight is the night (You Make Me a Woman)”. Betty wanted us all to take a little trip back with her and think about our very first time. Mine? I was fifteen in the backseat of a Subaru parked atop a bluff overlooking the ocean, but the windows were very steamy so there really wasn’t anything to see. No ocean waves, only waves of passion as our half naked bodies caressed the luxurious naugahyde upholstery. His name was Jim. He lived in a small town to the north known for a tulip festival. Earlier that night I was descending the stairs at The Monastery, both an underage gay nightclub and a Universal Life Church – open Friday and Saturday nights from 11pm until 6 in the morning. The Reverend George Freeman would stop the disco in the wee small hours for a mini sermon on letting ourselves be free, or something otherwise essentially hedonistic. “Dance children, get high, experience God!”
The Seattle P.I. writes: If you hung around Seattle’s teen music scene back in the mid-1980s, you remember a notorious all-hours club on Boren Avenue called The Monastery. It looked like a church and was anything but. The club was closed as a public nuisance after Seattle police officers testified it was a pest hole of prostitution often involving minors. The Monastery and a few other fly-by-night clubs were places where adults preyed on vulnerable kids hungry for attention and receptive to offers of drugs and quick cash.”
My first night there I made my way down the tax-free stairs where this very handsome fellow teen cornered me. He said I had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen and asked me to dance. Paradise was playing and as we danced he kept looking at me with the dreamiest expression on his face. Later on he literally got down on one knee and kissed the back of my hand out on the dance floor. Needless to say I knew he was the one. Jim would be the man to make me a woman, or adult male or something.
After our encounter which left the biggest perma-grin on my face I’d probably ever had, we parted ways, only I didn’t know to reach him. I had to be home before my parents woke up. All I knew was he was a senior in high school and the city he supposedly lived in. I took a gamble a few days later on the probable name of his high school and utilized my involvement in student activities to track him down. I had to see him again. I phoned the school and asked if there was a senior named Jim, last name unknown, and gave a physical description. I lied, explaining that he’d left his backpack in my car after a game. I waited on hold for a few minutes while they called him out of class and he picked up the phone. He was amazed at my stalking detective skills and we exchanged phone numbers and set a date for later that week. I couldn’t wait!
When the weekend arrived, however, it seemed whatever spark there had been had mysteriously vanished on his part. The following weekend I went back to The Monastery and as I entered the dance floor I saw him on the dance floor, down on one knee, kissing the back of some other boy’s hand – and I realized I had been a total sucker. But Jim, wherever you are ya hosebag, thank you.