I don’t know how I let things get so bad. I’m actually drinking cheap merlot for dinner. Out of a coffee mug. Yes, I have food. Frozen dinners and soup-in-a-can. But it’s not condensed soup. It’s Progresso. So I could be worse off.

Don’t judge me!

Below is the second part to my salacious tale of teen lust. Read if you dare. Unless you’re Mom. Then you can check this out! Actually, it’s more funny than it is salacious, and I have to admit it’s on the sad side as well. And long. Fuck it. Read it or don’t; it's just good exercise for me. Maybe you'll think of some long-lost memory? You should write to me about that, I'd like to hear yours, too.

Although Steve had given me his phone number, I didn’t call (his hard-on freaked me out that night. He kept rubbing it on me and I felt like I was being humped by a dog). But the next few times we went to Knott’s, Stacy and Johnny would go on rides together—this made them sort of an unofficial Park Couple. I mean, if Johnny wasn’t there, Stacy was allowed to ride with another boy. And vice versa. Well, Stacy got her pass taken away on account of some lying she did. And that meant Johnny was on the prowl again.

One overcast Sunday, my mom took me out to the park. When I got inside, no one was there (this was before the time when every teenager had a cel phone, I’m sure being a delinquent is much easier now than it was in my day). No locals, the place was a ghost town (no pun intended).

So I went back outside the park to sit in the entrance plaza, that way I could spot anyone coming in. I would not get picked up until the evening, so I was feeling pretty desperate for company. Then I heard Johnny’s voice behind me.

“No one inside?”

“Nope.”

“Wanna go to the mall?”

“Sure.”

It started to sprinkle as we walked to the Buena Park mall (where I got caught shoplifting at and was banned from Longs’ Drugs, but that’s another story), just a few blocks away from the park. We were quiet for the most part. He didn’t ask about Stacy, and I didn’t ask about Steve.

Once we got there, we visited the Comic Book shop. Johhny loved the X-men, he said. He showed me some issues that he was particularly fond of, and told me his favorite character was Wolverine. This was the most personal piece of information I’d ever heard him utter. It explained his sideburns and quasi-pompadour.

After tooling around for about twenty minutes, he suggested we go see what was playing in the theater. There was a matinee of Toys. I bought us the tickets and we took some photos in the booth outside the box office to kill the time left until the show. In the booth, I sat on his lap.

The theater was empty, for the most part. About halfway through the movie, Johnny put his elbow next to mine on the armrest. That electrically nauseating touch was my first taste of real desire.

I still have the ticket stub to prove it.

After the movie, we walked outside the mall and headed back to the street. By then, it was really raining. Johnny hopped over a low wall and onto the sidewalk. He motioned for me to follow. I timidly climbed onto the stucco, and placed my right foot into the planter on the other side that Johnny’s long legs had completely overstepped. As I brought my left leg over, my foot slipped in the slick ground. And I fell. Onto my ass. Into the mud. I held back tears as Johnny laughed hysterically, unable to breathe.

“Ha, yes, very funny!” I pouted. “Now I get to be wet and muddy for the rest of the day.” My mortification was complete, as he offered a hand to pull me up.

“Oh,” he stifled a giggle, “I live right around the corner. We can wash your clothes, it’s not a big deal.” He put a finger on my chin, “It’s ok.” His green eyes were totally hypnotic. That’s what I wrote in every poem about him for the next year.

The house where Johnny lived with his grandmother was right across the street from the mall, a typical late 60’s suburban home. Inside, the walls were wood-paneled. There was a thick mustard yellow carpet, and it smelled like dogs. His grandma was home, but did not seem to notice as we walked past her and he said, “I’m here with my friend Helena.”

Once in his room, he told me to get undressed. He handed me a pair of his boxer shorts and a Social Distortion T-shirt. He left and I changed, taking in all the details of his personal space. Being in someone’s room, I always felt, was like being inside of them. He had posters of the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Sandman on the walls. His dresser was covered in figures of elves, fairies, and dragons. There were lots of the symbols most people associate with magic or devil-worship. The ankh, pentagrams. There was a Ouija board sitting on a mirrored tray.

When he came back in, he took my muddy clothes. I followed him to the washer and his twin sisters, about four years old, were in the laundry room playing on the floor. They approached me and laughed, they said, “Those are Johnny’s clothes!” I talked with them a little while as he started the machine. Their dark skin and tight, curly hair clearly indicated that they were mixed. I wanted to ask Johnny why that was, especially since his grandmother referred to any person of color as a ‘nigger’. But I sensed this was not the time. He pulled me away and back into the close quiet of his room.

“Sit down, I want you to hear this.”

He put on the Velvet Underground.

“Listen,” he said, “the way it gets more and more intense. It’s supposed to be like taking heroin.” He closed his eyes as the music became increasingly powerful, and nodded his head with the beat. I was watching him and felt that I was looking at a different person. Where was the mysterious, dark stranger? Johnny was a boy, like any other boy. But trying so very hard to be something more.

“Do you use that?” I asked, pointing to the Ouija board.

His eyes opened, dark, “Oh yes, but it’s no toy.” Normally, such seriousness would have made me laugh. But for some reason, when he said these things, no matter how ridiculous they were, he had this air of authority that made laughing impossible.

I had been taught for years at my private Christian school that a Ouija board was a tool of the devil, and we were to avoid it at all costs. I wanted to know the devil more and more those days, so I persisted, “Well, can you use it now?”

He said that he could, but things would have to be made ready. He placed the board and the mirrored tray on the floor. He poured a circle of salt around the board. To keep all the spirits in the circle, he said. I still didn’t laugh. He lit three candles around the mirror and turned off the light. Then he closed his eyes, and touched his fingers to the dial.

He told me to ask a question. I asked if anyone had ever died in this house. My heart raced as the dial jerked across the board. Johnny’s eyes flew open, and he said, “Get out of this room!”

“What?”

“Get out!” He frantically began pouring salt all around the board, and used his fingers to pinch out the candle flames. “Now!” he said, grabbing my arm as he stood up and ran out of the bedroom, into the hallway bath.

He closed the door behind us and sat on the toilet. He appeared shaken. Looking at his fingers, I could see that he had burned them.

“Here,” I whispered, taking a washcloth and putting cold water on it, “let me see that.”

“Johnny?” his grandmother’s voice came from the other side of the door, “Is everything ok?”

“YES grandma, it’s FINE.” Silence.

I wiped his fingers and found ointment to put on them. As I rubbed it in, he looked at me. “Bad things were about to happen.”

“I believe you.”

And then he pushed my hands away and pulled me down to my knees, where he kissed me. The linoleum was cold and hard. Standing up, he undid his black jeans and took them off.

I didn’t have any smart aleck remarks, I didn’t have anything to say. He was pale, perfect, beautiful. He guided me down onto the little blue bath rug, and put his hand inside the fly of the boxers I wore.

There was scratching at the door.

“Jooooooooohnny,” one of the twins said, “what are you DOING in there?” They both giggled. A tiny brown finger wiggled in under the door and caught a lock of my hair.

“Go away!” He pulled the boxers to my ankles and pushed himself inside of me. I don’t remember much, except the strange sensation of flesh within flesh, something unreal. He immediately pulled back out and kneeled over the toilet. I heard a faint splash.

There was a hard rapping from outside. “Johnny, you come out of there!”

It seemed the twins served an effective, albeit delayed, alarm system. Unfortunately for his grandmother, premature ejaculation was not an element she had accounted for.

“Put your shorts on,” he whispered harshly, cleaning himself off and flushing the toilet.

Dazed, I stood.

He opened the door and there was the fuming matriarch of his home. “You come OUT of there. You and that hussy.”

Hussy?! Why, that wrinkly old racist bitch. Lucky for Johnny, my mouth had not fully developed. I was ushered into the bedroom where I waited for him to retrieve my still-damp clothes. I put on a pair of his pants and we headed back to the park.

***

I was his Park Girl for a few weekends. Then a new girl came into the clique, and garnered everyone’s attention. He forgot about me. One day, I made a scene, and told him, “You can’t treat people this way!”

He took me aside and said, “Don’t you EVER talk to me like that here again.”

That was his world. He ruled the park. The Johnny groupies snickered as he returned to them once he had dismissed me.

After that summer, I stopped going to the park. I tried Disneyland for a while, but it wasn’t the same. Stacy wasn’t allowed to see me anymore, because her parents had read her diary and found out that I arranged for her to buy some pot through a guy we knew from the park. I tried to tell her once, what had happened with Johnny. But she hung up on me. Her older sister called me back and said, “Bitch, you better not be serious, because if you are I’m coming to Downey to kick your ASS.”

I told her I was only joking.

I ran into Johnny a few times over the years. The last I heard, he’d changed his name to Johnny Rockstar, and had R2D2 tattooed on his arm. I went to a coffee shop in Long Beach once and saw, written on the bathroom wall, “I Love Johnny Rockstar.”

I added, “Me too,” underneath.

fin.