Some people say that our earliest sexual experiences shape our lives. They tell us those experiences mold our sexual personas and preferences, the styles and roles we choose, the partners we seek out, and the specific sexual acts that turn us on. This is a fascinating idea. If it is true that we are formed by our earliest sexual experiences, then perhaps, if we look closely at our own lives, we may find a pattern, a thread we can follow that begins early and weaves through time.
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It was the late 1960’s, and I was driving my uncle’s 1964 Oldsmobile Cutlass into town from the ranch where he and my grandpa ran cattle and grew wheat thirty miles to the south. The Cutlass was my uncle’s town car, and for the trips he took to Rapid City in the fall to sell calves and drink when harvesting was finished. The car was big, smooth even on gravel, and easy to drive.
This was wide open, high plains prairie with gently rolling low hills, a few small, lazy rivers, and hardly a tree in sight, farmed where it wasn’t too rocky, grazed mostly by cattle and a few sheep everywhere else. It was fiercely hot in the summer, bone-chilling cold in the winter, and the wind seemed to blow all the time. In those achingly cold, windswept winters, my grandpa would say that “the only thing between here and the North Pole are fenceposts.” But by the time I came along, people out there had learned to survive and even thrive, to live lives as rich - and dramatic, and complicated - as people anywhere else.
Growing up, every summer I lived for several months on the ranch, daydreaming, riding horses, and playing in the river, gradually taking on chores like milking cows, bucking bales, and driving a grain truck when we harvested wheat and oats. I was there this particular summer, which was to be my last at the ranch, to help with the farming, but also to work as a waiter in a café my uncle had, he claimed, won in a card game. This seemed likely: he had always been a rancher and a gambler, and gambling seemed the most likely reason he would end up owning a cafe.
This day, I was driving into town in the late afternoon to work the dinner shift at the café. It was in a very plain, white, two-story clapboard building, flanked by other businesses - grocery, clothing store, drugstore - in the two block main street. It had probably been built sometime soon after the railroad reached the town in 1915. Inside, it had the linoleum and formica of a diner from at least the 1940’s. But it had a nice feel, with comfortable tables and booths, and a high ceiling with lazy overhead fans - a blessing with no air conditioning. It served decent food at a fair price, and we had a green Hamilton Beach milkshake mixer that seldom got a rest. My uncle, who was hardly ever around, didn’t care if people sat around and drank coffee all day. And a lot of old ladies did just that.
I was wearing black slacks and a white button down short sleeve shirt, the only clothes I owned that weren’t jeans and t-shirts, and which gave me at least the veneer of a waiter. But I was tall, awkward, and self-conscious, and really not a very good waiter. Luckily, most of the customers had known me growing up, they were in no hurry, and they were patient and kind.
None of that mattered to me: my thoughts were filled with hormone-fueled fantasies about one of the waitresses at the café. She was short, dark-haired, and busty, and she teased me relentlessly. When we met, the first thing she said to me was, “ You are so tall, how am I going to kiss you?”
She wore short skirts that hugged her round ass and blouses that displayed her full breasts, and she kept her long, black hair tied in a pony tail. She had dark eyes, slightly olive skin, and full lips; she was smart, cute, and sexy and when I met her I was immediately lost in a fog of lust and love.
Her name was Linda, “actually Linda Sue Delaney,” she said, as she showed me her high school class ring with her initials. “LSD, you know what that means,” she whispered, smiling.
Whether that was an invitation or just a joke, she immediately let me know she was not just another girl stuck in a small town a million miles from nowhere. She was someone, someone special, she knew things, and she was going somewhere. The Animals “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” had found its way to our jukebox and she played it a lot that summer.
And she wasn’t shy.
Through the summer, she took every opportunity to touch me and flirt with me. When business was slow, she would lead me into the back room of the café, stand on a milk crate, put her arms around my neck, and kiss me. Before long, her tongue was in my mouth, and soon enough we were in the storeroom French kissing at every opportunity. She would push her breasts against me and rub her body against my cock, which was hard whenever I was around her. And often when I wasn’t.
One day, after weeks of kissing and grinding against each other, she took my hands and put them on her breasts. “Squeeze my tits,” she whispered, then sucked my tongue back into her mouth and nearly knocked me over rubbing against my cock.
A few weeks later, she put my hands under her blouse, and soon enough, I had her bare breasts in my hands. “Squeeze my nipples,” she whispered, and then “harder, squeeze them hard.” Her tongue was in my mouth, my hands on her breasts and nipples - and then her hand was rubbing my swollen cock outside my pants. I didn’t cum from all of this, although I don’t know how, but every night after we had been together at the cafe, I pulled off the road on my way home, took out my aching cock, and furiously masturbated.
And so the summer went: Linda and I kissing and groping whenever we had the chance, she slowly showing me what to do with a woman. I was in a constant state of arousal, from kissing and touching her, missing her and looking forward to being with her, and imagining what we would do if we ever had time and the opportunity to really be alone.
We each have a soundtrack to our lives; many people still live with the songs of certain times of their lives, but even if we aren’t aware of it, we are all bathed in sound and music, and they are a part of our story. A lot of my soundtrack for that summer came from CKCK radio in Regina, a Top 40’s station that covered that corner of Saskatchewan and a little way down into the U.S. It was a lifeline out to young people living so physically isolated from the world. You could not turn on the radio that summer without hearing “I Think We’re Alone Now.” That song surely inspired a million romantic fantasies, including mine. Those tender, romantic dreams—"the"beating of our hearts/is the only sound"—vied w with the incredible sexual cravings I felt for her, and I was jerked back and forth between them by her body and the songs on the radio.
When we are in those moments, we will do anything to have the tension resolved, have the uncertainty and the anxiety disappear. And eventually they do and we find some peace. And yet, it sometimes happens that down the road, we suddenly remember that feeling of being fully alive, fully engaged in the stuff of life. We remember that feeling, and we want it again, that passion and fear, hope and dread. And we want it so badly that we are willing to do it all over again, do whatever it was that made us come alive. I learned this truth that summer with Linda.
Sometime that summer, while we were in the back kissing, for the first time I really looked at, really noticed her eyes. Most of the people who had moved into the area as homesteaders and later farmers were Scandinavian, many of those Norwegian. They were generally fairly tall with fair skin and blue or brown eyes. She was unusual.
“You have black eyes,” I blurted out. And immediately regretted it. “Sorry," I said.
She laughed. “Do you like them?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” I said. “They’re just, you know, kind of unusual.”
“Yeah, well, I’m Irish," she said, "not many of us here. My grandpa came in building the railroad and just stayed. He was a blacksmith, later a mechanic and machinist, like my dad.”
I didn’t know anything about her family; I was surprised to learn they had been there almost as long as my grandpa, who had homesteaded there early. “I wonder if your grandpa knew mine,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, “we were Catholic.” And of course the Scandinavians were Lutheran or Methodist, and they didn’t mix with Catholics. “But I’m pretty sure my dad knows your uncle," she said. “I think they drink together at The Slipper. I’ve never waitressed before and I kind of think that’s how I got hired.” She was Irish, and a Catholic, as exotic as anyone I had met.
And then there was a call from the kitchen and we both smoothed our clothes and slipped out of the storeroom, carrying something to show we were back there for a reason and not fooling around.
Linda had graduated from high school that spring; she was staying in town only until college began in the fall, and she was anxious to get on with whatever the world had waiting for her. She was old enough to cross the border and buy beer in Canada, and she would tell me about the parties she and her friends had down by the river that would go on long into the night, mostly farm kids with a few priceless nights to let go. She asked me to go, and I desperately wanted to be with her. She would be there and I had enough experience to have developed a taste for beer. But I couldn’t go out with them, not with having to drive my uncle’s car an hour back to the ranch afterward on narrow gravel roads. It was always a struggle, but the consequences always seemed too much to risk.
As the summer was winding down, Linda left on a family trip to visit relatives in Wisconsin. She was gone for two weeks, and I was in despair: I wanted to be with her, I was sure I was in love with her, and I wanted to spend my life with her. I lived in a frenzy of lust and yearning, masturbating to memories of kissing and touching her, only to almost immediately get hard again. Looking back, I can see that I was in serious danger of going blind or jerking my cock off.
When Linda returned from vacation, it was as though nothing had changed, but it felt different. We went back to our furtive storeroom petting, but with a renewed sense of urgency. We both knew that our time together was almost over: in another week, she would be leaving for college, and soon after, I would be going back to my town a thousand miles away.
One night, as we were closing the cafe, she asked, “Do you want to be with me?“
I had never imagined her saying this. I didn’t know what to say.
“You know,” she said, “BE with me?”
It was one of the few time when she wasn’t joking or teasing, and she was, as she had always done, taking the lead.
She stood looking at me. And I knew she was asking me if I wanted to have sex with her.
“Yes, I do,” I answered. For at least this one moment in my life, I said the truth: “Yes, I want to be with you.”
She took my hand. “How about I get some beer and you and I can have a little party of our own? We can go out to the old Larson place south of town for awhile after work on Saturday, and then you can go on home.”
My mind was reeling—was I really going to have sex with her? After all the fantasies, was it really going to happen?
“That sounds good.” That was all I could say.
At the door, she took my hand, kissed me, and smiled. “Saturday night, then. We’ll have fun.” She turned and walked down the street, her hips swaying beneath her short skirt, leaving me to turn out the lights and lock the door.
Out on the High Plains, there are places where you can see for a hundred miles, or so it seems. People say that, from some of high these places, you can see into tomorrow.
It was Saturday afternoon, and I was cruising up one of those high, broad - shouldered hills, car windows down in the August heat, dizzy from the smell of wheat and sun and dust, with the radio blasting the top 40 from Regina. Images of my waitress, her lips and tongue, her breasts and nipples and curvy body, were fused with the heat and the music, and I was singing with the radio “Come on, baby, light my fire” as I crested the hill and saw the town down below with the cafe and a delicious girl and beyond it the Canadian border and the plains rolling away into the summer haze.
When I walked into the cafe, Linda came over and whispered, “I got the beer. Can you come?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll be fine as long as it isn’t too late.”
This was, I knew even then, a lie. This lie was trying to hide an important truth: that at that moment, I was ready to risk everything to be with her, whatever the risk, whatever the possible consequences. And I would take those risks again and again with other lovers.
We often proclaim, and maybe even believe, that we are rational beings, when the truth is that we are a stew of emotions, of needs and fears and desires, whose demands we serve. Because these desires live in the unconscious, we mostly don’t know why we do what we do. Every adulterous husband and every unfaithful wife testifies to this truth. Linda had poured something into me, or maybe called out something already inside me - or perhaps some of both. I had no idea then of the source, and now . . . . well, now I don’t know. Whatever the source, it felt to me then like the deepest of needs, like life calling. The only possible answer was, “Yes, I want you.”
The cafe was no busier than usual that night, but we didn’t go back to the storeroom. I always assumed she was experienced, and she may have been, but that night she may have also been nervous, maybe a little unsure about me. She knew little about me: I was an unknown, and from a different world far away from the plains. Sadly, we are hardly ever awake in these situations, whatever our age, but now I understand that she was taking a chance, a risk with me.
We kept busy, we both found things to do to pass the time. But there was a charge in the air. I looked at her, imagining yet again what she would look like naked, what she would feel like, what she would do, what I would do. And she looked at me. I had no way of knowing what she was thinking, I only hoped she shared my excitement.
And then it was nine, the last customers had drained the last coffee cups, tables were wiped, chairs up for the cleaning lady, the cash box locked away. We turned out the lights and walked outside. She was wearing a pale blue blouse and a yellow pleated skirt, and I felt like she was just barely real. It was dark but still hot, another long, hot August night, the air heavy with a chance of thunderstorms. There would be farmers out running their combines across the wheat fields long into the night, hoping to get the crop in ahead of the rain, or worse, hail, and on a few of those hot August nights they would be blessed by the Northern Lights dancing across the sky.