I met my first girlfriend just two blocks from where I lived in Williamsbridge, The Bronx. It was September 1972 and I had started my senior year at high school. I was seventeen years old and my romantic experiences at school had been, frankly, non-existent. Maybe high school was overrated as a dating location, but I hadn’t found a single prospect during my three years there. By that point, I was starting to think ahead t...

I was going to wait two days before calling Margery, figuring that I wanted to appear interested but not desperate either. That was about the limit of my knowledge about handling dating situations. However, she was the one who called me the very next day. She had suggested that she might do something like that, but I hadn’t taken her very seriously. It was a Friday, and I had just gotten home from school. “Hey Hank, how a...

On Saturday, as promised, Margery did call me around one o’clock. As on the day before, she asked me to meet her in the park in front of her building. I figured that since it was a weekend, we’d probably do something together for those two days. Then, when the school week started again, perhaps we should both concentrate on our homework. At that time, I had no idea about how to deal with a girlfriend. I had initiated the...

The next week, the last one in September, was a time for Margery and me to have introductions to various friends and family. The one I want to talk about here is when Margery met my two best friends from high school, Mark Zimmerman and Dan Behrens. I had met Mark in the West Bronx back in 1966 when we were eleven years old and starting junior high. If someone was going to play him in a movie, I might have picked Woody All...

A few days later Margery had a new version of the schoolgirl/knee-socks look for me to examine. We met after school on her block, and she looked better than ever. She had changed her appearance notably from the rather sloppy look she had when I first met her. For one thing, she had trimmed her hair so that it fell only to her shoulders, and she had a hairband to hold it in place. It was her clothes, however, that really g...

I was having a hard time with the scene in that basement. Here was this nice high school girl in her strange state of undress, and I knew she was going to talk about some provocative topics. I had a sudden attack of prudishness. She seemed to understand what I was thinking. “You know, Hank, let me put my skirt back on. I get the feeling that the sight of my bare crotch is unnerving you a bit.” Odd, being half-dressed does...

In the week following that problematic Circle Line tour, my attempt to play hard-to-get failed. Margery had easily seduced me – more than once – on the following Thursday. I knew I was folding under the pressure of her charms. As a seventeen-year-old guy, and not a particularly physically impressive one at that, I was getting more sexual stuff than I had ever imagined I’d have at that point in my life. I doubted that many...