MY FIRST REAL SEXUAL EXPERIENCE

As the trio left the stage the audience applauded not very enthusiastically. Soon, the main part of the show started, it was a striptease, which was what the audience mostly waited for. I was feeling a bit nervous but thrilled at the same time; I thought to myself, “Hey, this is real grown-up men’s stuff!” I had a beer on the table and drank it in less than five minutes. In no time, my friends had ordered a second round for me, which I also downed. I must have started to show evident signs of being lightheaded when a very good looking girl in her early twenties sat beside me; she must have been about 5’5”, with long, lustrous black locks and brown saucer eyes. Her lips were stained with a fire engine red, which shone with the flashing lights in the room. She was wearing a short, sequined blue dress with a plunging neckline that showed off her full, C-cup sized breasts. The girl started to call me “sweetheart” and kept getting closer and closer to me while I quietly shied away from her until there was no more room in the seat to go any farther.

At this point, I decided that I better start “cooperating” and I gathered all my “macho bravery” or whatever you may call it, and grabbed her right hand and kissed it. She returned my show of affection with a kiss on my neck, leaving a red mark on it and sending an electric shock throughout my whole body. She kept rubbing my hands and kissing me while trying to start a conversation that I was far from able to maintain as my mind was drifting, wondering about where this would all end up. She kept asking me to hug and kiss her in return, which I was glad to oblige, while my friends were happily dancing with their chosen partners all over the dancing floor and once in a while they looked over at me and smiled.

A good half an hour must have passed and my friends stopped dancing and brought their dancing partners to the table, they were sweaty and wanted to take a break while at the same time they asked me to go out on the floor and dance with my newfound “friend,” who had continued the courtship with me. I didn’t know how to dance, I must have looked like a broom's stick trying to go around her, but I managed to "dance" to a couple of songs any way and went back to my seat where my friends were having a ball with the girls and kept on drinking beer.

Benancio Flores, the leader of our group, “el flaco” (the skinny one) as we used to call him, evidently the one with the most experience in this business asked my girl to go dancing with him, which she did. I felt kind of jealous when I noticed he was whispering in her ear. I had no clue what he was telling her, but I kept wondering why he had to dance and talk to her, when he had his own partner to dance with. Eventually, my girl came back and sat right back where she had been before, next to me and took my hand again. I felt my hand was sweaty and I didn't know whether I should tell her of my jealous feelings or just continue to play her game. I did the latter. She asked me to head to dance floor again, and while there, I asked her what kind of conversation she had had with my friend. “Nothing important,” she said, “I know you are a little jealous, but, honey, you don’t have to, it is you that I like and it is with you that I’d like to go to bed with tonight.” I was really stuck in a complicated situation here, because I wanted to do it, I mean, the girl was extremely attractive, but, at the same time I was really afraid of having a sexual encounter with a woman I knew was a prostitute. More importantly, I had no money, and I confessed that to her. “Don’t worry,” she purred, “I’ll do it for free. I’ll do it because I like you, I really want to have it with you" and continued, "I promise you, you are going to like it.” The discussion went on for about fifteen minutes until I felt that my flesh was stronger than my brain, and conceded. A few minutes later we were heading to a room in the back of the place, a room with a queen size bed I had never seen with so much anxiety and fear at the same time in my whole life.

It was my first experience with an adult woman, and it was the glory. I felt like I’d discovered a continent, like I indeed was a grown-up man now. We did it twice in less than one hour and I felt exhausted but I wanted more “horizontal mambo dancing” but the girl told me she was exhausted, and much to my regret I had to shower , get dressed. and leave the room. What I did not know until after I left the place was that my much older friends had been watching the whole time through a peephole. They had, in fact, paid the girl to do it graciously with me because they told her I was a debutante and they wanted to see how I performed. The bastards laughed so hard their sides split as we taxied our way back to our places. I didn’t care. I even dared to laugh with them after that fateful night in the winter of 1959 at the Villa Ivonne. I was only 17. Even then I knew that sometimes it’s important to laugh at yourself.

In my next posting: A NOT SO GOOD SALESMAN