Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou by Clay Reynolds

Author:Clay Reynolds [REYNOLDS, CLAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: 7UQAAQAACAAJ
Amazon: 097287755X
Publisher: Stone River Press
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

MY FIRST DATE

“The absence of romance in my history will,

I fear, detract somewhat from its interest. “

—Thucydides

Dating in my hometown when I was a kid was not easily done if for no other reason than there simply wasn’t much to do. The movie had burned down when I was in junior high, and the bowling alley went up less than a year later. Occasionally there was a dance held at the Teen Canteen, but ticket prices were high, and the chaperones usually outnumbered the couples on the dance floor two-to-one. There was a drive-in movie, but asking a girl out to a drive-in was, in those days at least, like making an obscene proposition. Besides, it was only open between June and September. So dating, for the most part, was restricted to driving around and around the town’s main streets, “The Drag,” with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke, and to attending special, school-sponsored events such as banquets and dances.

Not surprisingly, most kids in my hometown didn’t date very much at all. There were the “steady” couples who logged hour after hour during the early weeks of their courtships, driving around and around the town with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke. But when their romance had progressed beyond the public display stage, they retired to “The Lanes,” where they would park for hour after hour of love-locked embraces, pausing only for an occasional tour of “The Drag” so their parents wouldn’t get wind of their teens’ torrid trysts on rural byways.

But that was for the “steadies.” The rest of us mostly hung around the Dairy Queen parking lot after we had used up all of somebody’s gas, waiting on the “steadies” to take their dates home and come by with wild, pornographic tales of the escapades—or for midnight, whichever came first.

Frequently, however, an event would occur which would require even the most reluctant among us to seek a female escort for the evening. Events such as the Senior Banquet, the Sports Banquet, the Band Banquet, the Future Farmers’ Banquet, the Future Homemakers’ Banquet, the Future Teachers’ Banquet, and all kinds of other “feeds” would force even the farm or ranch boy to trade in boots for a pair of dress shoes and a starched shirt for an evening of preordained misery in the company of some “young lady” to whom he wouldn’t have spoken three words otherwise and probably wouldn’t say more than five anyway.

I personally participated in a number of these events during the four years I spent in high school, and I soon evolved a theory about teenaged dating in a small town. It stems from all those years of sitting beside some “young lady” and eating cold creamed-chicken and cherry cobbler and listening to some bore drone on about the marvelous wonders of whatever organization was sponsoring the affair: There is no way for an individual to have a good time on a date.

The odds are totally against it.

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