My First Boob, the Loss of Innocence

My First Boob, the Loss of Innocence

by Dave Woehrle

Everyone in middle school has a friend whose parents were never home.

When you grow up in the wealthy Chicago suburbs, it's usually a mansion, a beautifully unsupervised place, decadent, always with a pool in the back and a pool table in the basement.

And this house, unequivocally, was the best place to make out: no time limit, no checking in, no parents, no pressure.

I was thirteen when my girlfriend and I were at this mutual friend's mansion, making out on a couch in the basement after another 8^th grade day.

Making out on a couch, of course, presents challenges you don’t see in movies: arms get numb caught under bodies, someone gets an elbow to the temple when shifting positions, and necks smell weird with saliva on them.

Just a week prior to this make out session, I'd touched her boob over the shirt at the movie theater, where we saw Matthew Broderick in Godzilla. I'd enjoyed the suppleness of bra-ed breast under a tank top, but the movie had, well, a Puff Daddy song in it.

But now, in the moment, in that empty, cavernous basement, it was the real deal. Alone. Horny and wearing my dad's Old Spice, it was Go Time.

I struggled with her bra, so she took it off herself in a wondrously quick one-handed way, and her boobs were suddenly free in her sleeveless sweater. And my hands, sweaty and eager, were free to find them.

When you make out, you keep your eyes closed. When two teenagers open their eyes in such a situation, it's awkward, silly, and downright alarming.

So, in hindsight, in my defense, my eyes were closed.

My hand went in and up into her sweater, like a deep sea diver coming up to water. I found her bellybutton. I played around there for awhile. Then I traveled north. As I went up, we shifted on the couch, switching sides. 

Suddenly, I broke through. The tit, her right tit, was near my palm. Oh fuck, I thought. This is it.

I grasped her breast. My first thought: Wow. This is firmer than I expected. It's like, all muscle-toned. I rubbed it some more. It's was almost bony. I was deeply unsettled at the lack of nipple. I opened eyes and realized I was rubbing her right shoulder. My hand had escaped her sweater shirt thing and I was just grabbing her fucking shoulder.

I thought to play it off as intentional by rubbing her other shoulder in a sexy pre-boob-clutch-massage-way. However, my left arm was asleep beneath her neck, so I was paralyzed, my arm in stuck snaked through her shirt, my hand resting on her shoulder.

She giggled. She knew what I'd done.

I eventually corrected myself and found her right boob. It was the greatest thing I'd ever done in my existence.

I felt it for over twenty minutes until it occurred to me that I could go for the other boob. That was a heavenly realization, a glorious doubling of fondling membership and joy. Frankly, it was a great day.

In hindsight, I don't remember meeting the parents of whoever owned that huge mansion. It was just a place us kids all knew we could go to do questionable things: touch each other, drink Icehouse or wine coolers, smoke cigarettes, and light firecrackers. The mansion was more an idea than an actual home.

Eleven years after my hapless, bumbling boob-grasping, I saw on the local news station a still shot of the mansion in black and white, tilted for effect, with red, stamp-style letters of “Heroin in the Suburbs” filling the screen.

Our mutual friend had run into some legal trouble, apparently. A party had taken a turn for the worse. Several attendees were doing heroin quite excessively into the night. In the morning, they found a seventeen year-old boy overdosed in an upstairs bedroom. Panicking, my friend, along with other junkies, decided to ditch the body in a downtown Chicago alley dumpster.

I saw my friend's mug shot on TV. Her face, the same one that put Tombstone pizzas in the oven so we could eat a meal while watching South Park on a big screen, had recently taken a dead body out of her house one morning to put it somewhere else.

And it was then, only then, that I realized what people meant when they used the phrase “loss of innocence.” It's not about virginity. It's not about casual drug experimentation. It's about seeing a place I’d associated with adolescent, carefree glee, transformed into a place of death. As a youth, I couldn’t fit a boob in a shirt in that basement. Now other teens took a needle to their end a couple staircases up.

A few days after seeing the news brief on TV, I wondered if the dead teen had taken his shoes off on the same rug near the front door as I had done as an 8^th grader. The image of two empty sneakers haunted me for weeks.

This isn't an anti-drug ad. Frankly, there's probably little to take away from my tale of tit and death in the modern American suburbs. It was simply the first time in my life I felt something pure inside me leave forever. 

Life can’t remain a Wonder Years episode forever. Bad shit happens, and it happens to or near people you had homeroom with. That’s a fact, I learned. 

You can only close your eyes for so long. 

The Bite

The Bite

By: Dave Woehrle

I work at a special needs summer camp. A couple weeks ago, on the bus, waiting to go to the pool, a kid clawed my neck, pulled me towards him, and bit my left upper arm. A quarter-sized bruise welted up. It hurt. But it was more shock than pain. It was the surprise, the realization that it’d been years since biting someone to show dismay was even an option.

            After work, I had an afternoon nap. I have insomnia, you see. Anxiety shows up every night to dance the dark ballroom of my mind. Thoughts that happen at three in the morning are not good thoughts.

            Post-nap, I had dinner. I saw a summer storm coming in.

            I noticed a missed call on my cell phone from an old friend of mine.

            I dialed him up and stood barefoot in my parents’ garage. The garage door was open, and I watched the tree leaves in the front yard go silver as the wind upturned them.

            My friend, a writer, a farmer from Iowa, said “Hey, what are doing?”

            I said, “I’m watching a storm come in.”

            “That’s good,” he said.

            His voice was wrong, not his.

            He told me that a mutual friend of ours had committed suicide.

“What?” I asked, needlessly.

“Yeah, he’s gone. I’ve been lying on the floor and crying for most of the day.”

            I was speechless. I stood with my cell phone to my cheek. I watched warm rain flood the street in a single sudden surge. It was a short roar, a few seconds of heavy downfall.

            My friend on the phone, he said our friend got a hotel room in Colorado, a gun, and, well, that was that.

            I paced the garage, smelling the rain, feeling helpless.

            My friend on the phone, responding to my silence, said, “I know. I don’t know, either, man. I just thought I should tell you.”

            The storm outside shifted and a double rainbow appeared in the sun. I’ve never seen a double rainbow after hearing about a suicide. God is an asshole sometimes.

            Because I didn’t know what else to say, I told my friend on the phone about the double rainbow above my neighbor’s roof across the street.

He said, “I wish it would rain here, so I could see that. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen that.”

            After a while – after I walked in circles in the garage, randomly squeezing tires to estimate air pressure for no real reason – we exchanged memories of our lost friend: he’d written a short autobiographical fiction piece from King Kong’s perspective called “Correct Me If I’m Kong.” He’d played Debussy beautifully on piano. He was once in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in college. After the show, a professor said, “You know, he was the only up one up there that seemed to be having a good time.”

            That’s how I’ll remember him, the man who knew more than most of us ever will, the guy who saw the Big Joke and the Big Beauty.

On the phone with my friend, we agreed we had to look out for each other, to call, to catch up, to remember that the ones we love have to live every day just like us. After awhile, it was clear we’d made each other feel better just by being there, by being and continuing to be, which is so much harder than anyone admits.

            My left shoulder ached suddenly from the bite after I hung up the phone.

It was the pain. It was the realization of the ways others choose to show dismay.