I glanced at them in the mirror, and at the boy beside me, and then with as little will and forethought as I had shown in stopping for them in the first place, and even less in the way of good judgment, I took my right hand from the steering wheel and put it in his lap.
He started as if an electric current had passed through his body. Perhaps it had. I put my hand right on his groin and watched him out of the corner of my eye. He turned his head and his eyes met mine. At first his expression was guarded, unsure, and then I turned slightly toward him and let a smile bloom on my lips, and his features relaxed and he smiled in return.
In the rear-view mirror I saw one of the boys petting with the girl while the other was idly patting her thighs and talking about his finals.
I let my fingers play on my new friend’s crotch. He began to rise to the occasion, and when I felt his penis growing in his pants I experienced an overpowering wave of excitement, almost driving the car off the road. He squirmed in his seat, and the next moment the boy on his right, next to the door, looked over and saw what was going on.
“Christ,” he said, quietly.
From the rear: “What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you Christing about?”
“Jimmie’s got himself a girlfriend, that’s all.”
JIMMIE: “Will you for the love of God shut up?”
THE GIRL: “Oh, really? Oh, wow!”
I wanted to take my hand away. I wanted to think of a light way to pass all this off as a joke.
I kept my hand where it was.
The mood grew sexy in the extreme. The girl had gotten up from the back seat and was leaning over the front, commenting with interest on my manipulation of Jimmie. One of the boys had his arms around her from the back and was handling her breasts, and she kept giggling and telling the rest of us just what he was doing and just how it made her feel. I opened Jimmie’s zipper and put my hand inside, and he let me fumble around for a while and then extricated himself from his underwear and let me take hold of him. He had a good-sized penis, long and very slender, and I stroked him and moved my hand up and down on the shaft and was rewarded with an intake of breath from the back seat and a moan from Jimmie.
The girl said, “We’ve just got to call you something besides ma’am, ma’am.”
“Priss.”
“Is that short for something?”
“Priscilla.”
“Groovy. Well, I’m Gloria called Glory, and I’m presently being felt up by Ken and Robbo, and that’s Mike on the other side of the door, being left out, and that’s Jimmie that you’ve got your hand wrapped around, and I think he likes it. You’re absolutely out of sight, Priss.”
One of the boys in the back said, “Let’s have an orgy.”
“We’re having one, stupid.”
“I mean really.”
“Out of sight.”
“I wish the rain would stop. We could get high and ball in somebody’s field.”
“You dig to get high, Priss?”
“Yeah, Priss, do you dig grass?”
“Why not?”
“You hear it? Why not? Right on, Priss.”
“But this is like too cold and wet for fucking in cornfields.”
“I’ll bet you never fucked in a cornfield.”
“Would you believe a wheatfield?”
“No.”
“Would you believe a hayloft?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe the locker room at half-time?”
“Wow!”
“Right on!”
There was a Holiday Inn coming up on the left. There always is. If you go off in any direction you’ll come to a Holiday Inn in the time it takes you to pass three supermarkets. I braked and swung the car around to the left with as little planning as I had taken in stopping for the five of them in the first place. I pulled the car to a stop and took my hand from Jimmie. I opened the door.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll get us a room.”
While I checked in at the desk, hoping that the room clerk wouldn’t find out what I was checking in with, it occurred to me that it might have been a sage move to take the car keys with me. All Jimmie had to do was tuck himself into his pants and turn the key in the ignition and I would be stuck at a Holiday Inn by myself, with no way to get home and no plausible explanation for my presence there.
Of course the car was still there, and the kids in it. Kids? They must have been nineteen or twenty, the same approximate age Rhoda and I had been when, in a sense, this entire story got started in the first place. Kids? I was no more than a decade older than them, and sometimes that seemed very much older indeed, and sometimes it did not.
The room was around the back on the first floor, and like all of the rooms at the better new models, it had a pair of double beds.
You wouldn’t believe what a great idea that is.
We smoked an impressive quantity of marijuana. I hadn’t had any in ages, but there are certain things you don’t forget once you learn them, like swimming or riding a bicycle or balling your roommate, and getting stoned is another of these. It came back to me easily enough. I drew smoke deep into my lungs and let myself tune in on myself, let everything spread out and get loose and easy.
I thought, suddenly, of Rhoda and Harry. How long would I be gone? Would anyone worry? Would they be upset?
If I happened to die in that motel room, I decided, then Rhoda and Harry would get married and live happily ever after. My eyes misted over at the thought, and then suddenly the mood was gone and I was laughing at my own sense of melodrama. Someone asked me what was so funny.
“Everything,” I said. “Everything is very groovy.”
“You’re stoned.”
“Right on!”
Artlessly, and charmingly, everyone began to take off clothing. There was no sense of striptease about this, nor was there the feeling that one should avoid watching the procedure. I watched as Glory and the boys got undressed, and I also got undressed, and someone passed me another joint and I took another drag on it, and I passed it on, knowing that I was already about as high as I had to be.
My mind was nicely compartmentalized. I was completely loose and open and at the same time felt wholly in control of myself. And I thought that what I really wanted to do was blow this control, get out past it, beyond it, so that I was no longer in control of myself and my body could do what it wanted to do. This never did quite happen, but I don’t suppose I was unduly handicapped by it all. I certainly didn’t feel repressed or anything of the sort. Not at all.
No.
I was very interested in Gloria’s body. Not in the sense that I wanted her, but that I felt the two of us to be in some sort of friendly competition, like the United States and Canada. She was a short girl, and quite slender, but with surprisingly large breasts for her slender frame. She seemed to be utterly unselfconscious about her body in a way that would have been miles beyond me at that age. She went from boy to boy, kissing each in turn, being enfolded in one set of arms after another, being touched now by two or three of them at a time, and throughout it all being absolutely at ease with them and with me and with herself.
One of the boys kissed me, and I closed my eyes and let him lead me over to the bed. I lay down with him
