Melanie and E.T.

I sat in the dark picture house intensely excited at the prospect of another Spielberg film about to twist my reality. If Indiana Jones, in my mind named after my state thusly being a cinematic prescient portent to the hero a young preteen from that very state could become, made me wear a leather jacket to school all year I was bursting at the seems to see what kids my age could do with a pet alien.

Air conditioning in the summer was also a good thing, as was copious amounts of coke, popcorn, and my older cousins and their friends. Pet aliens, Spielberg, junk food, and older girls, it was the weekend of a lifetime.

I was glad to be out of that crashing Indiana glare and mid June humidity that sucked the life right out of me, at least for part of the afternoon. No, scratch that, I was a very fit child, the summer atmosphere invigorated me and just as every morning since I was able, I went on that little two mile jog with the old man.

Relaxing in the theater and not really watching the still ads for car lots and hair salons my mind drifted again. That morning we'd stopped half way to do pushups and stretch as usual before the slog back to the house. An intoxicating smell made me think about how my father would point out and notice women that weren't my mother. While we were out running he'd tell me how pretty they were or how sweet their asses were. At first it made no sense. How sweet could an ass be as it neither looked like or as I assumed, tasted like sugar?

A year or so into our ritual, and it wasn't really a sudden thing, I'd started to understand his enthusiasm and noticed that he'd observe finer women when shopping or filling the gas tank just a little too enthusiastically. To my horror, I too was increasingly and magically drawn to breasts, or pert asses, or long legs, or shiny blonde hair.

Here's the fact of the century, I am my old man. My mother was prettier than he was so the combination went like a yin yang feng shui balancing act of the good parts of both. My father was tall, and lean egocentric, and a sexual deviate. My mother was thin, and graceful, and pretty and artistic. Therefore if you were to sum me up, I am tall and lean, graceful, egocentric, a pretty boy, and I'm just a little too artistic for my own good. Oh, and yes before you forget, I'm sexual deviate. Where I get the friendliness that people claim I have is beyond me. Maybe my mother blew the mailman while my father was inseminating her, who knows.

Back in the picture house the smell dragged me away from an incredibly cool Marlboro ad. It wasn't horse smell, or leather, or grass, or even cigarettes. Cheating right now using that adult knowledge of useless fashion shit information I can tell you it was Chanel No. 5. The scent was purposely reacting to the air washed over the soft radiant skin of Melanie, my cousin's fifteen year old school friend who sat next to me. Barry sat to my right and Barry smelled like hot dogs.

I didn't need to understand the way air conditioning stimulates air currents in cinemas built from a cement loving architect's dream in the 1970s. Something made that aroma waft up my nostrils where it triggered impulses that raced into the prone cobra reptile part of my brain. It was into the bit of my gray matter that evolved just before we were all cavemen where it connected with my new found appreciation for sexual arousal. I could feel my recently developed post-boyhood become engorged with blood.

I looked at Melanie, we were sharing popcorn because Barry had his own trailer full of it on the empty seat to his right. She looked at me, and it was the same girl that had been at my uncle's places playing with Hillary since before I could remember, or part of me thought that. This time in the faded light the photons from the Marlboro ad on the big screen flickered in her blue blue eyes. Her nose twinkled making me think new thoughts about Samantha the witch and how her pants fit her really well. Melanie's girly lips raised and she smiled and giggled at something bringing my consciousness to a new level.

I had a raging hard on in public and this girl was looking at me laughing at something. Was she laughing possibly at the stiff pole in my basketball shorts? Was she laughing because it was sticking up in the cinema like it was inhabited by circus folk underneath? Actually I was horrified and embarrassed for no reason, she was not laughing at my erection. She was just like me, excited to be out on a weekend with a bunch of kids sitting next to this cute friend of her cousin's and sharing buttery salty goodness. Nevertheless, the darkness hid my red face and despite all that ferocious self consciousness I was still able to lock her gaze and feel her good humor scrubbing me clean of doubt and negativity.

My immediate feeling was the hold her gaze long enough for my woody to retreat back to childhood. As she laughed, I laughed, then Barry laughed, but he might as well have been the Marlboro Man dying of emphysema for all we cared, this was a moment we shared. Melanie was cute, even beautiful, and my boy crush developed in the duration of my erection to encompass love and yearning for her fifteen year old womanhood in ways that I suppose were fostered by my father's secret Jedi training without my permission or premeditation. There was no guiding or controlling this, it was chemical imprisonment and I didn't care for anything else in the world at that moment.

I was sure she had not discovered my rod's condition there in the dark. In the middle of our laughing festival she reached over and put her hand in my hair and mussed it up so that it was not way my mother had trained me to comb it daily. Immediately after retracting her hand from my hair, she'd leaned in and without thinking I had also leaned into her, and she said, "now that's better". All I could do was sit there and go, "dah".

I was glowing because she'd touched me, and her perfume was even more intense because her neck was so much closer than before. Just when I thought the world was perfect and this fine fine woman had accepted me into her secret club, she put her lips on my forehead and kissed me. She was still giggling and playing with the hair on the back of my head when the movie started.

E.T. was for me, my first two hour erection.

Thank you Mr. Spielberg.