Pilgrim and Mary
Pilgrim's pretends to know how to do it
While mired inside his USC fraternity: Pilgrim found no way at all to interact with the opposite sex! Yet, just as soon as he emerged: the landscape changed. At the very start of that summer he found a new love. She wasn’t a Los Angeles born girl. She had thick dark hair with a rounded, pouting un-aquiline face. She was probably half-American and half-Pacific Islander. Her U.S. born mother operated a bar near the US army base in Guam.
When it came time for her daughter to get higher education, she sold the bar to buy an apartment house in Santa Monica, and so mother and daughter flew to the U.S to settle in. The mother collected rent and managed the complex, while her daughter pledged a sorority and waited for the school year to begin.
A sorority was probably not the best choice they could have made! Mary’s new “sisters” took a look at her naivety, and then started playing with her like a doll. Under their gossipy, solicitous, semi-vicious wings: She was advised to get “laid”, and given instructions for finding a boy to do it with!
Her mother had given up a lucrative business serving drinks to sailors: most trying to “get laid”, to bring her daughter halfway around the world Her goal in life was probably to remove her daughter from such environments. So Pilgrim comes upon her daughter at the fountain between classes one hot summer night, and ends up asking her out on a date.
The daughter is always truthful and accustomed to asking anyone for help. Among the first things she asks Pilgrim: is his opinion about her sorority’s advice! After a very long pause, he told her he’d be (ahem) “very glad” to help from a “greater” knowledge of the thing. At any rate: he’d certainly try to (ahem) give her “a hand”.
Of course, he had no experience at all! Well: not exactly… Before bonding with Karen, he’d gotten his hands into another girl’s bra. It was on their second date: he’d parked the car in deepest Big Tujunga canyon. He remembers them kissing, while she fended off. Then more kissing and more fending, until “final triumph”.
Final triumph was uncomfortable: and there they sat: a couple of his fingers resting on her nearest nipple. Both were deeply embarrassed, and he had with no momentum to head “another direction”. At least he thought so!
Mary’s Apartment House
Mary’s apartment house was on a long street of the same kind of buildings: half way between the UCLA campus and ocean front. Each building along these blocks had a theme: Usually the décor started with some cheesy sign at the street entrance or on ghd side of the building. This usually matched décor inside the complex’s courtyard. There was “Tiki”, “Chalet”, “Mediterranean”, or “Coffee Shop Modern”.
For a month or so they went weekly to movies or campus events and then returned late in the evening to this particular long block of schmaltz. By late evening: all Santa Monica neighborhoods drip with fog. Soon: of all those cars parked head to tail: Pilgrim’s was the only one fogged outside and inside!
Inside the two of them were busy wriggling around inside that pond: experimenting with their respective sexual natures. She ended braless, both pantless and urgent: but never quite there. For a start, she was a complete and utter virgin, resistant to anything larger in diameter than his little finger. Neither could she stretch out: or properly spread her legs.
A short time after this flurry died out: he moved to Manhattan Beach, and then he called her, and she came down to his little cottage. She put on a bathing suit and walked with him down the steep sandy slope beside the oil refinery. With a burst of male bravado: He led her straight into the waves. The water was “bracing” that day at it always is on Southern California beaches, except for the very last weeks of summer weather.
The surf was also particularly heavy that day. He led her in chilled water crashed all around them. Immediately, he had to grab her arm to keep her from being sucked out. She was very small girl, now very cold, and her bathing suit bottom sagged under a load of wet sand. They returned to his cold drafty cottage, but no warm pond waited there: they tried again with enough space, but failed to couple due to her pain.
He now knows how abrupt he was, and.how totally inexperienced at sex. He was insensitive, “show off” liar: all because he had an image of himself, that wasn’t his geeky personality at all. That self-image was an all-knowing, “heroic guy”, dead certain of any young girl’s feelings and desires, because she obviously felt just like he did!
Don’t laugh: this wasn’t unusual for a male his age!
What females don’t often appreciate about males is carefully hidden under male bluster: that is: a fidelity in memory to any female. It’s not what the churches or ordinary people call fidelity, but every woman who ever decided Pilgrim was worthy enough to kiss, remains fast in his memory! In fact, he can forget car keys, or what exactly happened for decades of his life, but any feeling gesture a female ever made has an inviolable place.
So thinking of his interactions with Mary always fill him with sorrow and guilt. It was a litany of young inexperience and pain: and ended without resolution. Almost a year passed before he had freedom had courage to check in with her again. By that time, her mother had sold the apartment house, and the two were gone!
He’s been trying to justify it ever since. The best he can do is hope for her future and write about her. Everyone: the rich, the ordinary, the under privileged, unrewarded or spurned: continue to rise every morning with hope that on this particular day: “something will be good”. Humans persist. Surprising things may happen around every bend.
Someone “loving and more experienced” is what he wishes for her. Along with this place in the memoir that shows his pain, along with an absolutely crystal mental image of her body, and her presence as she spoke Also her momentary embarrassments, and “who she was”.
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