Chapter 3: Whitestone Drive-In

Within a few weeks of dating Mandy, I was getting to know her strange tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, especially when it came to sexual matters. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I had seen that in the first hour I had known her in the back of the Paradise Theater.

She would make up “games” to play, often in a public setting, and she could stay in a made-up character or persona for a couple of hours or more if she choose to. I had already gotten a hint of her acting abilities on the day I had met her. Anyway, these contrived events could be a lot of fun, but sometimes they were a bit unnerving too.

The first really elaborate stunt she pulled on me was one warm Wednesday evening just after Labor Day. I had driven over to her apartment in Kingsbridge Heights in my brand-new used car, a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan. We had planned a date although we hadn’t worked out the specifics yet.

It was just after eight o’clock when she buzzed me into her building and I went up the elevator to her fifth-floor apartment on Sedgwick Avenue. The first thing that struck me was the way she was dressed, which seemed somewhat different from her usual look. The main thing she had on was a sleeveless blue jumper, I guess you could call it. It had some kind of white pattern on it. Under that, she had a short-sleeved white top. Her footgear was white stockings – my first thought was, how far up her legs do those things go? – and very ordinary brown shoes.

The way Mandy greeted me at the door was a bit unusual too. I moved to kiss her and give her a hug, but she stepped back and then gave me a peck on the cheek. She said, “Paul, I need to talk to you about something important. Please come to my room.”

Usually, we would hang out in the living room before going out on a date, so that was something of an anomaly too. Mandy’s roommate Vivian Hannity was sitting on a sofa reading a book, but that never inhibited us from having a conversation before.

Once in her room, she closed the door and sat on the bed. “Please, use the chair over there.” There still seemed like there was something off about the way she was behaving. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and said, “You are probably wondering why I’m dressed so modestly today.”

“I does look a bit different, but not drastically so.”

“Well, there is a point to it. You must have noticed that my behavior has been somewhat out of control recently – I mean in regards to, how should I put this?” She looked up as if she was pondering something. “I mean, as it applies to my physical desires.”

She seemed to be talking in a weirdly formal way at that point. I was still a bit baffled, “It’s been less than a month. Yeah, that first day was kind of wild, that’s true.”

“Well, it’s time for me to grow up and be a good girl again.” I thought, it seemed liked growing up meant you would be the bad girl I had liked so much. Then it struck me: this was all an act she was putting on. In fact, she had probably prepared, at least informally, a script to follow. It would be my job to improvise some lines to go along with whatever she came up for me.

I pretended to be interested yet not too concerned with her statements, “All right, so what do you expect from me then?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. For one thing, this parking in your car and what we do in it is completely unacceptable.” This chick’s façade of primness is impressive. I wondered what it was all leading to.

What we had been doing in my car was having sex in it. I hadn’t expected that to happen because she had her own apartment. It was her roommate that got in the way. Even though there were separate bedrooms, Mandy and I felt somewhat inhibited about fooling around in the apartment when Vivian was around. For one thing, we tended to make a lot of noise during our episodes there.

It wasn’t like Vivian was the type to complain. And I had to give Mandy credit for being polite and not asking her roommate to get lost for two hours or so. We had indeed used the apartment a couple of times when her roommate was out, but more often we were in my car.

And it turned out that, after dark at least, it wasn’t that hard to find some reasonably private place to park in the vehicle. One of our favorite places was in a corner of Van Cortlandt Park off Jerome Avenue called the Allen Shandler recreation area. A paved road ran into there; then it was just a matter of turning into a place among the bushes.

After our Van Cortlandt recreation, we would often go back to the apartment, have a late snack, and simply go to sleep in her room. One night I did wake up at 3:00 AM and we had a late-night quickie. Overall, this set-up seemed to suit all three of us just fine.

I was pondering this while pretending to examine my finger-nails. I said, as casually as I could, “So I assume you don’t just mean in the car; you must mean, you know, in general.”

“That’s right, I feel like I must be...” She put on another display of considering matters. “I believe that I should be virtuous again.”

She seemed so dead serious that I had to stifle a smile. Yeah, Mandy, how long has it been since you had your virtue? If I had the slightest belief in anything she was saying, I might have argued with her. Instead, I mildly said, “Okay, Miranda, whatever you want is fine with me.”

I caught a tone of concern in her voice as if she had expected me to complain and then she was surprised that I hadn’t. She said, “That’s good Paul, I’m glad you fully agree with me.” Maybe she had noticed that I had used her full first name, although I wasn’t sure what that had signified.

I said, “Anyway, we are going out tonight, aren’t we?”

“Yes, and I’d like to go to a drive-in.”

That was an unexpected wrinkle. “You mean like a drive-in movie? Where am I going to find one of those?”

“There’s the Whitestone, out in Throgs Neck.”

I had forgotten about that one. Drive-ins were not big in New York, and I had never been to one. I think the Whitestone was the only one in the borough at the time.

“Do you happen to know what is playing there?”

“Yes, it’s this movie called Fun With Dick and Jane.“

“That came out last winter, didn’t it?” I remembered it was a sort of comedy caper with George Segal and Jane Fonda. I thought the plot had something to do with the husband character played by Segal losing his job and then he and his wife, played by Fonda, turning to a life of crime. Yet it seemed like the main point of this excursion was not to see that particular movie, but rather it had something to do with just being at the drive-in itself.

I decided not to ask Mandy about the details, but rather I would just go along and see what she had planned. I merely said, “All right, I’m okay with that.”

“It starts in forty minutes. You think we can get there in time?”

“If we leave now, we should have plenty of leeway.”

Just as we were leaving the room, she put on a brimmed straw hat I had never seen before. I figured it somehow emphasized the new “chaste” appearance she wanted to project, although I didn’t know exactly how. Nevertheless, I liked the overall effect

Vivian was still in the living room. Like Mandy, she was fairly tall but otherwise, she was a quite different kind of girl. She was thinner than Mandy and her blonde hair was quite a bit lighter. And where my girl was brazen and unpredictable, Vivian was quiet and low-key.

I assumed that Mandy had told her something about her motives, so on the way out, I tried to make some subtle gestures. I pointed to Mandy and shrugged as if to say, so what’s going on with her? Vivian smiled and shook her head. You’ll find out soon enough.

On the drive over there, Mandy seemed sociable, and we talked about our respective first-months-out-college job hunts. I hadn’t told her this, but I had not been particularly ambitious and I hadn’t sent out any applications in the time before graduation. But Mandy hadn’t done anything either, so she wasn’t in any position to call me out on it.

It was just getting to be dusk when we arrived at the Whitestone. As we drove into the lot, she said, “You do know that you have to drive over to one of those posts and get a speaker. Then you have to attach it to your window frame.”

“I sort of get that, I’ve heard it somewhere.” The whole idea of watching a movie from inside a car, although it was an established American tradition, was quite alien to my New York sensibilities.

As we waited for the movie to start, Mandy said, “Now just because we’re in a drive-in together, that doesn’t mean you can get fresh with me.”

The word fresh sounded like something that applied to eggs, not intersexual relations. It seemed obsolete, like a term used twenty years earlier. I felt we should be sitting in something like a 1955 Chevrolet, not a 1972 Oldsmobile. I tried to remain nonchalant as I asked her, “How exactly do you define getting ‘fresh?’”

“Oh, you know. I’m too much of a lady to go into details.”

“Well, give it a try, just so that I’m sure we’re on the same page with this.”

She hesitated and said, “It’s what boys try to do with girls when they park in cars. Going to a drive-in is a good excuse because it gives them a pretext to be there. They try to, well, cop some feels; maybe try to get into some serious petting.”

I thought, serious petting? Mandy, in recent weeks I’ve touched, kissed, and licked about every square inch of your sweet ripe body. But I remained mild about it, “I thought we were here to see a movie.”

“Well, that’s why I came here, and I hope you did for the same reason.”

Now I had an idea of what she was playing at. I was supposed to make some moves on her, and then see what happened.

There seemed to be only two possibilities with that. The first was that she wanted to be seduced right here in the car while the light from the screen illuminated us through the windshield. Getting down on the floor in the back seemed like the best way to avoid detection. It was part of the great American drive-in tradition, I supposed: see how far your girl would let you go.

The logistics seemed to dictate that taking her from behind would work best. She could get on her hands and knees back there. The drive-train hump precluded us from laying back flat. I supposed that we could try it cowgirl style on one of the seats, but then we would quite visible from outside.

The complications of it all that seemed daunting. Then there was another alternative, and I was getting to know her well enough to think it was more probable. Maybe she would pretend to resist my advances. I couldn’t figure out what she would get out of that, beyond the joy of messing with my head. All right, sweetie, you want to play a game, I’ll give it a shot.

Just as the Columbia Pictures logo appeared on the screen, I thought of what my own course of action might be. The hell with it, I’ll just sit here and watch the movie for ninety minutes. She might become so frustrated that she would start making moves on me.

But that didn’t seem right. She had obviously put some thought into her scenario and I was curious to know what she had cooked up. I let the opening credits run through first. They were sort of clever. The filmmakers had created a real book that looked like one of the old Dick and Jane primers, and an unseen hand turned the pages. I had a feeling that the rest of the movie wouldn’t be as imaginative as the opening had been.

Then I looked over at Mandy. Usually in a situation like this, she would be sitting pressed up against me. Now, however, she was at the far end of the front seat, practically against the door. I had the notion that she was practically daring me to go get her.

Rather than pull her over to me, I slid over to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She tensed up at my touch of her. I whispered in her ear, “How about a little make-out session?” It was odd to have to ask permission for that because normally she’d be up for almost anything sexual I asked her to do.

She replied, “All right, a little one.” That turned out to be mostly me nuzzling her cheek. I considered again just dropping this whole thing with her and watching the movie. Is that Ed McMahon up there playing what seemed to be Segal’s boss?

Instead, I decided to escalate the situation inside the car because I was curious to see what happened. Her jumper thing; that definitely got in the way of anything too daring. Like, how was I supposed to pull off the traditional drive-in bare-tit maneuver if she had that on?

Well, if I couldn’t go high, I’d go low. I dropped by right hand onto her stockinged left knee. My plan was to work myself up her legs and try to touch some panty-crotch, maybe even bare cunt. She immediately jumped back, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

If she was going to put on a show, then I would too. I leaned into her again and quietly said, “Come on Mandy, you know I like you. We could do things for each other and we’d both benefit.”

“I see where this is going; you are proposing very heavy petting.” There was that word petting again.

I tried to be evasive, “I don’t know if that’s the term I’d use.”

“Well, that’s the word I’m using. I know what you want; I’m supposed to rub your crotch until you come in your pants.”

I decided to escalate it, “Actually, I was hoping you’d unzip me and take my cock out.”

“All you guys are outrageous. You’re all sex maniacs.”

“As I said, I’d rub you too.”

Somehow that part of the deal didn’t register with her. She reached into her purse and took out a bottle of hand cream. “Here, if you’re so eager to get off, go in the back seat and do it for yourself.”