Chapter 10: Puppy Love in the Basement

A couple of things happened beginning in September of 1969. My parents announced that the family was going to move to the North Bronx by the end of October, earlier than they had first anticipated.

Whenever we went, we would surely be living closer to Arlene’s apartment on Barnes Avenue near Pelham Parkway. However, I would be more remote from the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, which was my link to Molly. From Morris Heights, there was a single, relatively short bus ride to the GW Bridge Bus Terminal. Molly would usually pick me up there or directly across the river in Fort Lee. Sometimes I rode the Red and Tan buses all the way to her house in Alpine.

The implications of those changed distances didn’t strike me immediately as important.

Secondly, my relationship with Arlene, my new high school paramour, went better than I had initially expected. The moroseness that I had seen in her during the first week of school seemed to disappear, and she became warmer and more relaxed with me.

Since we were both so young, we didn’t know exactly how we were supposed to interact as a couple. Thus we ran on instinct, and we made up our own ways to deal with each other.

For over a year, since the spring of 1968, I had been eager to get away from the block where I had grown up. Thus, especially on weekends, I roamed around the city on public transit. Sometimes I only went as far as Fordham Road, but on other journeys I went much further afield to places like Coney Island and the Rockaways.

Arlene was content to travel around with me, which I hadn’t anticipated when I had met her. It started by coincidence, perhaps, when one Sunday I called her and invited her on a little excursion. I was going to walk up to Van Cortlandt Park, about two miles north of Fordham, just to have a destination on an otherwise aimless day for me.

It was only the second weekend of the school year, and I hadn’t been involved with her for very long.

We compromised on a meeting location we had used before, that being on Fordham about halfway between our two residences. It was a sunny late summer day, and I discovered that Arlene enjoyed walking for its own sake just like I did.

We held hands for part of our jaunt up there, but I was finding out that she wasn’t the clingy type and she didn’t insist on grasping me at every moment. Nevertheless, I had never been able to touch Molly at all while we were in public. It was very pleasing that with Arlene, despite our youth, we could openly be a couple and show affection for each other without bringing unwanted attention to ourselves.

At the park, we sat on a small railroad bridge over the lake. By that time there were maybe a couple of freight trains at night. During warm weather, the bridge was used by park-goers for recreation, including fishing for whatever scant pickings were available.

Arlene and I sat on the side girder away from the track, and we talked and made out for a while. It felt great to be outdoors with my new girlfriend and be free to kiss each other as much as we wanted.

After that, if we were going somewhere on the subway, we would always meet at Fordham and take either the D or the 4 train from one of the nearby stations.

In those first weeks, she would sometimes dress casually in blue jeans or shorts for a ride to the Aquarium at Coney or the Playland Amusement Park in Rockaway. If we were going out in the evening in Midtown, then she would wear often wear a skirt with tights or knee socks.

I thought she looked great in any case, although if I honestly was to assess her, she actually looked like any of a lot of other New York girls. Her nose was a bit too large for her to be called beautiful, but I didn’t care. She wasn’t just any girl, she was my girl. I liked her thick, curly dark-brown hair which she either wore down to her shoulders or tied up at the back of her head.

Even if she was my girlfriend, we never said we loved each other. One of us would have had to take the initiative to do that, and probably neither of us was mature enough to take that step.

Both of us told our families — she only had her mother and older sister living with her — that we were dating each other, and they were willing to give a bit more cash to us for carfare and meals and an occasional movie.

I’m sure our relatives imagined that our affair was relatively innocent, a “puppy love” type of relationship with age-appropriate kissing and hand-holding occurring between us. A few times I visited her apartment and we would listen to records in the room she shared with her sister.

During our trips together, I also found out that she liked talking to me about the arcane bits of New York history that I had picked up. To our families, such things seemed a part of a wholesome yet sweet adolescent romance.

However, there was another side to what we were doing together. What our families couldn’t imagine was the intense sexuality that two young teens could indulge in if given the opportunity. It was a different era from what our parents had known two decades earlier. Arlene and I imagined that everyone else was getting their share of the sexual revolution and thus we had a right to grab some of it for ourselves.

She had decided against further rooftop trysts after the first two of those, and she knew of another, more protected place in her building to enjoy our secret pleasures with each other.

In the sprawling basement of that place, there was the kind of room that was often found in apartment houses, especially older ones. It was supposedly for tenant’s storage, but these places became the repositories for discarded furniture, baby carriages, and all manner of other abandoned household goods. It was indeed a shabby setting with a single light bulb in the ceiling, but it was private and it was all ours.

Our new love nest had a reasonably clean mattress on the floor in one corner away from the door. We covered it with a quilt and brought down extra pillows and a blanket from her apartment. Its location in the room was protected by an armoire and a chest of drawers that would screen us, we hoped, from the view of anybody who might walk in unexpectedly. We were lucky in that no one ever did when we were playing sex games in there.

When we were on that mattress, we passionately went at each other’s bodies with our hands and mouths, giving each other as many orgasms as we could manage during a particular session. With our hormones rising month by month it seemed, our senses were keen and tireless. We were impressed by how much frantic sexual energy we were capable of releasing within each other. I had never imagined having that much uninhibited fun with a girl.

Arlene and I would be down there for a couple of hours after school and up to four hours or so on a weekend. We told our families we were “going out,” which was sometimes true, but at other times we would be in that room getting our share of the teenage delights we both thought we deserved.

Imagining myself as a gentleman, I would always give Arlene her due first. She would be wearing a skirt with thigh-high stockings, knee socks, or merely ankle socks with sneakers. After a few minutes of making out, I would get my hand into the front of her panties and fondle her warm, hairy crotch. It was rare, in fact almost unknown, in those days for girls or women to shave their pubic areas.

“Fondle” might be an understatement. It was more like I was masturbating her as vigorously as I could with several of my fingers. I had learned from Molly to use a couple of fingers inside while another one worked on her clitoris.

Meanwhile, she would open up her blouse and bra and I would put my mouth around her small but erect nipples. Her hands would then go to help mine work on her pussy. With that much stimulation, she would soon lift her hips off the mattress and noisily climax as I felt her vagina tighten on my probing fingers.

Instead of taking turns with each other, I would give her perhaps three orgasms in a row. Usually, for the second one, I would remove her panties and some other items of her clothes but sometimes not her skirt or footgear. I enjoyed her more when she wasn’t completely naked, even if it was merely her socks that were left in place.

Then I would go down on her as she spread her legs apart or clamped them around my head. Much like Molly, she enjoyed that immensely, and she would grip my head and push it around as my mouth kissed and sucked on her wet cunt until she peaked again.

For the third act, I would sometimes insert some object into her vagina — a banana or cucumber would do fine — and use it as a dildo on her. By that point, she was gaining even more erotic momentum and she would reach down to help me rhythmically slide her improvised “toy” against her clitoris.

Then it would be my turn to be pleasured by her and I also didn’t get fully undressed. I would be wearing my undershirt and sometimes my outer shirt as I stood in front of her. Then she would suck on my cock until I shot off, either into her mouth or into the air if she pulled me out and stroked me to my climax.

After I took a brief pause to recuperate, she usually would lube up my cock with Vaseline and jerk me off a couple of times. Usually, I would be kneeling for these sessions as her eager hands stroked me.

When I came, she delighted in witnessing my ejaculations as I sprayed my cum all over the quilt. She would exclaim something like, “Oh wow, that is amazing, I mean how much cum you can put out. And it’s yours truly here who made it happen!”