I grew up in Daytona Beach, a small city in central Florida. Like most kids I knew in those days, I didn’t have much money to spend on “frills”, as my mom called them, like comics, baseball cards, and of course, movies. My best friend at that time was a kid named Ronnie Berner. He was a year older than I was, chronologically, but several years older in maturity and life experience. I was never sure why he let me hang out with him, but I learned a lot from him while we were neighbors. One of the things I learned from him was how to sneak into a drive-in.

There were two drive-ins in our town. For you young folks (anybody less than fifty), a drive-in was a place where you could go watch movies from the “comfort” of your car. You bought your ticket and then found a place to park on a slight incline, facing a large screen. A speaker hung on a post next to where you parked, and you could either clip it onto your window or leave it on the post; then you were ready to watch the show. None of this was very high-tech. The picture quality was lacking, and the sound coming out of those antique speakers was sometimes unintelligible. However, this was the 1960s, so we didn’t know what we were missing. It was the best we could hope for at the time.

One day, we were reading the local paper (yes, GenZers, in those days we actually read printed newspapers) and saw that the Starlight, the drive-in closest to us, was showing a Robert Mitchum double feature. One movie was “Thunder Road”, which we had both seen, but wanted to see again. I don’t even remember what the other movie was, for reasons that will become clear. We had the same conversation probably half a dozen times that summer.

Ronnie would say, “Mike, you got any money?”

And I would say, “Nah, do you?”

“Nope. Guess we’ll have to sneak in.”

“Guess so,” I nodded.

And so we did. We rode our bikes to the Starlight and stashed them in a small wooded area by the exit lane. There was a rudimentary gate there to prevent anyone from driving in that way. It might have kept idiots in cars from getting in, but it didn’t deter teenagers on foot, like Ronnie and me.

After we made sure nobody was guarding the gate, which happened occasionally, we casually walked around the primitive barrier and up the exit lane into the drive-in. There was a playground in front of the large screen for the rugrats to use while waiting for the movie to begin, and between the slides and swings and the first row of cars were some benches. There were speakers behind the benches, which made it a good place to watch the movies for anyone who wanted to get out of their car. Or, for car-less interlopers like us.

There wasn’t anybody else sitting on the benches that night. We sat down in the middle, with a space between us. The last thing we wanted was to have anyone we knew seeing us sitting next to each other and starting rumors that we were homos (“gay” still meant happy in those long-ago days). That was the worst thing you could call a teenage boy in the ‘60s. Our timing was good. The previews had just ended, and as we settled into our not-very-comfortable seats, “Thunder Road” began. Even though we had both seen it before, I still felt a warm glow of contentment surging through my body, knowing how much I was going to enjoy seeing it again. I think it was a hormonal thing. I haven’t felt anything like that for a long time.

Ten minutes or so into the movie, something strange and wonderful happened. I felt someone sit down next to me, and I mean, right next to me. I turned and saw a girl about my age, watching the movie like there was nothing unusual about the fact that she had ignored the dozens of empty seats around us and chose to sit so close to me I could feel the warmth of her body against me. I turned to Ronnie, wondering if he was seeing what was going on, and saw that he had made a new friend too —a young lady who was clinging to him like iron filings to a magnet.

I turned back to my visitor. She wasn’t looking at the screen now; instead, she was grinning at me. If she had been a guy, I would have been scared, but instead, all I saw was this girl wearing shorts and a t-shirt, with a long ponytail. It was a little hard to tell in the light reflected from the large screen in front of us, but I thought her hair was either blonde or light brown. It was tied in a loose ponytail and hung down past her shoulders. She had a face that, as far as I could tell, while not beautiful, was still cute. I could see her braces flashing in the semi-darkness as she looked at me. I was frozen, unsure of what to do. All I could hear was the sound coming from the speaker behind us; then I heard her ask, “What’s your name?”

“M-m-mike,” I stuttered. My voice hadn’t betrayed me like that for months, but the weirdness of the situation was getting to me.

“Hi Mike. I’m Tammy, and my friend over there is Vera. We saw you guys sneaking in. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna tattle on you. We just want to hang out for a while.”

While she was telling me that, I felt her grasp my wrist and place my hand in her lap. My fingers came to rest between her thighs, almost touching her pubes, which at that time in my life was a strange, unexplored land. I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to do. When I looked at Tammy, she seemed to be waiting for me to make the next move, and I had no idea what it should be. I thought for a moment I should go in for my first real boy-girl kiss, but before I could get my body moving, she got up and started walking away.

“Come on,” she said, looking back over her shoulder as she headed back toward the rows of cars behind us.

I looked back at Ronnie, hoping he would give me some advice, but saw that he and Vera had already disappeared. Finally regaining control of my body, I jumped up and ran after Tammy. Even in the dim light, her white shorts were glowing like a beacon drawing me on. The way her tiny butt was twitching in front of me only added to my desire to follow her. Wherever she was going, I was her willing, eager puppy.

She led me through the rows of cars, carefully avoiding the speaker cords. She paused for a moment at the concession stand, and I was afraid she would ask me to buy her something. She should have known, since she had seen us sneaking in, that I probably didn’t have any money for snacks. Fortunately, she kept going, all the way to the last couple of rows of cars in the back, the place everyone called the “passion pit”. It was common knowledge that anyone parked back there was more interested in making out than they were in the movies. If the rumors were true, more than a few cherries had been plucked in that quiet part of the drive-in.

Tammy went up to an older station wagon, opened the back door, and climbed in. The middle and rear seats had either been removed or lowered, and an old, smelly mattress lay on the flat space behind the front seats. I crawled in after Tammy, and a moment later, we were lying side-by-side in that somewhat uncomfortable space. She put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but kiss her. Not that I didn’t want to, but I was afraid my inexperience would disappoint her. Something about the easy way she had slid into the back of that old car told me that I wasn’t the first boy who had accompanied her there.

Our lips met, and even all these years later, I still remember three distinct things about that moment: the almost painful way her braces dug into my lip; the way her slippery tongue pushed its way into my mouth; and the unmistakable odor of cigarettes on her breath. Both of my parents were smokers, so I knew it well. That first kiss only lasted for a few seconds, then our mouths parted.

Mentally, I was checking off the first item on my list of things-to-do-before-I-turned sixteen: a real kiss with a real girl. I might have been happy to stop right there, this bizarre evening already seared into my memory, but Tammy wasn’t finished with me. She came back for seconds. This time, she was more aggressive, pulling me closer to her and grinding her lips against mine. With that encouragement, I grew more daring and pressed my hand against her breasts, outside of her shirt. I didn’t want to go too fast and have her suddenly chicken out. I shouldn’t have worried about that, but I was still just getting used to an aggressive, willing female.

Tammy grabbed my hand, and for a moment I thought she was trying to push it away, but instead she guided it under her t-shirt. Before I knew it, my hand was cupping one small bare boob. It was just big enough for my palm to cover it. I felt her tiny nipple, harder than I had expected, poking against my hand. I wasn’t sure whether to rub it, squeeze it, or just be content with the fact that I was checking off another item on my list.

Between the messy kissing and feeling, it took me a moment to become aware of what Tammy was doing. Somehow, she had managed to unzip my shorts and send her hand on an exploratory mission into my underwear. When I felt her fingers wrapping around my dick, it was like getting hit by lightning. The night was just getting better and better.

It only seemed fair for me to return the favor, so I stuck my hand up the leg hole of Tammy’s shorts. At first, my confidence was still low, so all I did was rub my fingers over her panties, in the area around that mysterious area between her legs. Remember, this was in the 1960s, before the internet, before X-rated movies, and before Penthouse and Hustler, so all I knew about female anatomy was what I had heard Ronnie and some of his friends talking about. I thought I was doing okay, when Tammy pulled let go of my dick long enough to pull the leg hole on her panties to one side. Again, she put my hand where she wanted it. Then she went back to jacking me off.