I’m in You
- Jun 17, 2022
- 4 min read
by Patricia Q. Bidar
It was 1976, America’s bicentennial year. Skylab, the first US space station, had orbited earth for too long, and was failing. Angel-headed Peter Frampton, with his wahwah voicebox and fake audience members losing their shit, filled the airwaves.
On the community theatre scene, Nidia and I were not children but not legal, either. Jailbait, they called us. Nidia and I wore our tightest pants with platform shoes. She knew these people because her parents had acted before their divorce.
For theatre parties, we would wear polyester halter dresses we bought in downtown San Pedro from Travis, an old man in a greasy fedora. Through the part in the dressing room fabric Travis watched us try the dresses. We didn’t care. We zipped one another up, filling the tiny shop with the scent of Herbal Essence.
The bar around the corner from the community theatre was called the Branch Office. Nidia and I would cage ginger ales and little bags of potato chips and cling to unemployed, middle-aged men on the dance floor, driving them wild.
Nidia and I were jailbait. But we were safe. Sure, these grown men put their dicks in our curious mouths and said they could go to jail for what they wished they could do. But they were old friends of Nidia’s parents. When they asked if they could finish and we said no, they stopped. Excused themselves and returned with their pants fastened.
Like Benny Sher, a Cajun teetotaler from New Orleans. The wide front seat of his white Cadillac reclined with a purring sound. He begged to watch me touch myself. His back seat teemed with empty cans of Near Beer. His fiancée managed a bank.
I loved that my body — the one the boys at school ignored — could render grown men helpless. Their urgent kisses made my body melt.
I marked my birthday at Torrance Community Theatre. It was a rehearsal night. I tousled my surfer bangs and called to our older friend Crystal Ivey’s brother Rick, “Man, I’m 16!”
Rick pressed a dime into my hand. “Call me when you’re 18,” he boomed, to make the others laugh. Like Crystal, Rick was in his 30s. He slept in Crystal’s pantry with his collection of sci-fi paperbacks. Just the weekend prior, I’d made out with him in the back seat of Crystal’s Firebird as she sped town the eye-10 to San Pedro and home. He’d rubbed my crotch with urgency — an astounding sensation. Once I saw him shuffling down Pacific Avenue in downtown Pedro, reading as he walked. He looked like any wino near the Longshoreman’s Hall. I was alone; I could have greeted him but chose not to.
Tonight, we were all going someplace special: a bigger bar in Manhattan Beach. Crystal told us the front was shaped like an enormous ship’s bow. Nidia and I added to our halter dresses white captain’s hats she’d bought at a party store.
That night, just around the corner from My Ship, I attended my first orgy. Rick brought me. I waited like the proverbial fifth wheel with my captain’s hat in my hands while blurry, fleshly things happened around me. I told myself that this was part of the adult life that awaited me, and that choosing to sit this one out was simply a cool, acceptable choice.
“How can you leave when you haven’t come?” the hostess purred to Rick. She was an elementary school teacher. There were stacks of construction paper in the corner of her studio apartment, and kid art on her fridge.
Once Rick’s pants were up, he walked me back to My Ship. I tried to hold his hand. He squeezed it politely, then released. Inside, Nidia slumped at a back table, crying. I only spotted her because of that white halter dress. That captain’s hat, with its crisp gold braid.
It turned out that Ray, father of four, had rushed to meet Nidia when she arrived at My Ship. His wife had run off in a snit to do coke with her friends. Ray’s urgent tongue explored Nidia’s ear and switched her on. Then he’d forced her head down and hadn’t stopped. And then he’d left her there.
Knowing what I know, would I run them through with steel, those old men? Sure, they were of age and we were kids. Yes, they were cheating. But now as then, I can use my finger to poke the memory of them and they crumble, as they have, in fact, crumbled. Some are dead. Their girlfriends became their wives who nursed them. In my mind, the men are dust while their girlfriends remain fresh in long vests, flared velvet pants, and matching headbands.
After high school, Nidia and I worked as waitresses in a chain hotel restaurant with an Aulde English Theme. The sound of the bar entertainer, a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator, bled through the adjoining wall. He liked to joke that to him a woman was just life support for a cooter.
Skylab’s decaying orbit made it clear: the spent and sickened space shuttle was coming home. NASA hadn’t planned well for the shuttle blasting back to earth. No resources were committed to delay its entry or blunt what would occur. That day, Nidia and I spray painted a big target on a white sheet and used it as a picnic blanket at Averill Park.
Nidia and I are both long married and know for ourselves wedlock’s charming compromises and suppressed truths. From time to time we meet up. A different city each time. We run across town plazas with arms outstretched, calling each other’s names.
Peter Frampton is old now, and in failing health. My husband remembers seeing him at L.A.’s Fabulous Forum back in 1979. By that time, the curly-headed singer’s star had already waned. For “I’m in You,” Frampton wore a miner’s lamp strapped to his angelic head as he probed the audience for love.
Patricia Q. Bidar is a California native, raised in the Port of Los Angeles Area. Her writing appears in a number of journals and anthologies including Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best Microfictions, and the Pushcart Prize. Her flash piece, “Over There,” will appear in Flash Fiction America anthology (W.W. Norton, March 2023). Patricia lives with her family outside of Oakland, CA. Connect with her on Twitter (@patriciabidar) or on her website (https://patriciaqbidar.com).
