WRITING: tell me about your first time

Our sophomore year, when Christina and I shared an apartment, we took a road trip out to California. It was my first time seeing the ocean. On the drive home, this incident occurred. This story was written for my Creative Nonfiction class in college. Christina was in the class, and we each wrote our version of the event without sharing with each other until the end. They turned out very distinct. If she still has hers, I'll post that one too.

The class identified the main theme in mine to be the contrast between Christina and myself. This story was published in the university's literary magazine. It is the only thing I've ever published. I am lazy with writing lately. Enjoy!

Tell Me About Your First Time

The night was dark, thick. The city lights of Albuquerque and the casinos on the edge of town were slowly fading away behind us. The vast desert landscape stretched out all around the car, but it was veiled by the black. It was only the headlights piercing the road and the distant, pale taillights of other cars ahead of us.

Christina sat silent and rigid beside me. The dashboard lights cast small shadows over her face. Her hands were clamped on the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead at the road, her head held tightly up, brow furrowed, lips pursed.

The quiet was heavy in the car; I was choking on it. I cracked the window. The wind howled in and swirled the cool night around us. I lit another cigarette. My lungs and throat would have probably been burning by now, but the beer and raspberry rum still slipped through my veins. The smoke was only sweet.

I looked over at Christina again. She had not moved. I knew she was pissed – she was never any good at hiding her emotions. She was clumsy and awkward when she tried to lie. But I didn’t care. I was too drunk, too irritated as well, to agonize over her anger. I cuddled up in the tension between us and tried to focus on the road and the darkness.

We were only an hour, maybe an hour and a half late leaving Albuquerque. She had no right to be upset. We had been planning to stop in Las Vegas and then Albuquerque on the way home. She knew I wanted to spend time with my friend and her family, and I wanted to drink. I was starting to get the shakes after a week of not drinking. She was fine, perfectly content watching Dave Chapelle on HBO and sitting with us until her boyfriend, Josh, called. Then she wanted to leave immediately so she could be home in time to pick him up from work. Their relationship caused enough problems for us at home. Josh was at our apartment every day and every night. I was either at home alone or with both of them molesting each other. He ate my food and showered in my hot water for free; I would do nothing to convenience him. Besides, if it was her friend we were visiting, we would have stayed unquestionably for hours.

God knows how the two of us ended up with the same name. I never could understand when people mistook us for sisters. Besides the fact that no parents would be so cruel as to name both their daughters Christina, we were nothing alike. She was tall and slender. I was a little shorter, “thick,” with big boobs. We did not live or act similarly either. She worked at a bar downtown constantly while I wasted away my days drinking with degenerates. She had never been in trouble; I was almost off a deferred sentence and had seen court for my friends or myself too often. Her family stayed together and had money; mine did not. All this tension always resonated in our relationship, but somehow it balanced out enough. Josh was the only thing we couldn’t quite resolve. She couldn’t see why it bothered the hell out of me to have him in my apartment every day and around all the time, and I couldn’t understand why she needed him present every second and never wanted to hang out with me anymore. I was always the third wheel either way.

I did not want to go home. I had no desire to leave California, Las Vegas, Albuquerque. She was itching to hurry home to her boyfriend after a week; I had nothing to go back to. I dreaded the identical, tedious days. We had gotten along so well the past few days; I did not want to start bickering with her about Josh once a week again. I didn’t want to return to the pointless classes, the pathetic job, the endless drinking, my empty life. The classes all looked the same, felt the same and could not hold my interest. I did not care about college, only knew I needed for later in life. I worked at an airplane restaurant where my boss hated me and I was lucky to make $20 a shift. The weeks just went in monotonous little circles, nothing new, nothing exciting. I had seen everything at home fifty times before. Why would I want to leave new places and possibilities?

The lights of Santa Fe began twinkling on the edge of the night. My throat felt dead, and my mind deafened me from remaining silent for so long. The alcohol was fading from me slowly. I felt my nerves rising up to my skin again.

“Can we stop at a gas station in Santa Fe?” I finally said. My words seemed so loud.

“Yeah,” she replied.

The tension seemed to vanish from the car. Christina sat more relaxed in her seat, breathed more softly as we pulled off the highway. It just dissolved. I was confused; I didn’t know if she was still upset, if I was still angry, but I glided along with it. Four more hours would be endless in silence.

The gas station was small, rundown, filthy – just like all the others on the way to Los Angeles and back. They all mirrored each other. The same people in the parking lots around the gas pumps, the same products in identical arrangement, the same dry, bored clerks. I cringed as I hovered over the toilet seat in every bathroom.

I could still feel the alcohol faintly as I settled back into the car and we returned to the interstate, but it disappeared rapidly as Christina and I filled the car with our babbling. I was unable to sleep in cars, so I was almost always up, talking with her through her turn at the wheel. She could sleep anywhere instantly. I swear the girl could pass out standing up if she wanted to. When I was driving, the car was quiet. I would sing along to a CD to keep myself awake, knowing she was too unconscious to hear me.

The gloom against the windows slipped by. I could see the terrain in my mind – the dead fields and few trees, the mountains or hills off in the distance – though it was too dark. I was familiar with the stretch to Albuquerque from escaping down to my friend’s too frequently.

The lights of the small towns rose before us and fell behind us, spaced out by the black in between. Fewer cars appeared on the road. We were alone. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, and we talked over our spring break. We reminisced about California, my first time seeing the ocean, staying with her aunt and uncle in Orange County, going to Hollywood Boulevard and Universal Studios, our encounter with the Scientologists. They had conned us into taking a personality test. While Christina passed as normal, I apparently scored low and had to spend over an hour with one of their representatives trying to convince me to let them help me. We laughed about Las Vegas, parking at the Aladdin and walking the entire strip – starving, being whistled at and bombarded by hooker flyers – to ride the slow rollercoaster at the top of the Stratosphere. We left Albuquerque alone, and the conversation shifted to sex. Eventually, we always ended up talking about sex.

“The thing I liked about him was that he was blunt, honest. No lines. No mind fucking. He just said, ‘Hey, you’re cute; I want to fuck you,’” I said.

“Yeah but he was a married crackdealer,” Christina said.

“I know. I know! Technically, he was separated. Why does the crackdealer have to be so hot? The tattoos, good God, the tattoos. I am a sucker for good ink!”

Christina laughed at me. We both knew that I was stupid. We went over her first boyfriend and things she did with Josh. I babbled about different guys, mostly how they sucked. We talked about places, weird behavior, any interesting or comical detail. Home was getting closer.

“Dude, my first time was horrible,” I said. I had turned sideways in my seat to face her, my knee pressed against the center console. “I was so drunk and on my period. We were on his sister’s floor, and I kept hitting my head on the heater along the wall. Oh, it sucked!”

“Oh, God. Did I ever tell you about my first time?”

I could not remember if she had before, so I waited for the story. The car was easing up a gradual hill, moving under an overpass in the middle of nowhere. As we reached the crest of the hill, a breath after her question, she screamed out, “Oh, shit!” and violently yanked on the steering wheel.

I turned my head from facing her only to catch a glimpse of a brown blob in the headlights. The car swerved through the left lane and towards the deep ditch of a median. Christina tugged the wheel again, and we went flying across the highway towards the guardrail. I could hear her saying, “Oh, shit. Oh, shit” as she overcorrected her turn again. The car skidded back and forth over the lanes – ditch, guardrail, ditch, guardrail – the body of the car rocking violently on the frame at the force.

Then the car lost control. Maybe Christina touched the brakes. We careened around. I could hear the tires squealing. My body was pressed into my seat. I felt my hand clutching the seatbelt. The world rotated completely around the windshield. Christina was yelling or saying something. I fell into an observant compliance. I settled into the accident and calmly watched it happen. I accepted that I had no control; I had been in enough car accidents, too many.

The car whirled around and smashed into the guardrail. I heard the metal contort in my ear. My knee slammed into the dash, and the car sprawled across both lanes. The engine puttered and groaned before stalling, leaving some alarm or buzzing filling the car.

We sat shocked for a moment, listening to ourselves breathe to make sure we still could. Christina’s hands were clamped onto the steering wheel, her eyes staring straight out ahead. I gradually loosened my hand from the seatbelt.

“Are you ok?” I finally said.

“Yeah. Are you ok?” she replied, releasing her grip and looking over at me.

“I think so. Shit, we should probably push the car out of the road.”

“Yeah.” Her voice was kind of shaky.

Headlights of a truck and a car pulled up behind us as I eased out of the passenger seat. Pain lit up over my knee when I stood. I noticed the dent in the guardrail and the steep drop into the dark on the other side. I could only think that I used to open beer bottles on guardrails when I was younger. I gimped pathetically around the car as we pushed it back onto the shoulder.

“Are you girls ok?” A man had stepped out of the truck and was walking towards us. The headlights blazing from behind him obscured his face, and I saw only his shape.

“Yeah. We’re fine,” one of us said.

“What happened?”

“There was a deer in the road, and I swerved to miss it and lost control of the car,” Christina said.

“You’re lucky we were pretty far behind you, or we would have hit you guys too,” he said.

I slid myself onto the guardrail as the man called the police. I could feel the cold metal through my jeans, and it bit at my bare hands. The woman from the car had joined us; she knew the man. They were both talking to Christina and to me. I responded but was not paying attention. My mind was wandering along the black banks of the creek so far down on the other side of the guardrail, anywhere but here. It was a sign; we shouldn’t have left; we shouldn’t go home.

The man let us use his cell phone even though we had our own buried somewhere in the car. Christina called her parents, the phone shuttering against her ear and her voice wavering as she regurgitated the story, told them she wrecked her brother’s car. I called no one. My father wouldn’t care, and my mother would overreact; I didn’t want to worry her until I was safe and at home, and it was over.

The ambulance arrived first. The man and the woman knew the paramedics. I kept wondering, where the hell are we that everyone knows everyone? I hated the small town feeling. I hobbled into the cramped back of the ambulance, clean and overloaded with medical supplies. They iced my knee as they asked the same questions, and we repeated the story again.

When the cop arrived, poking his head in and querying us, I knew we were fucked. In my memory, he was a thick man, dark with sharp eyes. His large head teetered on a puffed up chest. A typical cop. But I am not sure; it could be the alcohol tainting his features or the night distorting my memory.

He seemed helpful at first. He talked in a calm, restrained voice, but I saw it waiting in his crooked smile. Christina and I signed waivers after refusing to go to the hospital. I glanced over at the cop quietly mumbling to the EMTs as we returned to the guardrail between our car and his. Then the ambulance left. Our witnesses were already gone. We were abandoned on the dark, empty highway with this cop.

The lights on his squad car were swirling around silently. They danced over Christina’s worried face and our wounded car, flashed over the cop’s uniform. His civilities vanished almost immediately. I could see the power rush over him. He didn’t have to be nice anymore.

“Tell me again what happened,” he said as he paced in front of us.

“There was a deer in the middle of the road, and I swerved to miss it and lost control of the car,” Christina said.

“There was a deer?”

“Yes, there was a deer,” I said.

“Who was driving?”

“I was,” Christina said.

“You were driving?”

“Yes, she was,” I said.

“You know, I looked in your car. I think that seat is way too close for you to be driving.” Christina was only a couple inches taller than me. We never moved the seat when we rotated driving even when we borrowed each other’s car at home.

“She was driving.” I was starting to shout.

“I think you were sleeping, and she was driving,” he said to Christina.

“No, I was driving since Albuquerque,” Christina said.

“When did she start driving?”

“She was driving before –”

“I wasn’t driving. She has been driving ever since Albuquerque,” I said.

“When did you go to sleep?” he asked Christina.

“I was sleeping when she was driving.”

“She was sleeping when I was driving before Albuquerque. I wasn’t driving. She was driving after Albuquerque,” I yelled.

I knew what he was doing. I had played this game many times with many cops before. They were all the same. The cops that made us dump out an 18-pack in Palmer Park, the drunk cop and the asshole that gave us our underage drinking tickets downtown at our friends’ apartments, all the cops that had shown up at my accidents, the cops that snuck up on us on Gold Camp Road. All the same. He was trying to confuse us, trick us into confessing. He was trying to mind fuck us. Christina had not been in any car accidents; she had not done this with any cops before. I feared she trusted the police. He was confusing her, making her stumble over her words. I wasn’t going to let him do this. I wasn’t going to get duped into anything. I had done this too many times. We were telling the truth. But we were young; we must be lying. We were females; we really must be lying. I started ranting.

“Miss. Miss, come with me.”

He took my arm and guided me to his squad car. He opened the back door and pushed me to the seat. Amazingly, this was my first time in the back of a cop car. I wedged my legs in, and he shut me the door. My knee was throbbing against the partition and grate in front of me. The melted ice was dripping over my hands and down my pants. I watched him saunter back up to Christina. He had his hands on his fat hips and his back to me. Christina was shaking her head and moving her hands around while she spoke. I couldn’t hear them, just the gospel music in the car. I couldn’t make out the song, nor would I be able to ever identify it. The car just filled with “Praise the Lord!” or “Sweet Jesus!” every few minutes. It made me want to claw out my eardrums.

I looked out again. Christina was frustrated; she was crying. My chest tightened; I couldn’t breathe; I needed a cigarette. I was so scared she would slip. We were telling the truth, but he was trying to manipulate us. I didn’t know if she knew how to do this. I didn’t know if he was going to trick her into saying something. I kept thinking, oh, god. I’m fucking going to jail. I’m going to get a D.U.I. when I wasn’t even driving. I’m so fucked. I’m going to jail. The one time I was actually doing the right thing, actually being smart, and not lying I was going to get totally screwed. Figured. My father had just told me the day before not to call him if I got in any trouble because he wouldn’t bail me out; he jinxed me.

The anger was rattling around and pumping through me when the cop returned to the car. He opened my door and crouched down beside me. I eased my crippled leg out.

“Have you been drinking?” he asked.

This was the hard question. Do you lie when you’re underage? How do you answer this one? I thought for a second.

“No.”

“When was your last drink? I can smell it on you.”

Shit.

“Albuquerque, over six hours ago.”

“You were driving, weren’t you? She was asleep, and you were driving, and you nodded off at the wheel, didn’t you?”

“No. I wasn’t fucking driving! I drank in Albuquerque, and she drove us home!”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe me or don’t. It’s the fucking truth. I don’t know what the fuck else to say.”

“Miss, can you please watch your language around me.”

It had to be the gospel music. I just looked at him, and he shut me in again. I was shaking. I was so frustrated and deprived of nicotine that I wanted to scratch his goddamn eyes out. Why wouldn’t he just listen? We were telling the truth. I didn’t want to go to jail for something I actually didn’t do. I felt trapped, helpless. My heart was pounding, and my eyes were burning.
He led Christina to the car and put her in the front seat. I was the bad one who yelled and cussed; I got stuffed in the back. She looked at me as he walked around to the driver’s side. Her cheeks were puffy, eyes red, and there were tear tracks down her cheeks.

“We’re so fucked,” I said quietly.

The cop dropped himself into the car and crammed himself behind the steering wheel. He made us recite our information and punched it into his computer. God, I wanted a cigarette. I couldn’t think about anything else. If I was going to jail, why waste time and torture me with this atrocious music?

“All right,” he said. “I think you’re both lying. I think you were driving,” He looked at me in the rearview mirror, “and you were sleeping.” He turned to Christina. “There was no deer. You just passed out at the wheel. That seat was too far up for her to be driving. And how did you hit your knee in the passenger seat? I can give you a D.U.I., and I can give you reckless endangerment for letting her drive.”

“Why the fuck would she let me drive if I was drinking, and she was sober?” The alcohol was back on my tongue.

“Miss!”

“I’m sorry. But why would she let me drive?”

“I don’t know. It happens all the time though. Some guy will get drunk at a bar and won’t let his buddy drive his car home. They get in an accident, and the driver gets a D.U.I., and his buddy gets in trouble for letting him drive drunk.”

“But she wasn’t driving,” Christina said. He raised his hand.

He continued on with a lecture about drinking and drinking underage and drinking and driving. I just stared at the window and saw the smoke from a cigarette glide along the other side.

“I think I’m going to give you underage drinking,” He looked at me. “And you careless driving.” He pointed at Christina.

“Without having me blow?” I didn’t even care anymore.

“You admitted drinking to me, and I could smell it on you. Are you on anything else because your pupils are really dilated?”

“My pupils are always dilated.” I stared out the window and waited for my ticket. I was so close to getting off deferred sentence for my last underage drinking ticket but oh well. I was sure the court would have to waive it without an alcohol level from the breathalyzer.

The lecturing began again. His voice and the gospel music were shredding my brain. My skin was itching. I was feeling claustrophobic. I barely heard a word he babbled or anything he asked Christina or how she answered. I just wanted out. Somehow, eventually, he ended up giving us nothing and letting us go. I was not paying attention, so I don’t know how it happened. Did he fail at scaring it out of us? Did he finally believe us? Did he not have enough proof to actually give us tickets and haul us to court? I didn’t care. I felt the cool air on the skin and stretched my poor knee as I gimped back to our car.

The cop followed us to the next gas station. Apparently, we were just slightly south of Pueblo. The smoke felt so smooth and sweet in my lungs as I sucked down my last cigarette. I bought more at the gas station – filthy and small like the others. Christina called her parents again, and I just walked past the phone to the bathroom. I could tell them all about it tomorrow.
I felt a great relief over another cigarette as we started back on the highway again. It was shocking that the car still moved. Just a dented frame and maybe a bent CV joint. The depression near the trunk didn’t even look that bad. The ride home was slow though. Christina didn’t want to overexert the wounded car – a good idea. The whole experience wouldn’t really change anything. We would go home to the same days in the same lives, and it would just become a good story to tell, another excuse to hate the police, a reason to fear deer. We ranted blindly over the cop as the road raced underneath us.

“He was trying to mind fuck us,” I said.

“I know. He was asking all those questions, and I was getting confused, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“Yeah.” I turned towards her again, and my knee touched the dash. “Damn it! That’s how I hit my knee.”

“And he could have talked to those people. They saw us get out of the car. You on the passenger side and me on the driver side. The paramedics knew them.”

“Shit, I didn’t think of that. It would have been helpful to think of all this when he was bitching at us. He said you were sleeping. You weren’t sleeping; we were fucking talking the whole time. I can remember the last thing you said before it happened.”

“Me too.”

I sucked the last drag of my cigarette and tossed it out the window. The sparks exploded on the road behind us. Christina sighed and rested her head against her arm.

“So, tell me about your first time,” I said.