For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 5
The directions I had were pretty good and once I got off the bus I only had to walk a few blocks along a rustic road with no sidewalk to get to Cecilia’s sister’s house. I let myself in the gate and rang the doorbell and her brother-in-law, Todd, let me in.
He was a rangy guy in his late-thirties with coke-bottle glasses. He told me Cecilia was downstairs in her room and asked if I’d like anything to drink. “What are you having?” I asked. “I’m just opening a bottle of wine,” he told, and I said that sounded fine.
Laurie was in the kitchen making dinner.
“Hi, Daniel,” she said. “We’ve heard so much about you.”
It felt weirdly like meeting someone’s parents, although they weren’t that much older then me
He took me down to the basement, past me his shop equipment, and showed me where Cecilia’s little one-room in-law apartment was. It had a bathroom and a shower and a little high window that was at ground level.
“I see you’ve met Todd,” she said. “He’s cool. This weekend we should get him break out his gigantic bong. Laurie doesn’t like him to smoke pot so much but he will if we encourage him.”
I sat on her bed and she went over to the boombox on her dresser. “Do you like Guns ‘n’ Roses?” she asked me. I told her I wasn’t sure. In those days I read all the music magazines and all the local alternative weeklies. I subscribed to Spin and I had a pretty good idea of what bands were around. I seemed to recall a trend of L.A. hard-rock bands that were punkier than the hair-metal bands on MTV. They still had the glam thing going on but they were influenced by the Sex Pistols and maybe the Ramones and probably also the SST hardcore bands like Black Flag.
She put on a cassette and I could hear why she liked the music. For one thing it definitely rocked and the guitar sounded great. I wasn’t that into Axl’s voice but I could see where it might appeal to her. One of the song’s had a chorus that went “Where do we go/Where do we go now” and Cecilia told me how she thought that was the central issue for teenage lovers.
She scooted next to me on the bed. “You know how you’re always looking for someplace where you can get away from everyone and just be together?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”
“I mean you end up in a car or in a room at your friend’s house, but it’s this constant struggle.”
I just nodded while looking at her brown eyes. I kissed her. After we made out for awhile, she said, “Let’s go up and see if we can help out in the kitchen.” It’s funny. Even though Cecilia cultivated this rebellious image and seemed like she couldn’t give a damn what anyone thought, she still had better manners, a better domestic sense than I did. I’d just as soon have sat down there till we were called up to eat. I was lazy. I didn’t want to help set the table although I’d been brought up right and I knew it was the polite thing to do.
And it wasn’t just that this was her sister’s house and that she was living with them and that she wanted to stay on their good side or something. It’s just that she was a woman and had been trained from childhood in those graces that had somehow eluded me so far.
We went up and actually the table was already set. Dinner was nice, something simple with chicken and the white wine that Todd had opened. I didn’t know much about wine then but it was something from Napa.
After dinner (I helped clear the table), Todd went over to the fireplace and brought something back from the mantlepiece. It was a carved, hinged rosewood box. He opened it and took out a little baggie, a bic lighter, and some rolling papers.
“Oh, I should brought my stash,” I said.
“No, it’s no problem,” said Todd. “We don’t smoke it that much anymore, but what the hell— it’s Saturday.”
He quickly rolled a neat pinner, lit it, and passed it to me. I took a hit and passed it to Laurie, she did the same and passed it to Cecilia, who bogarted it for a while and then gave it back to Todd. On the second pass Laurie declined and went back to cleaning up in the kitchen. The three of us snoked it down to a roach.
“It’s more comfortable in the living room,” said Cecilia. We went over there and Todd put on some music, an LP by Joy of Cooking. “We should have a hootenanny,” said Todd. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “You know, a little talent show.”
“I don’t have any talents,” I told him.
“Come on,” said Cecilia. “It will be fun.”
Laurie came into the living room and Todd said, “It’s a hootenanny!” I was kind of dreading it. I’d just met these people. I was pretty baked and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself. Todd got a banjo out of the hall closet and played a fairly passable version of “Oh, Susanna” without turning off the record. Laurie sang a Cat Stevens song, “Longer Boats” or something, again with the contrasting music playing in the background.
Cecilia and I decided to do some “ice dancing” in our sockfeet. We pretended to ballroom dance while sliding around the hardwood floor loosely in time with the music on the stereo. We were laughing and it turned out I was having a pretty good time.
“Can we go in the hot tub tonight?” said Cecilia. “It costs about $20 every time you turn on the jets,” she said to me in a loud stage whisper that everyone could here. “Sure,” said Todd. “Don’t worry about the cost.” Laurie didn’t seem as keen on the idea but I’d never been in a hot tub.
This was in a way a kind of mythical California experience for me. I was going to soak in a hot tub in Marin County, naked with a bunch of near strangers, plus my girlfriend. I tried to imagine what the me of several years earlier, an uptight college student with east-coast attitudes, would have thought if I could have pictured myself now with a beautiful sex honey-blonde girlfriend. I was hoping I wouldn’t get inappropriately aroused but I had to admit that a soak in their outdoor tub on the deck under the stars sounded pretty good fun.
Todd went out to get the heat going and then came back in and lent me one of his bathrobes. Then Cecilia and I went down to her room to take a quick shower together so we wouldn’t get our sweat or grease in the tub, I guess. Todd’s robe was too big for, too long in the arms, but that didn’t matter. We went back upstairs to help Todd take the cover off the tub. “Does it really cost $20 a night to run this thing?” I asked him. “That’s about what the heating costs,” he told me. “But really, don’t worry about it. We probably would have used the tub tonight anyway.”
Cecilia and I put our robes on the deck chairs and then eased ourselves into the hot water. For the two seconds or so that I was naked and exposed to the cold night air I wasn’t actually all that self-conscious. I’d been losing weight lately and wasn’t as ashamed of my body as usual, and I figured nobody was exactly checking me out anyway.
We were sitting low in the tub, nearly up to our chins. We’d slip off the bench to put our heads entirely under and then come up and flip our hair back. My hair was down to my neck by then. Cecilia’s hair was shoulder length. It looked cool slicked back, sort of like a model.
Todd and Laurie came out, too their robes off, and got in the tub. Laurie was taller than Cecilia and somewhat lanky. She had pretty round breasts and I tried not to stare. She visibly relaxed as she sunk into the water. We all sat in the tub together companionably, looking up at the stars and rising or setting to adjust our body temperature. The steam from the tub made a somewhat warm zone above the water, but it was constantly whipping away and the fog was rolling in.
After about ten or fifteen minutes Laurie and Todd said they were going to bed and Todd asked us to turn off the heater and the jets and cover the tub when we went to bed. Their room was in the back of the house, so we noticed when their lights went out. I put my arms around Cecilia and kissed her. She reached down and held my cock in her hand.
“Fuck me, daddy.” she said.
I burst into tears.