Feels Like the First Time (12 page)

“Mornin’, Walt,” I said, waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

Walt handed me a piece of paper. I stared at it dumbly, completely unable to comprehend what I was looking at.

“That’s for you. I want you to have it.”

I stared stupidly at the paper, waiting for the world to come into focus.

“I woke up early this morning at about 5 AM.”

Oh, crap, this is going to be bad.

“I was sitting in my chair, watching the sun getting ready to come up and having my first cup of coffee when Dawn came in. She was so beautiful; walking in the door with the first light of the day peeking in behind her that it almost broke my heart. I sent her straight off to bed, but I was so moved at seeing her like that, I sat down and wrote a poem about it.”

Are you freaking kidding me?

“Uhh. Thanks, Walt. Really. But, why are you giving it to me?”

“Well, when I asked her why she looked so beautiful at the end of such a long night, she just said ‘Shawn.’ So, I thought I should bring it over to you.”

I had never been so relieved. I thanked Walt profusely, mostly for not killing me for keeping his young daughter out until sunrise. I said goodbye to Walt and turned around to see Mom, staring at me through narrowed eyes. I think she’d done the math, realizing if Dawn was heading home at 5 AM, we must still have been up when she went to the bathroom. Under her suspicious gaze, I went back to my room and collapsed across my bed. I slept the sleep of the dead and still-innocent until afternoon.

The rest of May 1978 passed in a happy, dizzying blur. Each of the moments we were able to spend together felt so rare and precious, I didn’t want to miss a single one.

My friends felt abandoned by me, but there were times I hung out with them just like we always had. One weekend, Jerry’s parents were out of town and we had the run of his house to ourselves. We didn’t throw the biggest party Mossyrock had ever seen. Instead, we opted for a mammoth game of
Risk, the Game of World Domination.
We blasted our KISS, Pink Floyd and Kansas albums at an absurd volume and played
Risk
for thirty hours straight. If Red Bull or Jolt Cola had been invented in 1978, we might have lasted longer. Instead we crashed and burned mid-way through Sunday.

During this marathon of skill, tactics and aggression, I occasionally thought of Dawn. My life had been challenging up to that point. Dawn and I had created something that was positive. That weekend at Jerry’s house, knowing she was just a few miles away, made me more confident about life than I had ever been before. I felt lucky to have her helping me emerge from the shell I had built around myself.

During this time, everything was easy and natural between us. The only challenge we faced was a predictable one: how to handle our racing hormones. On Prom night, when Dawn told me she wasn’t ready for sex, I quickly agreed. I was a normal teenage boy with normal lustful thoughts. But I knew we weren’t ready to go too far too soon. As time passed, we constantly revisited that plan.

Things progressed quickly. We advanced from being too awkward to properly make out in the back seat of Kenny’s Nova to incredibly intimate moments. We knew where we were headed. When talking calmly and logically about going further, the answer was always crystal clear. We both knew we needed to wait a while, no matter how passionate and impatient we felt. If we were in this for the long haul, waiting a few weeks, months or years made complete sense.

For the rest of the school year, we were completely content to run off every chance we got to what we regarded as our spot–Doss Cemetery. There we held each with complete emotional intimacy, skin to skin and staring into each other’s eyes. Looking back on that time from my more jaded perspective, it seems impossible that that’s all we did, but it was.

The longer we were together, the more comfortable we were with each other. Gradually, the conversation changed. Each of us would say “Well, I know I love you, and you love me, so…” We were not the first teenage couple to think this way. At the same time, I knew what it would mean if we slept together and were discovered. It would almost certainly lead to separation, and no short-term pleasure was worth that risk.

Toward the end of May,
Saturday Night Fever
was playing at the Fox Theater. We heard so much about it from our friends we had to check it out for ourselves. We went to the early showing and were surprised when we walked out of the theater into a warm spring evening. It wasn’t even dark yet. We looked at each other, tested the air, and knew we weren’t ready to head back to the ‘Rock just yet.

I had the brilliant idea to go to the drive-in over by the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds, where the Grade-Z horror movie,
The Incredible Melting Man
, was playing. It didn’t matter what the movie was, because as soon as darkness fell and the movie started, Dawn slid into me. Within a few minutes, we were both panting with pent-up passion. Dawn looked at me with a deadly serious, heated look and said, “I think you need to take me out of here.”

Forty minutes later, we were once again pulling into our familiar spot at Doss Cemetery. That entire drive, I remember thinking to myself, “Is this it? Are we going to do it tonight?” followed by, “Come on, Shawn, snap out of it, you know better than this!” As soon as we rolled to a stop, I opened the hatchback, spread out the blanket and we hopped in the back.

Dawn lay there with the leaf-filtered moonlight playing across her. She was the most beautiful girl I could imagine. Even so, the drive had allowed blood to flow back to the part of my anatomy that needed it most–my brain. We talked about music and the end of the school year, and waited for the fever to pass us by. When Dawn’s curfew drew near, we drove down the gravel road toward home as innocent as we had been when we drove up it.

One of my happiest memories of that May happened one Sunday afternoon. Our backyard was pretty big, since our property was a little over half an acre. Beside the L-shaped garden was a spot where my step-dad had plumbed in a water spigot and a hose reel. This was my favorite place to wash the Vega.

I pulled the Vega up into the yard with the doors open and the radio on. Jackson Browne’s
The Load Out
was playing loudly. I’d already soaped and rinsed, and was starting to dry it off when Dawn appeared. It was a warm spring day and she was wearing shorts and a halter top. The sun had been shining all day, but spring weather changes quickly in western Washington and the sky suddenly darkened.

The thought of rain just crossed my mind when I felt the first raindrop, the size of a nickel, splash warmly against my arm. I looked up to see a sudden squall upon us. Drying the car was suddenly less of a priority. Both our houses looked far away, so we dashed inside the greenhouse my step-dad built across the back of his workshop.

In the time it took us to run to the greenhouse, we were both soaked. Inside, the smell of potting soil, plant starts, and gardening chemicals was heavy in the air. The rain escalated quickly into a thunderstorm. It beat down with incredible force and noise on the tin roof of the greenhouse. The storm came on so fast it made us laugh with surprise as we stared out at the show Mother Nature was putting on for us. I looked at Dawn with her soaking wet hair and held her close. I sang the song
Rain on the Roof
by the Lovin’ Spoonful softly in her ear. I’d never felt closer to another human being, almost whispering the words to her. I was in heaven, and wished those days would never pass.

A week later I was at Dawn’s house watching
Fantasy Island
with Dawn and her parents. I should say that Walt and Colleen were watching TV. Dawn was busy applying lip gloss and I was busy watching Dawn applying her lip gloss. This was endlessly fascinating to me, as it would be to most teenage boys.

It was a light, strawberry-flavored lip gloss that didn’t have a lot of color, but gave her lips an alluring shine. I was thinking I would kiss the gloss right off her if Walt and Colleen left the room for even a moment. I don’t know how long this process lasted, but Dawn was making quite a production of it. She would put a little on, then glance over at me, then put on a little more and glance over at me again, teasing me into oblivion.

Eventually, Colleen cleared her throat at us, which brought me out of my reverie. I don’t know how long she had been watching us, but it had been long enough to catch on. She arched her eyebrow at Dawn and said, “Are you trying to hypnotize him?”

Dawn said “no” in the scornful way only a teenage girl can. But, of course, that was exactly what she had been doing. The innocence of innocents. 

The most perfect month of my young life vanished as suddenly as it arrived. Just before graduation, I took a job working on a small farm outside of town, cleaning out stalls, feeding the horses and pygmy goats and spraying the fields for toxic weeds. It wasn’t glamorous work, but part-time jobs weren’t easy to come by in a town of 400. My job was as simple as life could get, consisting of moving horseshit and listening to mindless orders.

The only tricky part of the job was dealing with the pygmy goats, which had free range over most of the farm. The alpha billy’s name was Adam, and he had a classic case of small goat syndrome. He may have been less than two feet high, but he walked tall and acted like the enforcer for the entire farm.

Apparently, he saw me as a challenge to his authority, because he had a favorite trick he loved to play on me. He would lounge around the barnyard, looking innocently one way or the other until I was lulled into a false sense of security. Just when I turned my back on him, he would lower his head and ram his horns into the back of the knees.

Anyone who has been hit in the back of the knees by a pygmy goat knows the applicable laws of physics. I was going down. Eventually I learned that walking around with my head in the clouds was dangerous, often resulting in me lying flat on my back in the dirt. I learned to listen for the
thump-thump-thump
of Adam’s approaching hooves. Of course, it was harder to jump out of the way when I was carrying two buckets of pig slop.

Graduation was scheduled for June 2
^nd
, but the powers that be at Mossyrock High unleashed us on the world a week and a half earlier. As a freshman, Dawn was still in school. Therefore, the outside world held little interest for me. If they had let me, I would have continued to prowl the halls until graduation forced me out.

Instead, I took the chance to work overtime at the farm spraying for Scotch broom, a noxious shrub that spreads quickly if not contained. That meant lugging a canister of weed killer on my back and spraying it on any suspicious-looking plants. Doing this job helped me decide to stay in school and find work that didn’t require me to sweat unless the air conditioning in my office went out.

After several days of spraying, I had inhaled enough poison to kill my entire family. I was not feeling well. In fact, I was almost done spraying the last field when I found myself unexpectedly laying on my back, staring up at the wisps of clouds against the blue sky and wondering what the hell happened to my legs.

I was feverish and dizzy, but I thought I had simply ingested too much weed killer. I went home, showered and changed, and went to my baccalaureate. It was being held in the Multi-purpose Room. Outside, it was 90 degrees. It was even hotter inside, and before long I felt sick as a dog. Midway through the ceremony, the inevitable moment arrived and I passed out for the first and only time in my life. Fortunately, I stood between Jerry and Harold, who held me up.

I realized it was something other than the spray making me sick. After a quick visit to the doctor, I had an easy diagnosis: strep throat. The prescribed cure was to take some antibiotics, stay off my feet, and get plenty of rest.

Unfortunately, there was no rest on the agenda for the next several days. My graduation was the next night, then my
Star Wars
-themed Senior Party, which our parents had been planning for months. Two days after that, I would be flying to Alaska for the summer with Jerry.

When we made the plan to spend the summer bumming around Alaska, I had no social life and I didn’t think I’d be missing out on much. Now, being away from Dawn for three months seemed like a horrible idea. I was dreading the trip with every fiber of my being.

My inability to have an adult conversation essentially cost me my longest friendship. As spring and my relationship with Dawn bloomed, I could have gone to Jerry and told him, “Look, man, I know our Alaska trip seemed like a good idea when we planned it, but now I just don’t want to go, and I’ll be miserable if I do go.” I think our friendship had been strong enough to have withstood that.