My Sex and Violence

Al’s drug dealing dad wasn’t able to muster up enough child support to send him to the elite all male private schools me and my friends went to. So they sent him to the neighborhood public shithole school, G——–. It all worked out though, cause unlike the tough entrance exams for elite private schools, the metal detectors at the entrance of G——— were something Al could actually pass.

The public schools did have one thing my school didn’t: Girls. I knew this because Al and my nightly phone chats started getting interrupted by a mystery caller. After a lite grilling, he gave up her name, Belinda.

“Dude, introduce me.”

“No way.”

“Conference call us.”

“No”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

After what seemed like an eternity, Al relented. There was one giant string attached though. I had to promise beyond a shadow of a doubt that no matter what, I would NOT try to steal Belinda from him. So I promised, crossed my heart and hoped to die with a needle in my eye. This must have disarmed Al’s suspicions because a few seconds later, there was a 13 year old girl’s voice on the phone. Now I hadn’t been trying to deceive Al. The sad fact is, I’ve always been too terrible a liar to even attempt that. But after I heard Belinda’s Voice, I knew I was going to break my promise.

There are few steps to stealing a you friend’s girl. I couldn’t articulate them at 14, but my factory pre-installed instincts just kicked in. These are the same instincts that come built in to all of us. Just watch children in a playground playing or adults in.. well everywhere.

Step #1: Put Your Friend Down…Subtly.
I told Belinda about the day Al almost broke my neck on the trampoline, except I took out all my threats of kicking Al in the fucking face and played it like I wanted Al to jump with us. The part about him faking being hurt made Belinda laugh, and drove Al into a slathering frenzy of denial. At this point, if you’re Al, your subconscious alarm system is reeling, except your little peanut of a conscious mind is still trying to figure out why. It’s cause you’re losing face man.

Step #2: Rescue Your Friend By Giving Him a Compliment… That Categorizes Him.
Once Belinda was having a good laugh at Al’s expense, I came to his defense, saying Al’s the Rebel. He always does his own thing. Doesn’t let anyone tell him what to do. Doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Al, desperate to regain the status he had lost, immediately grasped the life line I was throwing to him and eagerly agreed with me. This was the nail in his coffin, cause it sent a clear signal to Belinda’s feminine radar that Al had just let me define him. Regardless whether the definition is good or bad, the definer is the dominant friend. And the defined immediately loses that female catnip known as mystery.
The real elegance to this dagger stab into Al’s psychic back though, was that I called him a Rebel. The Rebel doesn’t care what people think. So now Al can’t bitch about the whole story or it will look like he cares what we think, and contradict the rebel identity he’s just claimed! Check mate. At this point, Al was like a chicken running around with its head cut off, spewing blood from his neck stump, not realizing it’s already dead.

Step #3: Wait Til Your Friend Cuts Her Off, Then Listen To Her
So Belinda starts telling me about a similar story she had with Al at which point Al, trying to save face, cuts her off. I immediately cut Al off, and told him to let Belinda tell her story. I don’t remember her story, cause I really wasn’t listening. By letting her talk though, I was defending her while allowing her to seduce herself by basking in my male attention. My 14 year old brain was on total autopilot now, and Al’s headless chicken was going into convulsions on the other end of the line.

Step #4: Flirt With Her Just Enough To Maintain Plausible Denyability
At this point, I gave Belinda a subtle generic compliment by telling her only smart girls really like me but for some reason, dumb girls hate my guts. Sounds innocent, but to her feminine computer decoder, that means: “We’ve been talking for a while, and I don’t hate him, so he must think I’m smart. I like that. He appreciates me.” Poor Al’s chicken is in the fryer.

Step #5: Be Unavailable
Hey Belinda, it was cool meeting you. I Gotta go though. Why don’t we talk later? Now a really smooth cat would have made an excuse to talk to her later that seemed completely logical and innocent, but hey, what do you want? I was 14 and still a little angry at Al for the trampoline incident.

Like I said before, all these steps to stealing Al’s girl were instinctual. I had no conscious idea how I was doing it. And Like the first traumatic experiences of a baby’s life, my memories of what Belinda and I spoke about during those first weeks on the phone have been completely lost, probably for my protection. But I do remember how it FELT. I remember the tension of neither one of us wanting to be the first to admit how turned on we were by each other. I remember how it felt for a beautiful girl (Al had shown me her picture) to be attracted to me even though she had no idea what I looked like. It felt…powerful.
Then, one day, and completely by accident, Belinda and I met in person. Al and I went to the multiplex to see “Great Balls of Fire.” It’s this movie about a famous pianist who married a 13 year old. Anyway, Al and I are watching this thing when he turns around and lo and behold, there’s Belinda with some friends sitting right behind us. We only saw each other for a brief second in a darkened theater, but it was the first time she ever saw the kid who was enrapturing her every night on the phone. I was terrified, mainly because she was just as pretty as her picture. He dark curly hair made a shiny frame around her full lips and sexy half-Asian eyes. It was more than my hormones could handle. So after a brief hello, I awkwardly turned back to watching the movie. My reaction in her eyes must have seemed not much different than as if Al had pointed out a piece of gum on the floor behind us. This is the first time I hurt Belinda’s feelings simple because I was scared or clueless, and it started a pattern that would continue for years.

A few days later, I asked Al what Belinda had thought of me. He said she said I had crooked teeth. At least she was honest. While playing blind man’s bluff when I was five, I ran full speed into a steel door. My front tooth is still chipped, and cause I never wore my retainers, my teeth are still all crooked. But that didn’t stop Belinda’s phone calls.

Pretty soon, Al started complaining about how Belinda, who used to be his potential fuck mate “best friend,” was now ignoring him. I even got the feeling that Al secretly blamed me for this. The nerve. I couldn’t be really angry at him though. After all, he was now at the receiving end of that cold opportunistic feminine instinct that women keep neatly tucked away behind their superior socials skills. Belinda had simply found someone she liked better, and she had no more control over her new feelings for me than she did over the vacuum that had replaced her feelings for Al. Since she couldn’t force herself to like Al, why bother leading him on? I’m not sure how Al felt about all this, cause I cut him off when Belinda called.

You see, I had bigger fish to fry. Since Belinda had called me after that random meeting in the theater, a thought started growing in my virgin 14 year old mind. If I could get Belinda to hang out with me when her parents weren’t home, I might actually have sex with her! After all, she was a public school girl. So more and more, our conversations started focusing on how we were going to finally get together. And finally one day, she invited me over…when her parents weren’t home!

But I’ll tell you all about that disaster later.