A Million Inches Delicious

(Part of a possibly-too-graphic series based on the misadventures had while stumbling around the figurative baseball diamond of sexual maturity. In no particular order.)

There is a brief lapse in dialogue in the Ingmar Bergman film we’ve rented, and that’s all the excuse I need. I pounce, gingerly, onto Kabir like an overstuffed dragonfly, praying to every Swedish filmmaker ever to live that my attempts will not be rejected. Kabir was a second-generation Russian girl with almond skin, marzipan laughter, and lips you could raise a family of four on. I was enamored, but more than just enamored, I was terrified. As a friend of my mine would later put it, Kabir came equipped with no status bar, there was no way to read her. One moment I was the springing fawn upon her heart’s meadow, and the next I would be neck-deep in confusion, turned down faster than a bedspread at a hotel run by centipedes on coke. Now I was all in, all cards on the table, anteing up and betting high. Poker references.

And it works. By some miracle she reciprocates, warm breath across her lips’ horizons, and just like that we’re in it. I come unhinged at the flare of unexpected acceptance, and soon we’re tumbling about like an eight-limbed lint roller, shedding clothes and squealing. That’s when I notice the smell.

At some point during the evening a dog had snuck into the room, a dog soaked in sweat and gasoline and farting out tar. At least that’s what it smelled like. The smell was so potent, so palpable, that all affection was executed, stopped dead in its footsteps. We search the apartment for the source, but the smell seems only to emanate from somewhere in her room. We sift through the garbage and peek under the mattress, but it’s not until we notice smoke that the culprit becomes clear. In our amour we have pushed the pillows against her bedside lamp, and now one of those pillowcases is on fire.

My heart leaps into heroism, and in an instant I have the pillow on the floor, the fire smothered under the valiant stamping of my trusty sneaker. Expecting a hero’s welcome back into the secret headquarters of her sheets, I am sorely disappointed when she breaks apart in front of me. “That could have been my hair!” she wails before running from the room, leaving me alone with a pillowcase and a pair of courageous moments, all ruined.