I love symphonies, concert halls, polyester band concerts, anything with classical and pseudo-classical music played, and I'm sure this is the derivative of some sort of sexual awakening as a very, very nerdy band student in the 8th grade. I was half boys-degutante, half boys are super-bueno! It was in this absolutely, devastatingly dorky phase of my life (13 years old) that I met a tall lanky fella that had a way about him at the time, and that way was seriously filling up pages and pages of these cheap Mead Composition Notebooks I would write all sorts of hateful, secretly lustful, and altogether "juicy" pieces in. "Juicy" being a relative term, considering the "dorky phase," "13 years old," etc. etc.
This boy had a sick charisma - not popular, not exceedingly handsome, not inventively clever. He was peculiar, he was tall, and he had an obscene amount of a reciprocated crush on me. In the land of 13, I was definitely underexperienced, unkissed, undeveloped, and thus, in need of some sort of male/peer approval. I started hanging out with these "normal" girls who had begun dating boys, and had to keep up - thus pressurizing the hell out of the situation. He had a crush on me. He could also have had a crush on my two best friends, but he was going out with a tall girl named Jamie. It was all very eighth grade. Very tapered-jeans chic.
I held his hand the week after he & Jamie broke up, at Wayne's World 2 ("just follow the weird naked Indian") and I thought that my whole life was beginning - nauseatingly and anxiously beginning. I called him that night after the movie from my friend Wendy's house and we giggled and jumped around on her queen-sized bed, her crooked poodle Charlie wondering what the hell was up with the two little blonde balls of hormones. Wendy was one of the best friends the boy was interested in. (Later, in 2003, the other girl he was interested in, Amanda, would call me and tell me that Wendy and her husband were killed in a car crash. I haven't thought about it - but I wonder if this boy attended her funeral. I didn't. I had gone to another friend's wedding. I still feel uncomfortable about it.)
The boy and I would have turbulent and passionate phone conversations about absolutely nothing - nothing important, nothing relevant, until one day he called me a bitch and I thought I would never speak to him again; that boy is cut out of my life. He was my first kiss at the ripe age of 17, four years after.
But in the Christmas of that year (1993), there was some sort of all-state, all-district band competition and he was going to see it. I sat next to him, after much of Wendy's prompting, and could smell his spicy, salty heat in the dark. I stole a sideways glance, saw his long silhouette next to mine, and felt the electricity of that smell. It was exciting, it was scary - everything, my whole adolescence was tangible in the scent, the experience of him.
There were small golden lights off to the side, a loudspeaker announcing the next performer.
To this day, I can think of no sexier place.