True Story
When I was in college I lived at home, commuted 25 miles to school on the bus every day, and held down a part-time job at the library to pay expenses. My dad said that I could live at home rent-free as long as I was in school and kept my grades up. He also covered my car insurance on a seven-year-old Toyota with a slashed back seat thanks to my brother forgetting he was carrying a box cutter on his way home from work at the local grocery store.
I caught the bus early in the morning and get to my first class at 8:10 am. I stayed in class until noon when I would get out, head to the sports center for a few minutes at the gym, and then grab lunch and head to the library for work at 2:00. I know that this is dating myself, but when I worked in the library I checked out software on a single floppy disk. Word, Excel, Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3 all fit on one disk in our cool, new, 9-inch screen Mac computers. We were high tech with a laser printer that only cost 25 cents a page to print. I made extra money by designing Excel charts for the liberal arts kids at $5.00 a page, unless you were cute, flirty, and a girl, then the price dropped to $2.50 a page.
I stayed at work until around 6:00 PM. After work I would study and try to be on the last bus at 9:00 pm. I worked 4 days a week and Thursday was my day off. This worked well because Thursday was “student day” at our local ski resorts with $5 lift passes. All my friends worked hard to get M-W-F class schedules in the winter so we could hit the slopes every week without missing too many sessions of our Thursday classes.
Thursday was also my day to get all my crap done that I didn’t get to during the week. My favorite errand, and the reason for this story, was getting my hair cut on 9th East, at a little barber shop just north of the mall and across the street from the park. I found this place because my friends and I would meet for Frisbee Football (remember, I’m old) on the weekends.
I dropped in early one Saturday morning to get a price list but the door was locked. Some of the lights were on in the back, so I knocked a couple of times and waited, watching for my friends to pull into the parking lot across the street. My car was always parked in front of the same lamp post every Saturday so they would know if I had arrived since I owned the flags from a summer spent as a camp counselor.
Through the barbershop window, I saw an older Hispanic man cross the back of the shop with a broom in his hand. I knocked again, hoping not to break the glass, or my knuckles. While I was waiting for him to reappear, Ray pulled in to the lot and parked next to my car. I stepped to the sidewalk and called his name. He saw me as he got out of his car and I threw him my keys so he could unlock the trunk and get out the stuff to start the game.
Now that I knew someone was in the shop, I wasn’t about to give up.
I turned around to knock again and almost rapped my knuckles on the forehead of a woman who was opening the shop.
“Watch yourself kid,” She said, and laughed at my obvious embarrassment, “What’s the rush?”
“I just need a haircut.” I stammered, forgetting that I was really only there for a price sheet.
She took me by the hand, pulled me into the shop, and led me to the first chair on the left. The shop was classic barbershop décor. Old magazines, mostly sports but a couple of Playboys at the bottom of the stack. There were mirrors in front of each chair and a couple of black and white TVs anchored to home-built shelves between the cutting stations. The smell of shaving cream and disinfectant pervaded the air and I started having flashback to watching my dad get his hair cut at “Frankie’s Chop Shop”, a surprisingly hip name for 65+ year-old Frankie.
She stood behind my chair and pressed her foot on the pedal, lowering my eyes until they were even with her breasts. I tried to avoid staring at them but there they were…
I have 4 different versions of this story in my drafts folder, they all date from 2007. That is 5 years ago! It is a story I have struggled to tell because it was very important to me and yet so long ago that I only remember the romanticized details. I find my writing skills on poor display as I go back and look at what I tried to capture in just words… As I look at the drafts, some are more accurate than others are. When I started blogging I changed the details a lot to “hide” who I was. I was always worried about being discovered, but honestly, who was I kidding? I barely got 1 comment a month back then so my fear was mostly ego and the hope that someone cared enough to find me.
A Truer Story
OK, so here is how it really happened.
I was 17, just out of high school, still a virgin, and very unsure of myself socially. I wasn’t in any rush to lose my virginity, but I was discovering how wonderful women were and they still made me very nervous, and my shyness was quite a bother.
I met Jane because my regular barber quit. She was chair number three and was rarely (never?) around when I got my haircut because she only worked weekends for a long time and I was only on campus during the week, so we never crossed paths. I was at school for an advanced prep class getting in-coming freshman ready for college.
She was really pretty, beautiful, very down home, simple make-up, fantastic hips, a beautiful smile, lips that smiled often, and very nice breasts. No one has found a subtle way to describe a woman’s chest, so most of us don’t try. You can say that a woman is full-figured, but that sounds like fat, you can say she’s “curvy” but that means a big ass, you can say she’s stacked, but that sounds like a truck-stop girlfriend, so I’ll just say that she had nicely shaped, always covered, perfectly sized breasts.
I would usually get my hair cut every 4-5 weeks, keeping it in control, but not too short. After I met Jane, I adopted a buzz cut that needed attention almost every week. At first she laughed at me when I’d come in only 7 or 8 days after our last cut, but as we became friends I think she started looking forward to Fridays at 4 o’clock.
Each week we would go through the same ritual. I’d come in, pay my 10 dollars to the receptionist, grab a magazine, and head back to the shampoo station. With my hair barely a quarter inch long, the women in the shop would look at me with a raised eyebrows….
I still keep my hair short, but now for much more practical reasons. While still sporting a full head of hair, unlike my brothers, it’s changing “shade” and I want to hide that as long as I can without going to hair in a can route. Jane was her real name. I quickly fell for her. She was married and as a young religious kid, I had a huge struggle between emotion and morals. I though she and I were a perfect match and the ideas that were running through my head were counter to everything I had grown up believing. I knew my mom had been unhappy for years, and though I never confirmed it, I suspected her of having an affair. I wondered if her affair made her happy, if my dad new about it, if he cared enough to even care. I say that only to say that my parent’s relationship, and the worries I had around it, changed how I related to Jane at a fundamental level.
Here’s the short version.
Jane started cutting my hair in the summer of ’83, after I got out of high school and started working on campus for the college football team. Summer was hotter than blazes and I found that I felt better with a buzz cut than anything else.
Jane’s shop was the closest to campus and that fact that she was seriously pretty didn’t hurt.
I started going in every week just to see her. She would slowly shampoo my hair and I would be in heaven. A couple of times, when the shop was empty, she would kiss me on the forehead and stroke my neck as I let my head soak under the hot running water.
Once, I was wearing shorts because I would be on my way to practice after my cut. I let my mind wander and I popped an erection that was very visible. She must have been looking at it for a minute or two before I realized what was happening. I tried to cover it up, stammered out an apology, and tried to stand up. She me from leaving and simply said that she took it as a compliment and that she wasn’t upset.
We continued like this for 6 months. I would come in every Friday, we’d talk, I’d try to flirt, she’d flirt back, and she’d give me wonderfully sensuous shampoos. When the football team was on the road, I would send her post cards, the tackiest ones I could find, and when I returned, they would be up on her mirror and it would make me smile.
After Christmas, I noticed a change. She seemed to be a bit more serious. We would talk more about her and her husband and, while she never admitted it, I started to notice problems that they were having. She missed a couple of weeks of work and people asked me if I was growing my hair out for the winter.
When she returned she was in a much different frame of mind. She stopped complaining about her husband and she returned to her fun and flirty ways. By necessity, she was always inside my personal space when she cut my hair, but on her return, she took it to a new level. When she stood in front of me she would lean in closer, when she spun me around to look at my hair, she would drag her fingertips across my shoulders and neck.
As time moved on and the end of the school year approached, she asked me to move my appointment back to 5:00, the last appointment of the night.
My story ends there, with one final meeting in the darkened barbershop on 9th street. My shampoo took hours, the cut was a languid two days, and the time under the hot towel was a week as Jane told me that she was moving away with her husband so he could take a new job. He hoped that the promotion, and the money that came with it would ease the marital stress at home, allowing her to stop working,
We found every excuse we could to stay together that night. I helped her clean the shop, put away the towels, start the laundry for the next day and count the till. We sat next to each other as she talked and cried and held each other until the tears stopped for a few moments. I felt her body in my arms and cried with her knowing that we would be apart within minutes. I asked if we could see each other before she left town but she just shook her head. This was, quite literally, her last hours in the shop. She gave me my postcards as we cleaned up her station and boxed up her cutting supplies.
We looked through them and laughed and she took one of them back to remember me. It was one without my signature, just some funny drawing, her address, and a smiley face.
We turned off the lights and held each other as I leaned back against the wall, letting her body melt into my arms for one last time. I kissed her for the first time, I mean really kissed her. I had kissed a few girls by then, but not too many, and it make my heart race and all the cliché’s of fireworks and heavy breathing ensued.
Then she did something that surprised me to my core. She took my wrist in her hand and guided my fingers between her legs. This was new, unfamiliar, my head swirled, I stiffened, and I kissed her harder as I felt her mover her body against my hand. I knew better than to move it away so I pressed firmly and upward and felt a warmth and excitement that I had never felt. She ground her body against my hand and gasped as she climaxed and the tears started anew. Her hand came to my hard cock and with a few strokes through the already strained denim, I came and shivered and held her very, very close.
We stayed like that for a long time until the night air, the clock on the wall, and the reality of what had happened sank in. I wiped away her tears and kissed her lightly one more time. I walked her to the car with her boxed goods in my arms, set it on the back seat, and closed the door. By the time I got to her, she had gotten in the car and rolled down her window. Our goodbyes were done.
I leaned in but she took my head in my hands, kissed me on the forehead, and said good-bye.
True to her word, I never heard from her again.
I kept the postcards for years.
