The sweet smell of gasoline…

Just one whiff of it – always takes me back… Back to 1984.  To being 16.  To spending the summer in Nova Scotia at my grandparents’ house.  To falling head over heels in love with a small town mechanic.  Rodney.  (sigh)  He worked at the garage in Bridgetown.  He wore grease-monkey overalls and at the end of the day had to scrub his hands clean from all the motor oil.  He rode a Honda 750 motorcycle.  Late at night, I would lie on my bed listening for that motorcycle. He rode that bike without a helmet, wearing a pair of jeans nothing else.  Just a glimpse of him on the bike made my heart pound.  I was infatuated.  He had green eyes.  GREEN!  He had a rockin’ stache (think young Tom Selleck) and drank stubby beer, cause that’s how they made them then.  Rodney was 21.

Only now, as the mother of my own teenaged daughter, do I realize why my mother, when she found out about this tryst, freaked the fuck out.  But at the time, I couldn’t see what was wrong with the picture.

“MOM!  I am grown up now!  He knows that I am mature.”

“He knows that you’re built like brick outhouse is what he knows…”

I was so mature, so old-beyond-my-years, so…. infatuated.  God was I dumb.  Sure he liked me.  Oh yeah he did.  Today, my nearly 45 year old breasts, still have a great deal of tone and lift to them – at 16 they would have been spectacular!!  I had a helluva personality, even back then, but a smokin’ hot body is like catnip to young men.  I was 16, with a kick-ass auburn perm, blue eyes and braces.  But he really liked me.  He really respected me.

Except, you know what’s funny?  I think he kinda did.  ‘Cause when I was determined to offer myself to Rodney (in the backseat of his Duster – there’s class for you), we got to the part where I should  have lost my virginity and I was willing to grit my teeth against the pain… he stopped.  In my extremely limited experience with men I thought that stopping wasn’t possible.  I, as many girls my age, thought that once they got to a certain point, men couldn’t stop.  Or maybe that’s just what young swains tell the girls they’re trying to climb on top of.  But here was Rodney – stopping.  Because he discovered I was a virgin.

“We should stop.”

“No, no, I’m okay…  I’m okay…”

“We should stop.”

And we did.  That night.  I guess when you have a nubile girl desperate to lose her virginity, you can only remain stoic for so long.  I mean, he wasn’t a saint.