a friend stopped by today, somewhat unexpectedly, to tell me, among other things, that everything i do is awesome. that was nice. surprising. we had a nice afternoon, dicking around AsLIC. i played piano for a while, which was liberating. i have not played for others too much lately, and i will take the private recital versus the public hall any day. it was a fell swoop kind of encounter, all good, between two old friends.
…..
an unrelated conversation just occurred, in which a 40-something (i think) friend recounted how he unwittingly dated a 17-year-old thinking she was at least 21. she had fake ID and her dad was a cop, so she got free access to any clubs and bars she wanted. and, of course, she looked older, as many young women mature faster and tend to look older than their male counterparts of the same vintage.
she asked him to guess her age. he tried 23. younger. 22? younger. he thinks to himself, we’ve been to 4 or 5 bars, 3 or 4 clubs, obviously the bouncers should have caught something by now… she tells him she is 17. his jaw drops. hell rises. a jail cell flashes through his mind.
it’s all good, though. she shows up at his apartment the next day. she is wearing her school uniform from the catholic school. she stopped by to ask him to go the prom. he is 35. he agrees to go, and says that he spent most of his time at the prom checking out the teachers and chaparones, who were closer to his age. he met the family, who thought it was all fine. there was no sex going on, and it was a running joke in the family that the 17 year old hottie was working her wiles and exercising her powers over the old men of Queens Boulevard.
i have no comparable story of underaged near-debaucheries, though when i was 26 or 27 i dated a girl for a few weeks before discovering she was 17. we dated more seriously in later, more mature years, and we are still friends today (don’t tell anyone, but she is the above-mentioned friend with whom i spent the afternoon).
i have no comparable story to the 17 year old hottie with her NYPD-supplied credentials, but i knew a girl for a while who was 22, but who i thought was a few years older. i thought for sure she was 25, but no, it was 22.
she was talking one day about how she was moving out of her apartment, and she had to either donate things to Salvation Army, or just throw things away.
as an example she said “I have this dress, this blue dress. I haven’t worn this since the 8th grade. That was SIX YEARS AGO!”
i was 42 when she said this to me. at the time my 8th grade was 28 years ago, and but a squall of crumbled yearbook memories. her comment about the “blue dress” evoked Monica Lewinsky-esque associations of come-stained dresses held up to prosecutorial scrutiny. my “6 years ago” was 2004, whence my father was still alive, i still had not spent off the corporate severance money from 2002, and i guess life was just fine.
i don’t even remember the years any more. the years, i like to say, the years they pass like strangers. i remember not one from the other without some epistolary frame of reference, some paperwork. even e-mail will suffice for time-stampery, for a record of the time stampede.
