Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

  “No.”

  “Then why are you so God almighty nervous?”

  He shifted his weight and stammered, “You said you’d do it if nobody’d tell? I like you better than any girl I ever met and well, I got to find out, you know. I won’t tell, I promise I won’t tell, if you’ll do it with me. Come on, please.”

  The thought of doing it wasn’t shocking, it was that I’d never thought about doing it with ole Leroy. “But Leroy I don’t think I feel, uh—romantic about you.”

  “That don’t matter. We’re best friends and that’s better than all that mush.”

  “How are we gonna do it without getting caught?”

  “We’ll go down to the shack back of the lots. Only other person who ever goes there is Ted and he’s at work. Come on.”

  “Okay, it can’t be all that bad, I guess.” We snuck around the far side of the trailer and went down through the palmetto scrubs to the shack. An old twin-bed mattress that had the stuffing half knocked out of it was on the floor. We checked it for snakes and bugs. Then Leroy whips out his thing and jumps on top of me.

  “Leroy, you asshole. Don’t you want to take your clothes off?”

  “I never did that before.”

  “Well, I ain’t fuckin’ unless you take every stitch off. I want to see what I’m getting.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m taking them off.” He tugged at his socks, dawdled with his pants and generally took a very long time. I had my things off in about two seconds.

  “Molly, I never saw a girl without her clothes on except in dirty pictures. You look fine. I can see all those little muscles in your stomach. Your stomach is better than mine. Look. You haven’t got very big tits though.”

  “Go by a pair of falsies and play with them.”

  “It don’t matter none,” he said getting stuck on his zipper. “I think huge ones are ugly anyway, but all the guys go nuts about them. Can you get this zipper down?”

  After a struggle I got his jeans off. He was determined not to take his jockey shorts off so I reached up and pulled them down in one jerk. Leroy gave out a little shriek.

  “Quit this foolin around and get on down here.”

  He snuggled up next to me and lay quietly for a few minutes. Then he gave me a slobbering kiss, he never did get the hang of it but at least he had a hard on. After that he crawled on top of me and gets ready to do his number.

  “Leroy, we ought to wait around awhile. One kiss isn’t exactly the whole show.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t ever fuck so how come you’re telling me what to do? At least, I’ve done it before.” It didn’t seem worth it to tell him about Leota so I said, “Okay, do it your way.” Leroy huffed and puffed. All those books I’d read said it’s supposed to hurt the first time but it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, Leroy felt dimly good in there but well, it just wasn’t the same as Leota even though that seemed a thousand years ago. If I closed my eyes I could still feel her lips on mine. Even now it gave me a shudder.

  Leroy rolled off, exultant. “That was a lot better than that old whore.”

  I leaned up on one elbow and looked at Leroy with fuzz on his cheeks and small defined muscles already bulging in his back. Well Leroy, I thought, it might have been a lot better than that whore, but you can’t hold a candle to Leota. Yeah, maybe I’m queer. But why would people get so upset about something that feels so good? Me being a queer can’t hurt anyone, why should it be such a terrible thing? Makes no sense. But I’m not gonna base my judgment on one little fuck with ole Leroy. We got to do it a lot more and maybe I’ll do around twenty or thirty men and twenty or thirty women and then I’ll decide. I wonder if I could get twenty people to go to bed with me? Oh it doesn’t really matter anyway.

  “I am truly glad to know I’m better than a worn-out prostitute.” I laughed and threw Leroy back on the mattress. He thought I was going to beat him up and started pleading. “Shut up, stupid, I’m not going to hit you.” I kissed him and grabbed his thing. He was in utter shock, “You can’t do that.”

  “Whaddaya mean, I can’t do that?”

  “Men and women are supposed to close eyes and fuck. You’re not supposed to grab me.”

  “You amaze me. You are for sure getting yourself screwed on rules other people make. I can do whatever I want. I feel like playing with you and I’m gonna do it. Why don’t you lie down and shut up. It’s kinda fun anyway.” He started to protest but I put my arm up to belt him and he laid there quiet as a lamb.

  The sun was setting over the flatlands full of sandspurs, lizards, and cockroaches when we headed back for the trailer. “You ain’t saying anything, Molly, you promised.”

  “I’m not breathing one word. Anyway, you got something on me so why worry. I got everything to lose if I rat on you. So don’t worry. We’ll do it again sometime. And don’t worry about Craig, either. You hear me, Leroy? Just do what you damn well please.”

  Leroy looked at me with grateful eyes and gave me a hug. We got back to the trailer in time for supper. Florence was scurrying around with her apron on, putting food on the tiny table. She asked over the black-eyed peas, “You two been down at the canal all this time? You catch anything down there?”

  “Just a couple of queer fish,” I said.

  Leroy choked on his chicken wing and Florence asked if we wanted more milk.

  Sure enough, Leroy flunked eighth grade and had to go to summer school, but then he went on to flunk ninth grade, twice. We saw each other less and less over those three years because I was involved in so many extra-curricular activities that often my Sundays were taken up. It was just as well because Leroy was getting more and more like any other red neck. It got to the point where he thought he owned me, just because we’d do it every now and then. The crowning blow came when he bought a metalflake maroon Bonneville Triumph and I could drive it better than he could. He blew up and told me I really was a dyke and why didn’t I just shove off. Craig had left Palm Beach County the year before, and Leroy swore he hadn’t had anything like that going on so he was very righteous in his heterosexuality. If that wasn’t bad enough he had a girlfriend at school and they were all the time at it so he was unbearable. I told him that he was an asshole plus his points were blasted so he’d better get the bike to the shop. He nearly lost his scrotum and I turned on my heel and marched off.

  Aside from Leroy acting like a moron, things were fine. I had gotten invited into all three service clubs at once—Juniorettes, Anchor, and Sinawiks. I thought I was the original hot ticket. I picked Anchor because my two best friends were in there, Carolyn Simpson and Connie Pen. Also, Anchor was the sister club to Wheel Club and I was going out with Clark Pfeiffer, vice-president of Wheel. It seemed like a supreme achievement at the time.

  Carolyn was the school Goody Twoshoes. She made me sick ninety percent of the time, but she loved the movies as much as I did, so our bond was seeing every movie in town and then tearing it apart, scene by scene. I began to think maybe I’d be a great film director, although I still hadn’t given up the idea of becoming president. Carolyn had deep blue eyes and black hair and was about five feet eight inches tall. She laughed at everything I said but then everyone did that. Underneath it all, she was still school chaplain, so what I could do with Carolyn was limited. On top of that she was a cheerleader, and she was forever at practice out behind the gym concentrating on getting her voice very low. Ft. Lauderdale High’s Flying L’s prided themselves on their bassthroated cheerleaders. I think they were shooting up on androgen to lengthen their vocal cords. Their voices in unison could drown out all the thousands of the enemy on the other side of the bleachers.

  Connie Pen was a different story entirely. A little hefty, like a butterfly swimmer, Connie commanded your attention by her bulk, but she was physically lazy; swimming on the team was the last thing she’d do. She simply ate too much. Her eyes were a clear, warm brown and her hair matched them but the best thing about Connie was that she was totally irreverent. We were made for eac
h other, except that I was physically attracted to Carolyn, and except for the fact that Connie was hyper-heterosexual. She talked about it all the time, a real motor mouth.

  All three of us took advanced Latin together, and in our junior year, we applied ourselves to the task of translating the Aeneid. Aeneas is a one-dimensional bore. We never could figure out how Virgil got it published, and the tedium of the main character encouraged us to enliven those sultry days in Latin class. The teacher, Miss Roebuck, only added to our energy. Miss Roebuck was from Georgia, and her Latin was Georgian Latin. It was always “all a ya chotaw est” rather than alea jacta est. We had heard the rumor from seniors who survived the Aeneid that Miss Roebuck would burst into tears when we got to the part where Aeneas leaves Dido. Connie called her “Dildo,” of course. So on that day Connie and I decided to cinch Latin for the rest of our high school career. We brought onions hidden in handkerchiefs. Miss Roebuck’s voice started to quiver as Dido looked out her window at the departing Trojan. Then at Virgil’s giving Dido her suicidal buildup, Miss Roebuck opened the waterworks. The class tried very hard not to look up from their texts and trots they were so embarrassed, but Connie and I started sniffling and showed tears on our cheeks. Carolyn looked at us in amazement and I flashed the onion at her. Her Presbyterian morality was offended, but she couldn’t suppress a laugh. Soon the entire classroom was in hysterics which only highlighted our grief over the Carthaginian queen’s plight. Miss Roebuck looked at us with infinite fondness and then in her stentorian voice, “Class, most of you are shamefully, shamefully insensitive. Great literature and great tragedy are beyond your grasp.” She dismissed the class and called Connie and me aside. “You girls are true students of the classics.” She patted us on the backs with tears in her eyes and ushered us out the classroom. Connie and I became inseparable after that. We concocted one scheme after another and soon the whole school, two thousand strong, began to hang on our every action, word, look. The power was overwhelming.

  Our supreme achievement was going back into the school late at night (we were both in Student Council and had keys to everything) and putting a very dead fish in the huge main study hall ventilator. Classes had to be suspended for one full day while janitors cleaned out the mess. For weeks afterward the rooms near main study hall had the faint reek of rotten fish. Everyone was in our debt for getting them out of class and no one told.

  However, we came upon a little piece of information that expanded our power beyond the student body to the administration. I became aware of how government really functions.

  Saturday night, Connie, Carolyn, and I made a pact that we wouldn’t go out with our boyfriends but that we’d go to the movies and get drunk. It took courage for Carolyn to come to that decision, but finally she did with her irrefragable logic which ran that she’d do better to get drunk with the girls and find out how she could handle herself than to do it on a date and risk losing her virginity.

  The movie was down at the Gateway so we went to the 7:30 show and sat in the front row. It was a blah movie and Connie wrecked it beyond repair by inserting her own dialogue at appropriate points, such as when Paul Newman meets his boss’s wife in the library: “Hello Mrs. So and So, so nice to meet you. Let’s fuck.” There was one scene in which the wife of a wrinkle zips into Paul Newman’s bedroom to try to get him to do it. Connie was having spasms over Newman’s bod and I was having spasms over the lady. Connie kept nudging me, “What a bod. What a bod.”

  I answered, “Yeah, so long and slender and smooth.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Huh?”

  “Paul Newman’s body is not long and slender and smooth, fool.”

  “Oh.”

  Paul Newman turned the lady down and it depressed me no end as I was dying to see him take off her slip. I then noticed that Carolyn Simpson slightly resembled the lady in the black slip; they were both tall at any rate. Carolyn took on new stature in my eyes and I started getting that warning signal in my stomach. I had been so busy at school I didn’t think about things like that. Godammit, I have to go to this ridiculous movie and my stomach goes into a knot. I’ll never be able to look at a black slip again. I was heavy into this vein of thought when the movie at long last ended and we were on our way to Jade Beach.

  Jade Beach was an unpatrolled piece of sand between Pompano and Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. It was a well-known do-it place and we picked our way over the bodies to a spot behind a dune. Connie produced a bottle of vodka stolen from her father’s bar. We passed it around in mock communion.

  Carolyn coughed, “It burns. Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Connie volunteered.

  “Here, gimme that. You know my father finishes off a bottle of this stuff every two days? He drinks it because you can’t smell it. His stomach must be rotted to hell by now.”

  “How come your old man drinks so much, Connie?” Carolyn asked, the spirit of innocence.

  “Obviously because he’s miserable, dolt. Why else do people drink? He and the old lady fight all the time and I think they’re both fucking around. They need the alcohol to lubricate their genitals. You know, they’ve been dried up by middie age, low horizons, and conformity, blah, blah, blah. That’s why my old man drinks.”

  “Connie, don’t say such things about your parents,” Caroylyn scolded.

  “Truth is truth,” Connie affirmed.

  “Ditto,” I belched.

  “Do your parents drink and fight, Molly?” Carolyn pressed on.

  “Mine? No they’re dead and too dumb to fall over.” Connie roared and Carolyn tried not to.

  “This sounds like Youth Wants to Know.’ You started this, Carolyn, so fess up about your kin,” I said.

  “Mother remarried last year so they’re still in love. And you know what?”

  “What?” we both asked.

  “I can hear them in their bedroom doing it.” Carolyn’s eyes shone with this juicy information.

  “You ever done it, Carolyn?” I asked, truly curious.

  “No, I’m not going to bed with anyone until I’m married.”

  “Oh, shit.” Connie spit out her vodka on the sand. “You can’t be that square.”

  Carolyn was both hurt and intrigued. She hadn’t had sexual encouragement before. “Well, I’ve fooled around but it’s a sin to go all the way before you’re married.”

  “Yes, and I’m a rat’s ass,” Connie offered.

  “Carolyn, you’re being a little Victorian. I mean, it doesn’t have to be this big deal, you know.”

  She looked at me after that little rap and fired, “Well, have either of you done it?”

  Connie and I looked at each other, took a deep breath, then hesitated. Connie began, “There comes a time in the intercourse of human events when, yes, dear Carolyn, I have done it.” She finished her sentence with a grand hand flourish, clutching the dwindling vodka bottle.

  “Connie, no,” Carolyn breathed, scandalized and delighted.

  “Connie, yes,” Connie chimed.

  “Just the facts, Ma’am,” I said, pulling a Jack Webb.

  “This you’ll never believe. Sam Breem, are you quite geared for that one? Sam Breem. Oh and was he ever a winner, let me tell you. We drove around half the friggin’ night, trying to find a motel where you could fuck and not be married. And me with my diaphragm I’ve never used and had to go to three doctors to get because I’m sixteen years old. Super cool, gang, just super cool. So we get in there, this sharp motel room with coral walls. That’s enough to ruin your night right there. So we get in there and Sam tries to be suave about the whole thing. He pours me a drink and we chat a bit. Chat. I was a nervous wreck, you know, first fuck and all that jazz, and he wants to chat … and cross his legs like the Hathaway ad in Esquire magazine. So we finish the drink, rum and coke, ugh, and he decides it’s time to kiss me. So we kiss and after a half hour of dry humping and rolling all over the bed he tries to take my clothes off. Listen honeys,
never let them try to take your clothes off because they’ll pop your buttons, jam your zippers, and make you look as though you’ve just come from a rummage sale. After that wrestling match, we get down to doing it and in the middle of it, Sam the Man remembers to ask if I’m protected. Protected—what does he think I am, a five-and-dime with a built in burglar alarm? So I said yes and he continues on about his business. It was okay but I can’t believe they write songs about first times and people kill themselves over it. I mean really.”

  Carolyn’s eyes were about to bug out of her head, her mouth was dragging in the sand. “Oh, it’s supposed to be a beautiful experience. It’s supposed to be the most intimate experience a human being can have. You’re supposed to share this glorious moment and be physically united and—”

  “Carolyn, shut up,” I said.

  Connie took another swig from the bottle. “Drink up sweeties, one last drop for each of you. Besides which it hurt like hell,” she finished.

  “That’s funny, it didn’t hurt me at all,” I said. “But I probably busted my cherry on a bicycle seat in second grade or something like that.”

  “You too,” Carolyn stammered.

  “Carolyn, I’ve been diddling off and on since eighth grade with the same tired piece of cock.”

  Connie gave me a shove and we rolled over in the sand laughing like hyenas, and all the while Carolyn is sitting there in saintly shock.

  “So glad to find out there’s another honest non-virgin around. The one that cracks me up is Judy Trout. She’s been down with everything but the Titanic and she’s going around doing her white-lace routine. It’s enough to make you vomit.” Connie’s voice betrayed an edge of bitterness. She hated hypocrisy and Ft. Lauderdale High in 1961 was Hypocrisy U.S.A.

  “You mean our Anchor sister, Judy Trout?”

  “Carolyn, why don’t you take another drink, maybe it will clear your head. You seem to be in a permanent fog,” I added. “Maybe being chaplain has disconnected your brain.” She seemed hurt by that jab and I got a certain savage pleasure out of it. In fact, I began to get enraged at Carolyn sitting there in her righteousness and with that gorgeous long body.