Was it good? How old were you? Would repeat the experience if you had it to do over?

I was fifteen (almost sixteen. jeez!), and Bill was nineteen. We borrowed his friend's apartment for the occasion, and it was really nice. I wasn't in love with Bill, but I liked him a lot, and the experience was very playful and sweet. I'd be willing to repeat that if I had it to do over.

-- ann monroe (monroe@chorus.net), April 27, 2000

Answers

Yowzers! I always wanted to tell this story, but finding an appropriate forum is not always possible!

I had been dating my girlfriend at the time for quite a while, and things had gotten to the point where "the act" was a foregone conclusion, but since we were a little bit older (I was 18), we realized that this would be something we'd always remember, and having the right time and place was more important than just jumping in with both feet, etc., etc.

The perfect opportunity presented itself when my parents decided to take a vacation. They ran a "managed care" facility for disabled veterans. It was basically a rooming house where veterans who were on disability pensions would live, get three square meals a day and have someone around to make sure they took their medication. Almost all were WWII or korean war veterans, older guys who just couldn't handle combat.

We had the first floor of the building, a huge Victorian mansion, as our family's apartment. While my parents were away, my younger brother was staying with friends and my older sister was at college. It was my job, therefore to feed the vets and make sure they took their pills, which took about three hours out of my day. The rest of my time was my own.

So my girlfriend and I planned a romantic dinner, we had a fire in the fireplace, lots and lots of wine, and the soft music in the background. Birds singing in the trees, that kind of thing. It got later and later, things went according to plan and eventually we wound up in my room, enjoying the full flowering of our love.

At about two in the morning, as we were realizing that our passions "could hold a limitless depth" (or some such Shelly-an nonesense; we were weird kids), the fire alarm in the house went off. Not that measly little *Beep* *Beep* *Beep* that springs you out of bed in your house; this was the foghorn blaring of a commercial system. I leapt out of bed, got halfway to the stairs before I realized I was naked, ran back to my room, threw on a pair of shorts, ran back to the stairs, took them three at a time to the second floor.

There was a crowd of about eight men, all between the ages of 60 and 75 standing around the fire alarm in their underwear. I quickly shut it off and wheeled around on them. "Who pulled this alarm?" I guess that even though I was only eighteen and these guys were four times my age I must have been pissed off enough to make them jump to. One of the men in the back, Bill Tobin, meekly said, "It was, uh...I pulled it."

It was like one of the scenes in Evil Dead where the object in the foreground stays put while the background zooms into focus. Bill was directly in the center of my line of sight while everything else kind of went out. "Bill," I asked as calmly as I could manage, "why did you pull the fire alarm?" I was a little upset that in the span of about 45 seconds I had gone from being one of the only two people on Earth (my girlfriend, of course, being the other person) to being in the center of a bunch of old men who, let's face it, all could have used a bath and some clothes.

Bill, who was schizophrenic (sp?), looked me right in the eye and said, "My mom told me there was a fire in my waste basket." Bill's mom had died fifteen years before this.

"She did?" I asked.

"Um...Yeah."

"Was she right? I mean, is there a fire?"

"Uh...I guess not" He looked so scared and upset with himself I suddenly felt very much like a bully.

"OK, Bill. Here's what we're gonna do. From now on, you will check with someone before you touch this fire alarm, do you understand?"

"Uh, yeah."

I gave him a "that's OK" pat on the shoulder and made sure everyone went back to bed. It took about fifteen minutes for the hubbub to die down, then I went back to my room, where I found my girlfriend sound asleep.

-- Ed (Edward_Charbonnier@sunlife.com), May 01, 2000.