A few nights later, as the parade of house parties marched on, I switched things up and left with a girl named Meg whom I barely remembered from high school. Meg was a year older than me. From a high school hierarchy perspective, there was nothing exceptional about her—she wasn’t a Regina George type or a cheerleader or Megan-Fox-in-Transformers hot. Nothing that would have made her stick out in my memory. She was just a cool person who was fun to talk to that night and whom I knew about as well as anyone knows half the people they were friends with on MySpace. In essence, I liked her profile picture and wanted to slide into those PMs. Fortunately for me, her privates were not set to private, and by the end of the night she wanted to go back to her place so that I could put MySpace into HerSpace. I was excited, because I was getting kind of tired of fucking in my parents’ car. There’s only so much you can do in a sedan.
Spoiler Alert: Be careful what you wish for, boys and girls, because you just might get it.
There’s something you need to understand about where I grew up: There are actually two Santa Barbaras. One is fabulously wealthy and posh, with huge homes, lush gardens, and amazing views. People like Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Cruise have houses there. Sometimes people call it Montecito, other times they’ll call it the American Riviera, and it’s as beautiful as the pictures in the brochure. Then there is the Santa Barbara with houses that look like they washed ashore after an Indonesian tsunami fifty years ago and came to rest under some palm trees. That’s the Santa Barbara I am from.
That’s the Santa Barbara that Meg’s house was in. If you even want to call it a house. It was so small that Meg and her family probably qualified as being homeless in the state of California. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than 900 square feet.
When we got to the front door, she put her finger to her lips. “Keep it down when you walk inside, my parents are sleeping,” she instructed me. Keep it down? I wasn’t worried about waking them up with my voice, I was more concerned with stepping on them or hitting them with the door when we walked in.
“Okay, but won’t they be able to hear us, you know, doing stuff?”
“No, we’ll go out to the garage. My brother has it built up pretty cool. We’ll be alone in there.”
What is this place, the Goonies house? Is your brother Josh Brolin? Is he going to be in there fondling a chest expander and eye-fucking me? I had so many questions, but I put them all aside because Meg was going to let me trust-fall into her vagina, and insulting her home was a surefire way to fall on my face.
“All right,” I said. “Lead the way.”
We tiptoed through her dollhouse kitchen and she guided me into the garage, which she illuminated by pulling the string on a single forty-five-watt bulb suspended from an I-beam that held up the roof. I was right. It did look like the Goonies garage. There were posters of fast cars tacked to the exposed wall beams. There was even a shitty little weight bench with those old-school plastic plates that you have to fill with sand. Nothing about this room screamed “cool,” even to a kid like me who had a résumé full of dork.
“How old is your brother, fourteen?”
“No, he’s your age. He went to school with us,” Meg said nonchalantly as she led me past the Fisher-Price weight bench.
“Oh, okay. So your parents just kept this sort of preserved for him?” I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“No, he still lives at home,” she said. “He’s staying at Steve’s house tonight.”
“Yeah, Steve. Cool,” I said confidently. I don’t know who Steve is and after the nickel tour I didn’t really want to find out.
Apparently, knowing that Steve is a name that guys have was enough to put an end to the small talk. Meg quickly removes her top and leads me over to what appears to be a large pull-out futon bed with a huge comforter stretched over it. The comforter is tucked in around the sides on the concrete floor. No metal frame, no box spring, just floor. That’s okay, though, I’ve slept on worse.
Meg sits downs gently and I hear a loud crunch. I take off my shirt and she extends her hand toward me.
“Just sit down carefully, okay?”
I have no idea what she is talking about, so I let her take the lead and guide me down on top of her, but when the weight of my body presses down, I feel a loud metal crunch, accompanied by the same noise she made when she sat down. She giggles like this shit is adorable. Like fucking inside a recycling bin is a turn-on.
“What is this thing? This doesn’t feel like a futon.”
“It’s our old garage door,” Meg says with a laugh. “My dad didn’t really know how to dispose of it, so he’s just kept it in here all these years. My brother uses it as a bed.”
“Wait, you want to have sex on your brother’s bed, which is actually your old garage door, that is inside your garage, which is covered by your current garage door?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“You don’t find that weird?”
“I’ve never really thought about it. We just have to be quiet—”
“—because we’re having sex on top of an old metal door.”
“Well, yeah,” she says.
As I take off my jeans, I can hear and feel every single crunch from the garage door. Part of me is terrified that we’ll wake up her parents; another part of me wants to yank back the comforter to get a look at this thing. Meg insists it’s a garage door, but to me it sounds like a giant potato chip bag full of tetanus. When we finally get all of our clothes off and I put a condom on, it sounds like a tornado in a tin can. The metal garage door is being less forgiving of our movements than a tight satin dress in high definition. There is no hiding anything. At first I go slow, trying to muffle as much noise as I can, but instead of a tornado now there’s this eerie creaking sound echoing through the room, like a crab boat trying to cut through the Bering Sea ice pack.
“You can go faster,” she whispers in my ear. “My parents’ room is on the other side of the house. They’ll never be able to hear us.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. I’m not buying it. Jiminy Cricket slept in a matchbox that was bigger than this fucking house.
“Oh, totally,” she says, as if she’s gone the distance on top of this garage door plenty of times. The idea that her sexual sample size is statistically significant enough to make a confident claim like this is a little unnerving, I’m not going to lie. Not because it makes me think less of her. To the contrary, it makes me think less of myself. I don’t have the bedroom reps that she has (though technically neither does she if she spent all of high school hooking up on top of a door). If I don’t find my groove on this thing, I’m going to blow it and be totally disappointing. This is not how I want to end block leave.