The title of this chapter might make you think that this is going to be another one of those “my first time” stories. It is not. It starts out that way, but it’s not.

Where I grew up in Brooklyn, in the forties and fifties, we learned about sex at an early age. I was about ten. When you’re that young, your first reaction is total surprise, followed by disgust at what you had just learned. How could men and women do stuff like that? And you looked at the people you knew and found it hard to believe.

It didn’t take long for the surprise and disgust to be replaced with a strong desire to try it yourself. Most people started out slowly in those days. I think the average person was a high school senior before they actually “did it.” Between the time you find out about it and the time you do some experimenting, there’s a lot of talk, fantasy, exaggeration, and sometimes outright lies. The fact is, it’s very preoccupying and can affect your schoolwork, mood, and ability to concentrate. And some claim it can even give you pimples.

When I was about fourteen, a freshman in high school, I decided I was going to pursue it in earnest, especially when I discovered that my friend Rocco had had sex at around that age with a much older neighborhood girl. Most of my friends carried single condoms in their wallets. After a few months it left an impression in the leather for everyone to see—which was the whole idea. Occasionally, when the wallet was taken out, the condom would fall to the ground, “accidentally on purpose” as we used to say in Brooklyn. I too started to carry one, and eventually it just disintegrated.

In addition to the difficulty of finding a willing girl, there were other concerns, number one being the fear of a pregnancy, almost always resulting in a “shotgun wedding” to someone you didn’t want to marry, thereby ruining the rest of your life. There were plenty of examples of that in our neighborhood. There was also the fear of venereal disease, chiefly syphilis and gonorrhea. Or the dreaded “crabs.”

One day in the summer of 1949, a friend of mine, Billy Chase, came to me with what sounded like a good idea. He had landed a job as a lifeguard at Rockaway Beach, and he said he knew a very attractive girl who worked in a concession at Rockaway Playland and who was a little on the wild side. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, an older guy, and was best friends with a girl Billy was dating and who worked at the same concession. Billy wanted to know if I would like to go out on a blind date with her. This could be the one, I thought, and quickly told Billy to set it up.

A couple of days later Billy told me that she was interested in meeting me and I could meet her some night after work at Rockaway Playland. We could go for a walk and maybe get a pizza and eat it on the beach. He told me that she was seventeen and that he told her that I was over seventeen because he knew she liked older guys. I wasn’t even fifteen, and I was five feet two inches tall. I didn’t think she’d believe I was sixteen, much less seventeen.

I asked Billy if he knew whether she had a lot of boyfriends. I was already beginning to feel a little concerned. I didn’t want a girl who had a lot of boyfriends.

“How the hell do I know?” he said and proceeded to lecture me along the lines that if I wanted a “goody-goody girl,” I should go to a CYO dance. He said that this girl, Josephine, liked to have a good time and a drink or two. She liked to “live a little.” I was nervous, but I told Billy to go ahead and set up the date.

She wanted to see me on the night of July 4. She told Billy to tell me to be there at nine p.m. sharp. I had to take two buses to get to Rockaway. The second bus took me down Cross Bay Boulevard and over two bridges before getting to Playland, which had an assortment of rides, games, food concessions, souvenir shops, and even a tattoo parlor. Josephine worked at Moe’s Famous Hot Dogs.

There were two counter girls at Moe’s, and I knew immediately that the one with the dark hair must be Josephine. She was not the attractive girl Billy described. She was thin, with a dark complexion and pimples on her forehead, and wore a hair net. She had on a counter girl’s uniform that was much too big for her and kept flopping open at the top, partly because her breasts weren’t large enough to fill it out.

I lit a cigarette with my Zippo lighter, trying to look as old and as cool as I could, introduced myself to her, and put out my hand. She looked at it but did not take it. Instead, she just gazed at me and asked if I wanted a hot dog and an orange drink. I didn’t, but I said I did. I put a dollar on the counter, and she gave me fifty cents change, and I immediately wondered if I should leave a tip for her. I don’t remember what I decided.

I was nervous, excited, eager, anxious, and, frankly, scared. Josephine seemed indifferent to me. She had to wait on other customers but kept coming back. And each time she did, she would say a few words, like, “Billy said you wanted to meet me,” and then she’d disappear. She’d return and say, “Billy said you were seventeen. You don’t look it to me.” She didn’t wait for a reply. Then, “Billy said you were a nice guy”; “Billy said you knew how to treat a girl and that you would not be fresh”; “Billy said he told you I was a nice girl, and I am.”

All this talk was between waiting on customers. She kept looking at me while she was serving up hot dogs and orange drinks. Finally, she came over and said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.” I swallowed hard. “You are going to come back here at eleven o’clock on the dot. That’s when I get off. I need fifteen minutes to freshen up. I’ve been sweatin’ like a friggin’ pig all day, my feet are killing me, and I’m going to wash them off in the sink out back. Better make it eleven-fifteen on the dot. We’ll go out. We’ll get a pizza, and we can eat it on the beach. There are too many people on the boardwalk tonight on account of the fireworks. At about ten-thirty, I want you to go to Slade’s Liquor Store on 96th Street and get a six-pack of Rheingold. You’ll have to show them your draft card to get the beer, or they could lose their license. You have your draft card with you, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t have it with me. But I can get the six-pack.”

“Okay,” she said, “make sure it’s cold. I like to throw down a couple of fast cold beers to cool off, and it also gives me a buzz. Don’t you like a couple of cold ones?”

I nodded, but in fact, I had never drunk a can of beer, and I had no idea how I was going to get the beer without a draft card. I remember having a fleeting thought that I could leave then, but if I did, how would I explain it to Billy? I also felt a responsibility to Josephine. There was something about her, a sweetness underneath the toughness, and if I left, I knew she would be hurt. As I left, I realized I had almost two hours to kill—two hours to get more nervous, more anxious, more scared.

At ten-thirty I went to Slade’s and paid an older guy a dollar to buy the Rheingold for me. Eleven o’clock finally came, and at eleven-fifteen she was waiting outside. We got a pizza, and she suggested we walk down to a more deserted part of the beach.

When we got there, she reached into her canvas bag and pulled out a bed sheet for us to sit on. She apologized vaguely because it was so wrinkled and had some “food stains” on it. Of course, that last comment started me thinking, but I quickly made myself think of something more pleasant.

The first thing she did before she opened the pizza box was to tear open the cardboard-wrapped six-pack of Rheingold.

“Did you bring a church key?” she asked.

I looked at her and repeated, “Church key?”

“I figured you didn’t. I always have one on me.”

She reached into her bag again, got a beer-can opener, put two holes in each can, and took a couple of long gulps. (These were the days before flip-top cans.) She ate most of the pizza. I picked at one piece. I wasn’t hungry. I was nervous. She opened another can and drank it, and I could see what she meant when she said she got a little buzz on.

We were on the beach about twenty minutes, not saying much, and suddenly she said, “Why don’t we go under the boardwalk?”

Under the boardwalk? I thought. God, no. I’d heard lots of stories about what it was like under the boardwalk. For one thing, huge rats lived there. Another reason not to go under there was that, rather than walk a short distance to the public toilets, people would just go under the boardwalk. Of course, everyone peed in the Atlantic Ocean. Rockaway and Coney Island are crowded places. You’re never more than a couple of feet away from someone else on the sand or in the water. Many times, as I waded out into deeper water, I would pass somebody and feel a warm current on my legs. It wasn’t the Gulf Stream.

My cousin John actually had seen three rats sitting side by side with their heads turned upward and their mouths open. They were catching melting ice cream that flowed through the cracks of the boardwalk above after some kid had dropped his ice cream cone. It was a common sight to see rats running in and out from under the boardwalk in broad daylight. And this girl wanted me to go under the boardwalk with her.

I really wanted to leave then. I thought about saying that I felt sick—and I did—but I didn’t say it. Instead, I let Josephine lead me to a hole in the cyclone fence that was supposed to keep people out, and we went under the boardwalk. She knew exactly where the hole in the fence was, and I wondered how many times she had done this.

Once again, she spread out the bed sheet, and again I wondered how many times she had done this. Then I thought again about the rats and the people who relieved themselves under there. I don’t know which was worse: those thoughts or the thoughts about that bed sheet. I noticed that all around us was the glow of cigarettes, maybe a half-dozen or more, and some of them seemed pretty close.

This was not what I’d imagined it would be. I imagined something private, romantic, even beautiful. I asked Josephine if she was concerned about rats.

“Relax,” she said, “they’re more scared of you.” And then she said, “Did you bring something? You know what I mean?”

I said, “Yes. I did.”

She said, “I gotta see it.”

I reached for my wallet. She struck a match. The instant she struck the match I felt—or thought I felt—something touch my elbow. It felt like something nibbling at my elbow. I immediately thought, rat. I dropped the wallet in the sand. At the same instant, the July Fourth midnight fireworks at Playland began with a tremendous salvo that shook the ground under us. Roman candles lit up the sky.

The combination of the real or imagined rat, the blast, and the flashes of light, which momentarily illuminated the couples around us, caused me to jump and flail around in the sand. In an instant there was sand everywhere. It was in my mouth, eyes, down my shirt, down my pants, in my hair—everywhere. I began striking matches, partly to keep the rats away if there were any around and partly to try to find my wallet. I found the sandy wallet. Then I began to look for an empty coffee cup.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sounding annoyed.

“I’m trying to find an empty coffee cup so I can go down to the water and use it to wash the sand off myself. It’s everywhere.”

Josephine blew out the match, and in a disgusted voice she said, “Billy told me you were a smart guy. I can’t believe how dumb you are. You don’t need to go down there when you have this.”

She cracked open another can of Rheingold and started to pour it down my polo shirt. In an instant, she grabbed my belt buckle and pulled it toward her so she could pour the cold beer down inside my pants.

“It’s a waste of a perfectly good Rheingold,” she said, “but it will do the job.”

It did the job all right. That was pretty much the end of the night for both of us. I told Josephine that we had to get out from under the boardwalk. I told her that I was not even seventeen, let alone eighteen. I told her that I had never done this before, and I was scared. I told her that I thought she was a very nice girl. I told her that I would take her home to Brooklyn in a taxi. And, finally, I told her that I was sorry.

Her response was a minute or two in coming. She told me that she already knew most of the things I just told her. She said she didn’t think I was as old as I said and that I didn’t look it, and that Billy was right about my being a nice guy.

Suddenly, I felt hungry and I asked her if we could get another pizza or a roast beef sandwich or maybe Chinese, or whatever she wanted, and go back down on the beach and eat it. That’s what we did, and we watched the rest of the fireworks before hailing a taxi. The cab took us back over those two bridges, up Cross Bay Boulevard, and down Liberty Avenue to Brooklyn. It cost eight dollars, plus a tip, which was more than a week’s pay for me.

Josephine was very impressed. She told me that she had never before been in a taxi. In front of her house, she told me that I could not kiss her goodnight because her Italian father was probably watching from the window and he would hit her with a strap if he saw her kiss a boy goodnight. She said she had a good time, the best she ever had, and that she hoped I would ask her out for another date before Moe’s closed on Labor Day.

I walked her to her front door. We shook hands. I got back in the cab and told the driver to let me out on the corner of Liberty Avenue and Grant, a few blocks away from where she lived, and I walked the rest of the way home. I was feeling a lot better at the end of the evening than I did at the beginning. It was good to breathe the night air. After a few minutes my thoughts turned to what I was going to tell Billy the next day, and I decided that I was going to tell him the same thing I told Josephine, that she was a nice girl and we had a good time.