Rumors, Details, and Sex on a Picnic Table

Clumsy - Our Lady Peace (mp3)
Deny All - Bettie Serveert (mp3)

I'm in a dentist's office. The faux-leather chair is reclined, and the blood is slowly pooling in my skull, and that light, brighter than a thousand suns, burns into my mouth.

My dentist is a highly-intelligent and beautiful wife and mother who has somehow managed to hold onto every ounce of her attractiveness as she approaches 40. Her skin seems a little less soft, her face a bit more wizened, but she got that young fire in her eyes, with a mighty impressive figure and modest but sharp taste in clothing. And oh yeah, she's a kick-ass dentist.

Yet, try as I might, here's the image that inevitably flashes into my mind: her, 17 years of age and a junior in high school, lying back on a wooden picnic table at a popular local Chattanooga park, her knees dangling off the edge, her feet hovering in open space above the dirt and grass, her skirt up around her waist and spread across the planks like a disheveled too-small tablecloth. And a senior at my school, a year older than us, a popular and athletic king of the hill, pushing himself into her.

In most of my recreations of this moment, the senior boy is looking around in some twisted hope that someone can be a witness to this moment, so that when he brags about this moment over and over for friends and classmates, he can talk about the person or people who saw it with their own eyes. I imagine him, on the verge of orgasm, holding up a Joe Namath finger of victory, stoking the imagined enthralled fans surrounding the table in his moment of sexual triumph.

Of all the rumors and tales of sexual escapades from my high school years, this one is easily the most salient. We didn't have tales of group sex or fantasy blowjob drafts back in the late '80s, when getting a mere one blow job in a night was plenty impresive, so having sex on a picnic table in lingering daylight with one of our sister school's most stunning students was an otherworldly tale of studliness.

I once overheard the senior in question regaling his friends with the details. I then heard it a dozen or so more times as the story became hallway legend, gaining additional details, reaching new heights of the fantastical.

From day one, I doubted this story. One of my closest friends in high school helped out in our athletic training room in the afternoons, and she was constantly the subject of sex tales. She gave blow jobs in the closet. She would jerk you off while she wrapped your ankle. Tales that I knew to be untrue, but they got shared and passed around as factual as if they'd been etched into a chapter of the Bible.

That's what boys do. We talk. We sit round proverbial campfires and tell each other tales of the epic conquering sexual hero. It's as old as Beowulf.

Even when she was 17 and a rumored slut, my dentist wanted to be a dentist. Hell, I wrote it down in my journal. We had a conversation one time -- and all conversations with females of her caliber were recorded and immortalized in my journals for posterity -- where she talked about how much she valued clean, straight teeth. She'd known early in her life that she was going to be a dentist, she said. I remember keeping my mouth closed and smiling, hoping to hide the five dozen fillings in my mouth, suffering painful regret from so insufficiently and inconsistently brushing my teeth in my youth, knowing those cavities were a guaranteed barrier to her falling in love with me. (As if that was the singular preventing factor...)

So of course, when I found out she had moved back to Chattanooga and opened an office with her dentist husband (natch), I signed up as her patient. She'd always been brilliant; she'd always known what she wanted to do as a profession; she was hot. That, my friends, is a perfect combination of motivations for picking your dentist. It's a nice reward of convenience that her husband is a swell guy and a great dentist as well, since he attends to patients 80% of the time, now that she mostly stays home with their daughter.

I remember finding out she was pregnant. During my cleaning, the hygienist said, "It's really brave of her, having this baby." I shrugged and made what limited sounds I could with her fist in my mouth.

"You know, with her having Cystic Fibrosis and all." My brow furrowed and I made more gutteral sounds.

"She said she never even expected to see 20, much less get married and have a career. They didn't even think she could get pregnant in the first place." (More gutteral acknowledgments.) "So, you know, when they did, it just seemed like life was giving her a chance she couldn't pass up."

I don't know whether my dentist got laid on a picnic table when she was 17. But I do know this. If I was 17 years old, and I'd already accepted that I might never see 20, and I knew what kind of potential I might see if only I wasn't saddled with a debilitating and often-fatal hereditary disease, I think I might well be inclined to fuck just about anything I could get my hands on. I might be inclined to drink, smoke, bungee jump, skydive, ski jump... anything and everything risky and life-affirming I could find. Because my dentist was cool and attractive, she just so happened to date cool and attractive studs.

And if -- IF -- they found themselves in flagrante delicto, horizontal or vertical or diagonal on a picnic table, the event takes a different meaning. Suddenly that moment becomes about her, not him, about savoring a precious (if scandalous) opportunity, not about a boy getting a story to tell the school.

I love my dentist because she provides me just one more reminder that the details we don't know about the people we encounter every day create such a complex and wondrous story, and even just a glimpse of those secret details can alter our perceptions and opinions, can engender sympathy and understanding, bring us closer together.

It's a shame we need those details. It's a shame we can't just know those details are out there, none of our business, but ready to explain so much about so many people.