Ivy went to a school about four avenues and three streets from mine. She was popular, Trini and thick. She had a gap in her teeth, which I, like many Jamaicans, found sexy.
I don’t know what she does now because she keeps one of those Facebook profiles with no pictures. And she doesn’t have Instagram. So I do my best, from memory, to understand what she looked like at 16. And why we started hooking up in the park.
It goes like this: city kids with working Caribbean parents — like my mom and Ivy’s mom — we had to be clever about hooking up. We had no business being so sexually active because I guess we had homework. I didn’t do my homework though, and everyone knew that, even as I rifled through a backpack of loose papers pretending there was some missing essay in there.
Instead, I made it my duty to find spots in the park where I could get my freak on safely.
That’s why when I walk through Central Park now, thinking of things to write, or hand-in-hand with a lover, those times wash over me. Each hill or grove near a landmark but far enough away from people, was a place I tried to have sex. I would tell those girls I knew and wanted to have sex with that “we should go for a walk” and that the park was really beautiful. I would bring my camera from junior-year photography seminar, and say I wanted to do a photo shoot featuring them.
Or carry a poetry book with a couple of stray lines that could be about anyone (but was surely about her) to recite some lyrics that I swore were going to get me signed if not get me sex.
I didn’t have to do all that with Ivy. She kinda scouted me and chose me, discreetly, while we were on a trip earlier that year. Out of nowhere, during our bus ride to some Northeast school for rich kids, she put her tongue down my throat mid-conversation. I watched the autumn leaves scraping the bus window to check if this was real or if I was imagining some scene from a movie I wanted to be in. It was definitely real.
Hooking up with Ivy was wrong. I loved someone else, I thought, because the person who was my girlfriend was a very public partner. We had little in common, but I thought it fair to keep going out because we kissed often and talked on the phone about school topics like how I could do better in pre-calc. (Hint: Start doing your homework, muchacho.) She would tell me about dance practice, and then the dance shows she had, and I would attend them. But I reiterate, maybe out of guilt, that we were dissimilar. More different than the average boy and girl.
But we did both have Caribbean parents and we both went to private school. And usually, after a prolonged makeout session, she would allow me to do more than her Christianity permitted. For that reason, I have to omit her name from this story. I fear, if there is a God and that God is moral, they will strike me down for exposing one of heaven’s soldiers.
But I’m getting off track. Ivy is the subject here, and the ways Ivy and I hooked up in the park have been on my mind a lot recently, because I feel like part of my creative imagination was born in a spot that I often ride by when I’m biking to work. Trying to burn calories.
What should be an incidental place of inconsequential importance is a haven of adolescence. The gazebos by the pond show me what my life’s been and the risks I’ve taken to feel more alive, and less anonymous.
New York City makes me feel isolated in the crowd. Throngs of people walk down the street with almost zero awareness of anything but themselves and the speed at which they’ll reach the next destination. I imagine this is what a beehive is like. Thousands of synchronized unimportant steps forming a choric hum that fades into empty skies.
Central Park, on the other hand, contains pockets of intimacy. The indigent sleep on benches up and down Fifth Avenue. Know-nothing couples ride behind smelly horses who shit their way through a worn asphalt trail. And teenagers swap saliva along the mossy cement walls and cobbled bricks bordering the greens.
Ivy emailed me at an address that only she and another girl named Kit knew about. I had created the account for the West side school girls. There was another for girls from Brooklyn and the Bronx. She would say ‘what are u doing after practice? Meet me by 89th and the park.’ I didn’t even reply because I could only think of our meeting and how excited it made me. I started packing my North Face and trooping out of the red gates at my school.
My rich friend, the one who got a lot of girls, saw me on my way out the building and was like ‘where YOU goin nigga?’ and nearly burst out in giggles, knowing it had to be a girl I was rushing off this way for. I took nothing else seriously, and by then I’d started putting on a pair of glasses, and a bit of hustle when I left school to see someone. People are most predictable for their bad, indulgent ways, and I suppose he knew that early on because he was like that too.
“I’m going to Mind Ya Own Business Boulevard, at the corner of Suck My Dick Lane, you bum ass bitch.” And I’d laugh at him, despite how nervous I was to get caught, and that he was gossipy. He had started this game with the rest of us, possibly to validate himself, of tallying scores for who everyone hooked up with. He was trying to inflate his image and possibly embarrass Vern, who we all suspected was a virgin and therefore the butt of our jokes.
The system was simple: Freshman girls = 4 points, Sophomore girls = 3 points, Junior girls = 2 points and Senior girls = 1 point, because most of the Senior girls had already hooked up by then so it wasn’t special to find one who was ready to advance to that stage.
I was only hooking up with senior girls who I knew and I didn’t keep score. That struck me as some heavily insecure shit and, moreover, designed to fuck everyone’s life up. Ivy was a senior and few suspected we had anything going because we didn’t make it public, and she didn’t want to look like a ho. The other black and Latino kids from the private schools knew I had a girlfriend. And as far as high school marriages went, our puppy love betrayed no drama so I wanted to keep it that way.
When I saw Ivy at 89th, she was wearing black Guess jeans and a matching denim jacket with holes torn in the elbows. She was so fly. Her hair was pulled back and plaited nicely down the sides so she could control it. Otherwise, it was too noticeable and grown men on the street would talk to her for far too long, asking her where she was from and how she got it like that. The good hair. The old Belizean men and the Puerto Ricans would touch it.
As soon as we spotted the tree shade and a long walkway that led to nowhere, we would stop and kiss. She used her tongue immediately, which thrilled me so I made sure to thoroughly chew a Watermelon Bubblelicious and coat my tongue with a flavor she liked. I suggested we walk further along until we were deeper into the park and invisible. She was like ‘ok, but we not doing no weird shit so get that out of your silly brain right now, little boy.’
There was a gazebo I saw next to a big boulder. The rock had to be twice my height and the benches in the gazebo were unoccupied. Perfect spot for unplanned high school slobbering. In a flash we were sitting on the bench and she was straddling me. I couldn’t tell if people could see us but I’d learned to justify it in my head by saying ‘how could anyone see past this huge boulder?’ or ‘no one wants to run up on some teenagers kissing in the park, unless they’re a true pervert and, in that case, we’ll just leave.’
Right now, in present day, I understand people can see past that boulder.
Ivy went faster than I knew how to go. Daring to keep up, I reached around her and did the only bra trick I knew, unstrapping her with one hand. There were multiple notches and latches, so this was like some Mission Impossible: Lingerie type move that I was surprised I could pull off with my mind’s clock ticking. I didn’t want to look amateurish. She could kiss me, rub my neck, move her hips and undo her hair clips all at the same time. I could kiss, and undo her bra. No fancy stuff.
“Do you have a condom?”
“Yea, lemme go in my backpack.”
That landfill of undone homework and leaky pens had no condom in it. I was just fronting to seem like the kind of guy who had sex all the time, and obviously carried around spare condoms. Tuh. Clearly, my score was low.
“You know what…I think I used my last one…damn.”
She openly laughed. I got offended.
“Ooooo-kaaaaay, Andrew. Ok. It’s all right I don’t wanna get too carried away here. Don’t you have a girlfriend? Is that who you used your ‘last condom’ on?”
“Nah, I’m not saying that.”
I didn’t want to start unfounded rumors. My girlfriend and I hadn’t had sex, and it was better that way. She had a rep to uphold, and I didn’t want to be seen as one of the guys who went too fast. The veneer of innocence helped me too.
“We can do whatever else, though,” she said, and led me by the hand to the other side of the boulder. I looked out on to the pond, past the shadow of the gazebo, to see if any tourists were pedaling those swan boat things toward us. The vista only revealed weeping willows and actual swans.
She knelt in front of me. I could hear gravel crunch under her Nikes as she undid my belt. I looked around again, feverishly, for police or park vehicles. But I didn’t resist, even though I was scared we’d get arrested.
Although we’d done stuff like this before, there was something completely adult about trying it outside in the park. The risk we took here accepted the notion that nature allowed humans to be unashamed and passionate in a way that urban brick could not. Her apartment building stairwell would not offer the calm cooing of birds, nor would the clouds watch over us in our hasty exchange. I pulled the bra out of her shirt and over her head so that it eventually dangled from her back like a cape outside of her jean jacket.
She cared for me there, in the park. I pressed my palms backward into the boulders, trying to brace myself for all the pleasure.
That’s when I heard the rustling behind us. I perked up and opened my eyes.
“Did you hear that?”
This was how people died in the movies. Especially teenagers.
“Hear what?”
More rustling. I saw burly shadows near our backpacks in the gazebo. Peeking around the corner of the boulder (but not yet pulling my pants up from around my ankles), I tried to spy whatever was making the sound.
Skittering and huffs. Sniffs and hisses.
Ivy shrieked.
“Oh my God what the fuck is that! What the fuck is that what the fuck is that!” She pulled her clothing back on and into place and hugged her bra and herself while still crouching. I saw what she was squealing about.
Four toddler-sized raccoons were digging in the garbage can beside the gazebo. I saw them climb and lumber into the narrow hole at the top, one by one, and form a noisy scrum inside the giant green can. Some kind of fight to the death was popping off inside the garbage, and we were not trying to see the champion on its way out.
I ran lightly over to grab our bags, guarding her with my body as I side-stepped the park bandits. Once we gripped our belongings, I raced off.
“Call me when you get home!”
“I will!”
And we darted in separate directions to the exits of the park closest to our subway lines.
But it wasn’t the last time we hooked up in the park.