It's a lazy Sunday afternoon in Dallas Texas. I am keeping my cool by writing on my Macintosh in a Seattle's Best Cafe, part of the Borders bookstore at Greenville and Lovers Lane. No, hold that thought. This cafe is one of the few remaining Cafe Borders. The space is scheduled for conversion to a Seattle's Best, but not this month. The Borders has the layout and feel of an early Borders store, soon after Kmart set the chain off on its own.
Greenville and Lovers Lane is a corner where any item is available for purchase. I'm next door to a Tom Thumb grocery store, a bike shop and a Wolf Camera. I can see across the street a Condoms To Go franchise, one of many in the Dallas metroplex. Dinner is coming from the Tom Thumb tonight. I'll check out cameras in the Wolf Camera in a few minutes. I haven't found the need to go shopping at the Condoms to Go during my stay in Dallas, and there's a lot of locals who have more knowledge of warming lotions and adult devices than I. I've been in to see the merchandise, a sexual tourist for a few minutes, glad that the female sales clerks are friendly, but not too friendly.
Do you remember a time when planning for a night of love necessitated a trip to the back of a pharmacy? Or the planning required a stop at a trucker's plaza, going to the bathroom vending machine with a roll of quarters?
I am remembering, perhaps incorrectly, the movie the Summer of '42. Gary Grimes, the male lead, played by a 16-year-old actor, enters the pharmacy to buy condoms, and he has to ask for them from the pharmacist, standing at a counter. Internet Movie Databases lists him as a druggist. The pharmacist challenges him, demanding to know if Grimes knows their use. Grimes replies, I paraphrase, "Fill them up with water and throw them of the top of a building". That's not an old film, dated 1971, 35 years ago, filmed during my eighth year of life, about a summer 29 years before. 29 years passed before until the film, and 35 years passed before I reflected upon it in writing, a cycle of 64 years. My mother laughed at the dialog when she watched it with us on television. I understood the next time I saw it on television.
When my first girlfriend forced me into a pharmacy at night to buy my first box, the boxes had moved into a display area in view of pharmacist's counter, a counter now more staffed by pharmacy techs, busily dispensing. It was a pharmacy on the south side of the road between Corunna and Lansing, a proprietorship that I've not noticed in recent years. The pharmacist probably joined the staff of a CVS or Walgreen’s or Wal-Mart or Meijer's when those stores established locations, buying out the pharmacist's records, acquiring the pharmacist's patients. I bought unlubricated Trojans in an orange box. The box didn't come with an instruction card, as the boxes now come with instruction cards with simple pictures and step-by-step help in one of six languages, mostly languages experiencing a decline of new speakers. Hoo-hah! The unlubricated profos didn't work so well when we had an afternoon of privacy, but what did I know about KY Jelly or foreplay then? When I met a woman interested in sexual intimacy in college, I borrowed -- permanent loan -- a rubber from the guy across the hall. He hailed from the city of Fenton, Michigan, and I knew he kept a supply.
Since then, I remember driving a date to a F & M all night pharmacy and personal products store on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak and waiting in the parking lot as she bought her first box of French letters. I don't remember the brand, she used her own money and she bought lubricated, as I had suggested. I remember a woman who had never asked her lover to don a condom, and I taught her how to roll one over the penis, lubrication outside, and dry side inside. I've met more than one woman who knew how to hold the condom ring lightly between her lips and roll it over the cock on the first down stroke of a blowjob. There's a lot to know in the area of condom technology and anthropology.
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