Remembering Tamara - high-school boy's attraction to high-school girl - Column

I was a 15-year-old virgin with above-average intelligence and below-average social skills the year I took high-school biology in the eighties. You remember adolescence and virginity, I hope. The unbridled passion that a breeze might bring on. The way your bloodstream seemed to have discovered your genitalia overnight. Pulse, pulse, pulse. Not to mention the shuffle of bodies between classes in the halls with those "accidental" caresses of skin and that "subtle" mingling of Brut and Charlie in the air.

And you must remember biology. Memorizing all the bones in the body and partnering to dissect a stinky frog. (Footnote: Said frog dissection actually provided me with one of my rare moments of teenage rebellion. Despite strict instruction not to play with the specimen or to remove any segments thereof from the classroom, I used the small intestine as a jump rope for my classmates' amusement and later secreted its heart within my Trapper Keeper to repulse the girls in the cafeteria). I admit that I enjoyed the class.

There was but one barrier to my complete enjoyment of the course. Her name was Tamara. She was copper-colored, with hair to match (discounting the black roots) and a gold tooth in front. She had mercilessly plucked her eyebrows to oblivion and constantly adjusted the condition of her nails: chipping old enamel, buffing the ends, cutting the cuticles, repainting them with a new, garish shade of red. She had a scar. It ran vertically for two and a half inches down her cheek. Everything about her cried "woman!" to my 15-year-old senses.

She would never be on the cheerleading squad or the drill team like the pretty sepia china dolls that were in my social group and moistened my daydreams. She could care less about studying trivia for the academic team or learning the cha-cha with the Spanish club as I did. Her biggest academic concern seemed to be passing her required courses with the least possible effort. In biology she planned on my help in decreasing her effort.

Unbeknownst to Tamara, I'd retained a puritanical streak from some past life that made acts like cheating and overt sexual conduct cardinal sins. Or perhaps she did know. Perhaps she knew instinctively that I, like that minister in The Scarlet Letter, had physical longings that mental attempts at purity could never conquer.

So each day I'd come to class, homework in hand, prepared for quizzes. And each day I'd hear, "Chriiiis . . .!" followed by a pleading look for me to supply her with the answer. Or sometimes just "pssst!" Of course Chris, the virginal puritan, ignored such requests. That was cheating. Wrong. A big no-no!

But direct appeal was only Tamara's vanguard. Then came the hand, the heavy artillery. It stretched, nails filed to animal sharpness, beneath the table slowly toward my thigh. Once there, the nails feathered a circular impression, waltzing upon an untrod pathway. Neural sparks raced from thigh to spinal cord to cerebellum before resting in the groin. Oh yes. The site of so much abuse and neglect in our youth. As it pulsed, electricity filled my head, so that my eyes bulged and my mouth gaped. (Stop. Don't stop, please!!) With one hand Tamara had hooked a minnow on a barbed line. A rabbit in a bear trap.

Homework? Test questions? If she had played her cards right, this girl could have had a 1974 Ford station wagon loaded with gift-wrapped kitchen appliances beneath her bedroom window. All my parents' eight-track tapes would have been hers for the asking. Need I mention the never-touched perfumed guest soaps, unlit scented candles, wrapped guest mints and variety of middle-class bric-a-brac my teenage lust would have delivered lovingly to her if only those fingers would walk three inches farther north?

As I said, she only wanted to pass the class. So I gave her answers. her perpetual absenteeism finally caught up with her, however, and she flunked. Funny how she smiled upon each return to class, as if she had been enjoying some secret pleasure that I would little understand, let alone relate to.

I didn't see her outside of class much, and even then I only reluctantly recognized her. After all, what would those sepia china dolls think?

Still, with these many years having passed and virginity thankfully cast aside, as lights dim and strange flesh meets mine, I'm sometimes confronted not by the image of those fragile cartwheeling replicas of airbrushed fashion-magazine perfection but instead by the sensation of cool nails raking my thigh and a whispered "pssst!"

Christopher Adams is a 26-year-old self-described struggling actor who lives in Brooklyn.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Essence Communications, Inc.
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