My First Sexual Experience

We wanted to see female breasts. We wanted to see vaginas, although we used the crudest terms for those parts of the female anatomy. We were twelve and hungry with zero experience and zero opportunity, and that took us to Coney Island, specifically to the Tornado Roller Coaster.

          The Tornado was not the best roller coaster in Coney Island. Everyone knew that. The Cyclone was the best. On the Cyclone you felt your Nathan’s hotdog and root beer rising in your gorge as the roller coaster climbed slowly and haltingly up the first hill and you wondered if this wooden antique of a structure would blow apart under you, and then you’d reach the top and the roller coaster just waited there, and then it moved, moved downward and the world sprang to warp speed and the scream rushed out of your mouth and you’d feel that lightness in your testicles as you plunged down that first hill, eighty-five horrifying feet at sixty miles an hour.

          That was the Cyclone, what they call The Big Momma of Coney Island.

          But as we rode the few stops on the Brighton Line subway train from the Avenue M station in Brooklyn south toward Coney Island, we weren’t thinking Cyclone. We were thinking Tornado, an underachiever by roller-coaster standards. It had no death-defying first hill. It had no death-defying anything.

          The Tornado with its wooden track and steel structure was built in 1926, predating the Cyclone by one year. Arson burned most of it down in 1977 and the poor dear got demolished a year later.

          But this is 1957 and I’m on the Tornado with my friends frantically awaiting the first hill. Not for the thrill of plummeting down – there is no such thrill – but for the moment of hesitation when the roller coaster briefly stands there at the poised point between up and down. And then I look left over my shoulder. And my friends look left. We look down at a distant rooftop. We get a fleeting glimpse, a second, maybe two seconds of the rooftop far below the first hill of the Tornado.

          What do we see on the rooftop far below the first hill of the Tornado?

Naked women. That’s what we see. We see freaking naked women on a rooftop far below the first hill of the Tornado.

          Why do we see naked women on a rooftop far below the first hill of the Thunderbolt?

          Because the rooftop has a mikvah.

          What is a mikvah?

          A mikvah is a ritual bath religious Jewish women take at the end of their period. There are other reasons for a mikvah, but the end of the menstrual cycle gives you the idea. My mother was not religious and, as far as I know, never attended a bathhouse for a mikvah.

          What do we observe when we see naked women on a rooftop far below the first hill of the Tornado?

          What we don’t see are babes with young perky breasts and silk-smooth skin and bitable asses and flowing hair and that lazy sexual look we’d come to love. We don’t see actress Suzanne Pleshette who, according to my Aunt Sarah, grew up in her apartment building in Brooklyn. Suzanne Pleshette, who will go on to star on The Bob Newhart Show, is a babe. A Jewish babe. But she is not at the mikvah in Coney Island.

          What we see are middle-aged Jewish women immersed in water or waddling around the rooftop wrapping towels around their heads or folding towels around their waists. If we’re lucky we catch a glimpse of fat tummies, bloated thighs, sagging boobs. We see the darkness you know where. This is what we see for the instant the Tornada is suspended between rising and falling. Screams of joy rush out of our mouths and we’re punching each other and slapping the metal safety railing over our laps and we’re yelling, “You see those giant tits? Are they great or what?”

          And then the Tornada moves and performs its ritual fall, and the women vanish, and the Tornado ride isn’t ever exciting. Except when it’s over, we pay for another ride. And another. And another.

Excerpted from my memoir in progress Brooklyn Jew.