CASUAL
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual SEX AND THE SINGLE SWEDE Last Sunday, I took about the longest cab ride one can possibly take in Paris: from the Porte d'Auteuil (practically Brittany) to Roissy (practically Belgium). As...
...This was 1975...
...Sleep with me...
...I remember sitting around with my tenth-grade chums in the waning days of summer, having a conversation that went something like this: "Buncha kids comin' from Sweden this year...
...Pot's legal over there...
...Just south of us, in the imploding shoe-factory town of Lynn, the two high schools were suddenly so full of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans that our baseball team didn't win a game against either of them for a decade...
...Oh, she's got a big crush on you...
...He went up to Hector Bolkonsky, the school's four-letter hero-athlete (and, perforce, its most wanton jerk) to ask if Hector thought Amy would dance...
...But once we hit it, I had a thought: Isn't it Americans who are supposed to be the hedonists and Europeans the prudes...
...my friend suggested helpfully...
...What should I pass her...
...One particular dance in the high-school gym illustrated the sexual backwardness of the Euros...
...Lars Petersen, a slow-witted and gangly soccer player, wanted to dance with Amy Schneider...
...Un Homme...
...Two dozen Swedes could wreak moral havoc on a high-school class, or so we hoped...
...Europe was Chanel No...
...If what Europeans are now doing is tolerating any-thing-goes sexuality, then they're not acting like Europeans—they're acting like Americans in the Age of Disco...
...Must...
...Lars and Amy stepped onto the floor for a slow-dance, and Hector called the tenth grade up into the bleachers to witness the scene...
...Right now he's probably throwing shoes at his television set, screaming about how Clinton has corrupted America's youth...
...Yeah...
...How was Lars to know how cool it was to be Swedish...
...Maybe Swedes over there flocked to nude beaches and sex shops...
...5 and necking on the Bridge of Sighs...
...Our Swedes must have gone through some stick-in-the-mud vetting...
...Sweden at the time was associated with beer, pornography, and suicide...
...and second, once Lars had explained himself to Amy, an enmity between Hector and Amy that lasted for the rest of high school...
...Kiss her...
...Here I'm thinking of the Swedish exchange program we had at my high school north of Boston...
...Oh, I wouldn't want to do that...
...Right on the gym floor...
...We, on the other hand, are behaving like bloodless European socialists of yore...
...As soon as the cabbie picked up on my American accent (halfway through the word "Bonjour"), he decided to devote our 45 minutes together to Monica Lewinsky...
...A reasonable question...
...Her father'd prob'bly kill ya...
...So there we were at the unbridgeable divide...
...It's an insult if you don't...
...In Boston, attempts to bus blacks into Italian and Irish neighborhoods led to riots and bombs...
...It's bad manners if you don't...
...What is crush...
...This last was wholly unnecessary, as Amy had a reputation for being quick to forgive...
...My opinion of the matter tends to be congruent with the French one—the vive-la-difference, "your-so-called-free-country" opinion so widely lampooned in the American press...
...Look," I said in halting French, "although the president shouldn't be impeached, one can't deny that he's acted like a . . . like a . . . what's the word in French...
...America was Erica Jong and Plato's Retreat...
...She wants to sleep with you...
...Now, listen, Lars...
...The women were all blocky farmer's daughters, whose sensuality began at Yodels and ended at Devil Dogs...
...Still, I tried to explain that the Starr proceeding was neither illegal nor illogical...
...So our rich and progressive school board decided to share the burden of integrating society—by accepting 20 students from the richest suburbs of Stockholm...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...Under the mythology I grew up with in the 1970s, Europe was romantic, but the United States was sexual...
...But Hector was always kind of an angry fellow...
...It was an ugly one, with two results: first, hilarity from all of us gathered in the bleachers, through which was vented—almost volcanically— all our resentment at our Swedish classmates' failure to entertain us...
...Yeah...
...Yeah, prostitution, too...
...You ask her to dance...
...This was less interesting than it might have been...
...The boys were diligent, unironic, and dumb—this last failing disguised by their near-total failure to learn English...
...Yeah, and ya can go to the beach naked, too...
...If she says yes, that means she wants you to make a pass at her...
...And if she says 'Thank you' after the dance, then you must try to take her shirt off...
...Must...
...Don't be shy...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 5
