It's rather embarrassing to be twenty-two-years-old, a college graduate, and then have your family set up a date for you. But that's what happened to me in the late summer of 1977. Maybe they thought they had to do it because I wasn't getting any dates on my own.
I was still living at home at that point, so it was difficult to hide my predicament from my relatives. Perhaps I could have claimed that I was just having a string of casual encounters, but they knew me well enough to know that was highly unlikely. Besides, even if that was true, they tended to be on the prudish side and they wouldn't have appreciated hearing about it.
In any case, they had never seen me go out for a date, or even talk about one, because I indeed had never had such an experience.
One may find that hard to believe if one thinks of the 1970s as being a time of completely uninhibited sexuality. But I was there at that time, and I know that there were a considerable number of guys then who were, frankly, very eager for a girlfriend or even just some pussy. It may sound like I'm being - unenlightened, retrograde, or even "chauvinist" to use a popular term from that era. But all I wanted was a girlfriend, or maybe two if the first one didn't work out, and I wasn't even getting that.
The sexual revolution wasn't working out for me, and after more than fifteen years of it, women seemed to have the upper hand in choosing partners. Sexuality had turned into a marketplace, although few people were explicitly aware of it at the time.
Yet I was sure that I was doing something wrong personally if I couldn't compete. I was on the skinny side, but I supposed I wasn't that bad looking. I didn't stop clocks, as the expression goes.
I certainly lacked confidence, although I could do a plausible job of pretending I had it. The problem perhaps was a combination of passivity and procrastination, two of my biggest weaknesses. It never seemed that I could find a girl I felt comfortable approaching. It was always something I'd do next month - or next semester.
In early September after my graduation, I was working at a desultory job in Manhattan when my family in The Bronx found somebody for me. She was the daughter of one of my mother's co-workers. My mom worked as a production manager at a television studio on the West Side of Manhattan. That co-worker had a daughter named Janet Pankin, who was my age and also a graduate of the City University system, namely Hunter College. I had just left City College further uptown.
The main advantages that this Janet had, as presented by my parents, was that she was a "nice" girl and might even be considered in the longer term as a partner in matrimony. She lived with her family in a part of Inwood, in upper Manhattan, bordering Fort Tryon Park. That was a reasonable distance from where I was living in the North Bronx.
The idea of getting married was completely against any interests I had at the time. It may sound crass, but I was interested in getting laid, not getting "hitched." The idea of a steady girlfriend, however, did seem reasonable to me. I would consider something longer term than mere casual sex, which was I good thing because I suspected that this Janet person wasn't going to be introduced to me for just screwing around.
I wasn't that enthusiastic about the whole thing. Who exactly was this chick, and was there something odd about her that required her to be set-up too? I didn't want to think too much about that. However, since my dating prospects had been nil for my entire life up to that point, I figured I would give it a try and see what happened. I hoped this nice girl wasn't too "nice."
Thus these two possible lovebirds, Janet and me, had to put together "packages," one could call them, which included photos of ourselves plus introductory letters describing - well, whatever seemed worth saying about our lives up to that point and why we should meet.
It was a chore to create this message for a complete stranger. I struggled to write something plausibly interesting about myself, the main item being that I had written for and edited one of the college newspapers. This bi-monthly journal had printed some strange, sometimes pornographic materials at different times since the late 1960s.
In fact, it would continue to do so again after I graduated. It was influenced by publications as diverse as
The Village Voice,
Rolling Stone,
and even
Screw Magazine,
but of course, it was nowhere the quality of any of those.
I wasn't part of the wilder journalistic scene there; what I wrote were fairly conventional news and feature stories. There was a kind of weird schism in this paper, being half conventional and half outlandish. I decided to mention the name of the paper but not go into any details about it just yet.
The package I got back from Janet had some headshots and one full-body photo. My first impression was that she was just a generic girl like tens of thousands of others who were produced by the CUNY system every year. She had a roundish face and dark hair that came down just to her shoulders, which was a little short by the standards of the era.
She didn't strike me as either plain or pretty, but somewhere in the middle. I doubted I would have noticed her on the street or in one of my classes. The full photo showed her in a blouse and jeans, and she had a bit of chunkiness about her body. That was actually fine with me because I liked women of different body sizes. I guessed that she was about five-foot-six.
Her letter to me was fairly short and I found out that she was an English major. That fit in well with my own shaky employment prospects, having studied history myself.
There was one more notable detail; she wasn't smiling in any of her four pictures. One would think that she would do that to make a good impression. But then I wasn't smiling either in the five shots that I had sent to her. I wasn't that fond of being photographed in the first place.
My overall passivity left me undecided about what to do about this particular chick. I had her phone number and address now, but I procrastinated about taking the next step. I had no clue as to how to make the next move in the approach.
She, however, solved the problem for me. She didn't call me, but I soon received a short note in the mail. All it said was, "Hey Paul, I'd like to meet you. Please call me and we can go for drinks and get to know each other a bit more." She simply signed it, "Janet."
It was very short, but it was a bit flattering I suppose that this was the first woman who had ever said she would go on a date with me. It was also significant that she was the one who had initiated the meeting. What had she seen in my meager offerings about myself that I had mailed in my package? I had recently grown a straggly mustache in an attempt to look more mature, but I doubted that fooled anybody.
I called her number the very next evening and she answered. Her voice seemed pleasant by unremarkable. It seemed to be my role as the male to pick a venue, so I chose The Piper's Kilt bar on 231st Street. That was a lot closer to her house than it was to mine and she did know the place. She made one suggestion, "If you get there first, just go in a get a table. I'll meet you in there."
That was set for the following evening, a Thursday. I got there a few minutes early and didn't see her, so I went in and ordered a vodka and tonic from a waitress. I figured I'd dress up a bit, and I wore a new gray sport coat that was classier than the shabby, five-year-old blue polyester one that had been my only jacket for quite some time.
Janet was more than ten minutes late, and being the somewhat pessimistic sort that I was, I started to assume that she wasn't going to show up. My first actual date ever, and I feared she would flake out and I'd be stood up. I felt a twinge of disappointment; I was eager to talk to any female who would give me at least half-a-chance.
I didn't have to worry. Janet surprised me by making a fairly dramatic entrance. If you've ever seen the movie
Sea of Love,
which came out twelve years later, her arrival by coincidence was similar to a scene in the film. Al Pacino was just sitting at a table, waiting for his date, when Ellen Barkin comes sweeping in and just plops down in the seat opposite him without even saying hello.
That's what Janet did. Suddenly she was just there and sitting down in the other chair. Later I figured out that she had planned it in advance.
Somehow, Janet's next move also mirrored what Barkin would do later. She didn't say anything, but she just had a look that said,
well here I am. What do you think? Not too bad, right?
I didn't say anything immediately either. Janet knew she had caught me off guard, and yet she also was getting the first hints that I was impressed by her. It was the confidence she was exuding that got to me. Later I figured out that women are very good at picking up cues on what men are thinking. In those first few seconds, she probably knew she could have me if she wanted me. I was there for the picking, and that seemed to please her.
I guess I was pleased too. She looked better than she did in her photos. For one thing, she had a sly grin at having pulled off her little stunt. She was dressed up too, and she was wearing a gray suit with a white blouse. I was getting a sense of the shape of her body under her clothes, and I wanted to see the back of her skirt so that I could make a judgment about the roundness of her ass.
She said, "So what are you having?"
