Something 4 The Weekend # 185

New Order: Power, Corruption & Lies: "Age Of Consent" [mp3]

The following story is true, only the names have been changed to protect my innocence.

It was homecoming weekend in the autumn of 1983, about ten at night, and I found myself walking home from my buddy Stan's house on the other side of town because I was trashed on cheap beer and cheaper weed. My usual path between our two places took me past Lime Kiln Park, and it was here that I encountered two teenaged girls sitting on the hood of their car in the parking lot of the park, about 50 yards away from the sidewalk along which I was stumbling.

I had no idea who these two girls were, but being a teenaged boy recently broken up with my girlfriend, when they started whistling at me and called to me to come over and talk to them, I hornily obliged.

As it turns out, they were from Port Washington, whom we were playing football against the next afternoon. Port scags or not, they were cute and I was, as I said, trashed and horny, so their hometown hardly mattered.

What mattered was that five minutes into our conversation, one of the girls pulled out a handgun and aimed it directly at my chest, ordering me to remove all my clothing. Again, I obliged, although my libido had vanished at this point. As a general rule, hand guns do not make for sexy fun times.

So there I was, standing naked in the Lime Kiln Park parking lot with my clothes piled at my feet. While the one girl continued levelling the gun at me, the other pulled a small can of lighter fluid from her jacket pocket and proceeded to douse my clothing.

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked.

"You're gonna dance for us", gun girl replied as lighter fluid girl bent down and lit my doused clothing on fire.

"What?"

"Fucking dance!"

And so I danced, naked, as orange-blue flames licked my knees, the two girls giggling as teenaged girls tend to do.

When the flames had died down, leaving behind a pile of scorched clothing, the two girls got back into their car and sped off into the night.

"Age Of Consent" by New Order was playing on the car's stereo.

I gathered up my scorched clothes, and jogged the rest of the way home, about a mile away, avoiding the streets the best I could by going through some cornfields and Bones Woods.

I hated New Order, being the punk metal kid that I was, but after that night, I didn't anymore.

Hotcha! Hank