At The Movies
written by:
Naughty Miranda

It is said that a stereotype is only truly offensive (and stereotypical) if it is true. In which case, memories of a certain Adults Only theater, in a medium-sized east coast city in the early-mid 1970s are very offensive indeed.

Even from the outside, the building stood out like a dirty nail on a manicured hand, an off-white pile that was erected in the 30s as the latest in contemporary architecture, and had neither been painted nor refurbished since then. One it had indeed been a proud and beautiful theater, but the mainstream movies had long stopped playing there.

Instead, a proprietor who looked as seedy as his establishment, specialized in what the low-key marquee insisted were Continental and Scandinavian features, all of which apparently starred the same blowsily made-up cartoon blonde, scantily clad and long since defaced beneath precisely the kind of graffiti you'd expect to find in such a place - ink-scrawled cocks and balls that assailed her from every direction, ribald commentaries that blossomed in speech bubbles, and enough jets of Magic Markered semen to float a battleship.

The place never closed. Early morning, on the way to class; late into the evening, on the way home from a friend's house, and at any hour in-between, one of two or three bored looking youths would be seated in the ticket booth; and, occasionally, you'd see an actual customer shuffling in or out of the main door, and he'd be as clichéd as the establishment itself. He really would look furtive, he really would be wearing a raincoat, and nine times out of ten, he really would be wearing a flat cap, which he'd pull down over his eyes the moment he saw someone else on the street outside.

But there was one aspect of the experience that was not a stereotype; that was, in fact, so bizarre that even those of us who were aware of it were scarcely able to voice it out loud, for fear that the very act of open discussion might end the magic there and then. Every Thursday afternoon (but only Thursday afternoons), sometime before we turned out of class, the emergency exit at the back of the building would be mysteriously unbolted, and would remain that way all evening.

The first few weeks after we discovered this presumably magical portal, the four of us simply stood by the opening, squinting into the darkness on the other side, listening to the soundtrack that crackled off the screen; groans, gasps, cries and crescendos, all set to a kind of pulsing neo-rock music, played exclusively, it seemed through a wah-wah pedal.

Occasionally a snatch of dialogue would emerge amid the grunting; occasionally, the actual meaning of the words might be comprehended by one or other of us, but even if they weren't, the sentence itself would soak into our collective psyche, to become a sort of in-joke secret weapon, to be deployed whenever the adult world grew too demanding.

"Did you finish your history assignment?" "Go lick it off your tits." And I often wonder whether was I the only one of us who experienced a secret fission of excitement at the very thought of doing just that... of raising one breast and lowering my head, and then running my tongue through the thick pool of cum that a lover had just deposited there. I don't know, maybe I was. But when one of our number - I think it was Wanda - suggested that we actually pass through the door, and watch instead of merely listening to the movies, I was the first to agree.

We were no strangers to "bunking" into the movies for free. Every movie-house in town had its weak point, be it a back door, a bathroom window or simply a turn-a-blind-eye commissioner, through which a stealthy form could slip and thrill to those quaintly X-rated flicks that no-one at that time would ever have dreamed an impressionable teen should witness: Straw Dogs, Soldier Blue, The Night Porter, The Exorcist. If the marquee mandated 21s-and over, we were in there, and it was astonishing just how discriminating we became, able within ten minutes or so of knowing whether the movie was worth watching (bush, blood, tits and terror), or if we should up and march out, and do something interesting instead.

This experience was different, though. In through the out door, down a smokily unlit passage-way, and into an auditorium that was scarcely the size of a classroom, with a screen no bigger than a bedsheet. The room seemed darker than the usual theater, and the audience more restless. Rustling sounds, mostly, interspersed with heavy breathing. "Someone," Lisa whispered in my ear, "is having a quiet jerk off."

Only it wasn't so quiet. And it wasn't just someone. Judging from the rustling sounds, half the men in the room were at it.

A movie was already playing, a scratchy-looking black-and-white opus, whose plot... so far as we could distinguish one... was, how far could a cock slide up a fat woman's asshole before it bumped tips with the other one, that was sliding down her throat? And that, we quickly learned, was one of the more erudite efforts. But to four girls who had only ever seen sex in a Hollywood production, where it's camera work and angles that give the scene its sensation, even the crudest coupling was fascinating stuff.

By the time they hit their late teens, most girls are at least theoretically aware of the mechanics of sex. They know where "it" is meant to go, they've heard of the other places it can go, and they've already thought of one or two more where they'd like to think it could go. Even in an age where Internet Porn, Prime Time Smut and Cable Special In-between weren't simply unheard of, they weren't even dreamed up, popular culture had already built sufficient hints and clues into its make-up that a well-developed imagination could join up most of the dots. And if there's one thing about a teenaged girl that is well-developed, it's her imagination.

What was taking place on that screen, however, went beyond anything we had ever thought up. The titles of the movies themselves are long forgotten; so, in terms of actual happenstance, are most of the "plots." But the impression they left, the wonder they aroused, the excitement they provoked and the sheer sense of injustice that they left behind... why doesn't that ever happen to me?... would remain long after we left the building that evening, through the never-ending week that followed, and probably well into adulthood as well.

Had I ever seen a hard cock before? Never. Had I ever watched a guy cum? Never. Staring at the screen that first afternoon, I realized that everything... every single thing... that I had ever read, heard, seen or been told about sex wasn't simply wrong, it was ridiculous.

There was no "romance" here, no hand-holding, no eyes meeting across a darkened room while electricity flashed between their souls. It was hunger, it was greed, it was naked animal passion. It was cocks and cunts and juices and jizz. Love didn't even enter into it.

And it was quick. Of course the main movie was "full length"; an hour, maybe even 90 minutes, and there'd be plot and dialogue around the frenzied fucking. For me, though, the real meat was the supporting program, anything up to two hours' worth of shorts that could have been shot at anytime since my granny was a girl, and which made no attempt whatsoever at being anything other than pure sexuality.

They were rarely longer than nine or ten minutes. "That's because 10 minutes is the length of the average jerk-off," disclosed Wanda, whose knowledge of such things was rarely questioned (alone among us, she had an older brother, you see). But they didn't need to be any longer than that, because there was more "action" crammed into one ten minute dirty than you'd catch in a lifetime watching a Hollywood blockbuster.

I remembered reading a review of Last Tango In Paris, of how realistic the sex scenes were meant to be, and when I saw it, I agreed. They were realistic. But realistic isn't real, and no amount of fancy lighting will ever be a substitute for a close-up of a hard, thick dick slamming into a gaping wet pussy. So why even bother faking it?

The most amazing thing of all, though; the one question that has remained with me longer than almost any other puzzle from my past, is - how was it that four barely-legal teenaged virgins, all giggles and curls and noticeable curves, could sit week-in, week-out, in a darkened room full of masturbating men, and not get hit on even once?

It's not as though nobody knew we were there. In fact, on more than one occasion, guys actually got up and moved to another seat when they saw us trouping down the aisle. Maybe they were worried that we'd put them off their stroke? Masturbation is a solitary occupation, after all. Occasionally you'd catch a surreptitious glance out of the corner of your eye, and you'd find yourself wondering what the guy was thinking, was he looking at your tits while he was beating his meat? But that was it.

Except once. One afternoon, the action crept off the screen, slipped down the aisle past a dozen or so rows, and began playing out so close to me that I could have reached out and touched it. And I might have, as well. Except Wendy got in before me, and she wasn't the sort of girl who shared. I think she was an only child.

I remember the movie like it was yesterday: The Sexorcist, a blatant attempt to cling onto the coat-tails of the post-Exorcist boom in supernatural chillers, shot through with a series of extraordinarily explicit sexual encounters, most of them led by the delectable Lilly Lamarr.

Whatever happened to Lily? I never once spotted her in any other movie... maybe she burned out making this one. It was pretty heavy-going, after all, and her character comes to a very grisly end. But still she remains my all-time cinematic heroine, the one girl with whom, as I sat watching the movie, I would have traded places in a flash. And why? Because when she sucked dick, I saw my every dream and fantasy come true.

The problem with Deep Throat, I always thought, was no matter how into it Linda Lovelace seems to be, the fact is, she really doesn't look good while she's doing it. Her face is all screwed up, there's veins and tendons sticking out. She's not sucking the cock in, she's vomiting it out. It's just not attractive, and any guy on the receiving end of that is going to be thinking, "well, it feels great, but does she have to pull those faces?"

There's a visual aesthetic to blow jobs that goes beyond the actual act, and most guys will tell you, a girl who relaxes into the experience, and looks like she's having the time of her life, is a lot more exciting than one who's straining and spluttering, and looks like she's coughing up a hairball. LaMarr fulfills those criteria and then keeps on going.

She's an artist, an expert, the Bolshoi of blowjobs and, when her man cums, she opens her mouth just wide enough for all the juice to come dribbling out, simply so she can have the fun of sucking it all back in again. And again and again. I was watching her relish every inch of those dicks, and you can forget wet panties. I was soaking into the seat itself... and wouldn't that be a treat for the next guy to sit there? "This movie's so hot I can smell it!"

Anyway, I'm sitting there, literally flooding myself, when someone sat down just two seats away from me. I didn't pay any attention at first, but every so often, a movement would flutter in the corner of my eye. It wasn't fast, and it certainly wasn't furtive; at first I thought he was simply munching popcorn. But then Wendy, sitting on my other side, nudged me. "Are you watching this guy?"

I looked. He had his cock out... and that was unusual; most of the guys we'd seen playing with themselves had their hands wedged down the front of their trousers, or maybe covered their laps with a coat. But not this one. Bold as you like, it was out in the open, quivering hard and pointing bolt upright, and he was stroking it, a long, slow sweep with one hand and then, as he reached the tip, and his fingers hung there, the other hand would start at the bottom. And between each sweep, his free hand would go up to his face, and he'd sniff his own fingers and palm.

I glanced at the screen. The movie was into one of its plot interludes. I turned back to the guy. His eyes were glued to the screen, but his hands were still working their magic, slow and patient.

Wendy nudged me again. "How old do you reckon he is?"

"I dunno. Mid-20s, maybe?"

"He's cute."

"He's alright."

"Watch this." Wendy rose, placed her purse on her seat and squeezed past our friends on her other side. She walked a smart circuit around the theater, and then headed back to her seat from the other end of the row... the end where the guy was sitting. She'd have to get past him to regain her own seat.

All three of us were watching her now. Laughing, we'd often wondering what would happen if we crept up on one of the guys sitting around us, and placed one hand where his was. Just to see what it felt like. I never thought Wendy would be the one who actually did it, though. Looks like Lily Lamarr was working her magic on her as well.

She'd reached him. By the light of the movie, I could see her mouth "excuse me," and the guy's look of absolute shock as he registered her standing there. He made to stand up to let her pass, while frantically trying to tuck his cock out of sight, but as Wendy passed him, her own hand gripped it.

Have you ever startled a kitten when it's doing something it shouldn't be? That's what his face looked like, frozen, wide-eyed, bewildered... and those eyes grew wider still, as Wendy settled down into the empty seat between him and me, still clutching that twitching erection. Then she leaned forward a little.

With her nose just millimeters away from his cock, she took deep breath, then clasped one of his wrists with her free hand, sniffed at that too, and slowly licked her tongue up his palm.

The guy had shifted his feet a little; he was standing in front of her now (I hope nobody behind them was trying to watch the screen!) and I could see everything around Wendy's fingers: the thick vein that ran up the side of the shaft, the thick mushroom head, the forest of dark hair at the base.

There was a kind of bend in his dick. Although the guy was facing Wendy, the eyelet in his helmet was pointing straight at me. I took a breath, hoping I could catch his scent, but my own was so powerful that I'd need to get a lot closer before that happened. Close enough to smell him, close enough to taste...

Wendy read my mind, moving forward herself. Maneuvering myself in my seat, I saw her tongue snake out at the underside of his helmet, and I heard his gasp as she made contact. She'd been eating mints all the time we'd been in the movie house; would their tingle translate itself to her tongue? Or did that even matter now? What did it feel like to have such a sensitive part of your body immersed in the warmth of someone else's mouth, to feel the heat of their spit soaking into the nerve-ends? I glanced up his face, the expression of absolute pleasure that ironed out every line in his forehead, as her mouth inched itself languorously over the bulb.

A moment of irrational, unreasonable envy swept over me - partly because of what she was doing (and the knowledge that, had I only thought of it first, that could have been me sitting where she was), but also because... she looks like she knows what she's doing. Has she done this before? Who with? When? I seethed at the sight of the experience she seemed to be exerting here, the calm and casual manner with which she held the head of that hard-on in her mouth, before slowly withdrawing... not quite all the way, he was balanced on her lips now... and then in again, a little deeper, a little harder.

Now she was sucking. I could see her cheeks working, her tongue, too. It looked incredible. I thought, with all the movies we'd watched, that I knew everything there was to know about giving good head. But watching it actually unfold in the flesh alongside me, that was a completely different experience. I could hear Wendy's lips slurping at his hard flesh; could hear his breathing accelerate, from light gasps to groaning pants. Was he cumming?

I threw a glance at the screen. Lily was at it as well, sucking on the devil's dick, drawing him deep into her mouth. "Bite it, hurt it, bite it," he was muttering, and the camera closed in as her teeth sank hard into his helmet. Christ, I wanted some of that... I could see the actress' saliva flowing, thick and clear, flooding to celebrate the taste of a man. Her teeth looked sharp, that must have hurt. But was it a bad pain or a good one? It had to be good - how could anything that looks that wonderful feel like anything else?

I turned back to Wendy, hoping she'd tire, or lose interest or something, anything, so that I could pounce and suck and bite and taste. But no. She was moving faster now, graceful swoops down his slick prick; I could see her lips straining to enfold more of his length in her mouth - he must have been halfway in, how much more could she take? And, more importantly, how much more could he take?

He was loud now, his groans competing with the on-screen demon's, and when the actor came, with a cry of exquisite release, so did the guy. I saw Wendy's head jerk back with shock, as his cum shot out, showering her shoulder, spattering her face... if I'd been quicker, I could have thrown myself into the line of fire, felt it slap against my skin, and then licked it away again. Instead - I felt like grabbing Wendy and shaking her. You wasted it! Has Lily taught you nothing?

But I was fascinated as well, watching as the cock began almost instantly to subside, the last thick drops of white collecting at the tip to drip reluctantly to the floor. Their owner, too, was limp, leaned back on the seats behind him, collecting his breath and gathering his wits, and gazing at Wendy with such undying devotion that, as she stood up and squeezed past me, wordlessly returning to her own seat, I thought he was going to cry.

Instead he just stood there for a few moments more, slowly comprehending the fact that it was over, that Wendy wasn't even going to look at him again, let alone speak. Then he buttoned himself up and walked away.

We sat in silence for a moment. Then Wanda spoke.

"So what was that all about?"

Wendy didn't answer immediately. "I felt like it. We've done so much talking, I just wanted to see what it was really like."

So it was her first time. I felt a pang of relief.

Wanda again. "What does it taste like?"

Again, Wendy was silent, weighing her words before she committed to them. "Salty. Like a pretzel. A glazed pretzel. It was okay."

"Just okay?" That was Lisa.

"It was fun. It'd have been better if I'd been more comfortable, and my jaw did start to hurt after a bit. And he kept trying to push too far. But yeah, it's okay."

"What about at the end?" I asked. "How did you know it was... he was... coming?"

"I didn't, he just jerked away and it startled me. But I'm glad he did, I think. I caught a bit in my mouth, and..." she made a face. "Salty old socks. You probably need to get used to it."

I looked up at the screen. Lily didn't seem to mind it so much, and just watching the expression on her face, as her umpteenth mouthful dribbled down a dick, I was knew that, when my time finally came, I was going to love it as well, no matter how much getting used to it took. And, unlike a lot of the resolutions I've made over the years (quit smoking, get plenty of exercise, never pet strange dogs...), I'm proud to say that's the one I've stuck to.

The Sexorcist was one of the last movies we ever saw at that shabby old movie-house, with the mysteriously unlocked door. One of the last truly great ones, anyway. Other people learned the secret, including some who might otherwise have paid for their membership; and others, who didn't believe that such establishments had any right to exist in the first place. One balmy Thursday the following spring, we arrived at the back door, at the same time as always, to find two uniformed policemen standing in the shadows within.

We ran; they stayed, and the next time we passed by, the building was empty, the doors were chained, the marquee had been stripped bare. Only the cartoon blonde remained, and even she'd had a billposter slapped over her mouth. Even at our age, that seemed strangely symbolic.