The Ballad of Danny Joe

Danny Joe's father was an asshole. The whole town knew it as fact.

Danny's mother performed her duties as waitress at the small-town restaurant, just so that the family could eat. Danny's father was the local bootlegger, and not a particularly good one, unless you wanted beer. Then, he occasionally could provide. Otherwise, you could usually find him in the county jail.

I didn't get to know Danny until I was a freshman in High School. A small town high school, at that. Danny was smart, but lazy. Looking back, I think that his only goal in life was to surpass his father's success as a bootlegger. Can't recall if he pulled that off or not.

As I said, I didn't meet him until I entered High School, and he kind of took me under his wing. Why? I have no idea, other than there were a couple of weird times in school where I made him laugh. Once I started hanging around him, he looked after me, and I made him laugh. I was a small boy, and people would try to pick on me, but as long as Danny was around, nothing ever happened to me, in a bad way.

While most of my classmates were in bed late Friday and Saturday nights, I was always out with Danny, drinking beer. Probably not a healthy way to approach puberty, but that's where I was, at the time. We used to make the most amazing runs to liquor stores on other counties, since the county where we lived was dry. Hence the marketplace for bootleggers. There I was, 14 years old, sitting in the passenger's seat, with Danny passing me a quart of Coors beer driving about 100 miles an hour, with the radio blasting, and him telling me stories about his latest sexual conquests.

I knew the girls that he spoke about. Made it all very interesting.

He had this one girlfriend, Sara, who was actually a year older than he. She was very reserved. Not the kind of girl that you would fancy hanging around the likes of Danny, but live and learn, I suppose. She had gone off to college for a semester, and had come back into town for the Christmas holiday.

This one particular night, Danny was tending a gas station, which was his regular job as a senior in High School, and I was hanging out with him. Sara comes wheeling up, opens the door to the station, and plops down on Danny's lap, with a bottle of Vodka in tow. She's lit. Lit not like a firecracker, but like a stick of dynamite. They kiss and laugh for about an hour, exchanging drinks off of the bottle of hooch, and then they both turn and look at me.

Sara leaves the building, and Danny looks at me and says, "Sara wants to fuck you."

I'm sitting there, going, "What the hell?"

And Danny repeats his statement. "Sara wants to fuck you."

I answer, "What am I supposed to do about that?"

He replies, "I'll let you go with her, and you can let her fuck you. But she has to fuck you. If you fuck her, I'll beat the shit out of you. Understand?"

I said, "Yes." I was not telling the truth, of course.

So Sara drives me out of town, into this cornfield, takes a swig on the near-empty vodka bottle, and says, "Have you ever been with a naked woman before?"

I just say, "No, not since I took a bath with my sister when I was five years old." She laughs. She laughs in a way that I know that she thinks that I am funny.

She says to me, "Just watch." She starts with her shoes. Then her blouse. Then her jeans. And she's sitting in the driver's seat, wearing only a bra and panties, finishes off the bottle of vodka, throws it out of the window, and says to me, "If you wanna keep going, it's your turn."

I'm scared shitless. And horny. I wonder if this is some sort of big joke. I fully expect Danny to jump out of the corn and go "boo!" That does not happen.

So she says, jump in the back seat. So I do.

She's watching me from behind the steering wheel, in the rear view mirror, as I get into the back seat. She reaches into the glove compartment and gets a fresh pint of vodka. She opens it, and says, "Take your shirt off."

And I do. She says, "Take off all of your clothes, I want to look at you."

I almost run away, but don't. I slowly peel away my clothing, as she takes swigs off of the fresh bottle of vodka. Watching.

Finally, I am down to my underwear, and she can see the fear in my eyes. She laughs, crawls over the seat, until she is sitting right next to me. I can feel the heat coming off of her near-naked body, with her sitting next to me. There is just enough light from the moon outside that she doesn't have to leave a light on in the car, anymore.

At that point, she removes her bra. Then she pulls down her panties. And she is naked. Then she tells me to lie back. I do it.

She gets on top of me, and kisses me. My first kiss, and she knows it.

As we are kissing, she moves her hands down and starts pulling off my underwear. Then she kisses me on my neck. And then my chest. Then my belly. Then she looks up ands says, "Do you want me to stop?"

I merely shake my head "no."

Then she proceeds to take me in her mouth.

It didn't take too long, only about five minutes, but I screamed. Mostly because I think that she wanted me to scream. And I was right about that one.

I offered, at that point, to do something for her, but she said, "No." We pulled on our clothes, and shared the rest of the vodka driving back into town.

I was pretty drunk by the time we got back into town.

We pulled up to the gas station, and I stumbled out of the car, with a huge grin on my face.

Sara went in to use the bathroom.

Danny Joe looked me square in the eyes and asked me, "Did you fuck her?"

As a true statement, I said "No."

Then he asked, "Did she fuck you?"

I said, "Yeah, I think so."

He laughed heartily, and said, "Yeah, she likes to fuck. You tell anybody about this, and WILL beat the shit out of you!"

They gave me a ride home, and that was the last time I saw either of them.

I heard later that they went to California, or somewhere out West. Further west than Texas, I guess.