Nov 8, 2019

My first girl, relationship, very first, I guess that was around 13 years old. I grew up in Baltimore, and my 13th birthday my mother took me to this place in Baltimore called Mondawmin Mall. Back then it was 1972 or ’73, and I was around the same age as Michael Jackson, but in Baltimore it was the style, this thing called golds, gold tooth, gold on your teeth. That’s why this tooth is missing. A lot of people think somebody knocked it out, but they… The gold… I had gotten a gold… a whole gold.

And after I got that gold tooth, a girl across the street started liking me. Her name was Charlene, and she was around my age, and she was a… What do you call the person that’s the only child? Just that one daughter. She had no brothers, no sisters. Charlene was very cute, and a lot of the guys my age, when Charlene started liking me, got a little jealous.

Back then, like I said, Michael Jackson was a big influence on us back then, 1973. Everybody was a Michael Jackson… I had a big bush, and she was the first girl that wanted to touch my hair, so in the summertime we’d sit between your legs and we’d braid our hair. And she’d braid my hair. That was what I thought was what I… I might have been just infatuated with her, you know? And she was my first date and everything.

Her father was a old man that sit on the back porch, or sometime sit on the front, he’d sit on the back porch. He didn’t like nobody dating his daughter. And she had a girlfriend next door. Her name was Lance. And Lance liked my brother, so my brother was going with Lance and I was going with Charlene. In the summertime we’d sit on the back porch, and her father would shut us up and tell us stop all that giggling, making all that noise, because he liked peace and quiet. So she snuck me in the basement one day while he was upstairs in the kitchen, and it got a little late. It was getting around 11:00. So I remember that I lived across the street from her on Monroe Street, and 11:00 was everybody’s curfew in the neighborhood back then. Yeah. Well, everybody had a curfew back then. This is 1973. It’s not like the young kids growing up today with… Most of the kids in the neighborhood, everybody’s curfew was that time, so everybody get to hang with their buddies for the last… or pals, for the last half an hour until 11:00. So 11:00 came, and I was stuck in her basement because her father wouldn’t go upstairs. It was terrifying. But she got me out of there somehow. Snuck me out the back.

But, yeah, just… Relationship didn’t last that long. Maybe it lasted about six or seven months, but that was my first. That was my first date.