Bowling for Jailbait

By Tenzin McGrupp © 2004

27 Dec 03 Miami, Fl

The teenage hussies, dressed like medium priced hookers, lustfully teased us every time they'd intentionally bend over to pick up their florescent pink bowling balls. The Don Carter lanes were extra crowded on an early Saturday night. For the local high schoolers, the bowling alley was the hippest place to be seen. It’s their Spa of NYC or Ice of Las Vegas or Bliss of West Hollywood. Dressed up in their provocative outfits, with racy makeup smeared and caked on like a Van Gogh painting, their lubricious ensembles were inspired by the slew of scantly clad, titillating lemmings in MTV videos. After all the majority of these impressionable girls fueled their sexual appetite through salacious episodes of Sex in the City and a handful of terribly scripted, sexual innuendo-based, reality TV shows. Alas, any mentioning of the word "romp" or "wild rumpus" in the general direction of the sex-starved hussies, would get me thrown into prison. And as a wise friend once pointed out to me, “15 will get you 25 to life.”

The ruttish nymphets smugly paraded their almost-ripe goodies around, intentionally distracting us while we bowled. Sometimes they gingerly took their time and bent over in lewd and promiscuous positions, in an attempt to draw the magnetic allure of sexual amorality out of the deep slumber that my mind severely sequestered. Geo, Cappy, and I were not messing around, playing $1 a point. High stakes bowling was on our agenda, and being teased by coquettish jailbait was the last thing on our focused minds. Webster defined a nymphet as: a sexually precocious pubescent. But as well all know, in Nabakov’s epic novel Lolita, Humbert Humbert refers to a nymphet as a "demon child."

A small herd of these suburban demon children crowded on both lanes surrounding us. To the left, a group of racially mixed red-hot girls, some black, some white, and some Hispanic. To our right, a group of well tanned, white girls (and the token Asian girl), with upper class names like Whitney and Taylor, and freshly painted orange-cream nails and tiny, glitzy cellphones, hung out and sipped Diet Dr. Peppers. The girls to the left bowled with a lot more proactive fluidness, sultry dancing in between turns to the loud music pumped over the sound system, while the girls on the right were more concerned with chatting on their cell phones, trying to coordinate a place to meet up for later in the evening. And all I wanted to say was, "I know a place where you can all hang out..."

Tenzin McGrupp is a writer from New York City.