I went to NYC this spring for the first time in four years. I hadn’t been there since my senior year in high school. As always it was an amazing trip and the city did not disappoint. I would never consider myself someone who “knows” the city but I have been a handful of times and going back was great. It brought back a flood of memories: my first time alone in the city, my first time drinking at a bar underage, my first time smoking, my first time making out in the back of a cab. To name only a few of the rebellious teenage acts that happened there.

When I was growing up and to this day, my best friend spent all seasons accept summer in NYC. I, however lived in Stratford Ontario Canada, her family’s choice destination for the summer months. As soon as I was old enough my mother took me to visit her in NYC and that was the first time I fell in love with the city. Soon after I got a job and by the time I was fifteen I was able to afford to visit on my own. 

My first visit on my own I got to really feel what it was like to live in NYC and what it was like to be a teenager. I hung out in my friend’s loft, ate out with her girlfriends, drank in bars that couldn’t have cared less that we were fifteen year olds, and felt a taste of city freedom that a fifteen year old from western Ontario would never have felt, no matter how cultured she was.

I got there on a Thursday and went to school with my friend on the Friday. It was here that I got to meet all of the friends I had heard about year after year. It was also this Friday that I rode the bus home with her and her friends. This was the first time I had really ever watched people make out. It was the epitome of “high school make outs.” My best friend and her then pseudo rocker, bad ass, Soho-living, let’s just call him “lover-boy,” boyfriend made out in one seat, while her best friend, my therefore go-to-girlfriend for the short visit, made out with her boyfriend in the other. I sat alone. I watched teenage tongues mix about and Brooklyn disappear in the background, as we drove back into the city from their “country day school” and I knew that I wanted to make out too.

I wasn’t so lucky on the make out front this first trip to NYC however soon enough I was back, older and with a little bit of more make out experience under my belt. This time I was sixteen. My best friend’s NYC best friend had broken up with her make out partner from my last visit and my second visit to the “country day school” made me realize that perhaps this boy and I had a lot more in common than I had once thought. You see the first time I met him it was hard to tell cause his tongue was tied up making out my bestie’s bestie.

This time on the way back from school I sat with him. We didn’t make out but we talked and it was great. We ate PIzza Box pizza for dinner and used his fake I.D. to buy big tall cans of Heineken from a local deli. We drank them on his parent’s Soho patio with a bunch of other Manhattan friends. I remember talking about basketball and rap and falling for this skinny, glasses and baseball cap wearing boy. We all decided to try and go to some bar or Hookah bar, I can’t really remember which now, and somehow we got in, although clearly not even close to 21 years of age.

As curfew drew closer and us teenagers got drunker, cabs were hailed. Somehow I was put in the first cab alone with only my skinny, rap loving, four eyed crush. As we drove off back to Soho in our yellow taxicab my stomach was experiencing more than just butterflies. In anticipation we both moved into that position in between all the back seats. You know when one person is sitting in between the middle and left window seats and the other between the middle and right window seats forcing our legs to touch. It felt like ages before our lips met but I am sure that in reality it was only seconds after the tops of our thighs met that we started to make out. I’m sure that that poor cabby could not wait to drop off these sixteen year old, bad “making-outers” at their stop. Our lips were most definitely not on the offensive and instead our tongues, in that adolescent way, probably looked like two snakes fighting out in the open and causing our cheeks to be covered in salvia, but man was that one of the best kisses of my life.

We made out for the entire cab ride and arrived at his cement stoop a good ten minutes before everyone else. Again, as teenagers do, we spent those ten minutes making out on his stoop until they all arrived back. They were a pack of giggles knowing exactly what had gone on when they were following us back.

I left the next day with dreams of more NYC taxicab make outs only to return to the small town world of Stratford. However AIM was able to let me continue getting to know the most lovely, endearing, skinny boy of my life. Although we spent many a night typing out our lives to one another, those “oh so wonderfully bad kisses” faded and our lives went on.  On other visits to the city we were friends but after the age of seventeen things got different and making out got more serious. It started to mean that other bases would follow and it just never happened between us again. This wasn’t my first time hooking up with a boy nor was it even close to my last but it was definitely a memorable one. I was at the beginning of my adolescent life and ready for romance even if it was sloppy make outs in the back of taxicabs. I mean really what gets better then those first feelings for someone else and getting to express them sexually for the first time? I can’t think of much. At that point in my life making out was the most exciting thing I could imagine and that night will probably be the most exciting make out experience of my life just because of of how new and freeing it was.

In the most recent episode of Mad Men, Don has a few amazing scenes with women in the back of cabs. It brought back this flood of memories and made me realize how sexy cabs really are (even though their drivers usually aren’t). That, as well as being back in New York this Spring, made me realize how much that night meant to me and how much it really affected my sexuality. It made me nostalgic for the time when I had never made out with a boy in a taxi before, a time before I had ever really thought about any future with a boy, before my mind was clouded with insecurities and doubt. I don’t think I will ever have a better cab ride in my life and I hope that deep down that cab ride meant as much to that skinny boy as it did to me.