The Rule-Breaker

One hot July in the summer after I graduated from high school I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to drive over to church camp for a day. I was raised Baptist, and thank God my parents weren’t that strict, because Baptists generally have a prohibition on anything that even remotely resembles fun. No drinking. No smoking. No going to movies, playing cards, dancing, listening to rock music or doing anything other than sitting in a corner reading the Bible. And you probably couldn’t even do that unless you were fully clothed. The joke was, “Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up? Because they’re afraid someone will see them and think they’re dancing.”

But I liked going to Bible camp, because I saw friends that I never saw any other time of the year, and because the camp had a speedboat to water ski behind. I didn’t know anyone with a boat. Nearest lake to my hometown was only about the size of a hockey rink. And the sermons and bible studies didn’t bother me that much...you just learn to zone ’em out and daydream about drinking, and dancing, and sex.

So off I went...It was “Family Camp” that week, which meant you could go for a day if you wanted, and so, even though it was a 120 mile drive, that was my plan, drive over, ski a little, drive back. But my plans got sidetracked when I got there because of "Jessie".

Jessie Knotts.

She had a brother I hung around with named Donny. (Don Knotts, get it? We all thought that was SO funny). But he wasn’t there and she was. And she was cute. Major league cute. And, holy shit, she was sunburned. Not just a little pink, she was RED from stem to stern. I knew, because she was wearing a (gasp!) bikini, which was WAY, WAY, WAY against every Baptist swimsuit regulation dating back to the Crusades!

Whoa! A rule-breaker! A female close to my heart, and definitely one I had to meet. We hit it off immediately, and spent the day together. I sat “next” to her during evening services. I put quotation marks around “next” because one of the seven unbreakable rules of Baptist Camp was that boys and girls had to maintain a 6-inch gap of separation between their bodies at all times. Thus promoting chastity and purity of thought, which was B.S., of course. And, that joke was you could still fuck if your dick was longer than 6 inches, you just couldn’t put it in all the way.

Evening came, and I had to leave. I’d only planned on staying the day and didn’t have any other clothes, or sleeping gear or a place to sleep, for that matter. But you could bet your ass I was coming back the next day. Jessie was way too hot to leave alone. And it was only 120 miles.

One way.

And come back I did. That afternoon we broke another of the seven rules and left camp together to “go for a ride” which of course meant “go parking”.

Parking was code for “find a deserted road, and at the very minimum, burn a little lip.” And we found the greatest road ever, with a driveway that went into a cornfield, which was like the Holy Grail of parking spots. Not even passing traffic could see what we were about to do.

Which was break a few Commandments. Jessie was a rule-breaker, all right.

It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. For one thing, I was driving a 1967 Mustang, and the back seat had less room than your average sized coffin. For another thing, it was 90 degrees out, making for more sweat than could have been generated by ten "Body Heat" movies. And, of course, Jessie had that world class sunburn, which made for some really eye-popping tan lines that just emphasized all the parts that I was interested in. But that just meant that she got to be on top, and I had to be careful where and what I grabbed.

Oh, my. It was spectacular. We did it like bunnies for more than an hour (which, for me, in those days was about 60-plus minutes more than average) and I was about the proudest I’d ever been in my life.

Afterward, we snuck back into camp and sat the requisite 6 inches apart at chapel. Nobody asked where we’d been, and I left for home with a song in my heart.

A rock-n-roll song.