In The Air Tonight

I was not a summer camp kid. I’d never shared a bunk bed in a cabin by a lake singing campfire songs or telling ghost stories. I dreamed of going to Camp Little Wood like Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol in Little Darlings, but no, I got to go pick-up truck camping with my family where my dad would inevitably park under an acorn tree and the metal shell of the truck would get shelled by nuts all night long.

I’d also never been away from home, save for the very occasional one-night sleepover. It was a luxury I arranged in the air-conditioned houses of my more affluent friends as often as possible in the summer. If friendship applications were a thing, mine would have included boxes to check on room temperature and perhaps one on the number of younger siblings.

You see I was not an only child but I longed to be. My house was loud and I rarely recall an occasion when I was alone at home. By the time I was a young teen, we had four kids in our three bedrooms house. When my middle sister was a baby, my parents converted mom’s closet into a bedroom. The sliding louvered doors were removed and dad covered the space with an Amish country inspired red white and blue patriotic-patterned wall paper, tiny baby dresses hung on one end of the rod above the crib and a mobile hung at the other end with diapers and blankets lining the shelves. My mother’s clothes were squeezed into one half of what was my father’s tiny closet. 

By the time that sister outgrew her crib, mom was pregnant with another baby and my brother was moved into the laundry room downstairs. Tiny as it was, I fought hard for that space because there was a door leading to the back yard and I was already plotting my escape. I think we flipped a coin for that narrow little room, but clearly the toss was rigged. My parents would never intentionally let their daughters near an exit.

I finally departed the nunnery when I went to college just 30 minutes from home, and the world opened up to me. But yet again, my space was crowded. The campus was behind in constructing new dorms so they put three girls in rooms meant for two. One of my roommates’ dads was a contractor, so he built a loft for our three beds. It was totally campy and made our cramped space seem a lot more spacious. But the loft was also quite creaky. When Catherine or Stacy came home at 2am from a fraternity party before one of my 8am tests, the loft groaned on their ascent. As the school year stretched on and the bolts loosened, we were all sleep-deprived. And oh how those steps judged me like my mother with those “catholic creaks” when I climbed the ladder with Glen, the baseball center fielder, who I’d been waving at for months from the 9th floor balcony overlooking Boshamer stadium. But at 18, I was determined to wait until I was married before having sex. Glen didn’t want to keep climbing that ladder for no payoff and he soon stopped waving back.

Now my roommate Stacy once casually mentioned that she wanted to lose her virginity to her high school boyfriend while listening to Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. The song was number 19 on the Billboard Top 100 that year, but it was already beginning to feel cliché to me. Everyone, everywhere turned their steering wheels into snare drums, dorm desks into tom-toms or air-drummed while wearing their walk-mans as if they were Phil rocking the solo.

One night, when I was sound asleep, I awoke to giggles and slurpy suction cup kisses, the bang of a back against a closet door, louder laughter and then the creak of the ladder. And YES! That would have been the time to announce my presence, but I didn’t because before I could clear my head of the cobwebs of sleep, I heard the click of the cassette deck and then the drum and cymbals…da da da da da chi, da da da da da chi…and Phil starts singing.

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord

OH LORD!

And I hit my head on the ceiling as I popped up to plot my escape but my route was blocked by the shadow of Stacy’s naked boyfriend and within moments the whole loft began rocking and groaning and Stacy and her beau began rocking and groaning and I buried myself under my Gunne Sax comforter trying to plot my departure. Would they notice if I slid to the end of my twin mattress and slithered down the ladder like the Grinch taking a candy cane from Cindy Lou Who?

No you don’t fool me

Well the hurt doesn’t show but the pain still grows it’s no stranger to you and me

And then the climactic drum roll and the, well, climactic roll. And I remained silent. I've avoided loft beds since 1986. And I never did tell anyone what happened in the tiny plot of air between the loft and the dorm room ceiling the night of my inadvertent threesome. Until tonight.

As Shared at Story Salon on June 18, 2025.