The knock on my door resulted in a large paper grocery bag full of my things being unceremoniously dumped out on the front porch without a word. “Here’s your shit,” was implied in the gesture, and so I watched her walk back to her mother’s car, the end complete as I gathered up my shirts and socks into my arms and hauled them to the washing machine in the front hallway of my father’s house.
The breakup wasn’t especially dramatic, but it happened all the same, and for two seventeen-year-olds, drama can be squeezed from a stone. We had spent a glorious summer naked in her bed, rolling about in each other’s arms, kissing for what felt like hours, touching, fingering, squeezing, licking, and biting without ever doing the only thing that mattered. For three months we made out, but in spite of her offers, her pleading, and her delectable temptation, I said no to that one final act which would have meant I was no longer a virgin.
Even at the time, I knew it was a social construct (was it less so for men than women?) but I held onto it like a prized possession with some belief that my first time would be different. There was no clarity in what it might look like, except that I knew deep in my heart it would contain an insurmountable amount of love. And while my beautiful blonde neighbor and I luxuriated in her oversized bed a hundred times, I did not love her.
Which meant, I did not sleep with her. Which meant the relationship was over. Which meant I got a knock on the door one sleepy summer afternoon whereupon I was returned my few belongings which had been left at her house.
As school began again I left that blonde summer behind and expanded my group of friends outward in a thousand directions. As early as September I was done. My senior year of high school wasn’t exactly a waste of time, but if I had been more thoughtful and more serious, I might have attempted to make my escape a year earlier and find a college that would have accepted my premature brain and ambitions.
As it was, I was there for two more semesters with a group of friends who were largely concerned with their applications to Brown, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. I, on the other hand, eventually managed to blast out two college applications, both in the midwest and largely at the consistent pressure (and support) of my mother.
I don’t remember New Years of 1992, but it’s possible we spent the night in the basement of an old friend’s house, creating drama wherever we saw it. I believe there was a kiss with one girl whom I loved, another I lusted after, and neither of them ended well. I was full of cocky eagerness and the strong belief that people wanted to make out with me. And while there was some truth to it, they did not want to hear me brag about it. Or debate my incredible choices for which girl I might grace with my clumsy advances.
But January meant we were coming to the end, moving into a new era, and it was going to be a year of change no matter what. January meant we were going to graduate that year, spend a summer we might never forget, and then scatter ourselves to the winds of American colleges, spread out around the country like so many monasteries and cloistered dens of depravity.
Dating in my high school, however, was something of a challenge for reasons of which I’m still not entirely sure. Maybe it was because we had all known each other too long, had formed too many assumptions about one another, and were completely and utterly terrified of making a fool of ourselves by asking the wrong person the wrong question.
Which meant, I turned to the Catholic girl’s school not far from my father’s house, where friends of mine were called in to take the male roles in their school musicals. Like foxes in a henhouse, these theatrical boys spent hours on their campus, singing and dancing to the tapping feet of nuns and the disapproving looks of priests, while surrounded by a hundred sexually adventurous young women whose closest potential outlet was them.
Somehow I snuck my way into that inner circle of opportunity and there, on that holy campus of angels and plaid skirts, I met the girl who would shake my world, spin me around, buy me a dress, kiss me for hours, and eventually lift up her skirt on my bed so we might consummate our love by giving one another that socially constructed gift of virginity.
Maya was dark-haired, long-limbed, bright smiled, and brilliant. She smoked Parliaments and danced under the moon, and I had never met anyone more beautiful, more alive, and more willing in my entire young life. We fell into a relationship in minutes, sneaking out every night to kiss and touch and grope and quickly whisper words of love and adoration into the other’s waiting ear.
Our love affair last months, but time is a foolish measure. Maya and I were together for eons and our bodies grew old and died a thousand times before it ended. We were fire and ice and in the end, I was a foolish boy with an unending appetite and the emotional maturity of a lemur.
Nevertheless, one afternoon we drove to my mother’s house after school where we had at least three or four hours of solitude before anyone resembling a parent might return. I had stopped at a drugstore somewhere along the way and picked up my very first box of condoms, and the two of us climbed the stairs to my bedroom with the decision made between us both.
It was time for us to fuck.
But nobody taught me how to live in my body or what to do with hers and so there we were, two complete bloody amateurs, attempting to write a symphony without ever having taken a music lesson. Bodies, however, are bodies, and we knew the mechanics as well as anyone did. And most importantly–for me at least–we had the good sense to come prepared, latex in hand as we grew closer to what we hoped would be the beginning of something perfect.
As I knelt between her legs, our kissing and groping nowhere near enough effort for what was to come, I trembled in anticipation. For the first time in my life, I knew that I was ready and it was a certainty I didn’t understand. With her short plaid skirt around her waist, her panties lost to a frantic kiss, and my sticky fingers struggling to find the right side of the condom, we were ready.
By this point in my life, I had never put a condom on before. Not with anyone else, not by myself in the dark, not with the help of someone’s older brother. No, the very first time I learned how to roll a condom down the length of my cock, was the very first time I planned to do something with it.
Our first attempt was our worst, there is no nice way to say it. I made an attempt, she screamed and told me to stop, and then we tried again. I was shocked by the resistance her body offered up and she was frustrated by the pain that moved through her each time we tried. Nevertheless, our determination was strong, and so in spite of the blood and the tears and the utter confusion swimming through our brains, I finally kissed her sweetened lips and managed to push my way inside her.
After the pain and the confusion, after the realization that sex required logistics, timing, and preparation, and after that first awkward effort, we finally fucked.
And then we fucked again and again. We fucked on the bed, we fucked on the couch, we fucked by the window with my mother gardening outside, and we fucked in her car parked by the side of the road. Once we had managed to push through that initial challenge, we fucked and we came, my cock clad in latex every single time.
She was on birth control, both of us were virgins, and yet, in 1993 the fear of AIDS was so overwhelming for my teenage brain, the thought of not using a condom was like jumping off the George Washington Bridge. And so, for three months, we fucked and we laughed, we smoked and we drove fast down the highway, her fearlessness as beautiful as her smile.
But in the end, I grew restless and eager. After months of sex and friendship and a thousand other moments which only now sit together as a feeling of joyful memory, it ended. We saw each other less and less, and my phone calls grew further and further in between until they stopped altogether.
By the time I graduated high school, turned eighteen, and entered the never-ending summer of change, I was a single boy who had fucked more in those three months than I would for years to come. Maya was off on her own, our hearts were bruised, our egos challenged, my entitlement raging, and some strange part of me satiated in the knowledge that I was no longer a virgin.
I was a boy who had sex, and if all went according to plan, I might even do it again.