For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to lose my
virginity. I had yearned to cast aside my innocence since I’d been born. It would have been no skin off my ass, as they say.
Losing one’s virginity is Mother Nature’s Bar Mitzvah—the day you truly become a man. It is when God reaches down and unlocks the gates to the Garden of Eden, allowing you walk around inside and hit on chicks. It is when your flower bulb opens its petals and disgorges its pollen into the moist tropical air. You clasp your lady’s soft, milky hand and run naked under the Tahitian sun. Pineapples and coconuts fall all around your heads as you rut like wild boars. Multicolored parrots sing a sweet song as they sail swiftly through the summery sky.
It is the new rising of the sun. The first blossom of springtime. The urge to create. The muddying of clear blue water, perhaps, yet it is also the white-water-rapids rush of positive change and spiritual rebirth. You become a little less innocent, yet in some weird way, a little bit taller and thus closer to God. It’s a lot like the life-altering ascension from Webelo to full-blown Boy Scout.
It would have been nice if poppin’ my cherry had been a positive, life-affirming experience like that, but it wasn’t.
Fuck, I would have been glad if it had been traumatic. If it couldn’t have been pure and beautiful, I would at least have liked for it to have been cheap and ugly. I wouldn’t have minded if it murdered my innocence and severely damaged my chances of ever getting into heaven. It might have been sorta cool if it left me crumpled in a ball at the bottom of a hot shower, crying for mercy and never, ever feeling clean again. I think it would have been sexy if it plunged me deep into drugs, violence, devil worship, and the
occasional bout of prank-calling. I’d have nothing to complain about if the vagina was a black portal sucking me straight down into a life of dissolute debauchery, spitting me out the other end like a piece of street trash blown away by the dirty, dirty wind.
I wanted it to be special—either really good or very bad—rather than what it turned out to be, which was quick and ordinary.
It wasn’t until I lost my virginity that I realized you don’t really cross over an invisible bridge and become something new—only an ex-virgin. The English language has no true antonym for the word ‘virgin.’ Some would suggest ‘whore’ or ‘slut,’ but such
terms don’t really apply to everyone who is no longer a virgin. The website thesaurus.com lists “defiled, sullied, [and] abused” as antonyms for ‘virgin,’ yet such harsh epithets seem like a blanket indictment of anyone who’s ever had sex. Other searches yielded words such as “unchaste,” “unpure,” and—my favorite—“seasoned.” I like the ring of that. It’s as if you have some sort of spice on you for the rest of your life.
But alas, my experiences were not nearly so spicy. They had all the flavor of Saltine crackers with all the salt removed.
I’m honestly not sure when I technically lost my virginity. I guess it all hinges on how you define a ‘virgin.’ If it means any act of vaginal penetration, even if your balls are tiny grape nuts that haven’t dropped yet, then I was twelve. If it means post-pube full-bore ejaculation mode—known in street lingo as “P.-P. F-B. E. M.”—then I was eighteen.
At the age of a dozen years on a warm Easter Sunday, me and a male partner-in-delinquence trotted the neighborhood slut—also twelve—down near some sewer pipes in the woods behind our tract houses. This girl was a drug addict and race-mixer long before such things were considered as cool as they are now. I was mesmerized by the snotlike secretions glistening between her legs and the downy tufts of black hair right above the glistening slit.
I stuck my little pink pre-pube bone-bone inside her and just lied there motionless for about a minute before confusedly dismounting. I had no pubes, no cum, no orgasm, and no grasp of concepts such as thrusting.
It would be six more years of agonizing teenaged celibacy—and ten thousand jerkoff sessions—before I’d get the chance to poke another vagina. I had just graduated from high school and was enjoying Senior Week down at the Jersey shore. Sunburned and drunk, I bedded a girl who was blonde, rosy-cheeked, and rather plump. What was her name? Kathy? Katey? Peggy? Porky? Something with a ‘y’ at the end, I’m sure of it. I lasted all of twelve seconds. I quickly got dressed, my cock still slimy and smelly as it rested inside my tightey-whiteys, and rushed down to the boardwalk to indulge in the superior pleasure of carnival rides.
Though I’ve had dozens of partners and thousands of sexual experiences since then—ranging from the terrifying to the sublime—I can’t help but feel as if life has cheated me by giving such a crucial rite of passage all the excitement of a trip to the DMV. Thanks, life—
you can really be an asshole sometimes.