by Kevin Keck
I gave serious thought to the urges that often sent me to my knees, my palm slick with whatever lubricating substance was most conveniently at hand. It occurred to me that all of my recent visits to the doctor had involved either my head or my butt. (My family has an unfortunate genetic inclination toward depression on one side and hemorrhoids on the other.) And now, my genitals.
"Look," my doctor was saying. "Can you do that? Can you just not touch it? Just don't touch it. It's that simple. You're a grown man. Don't. If it isn't looking better in two weeks, call me, but just . . . just don't." He shook his head, peeled off his gloves and walked out of the room.
As I left, I stopped at the receptionist's desk to pay. My chart lay open in front of her. The doctor's handwriting was not as illegible as I would have liked, and his diagnosis — penis excoriated from masturbation — stood out on the page like a marquee advertising my shame.
When I handed the receptionist a check, she didn't even crack a smile.
Cherry Picker
I once went on a date with a woman who told me that at the age of eighteen she lost her virginity to a man who was an actual Tantric Master. Up until that point the evening had been sailing along magically, and beneath our conversation I could hear a choir of seraphim singing hallelujah’s and other such praises to Eros. Of course, after the narrative of the tantric master ended, the choir of angels became a barber shop quartet of insecurity. The revelation that my date lost her virginity to a tantric master is a little like cooking her dinner and then finding out that her father is one of the premiere chefs of France: it’s hard to feel anything but a little defeated.
The loss of my own virginity was simply that: a loss. On the brighter side, it was such an utter disappointment that every other sexual encounter I’ve had since has seemed rather transcendental by comparison. It might not have been such an anticlimactic experience (and sadly, it did lack a climax) had I actually been the first choice of the lady I ended up—very literally—rolling in the hay with.
I met her at a party when I was just barely sixteen. I had been watching her all night; she was a southern, white trash vixen, and while that may seem a derogatory remark to some, those of you from above the Mason and Dixon and west of the Mississippi must accept as gospel my assertion that a steady diet of grits and fatback through your youth instills in one an insatiable desire for cutoff jeans and big hair. My friend, Johnny Mason, had spent his evening making out with her against the side of R.J. Ryder’s house, unzipping her cut-offs and playing with her pussy. I know this because I watched it take place from the vantage point of the keg, which offered a beautiful locale from which to view the vista of teenage gropings taking place all around. When Johnny finally ducked around to the other side of the house to puke, the girl whose teased hair that had been calling to me all night slouched against the wall and looked bored. I sauntered over and smoothly said:
“Cool party.”
“Yeah,” she said, not looking at me as she put a Marlboro in her mouth. It had not been too many weeks before that my father had taken me aside and imparted upon me what he felt to be great wisdom:
“Boy, just you remember: a woman who will smoke a cigarette will do just about anything.”
I thought about this for a second and said:
“Didn’t mom used to smoke?”
“Used to,” he mumbled, and seemed to be momentarily overcome by wistful memories I cannot begin to guess about.
As I was debating the accuracy of my father’s advice, Johnny stumbled back around the corner and said:
“I’m fucked up.” Few words have ever sounded sweeter, for I knew at that moment that Johnny was out of the picture. As he weaved away from us and towards his car, his abandoned nymph turned to me and said:
“Walk me down to the woods so I can take a piss.”
I followed her down to edge of the woods, not saying too much, and when she thrust her beer into my hand and squatted to urinate right in front of me I politely turned around. When she finished she said:
“Let’s lay here in the grass for a while.”
Being fairly inexperienced with women at this phase in my life I was utterly mortified. I lay stiffly next to her, not moving, until she pulled me on top of her and started kissing me. After a few minutes of this she unzipped my pants and asked:
“Do you love me?”
That was the first instance of a woman touching my penis on purpose. Up until that point I had masturbated profusely to the time when Barbie Watson had accidentally brushed against my over-excited member during a dance. The sudden sensation of a hand other than mine on my dick was overwhelming. Had she asked me if I desired to be drawn and quartered while fire ants were funneled into my rectum I would have gasped, Yes! Anything! Oh, anything you want, just please never let go!
Which is precisely what I meant when I looked into her eyes and said:
“Of course I love you.” And at that, she pulled back her panties, and slid me into her.
Prior to actually engaging in intercourse, I was convinced that sex must be the adult equivalent of Disney World. Masturbation seemed pretty close to magical on certain occasions, but the looks on the faces of the porn stars, and the way premarital sex was forbidden by most major religions, gave me the sense that sex with another person unlocked secrets that bound the very fabric of the cosmos together. I mean, why else would people get so excited about it? It couldn’t just be because it felt good. Plenty of things felt good, and a lot of those things were not only allowed, they were even encouraged.
Instead of swooning into an intercourse induced delirium, as I suspected I would when I first made contact with the long sought after beaver, my mind did a curious thing that it has done frequently during sexual activity since: it kind of wandered. I couldn’t focus on the lass who was spreading her legs to cure me of my innocence. I was too busy analyzing what was going on, entertaining such thoughts as: Is this girl really pretty, or am I just horny? Also, the vagina seems to sit kind of low… (For some reason, my observation of porn and inexperience with female anatomy had me thinking that the vaginal opening was about an inch or two higher than it was; it seems a trivial observation now, but at the time it was rather rattling). And the thought that perhaps kept me from slipping into splendor the most: Damn. I’m getting laid in the middle of a field at a keg party. I wonder if anyone is watching?
Never mind the standard insecurities that accompany anyone on their first sexual encounter, as soon as it dawned on me that I might be putting on a show for the drunken mob, I couldn’t even approach being interested in what was going on. I poked my head up and looked around: we were about thirty yards away from the party where it was somewhat shadowy; no one seemed to be paying attention. I imagined that in the darkened area where we lay it was probably hard for anyone to really see what was going on, even if they could get a glimpse of our darkened forms in the cloak of the late Spring night.
Then I was fucking in a spotlight.
At first I wasn’t sure what was going on. It did occur to me that I might have had too much to drink, that I might have wandered into the house and passed out in someone’s bed, and that this was the end of the dream: the flood of overhead light stirring me from my slumber mixes momentarily with the dream world, and I am briefly suspended between the two, bathed in 60 watt light and alone, but still humping away in my anxious brain so that it feels like I am center ring at a surreal sexual circus.
But I had nothing to drink that night, which was out of the ordinary for me. And I was having sex, which was also out of the ordinary for me. I looked up and realized that some asshole had turned the headlights of his car on, illuminating me as my unpracticed hips struggled to maintain an unfamiliar rhythm. I felt my dick begin to lose its solid strength; relocation was in order.
“Hey babe,” I breathed, “why don’t we go into the woods over there?”
“I’m fine here,” she said dreamily.
I wasn’t prepared for her response. The way in whic
h all of this had transpired seemed to happen so easily that I thought surely this girl would cater to my every whim. I felt that maybe she needed to know the reason, so I said:
“Some people have their headlights on watching us.”
“Cool.”
I would not be shaken in the least at this point in my life if my partner wanted me to participate in putting on a show for total strangers. I’m certain I would find it to be pretty hot, but losing your virginity to a girl you just met, and in the middle of a field outside at a party, and then to top that off by making it a public performance… it was just more than I could handle. I pulled out, stood up, pulled her to her feet, and lead her to the woods. As she bobbled along behind me she said, “I’m hungry… Is there any food?”
It was obvious to me that my unskilled labors of love were impressing the young lady almost as much as if I had gone into an impromptu recitation of Wordsworth. She dutifully lay down on a mulch pile once we were in the woods, spread her legs and beckoned me to finish up.
Unfortunately, my own neuroses about my performance were becoming insurmountable odds by that point, and as I pressed my limp dick pointlessly against her unyielding vagina, I thought that maybe I might be cured of my first bout with impotence by receiving my first blowjob. Of course, the only experience I had with coaxing a woman to put her mouth around one’s penis came from adult films. And so, with a certain panache that shames me to this day, I looked my accomplice in the eye and asked, “Are you still hungry?”
“Yeah,” she said naively.
“Well, how would you like a hot dog?” And with that, I flung my limp member in front of her face. She let out a quick, “Ha!” However, her exclamation did not carry a note of amusement, but rather the disappointed tone of a girl who has sobered up just enough to realize she has offered up her pussy to a total moron.
She took my cock in her mouth, toked on it a few times with little success, and without speaking we both seemed to reach a point where the ordeal seemed better off coming to an end. I stood up and dusted the mulch from my knees, she shook it from her underwear, and we walked back into the field and towards the party that did not seem to have realized our absence.
“Well, okay…” and I trailed off.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to…”
“That’s cool, that’s cool.” We weren’t looking at each other.
“Okay.” And with that we parted.
When I found my friends at the party and told them I had gotten laid, finally, they could not have cared less. Instead, J.B. said to me, “If you didn’t have my car keys I was gonna leave your ass here.”
The next day at school I overhead Trina Bonner saying, “… and I heard she fucked this guy in the woods, and then she fucked like five more dudes after that in the house.” I thought at first that this was another girl, but there was no denying it was my own sweet nymph that had made me a man. For a while I comforted myself with the thought that I had been good enough to whet her appetite that night, but then I came to the conclusion that there is no pride in being an appetizer.
In the next three years I would have sex with four other women, and the total number of times I engaged in intercourse in those three years would be eight. While at least two of those encounters had been the stuff that a young boy’s masturbation fantasies are made of, none of them prepared me to deflower my first long-term girlfriend, Leslie.
Like Nabokov’s ill-fated Humbert and Lolita, my pursuit of Leslie’s maidenhead extended over such a long period time, and had to surmount so many obstacles, by the time we found ourselves ready to copulate in my parents’ basement on my twentieth birthday we were doomed.
Leslie was younger than I, just sixteen, and like a lot of sixteen year-old girls she changed her mind a lot. What she changed her mind about most was me. It seemed that in the year leading up to our eventual union, each time our level of intimacy reached a new plateau, she dumped me. When three months of heavy kissing and petting gave way to a hand job, I got a few of those and then she dumped me. I pined away for a month, then she came back, gave me blowjobs for a while, then dumped me again. Invariably, what I discovered was that I was a sort of guinea pig for her sexual exploration. Once she felt comfortable with whatever new sexual act she had added to her arsenal, I was of no more use to her. She then went back into the world to use her charms on more desirable boys. My grasp of this pattern was solid enough by my twentieth birthday that I knew whatever boinking I got to do with Leslie would be fleeting.
My parents were comfortable with my girlfriends sleeping over at our house as long as we shared separate beds. Of course, any parent who thinks their child might abide by this rule after the onset of hormones must be living in a cave, but not a cave that has any Freudian meaning.
After my parents had retired for the night I snuck downstairs to where Leslie lie in bed waiting for me. From the moment I entered the room I had a sense that something special was afoot: the smell of Victoria’s Secret lotion hung heavy in the air. When we had worked ourselves into a good lather, which took as little time as you might expect, I positioned myself to enter Leslie.
She wisely requested that I use a condom, and like many men, I felt my penis begin to shrink from such a thought. I can’t fathom why it is that putting on a condom can cause a rigid penis to collapse with lightening speed, but I would wager it’s something similar to finding out you have won a free back massage, and then finding out that you have to receive the massage while wrapped in an oriental rug.
When I had finally unrolled the condom onto my flaccid penis, and then coaxed the penis to an erection again and pressed the head against Leslie’s moist center, she stopped me.
“I can’t do this without music.”
I understood: the only sound was the sound of our bodies, and the music would somehow ease the weight of the circumstances. I turned on the clock-radio to a jazz station, and the romantic melodies of fingers tickling a piano swelled into the room.
“This sucks,” Leslie said. “Put it on the Top 40 station.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her. If she wanted pop, she could have pop; all I wanted was that elusive vagina of hers that I had dreamed of for over a year. I had beat myself senseless imagining how she would enfold me like a velvet envelope, how her face would look as I entered her, how she would sound coming, how she would look with my come on her. I was prepared to give her whatever she wanted.
I wasn’t prepared to wait for another hour as she deemed one song after another inappropriate or unworthy of this, her first time. I kept having to keep myself hard, in a condom no less, and when I finally ripped it from jerking too hard, I had to go through the minimizing ordeal of putting another one on, lest Leslie call me into action at any moment.
When Tom Cochran’s “Life is a Highway” finally wafted over the airwaves, Leslie was ready. Urban legends had primed us both for Leslie being in pain when I entered her for the first time; experience has taught me that adequate lubrication can make many things utterly painless. As I pressed into her she winced: I drew back and prepared to push in again, but she pushed me off of her and ran from the bed to the bathroom.
I lie in the bed concerned and puzzled. I asked Leslie if she was alright when she returned from the bathroom, and she apologized and said she merely had to pee from being nervous. Her song of choice was rapidly fading, and she urged me to enter her again while it was still playing. As we pushed and pulled at each other a few more times, Leslie seemed to be getting into it. I was having trouble feeling much of anything through the condom, but the situation itself was enough to keep me hard. I felt like I might even be able to come, a feat quite difficult for me when sheathed in latex. Then Leslie pushed me off and ran to the bathroom again. This time she stayed there for a while. It was rather obvious that Leslie had more than a nervous bladder.
The night went on like that, with us poking for a minute or two, and then Leslie bolting to the bathroom to let loose her bowels while I waited in t
he bed keeping myself alive. As it turns out, despite the fact that she was very beautiful, Leslie thought of herself as fat, and a friend at school had turned her on to the weight loss wonders of Ex-Lax.
We tried it again in a few days, and it went better, and then after having irregular sex for the next month, Leslie dumped me. She said, “It always seems to mean so much to you; I just want to get fucked.” That was the first time I encountered the notion that nice girls might actually like dirty, filthy, hot sex, and I knew for certain that’s what she had in mind to give to the next guy.
By the fall of 1998, when I was living in my parents’ house again, I was long past my enchantment with virgins. I found them to be teases for the most part, and I had no interest in being the guy who had to ease them through the gauntlet of societal repressions.
Of course, living in my parents’ laundry room meant that I was done with many things where women were concerned. I was also working in the electronics department of Target, and when one is clad in a red polo shirt and khaki pants, the odds of meeting women are reduced even further. Needless to say, I spent most of my spare time staring at the monochrome screen on my cheap laptop computer (which connected to America Online at a whopping 2600 bps), surfing the chat rooms and looking for someone to have phonesex with.
One girl that I spoke with on a regular basis, Marceil, was quite charming. Not only did she have the most filthy mouth and outrageous capacity for conjuring hot fantasies, she was exceptionally well read and interesting. We spent half our time masturbating together, and the other half discussing Thomas Hardy and Albert Camus.
We spoke for most of the year, then before I sojourned to back Central New York to complete graduate school, we decided to meet. I drove the six hours from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Opelika, Alabama. Not to disparage the good people of Opelika, but if they are under the delusion that theirs is a cosmopolitan town, then their view of civilization has not progressed much past the bronze age. Being from the south, you would think that I might feel at home anywhere that grits and venison are a staple food. But I am from the south of suburbs and gentility; I am a vegetarian, and that immediately alienates me from my backwoods brethren.
