MY FIRST TIME

A Memory in Fail-sharp, Opus 1

I was 17 and—according to my friends, “still”—a virgin, a fact which I didn’t mind admitting, being the truth and also not shameful in my opinion, but privately very much deplored, as I wasn’t less horny than the rest, only slightly more shy and sensitive, less able to leapfrog the verbal and emotional stages of intimacy in order to land straight into someone’s pants, or them into mine, such as I observed my entire cohort striving to achieve, with varying levels of success but a shared absence of restraint, each Friday and Saturday night, while I drank to excess in a paltry attempt to catch up. Below the surface of my fastidiousness, I felt physically quite ready, eager, frankly, to begin partaking along with my peers in what appeared to be the greatest joy available to humankind, or at least the most frequently praised in conversation. After a few failed attempts over the course of our now dwindling senior year, each sadly disrupted by self-defeating excesses of modesty and/or alcohol, I was determined, when my next opportunity would arise, not to complicate things. Go with the flow, as my friends said; seize the day, as my books said.

So, after meeting late at a birthday party and exchanging barely a few words before, among the tangle of goodbyes, sharing a drunken kiss and our phone numbers; subsequently going on a proper date the next weekend, enjoying a mellow jazz concert and a fast-paced succession of cocktails, followed by a passionate, achingly protracted kissing session on the sidewalk outside the club, when asked if I wanted to come over for a nightcap, I said yes.

We proceeded to a nearby tramway stop and my only worry, as we stood there waiting, was that I had started experiencing some rather painful cramping in my lower abdomen, which was getting stronger with every passing minute, and I didn’t know how much longer I could conceal this kind and amount of discomfort. Yet, despite what the relatively mature adult that I have become would advise their past self, I did not contemplate, even for a moment, verbalizing such a base physical fact on this first, so far successful, romantic date. It would have broken the mood as swiftly as a fart during a blowjob, is what I felt at the time (also underestimating the potential appeal, to some of us, of farts), unable to conceive the benefits of honesty in building trust with a new companion, rather than hiding oneself in a cocoon of shame. Call it youth or stupidity, all that mattered to me was to sustain the conventional appearance of romance until reaching the long coveted acts of sexual validation—not to behave fairly or authentically toward either of the people involved. Too many times before had I made up an excuse and ran away!

As the old tramway creaked to a stop before us, I stiffened my resolve: nothing so trivial as belly pain would stop me now in my quest to get laid! Especially since my date was pulling all the stops to entice me: having jumped on board, I sat in the second available seat, purposefully leaving one free ahead of me, yet was soon surprised to find my own lap occupied by their heavy, grinding bottom, and our lips joining again in deep, passionate tongue-twisting. Oh, it was on! and I was thoroughly enjoying it, except for the part that with each jolt of our rickety progress toward the suburbs, extra friction was created between our nether regions, which was having the opposite effect that one might, and my date certainly seemed to, judging by concomitantly localized sighs and smiles, assume would be produced in these circumstances: not pleasure but pain, and not the good kind of pain, rather the debilitating sort of gonadal contraction that can nip the most avid burgeoning in the bud. And yet, thus diminished, I kept pretending, repressing the sacrificial complaints of my lower half for the dubious profit of the upper—by which I mean the brain, there being nothing fake or artificial in the voracious contortions of my mouth—, I kept pretending to be fine.

From time to time, the tramway doors fluttered open and closed in the background, unheeded by the fervid lovers, until suddenly, after one look outside, they playfully jumped up and rushed me down the steps, into the unknown. We stood at the intersection of two perpendicular roads surrounded by nothing but wasteland, and I realized that never before had I ridden so far outside of my urban comfort zone. There were no landmarks, not even the faint orange glow of remote city lights to get a sense of direction, but they smiled and said: Don’t worry, my place’s this way, not far. The night was cold and quiet, the sky sprinkled with stars like grains of salt on a really rare steak, and already we were advancing at a brisk step, my hand held warm and slightly pulled forward, across the bare, frozen ground.

We soon reached a grove of rectangular, identical apartment buildings, certainly sprung in such isolation out of the wisdom of 1970s Sovietic urban planning, and in an overheated, sparsely furnished living room, met their two roommates who had also just returned, yet unaccompanied, from evenings out. There, I entered a strange state of stiff speechlessness. On the tramway, I was immersed in a frenzy of passionate, gluttonous making out, and thus escaped any measured exchange that might have betrayed my inner state. Now, eager to prolong and further that embrace, but uncertain of my capacity to suppress my pain long enough, I proved largely unable to engage in the affable bits of socialization that were exchanged among the three of them, and genially offered to me, as I sat on one end of a couch, feet flat on the ground, knees straight, an ill-advisedly accepted cup of tea, too hot for drinking right away, rigidly held with both hands.

Aside from its currently suspended, purely tactile operations, my tongue refused to function for anything but declaring my discomfort and need to retire home; yet having come this far, I stubbornly resisted the nagging temptation of admitting defeat, instead clinging fiercely to the appearance of propriety, as if sharing tea with the neighbors were a natural phase of the bedding process, and striving to present a jovial, if unfortunately mute, countenance. Thankfully, after some excruciatingly protracted remarks on the compared merits of various bars and nightclubs for procuring suitable erotic partners, which to me seemed mooted by the roommates’ current failure in that regard, and to which I nodded, my date ended up noticing my reserve and desperate attempts to swallow quick sips of scalding tea. Although likely misinterpreting what would have appeared as a more straightforward form of polite impatience, they got up with a frank smile and, reaching for my hand, unabashedly announced that we were now going to bed, to the manifest approval of our transitory companions.

I was glad to escape once again external scrutiny, to immerse anew into physical touch, with growing excitement and diminishing dress, as we rolled onto the bed in a bare, dark room only shaded by the glimmer of a half-moon through a tall, curtainless window. By continuing to rush forward, performing the putative steps of passion with an appetite and pace matched only by my complete inexperience, I could avoid focusing on my pain which seemed thus to recede, and only as our hands reached almost simultaneously into our underwears did I realize in a panic that we hadn’t discussed the scourge of our generation, the unavoidable return of the mechanical within the furthest throes of romance, I mean condoms. Or condom, even. I didn’t have one. Nor had I ever used one (see “virgin” above). Nor could I consider mentioning it, as it would imply a willingness and competence regarding penetration that I knew not to possess—my theoretical willingness being curtailed to the domain of imagination by an overwhelming incompetence, as well as, it may be noted, a curious fear to reveal in this setting my status and level of experience. As much as I wasn’t ashamed to discuss it in front of friends, I had gathered the misguided notion that admitting virginity to potential partners was—instead of, as may be conceived today by more accomplished minds, a rather obvious technical information to provide, counting at least on some moral understanding, the person whom one has elected to trust with the physical acts—a sure way not to get laid.

And laid I very much wanted to get, except, having reached adolescence in the 1990s, it had been decisively imparted on me that AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, YOU HAVE TO WEAR A CONDOM ALWAYS!! Or you will die. I had repeatedly, incessantly heard that message from school, parents, and magazines, long before anyone cared to explain what happens in and around the condom: what sex is, how it’s done, and why it matters physically and emotionally.

So, as much as I felt incapable of bringing it up, I stood in dread at the thought of violating that primordial prohibition, and yet I craved for IT to happen, penetration, and soon IT was already happening…

And it was magical. A fusion of self and other, of body and soul, dark eyes and dark hair wrapping around me like a shroud, pulling me as deeply into oblivion as if I were indeed about to die, right there and then to be killed, lovingly bitten at the neck, at the heart, devoured and conceived, swallowed and made whole.

When time came to come, there was thunder, transpiercing the dark pillar of the night.

And my virginity, taking my breath along, absconded out the window.

Sperm, sperm, sperm. There was sperm where there should not be. A lot of it, warmly, deliciously expressed into one another. Soon getting cold, though. Sticky cold. Uncomfortable. Squishy readjustments ensued. After that, I stayed on the bed, daring not to move or think, to enter that new reality that our act of supreme transgression had thrown into being.

Coming back from the toilet, they asked: Are you OK? I didn’t answer. Perplexed, they sat next to me and gently insisted: That was what you wanted, right?

I didn’t know how to respond without lying. I did want it, and I didn’t. It had been great, it had been terrible. The best and worst combatted still in me, excitement and despondency, physical release and psychological dread, pleasure and despair, pride and guilt: would one side eventually prevail? Would they learn to cohabit? I didn’t know. I couldn’t say.

I didn’t know, said I.

And there, to my surprise, they rushed forward and hugged me sweetly. ”I’m sorry,” they said, stroking my hair, “I didn’t mean to pressure you”. I could tell they were sincere and felt a bit guilty myself, a bit untruthful: had I not wanted it more than anything? Yet had I not also not wanted it? Comforted, petted, appeased, I accepted a kiss and we lay back down, our cuddle eventually turning into sleep, first as spoons, then each drifting slowly to oneself.

In the morning, they walked me back to the tramway stop. We didn’t hold hands or anything, neither of us pretending that nights as these mean any commitment beyond a common one to having fun. But I knew. At some level I already knew, as the birds sang brightly and in the gutter, a puddle of rain mixed with gasoline displayed every color of the rainbow, but darker, I knew that we were now irreversibly bound by life and death, the risk and attraction of both. I knew what this meant to me.

We got married a year later. It did not last until death—although the end of the relationship almost caused mine, but I doubt if that counts as fulfilling the wedding oath—, nor did it create life. And I have thought often since about that first night, my sense of tragedy when the deed finally happened, of indissoluble togetherness afterward. Would further events have unfolded differently had I been able to communicate my feelings better along the successive stages which led to the scaffold—I mean, to intercourse? Did my partner really have my full consent when performing the actions which so utterly tore down my boundaries, physical and emotional? Would the answer to this last question change based on which gender each of us identified with at the time?