A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 7

  In that sense, Scared Straight worked on me. I’ve also never been incarcerated, though admittedly I wasn’t a high-risk candidate.

  It’s for the best. I don’t even like Christmas candy.

  Virginity

  I spent the first seventeen years of my life firmly believing that my penis would never know the smooth, moist contours of vaginal walls.

  This wasn’t an outlandish thought. I grew up in North Jersey. The people who became sexually active at a young age were tanned and athletic and chewed their gum loudly. I was pale and shy and never managed to run with the sort of crowd that spent their middle school years fucking in public parks.

  My father never gave me “the talk.” To this day, I don’t think he’s ever acknowledged the existence of sex in my presence. He’s more concerned with things like Steven Seagal movies and the pH balance of the water in our backyard pool. One time around 1999, he mumbled something about “hope you’re careful.” That’s the only indication I’ve ever received that he recognizes sexual activity is a real thing I might actually partake in.

  My mother once tried to broach the subject, but it was a vague, off-putting discussion. I was on the phone in our kitchen, and when I hung up she was sitting at the table waiting to speak with me.

  “You know, your body’s going to start changing soon,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I replied.

  She paused. She looked down, her eyes scanning the table for some hint of what to do or say. She looked back up.

  “Sometimes I find stuff in your brother’s sheets,” she blurted out.

  She grimaced. I grimaced. We looked away from each other.

  “What do you do?” I finally asked.

  “I throw them in the laundry machine!” she said, before standing and literally running away.

  My aforementioned brother, two years my senior, could have served as my guide to matters such as these, but frankly, he wasn’t much help. Most brothers probably had heart-to-hearts about sex and girls and whatnot. My brother and I had bigger fish to fry.

  After he left for LaSalle University, a typical phone conversation with him would go like this: “Yo,” he’d start out, “can you believe Jerry the King Lawler showed up in ECW? He’s a WWF guy!”

  “You meet any girls down there?” I would try to slip in.

  “Nah,” he would quickly say. “But can you believe that Cactus Jack took that bump from Sabu? Man, ECW is the best.”

  Even if Gregg was more concerned with filling me in on the events of the third most popular professional wrestling league in America than with talking about girls, he still could have given me slivers of advice along the way. Where was I supposed to take girls on dates, for example? Where should I go to meet them in the first place? (I still have no idea.) And what about what to wear? Not that his suggestions would necessarily have helped. The most fashion conscious my brother ever got was when our neighbor gave him a huge bag of clothes from the early ’70s that had been stored away in his garage.

  “Holy shit,” Gregg said as he rifled through it and took out one particularly hideous item. “This orange jumpsuit is made of corduroy. Perfect!”

  He wore that orange corduroy jumpsuit all through his senior year of high school, which was the same year I was a freshman. While dressing like a member of Devo might have spoken to Gregg’s free spirit, the female reactions to it that I saw firsthand made it absolutely clear he would not and should not be my mentor in the ways of love.

  By the time my own senior year of high school rolled around, when my brother’s performance-art style of dress had mercifully faded to just a distant memory, I had established a pattern of how I dealt with women. It was a simple three-step process.

  1. Fall in love with a girl and absolutely never ever tell her.

  2. Slowly become her “best friend” over the course of a few months.

  3. Wait until she told me a guy had asked her out and she said yes. (At which point I would break down and tell her I loved her. To which she would reply she thought we were just good friends. To which I would explain that I’d always felt this way, and here she would accurately point out that I had been deceptive and manipulative by not revealing my true intentions. Afterward, we wouldn’t talk much anymore. Then back to step 1 and repeat.)

  It fit me like a glove. I was good at that routine. From Kristy Enginger to Melissa Goldfarb and back again, I was an old pro.

  Then I met Veronica and she fucked it all up by actually liking me back.

  Veronica was a redheaded, freckle-faced Irish Catholic girl. She was amazingly kind and cute. She’d also spent her whole childhood doing Irish step dancing, so her body was tighter than any seventeen-year-old’s has a right to be.

  The first actual conversation I’d had with Veronica was the one that occurred as I sadly left her best friend Samantha’s house after Samantha dumped me for delivering one of the most awkward first kisses in human history.

  During our junior year of high school, Veronica and I hit it off. She found me funny. I found her leggy and redheaded. I put my usual plan into action. It didn’t take too many months before we were talking on the phone every night. I liked her so much that when I heard things like the following—

  “I don’t care if I play cymbals and Kevin Connolly plays quads. I work harder than him and I should be the sole drum captain. It’s bullshit. We’re the only section in the whole marching band with two captains.”

  —I was able to pretend I actually gave a fuck. That’s love.

  Toward the end of the year I found myself on the phone with a guy named Will. He was an all right guy, but he was a little stiff and didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He also played the trumpet and was Unitarian. To this day I literally know nothing about the Unitarian religion, but I can safely say that the phrase “Unitarian trumpeter” doesn’t sound like the sort of label you’d attach to someone who’s fun to date.

  “Hey, you’re friends with Veronica,” he said.

  “Yeah, good friends. Best friends,” I answered.

  “I asked her out the other day and she said yes. Any tips on what she likes?”

  Up until then, I had kept my crush on Veronica secret from everyone. But Will must have instantly realized it existed. It wasn’t hard to deduce, being that my response was a long pause followed by muffled sobs.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, clearly annoyed.

  “Yes,” I replied, figuring there was no reason to lie about it at this point.

  “You like her, don’t you?” He sighed, heavily. “Let’s solve this right now.”

  Then, before I knew exactly what was happening, Will dialed Veronica up on three-way. She picked up to hear her boyfriend of nine hours and her weepy best friend on the line together. With him listening, I poured my heart out to her.

  “It’s just,” I sobbed, “I think you’re so nice, and you’re beautiful, and we have so much fun together, and I’ve wanted to ask you out for so long, but I never was brave enough, and I wish I was, because now I maybe lost my chance and I just can’t handle—”

  Wisely, she cut me off.

  “Chris,” she said. “I don’t think it would work anyway. You’re my best friend, and I need you for that. But we wouldn’t work together.”

  “So we cool?” Will said. I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him.

  Somehow, though, life went on.

  Veronica and Will dated for nine brutally long months. As summer moved forward and we entered our senior year, I couldn’t shake my crush on Veronica.

  Strangely, and independently of all of this, I somehow became just a tiny bit popular during my final year of high school.

  The head of the cheerleading team, Debbie, was my lab partner in physics class, based purely on the fact that the only other available option left was a Greek guy known as “Shit Lip Larry.” Debbie and I sat together, and at first she cold-shouldered me. But the teacher of the class was a club-foot-stricken creep named David Harding whom
everyone called Mr. Hard-on. He had a habit of bothering female students. Debbie was at the top of his list.

  “If you apply that formula, you’ll see how fast the plane rises despite gravity,” he’d say, grinning at Debbie as he leaned over our table and pointed toward a physics worksheet. “Sometimes things rise real fast.... Real fast. . . . ”

  “Mr. Hard-on, I got a question,” I jumped in and said.

  “Fine,” he grumbled, turning his attention to me.

  “How much force does it take for a roller coaster to go in a loop, and also do you think the way you’re behaving is appropriate?”

  I was trying to be a wiseass mostly to break the tension, but as a side effect Debbie came to find me both funny and a pretty good guy.

  When people noticed that she and I were palling around, it gave me credibility among a whole new social class. For the first time, those tanned, athletic gum chewers had decided I was okay enough to hang around their periphery. It gave me a bit more confidence.

  At year’s end, Veronica and Will were still dating. But she somehow broke rule 3 of my well-trod cycle. Instead of feeling betrayed or duped by my feelings toward her, Veronica actually made an effort to remain friends.

  We even still hung out. Albeit in a platonic way.

  She worked a few nights a week as the receptionist at the rectory of a church. She was convinced that a ghost haunted the building. While terrifying for Veronica, this was great for me. She’d sit on the phone with me all night to avoid getting too scared.

  I did my part to be a good guy and make her feel better, but don’t think for one fucking second that I wasn’t fanning those flames every chance I got.

  “You know,” I said. “Ghosts respond the most to teenaged girls.”

  “Shut up,” Veronica answered. “You’re just saying that to scare me.”

  “Well, I am trying to scare you,” I admitted. “But I saw a show about it on the History Channel. For real. Girls between fourteen and seventeen drive ghosts completely nuts.”

  After enough of these conversations, she hit her breaking point. One late evening I was off on some tangent about how ghosts are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but poltergeists are always bad, when she interrupted me.

  “Could you come up here to keep me company?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I answered, barely concealing my glee. “No problem.”

  I drove from my house up to Livingston, where we sat in the church basement together. I made fun of her about the haunting and tried to scare her. Before I knew it, we were holding each other on the couch because she was “scared of the ghost.”

  This happened a few weeks in a row. Eventually, we were cuddling without even the pretext of fearing the supernatural.

  One night she was lying on my lap.

  “I’m not saying Kevin Connolly is a bad guy,” she said. “I’m just saying that he doesn’t need to be drum captain. If he wanted to be, he should have—”

  “You know,” I interrupted. “Sometimes it’s really hard for me to stop myself from kissing you.”

  Veronica looked back at me.

  “Then why don’t you just do it?”

  And I did.

  “God,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m making out with you. This is so weird.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I just never thought you’d be interested in me,” she replied.

  This baffled me to no end, as she was one of the three participants in a conference call that had led to roughly nine months of horrifically low self-esteem for me.

  “Are you kidding me?” I replied. “I’ve been chasing you for a year.”

  “That was a year ago,” she said. “You’re, like, cool now.”

  She broke things off with Will and we became an item. Veronica was my first everything. We dated for years, and I learned much about life during my time with her. We had ups and downs like anyone else, and I’m willing to admit that 99 percent of what went wrong in that relationship was my fault. But the one thing I will always blame her for is the way in which we lost our virginity to each other.

  Fact: Any nerd you meet spends his childhood being completely sex obsessed. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a comic book nerd or a Dungeons & Dragons nerd or a fantasy baseball nerd or some terribly pitiful combination of all the different kinds of nerd-dom. A nerd is a nerd and he will have thought about sex for hours each day starting at the age of thirteen. Why? Because there’s no visible light at the end of the tunnel assuring a nerd that one day he actually will have sex.

  Like all humans, nerds want what they can’t have. And they are obsessive people by nature. So my recommendation to any ladies, if you wind up dating a nerd virgin as Veronica once did, is to let the first time sweep over both of you spontaneously. Allow it to be of the moment, to be a surprise.

  Certainly don’t pull your boyfriend aside and whisper, “I’ve decided I want to lose my virginity to you. Let’s do it in a week.”

  Because then you will have just made sure that nerd is going to have the worst week of his life.

  You will have sentenced him to spend the next seven days—the next 168 hours—obsessing over the idea that it’s finally going to happen.

  As a result, he is also going to spend those seven days reading up on cunnilingus and sex positions and ejaculation etiquette. About how he’s going to . . . maybe get a girl pregnant. He is going to research every STD over and over again, because he’s a nerd, and that means he loves gathering information and minutia, even if it’s about the many different types of warts that can grow on the underside of a penis head.

  That is how I spent my last week as a virgin. Nervous, skittish, obsessed. Wondering and worrying about how it was going to go.

  In the middle of that week, I decided it was time to face the reality of the situation and that I needed to get prepared.

  I needed to buy condoms.

  I borrowed my mom’s car and drove around town. Every time I got to a pharmacy, I pulled into the parking lot and convinced myself that I absolutely could not buy condoms there. Some of my justifications were very rational.

  This is Veronica’s neighborhood, I thought to myself. What if her dad sees me buying condoms?

  The first time I met Veronica’s father, he explained to me that he had served in World War II. He then went on to tell me he worked at a VCR company.

  “I find it funny,” he said, combining the two thoughts. “I used to kill those people. Now I work for them.”

  When your girlfriend’s father has taken human life, I contend it’s okay to avoid purchasing condoms in his neighborhood. Unfortunately, some of my other reasons for dodging the transaction weren’t so logical.

  Mom went to high school with the ex-husband of a lady who lives on the other side of that mountain there, I remember thinking while sitting in my car behind the CVS drugstore on Eagle Rock Avenue. If she sees me, reunites with her ex-husband after seven years of divorce, and he randomly contacts my mother for the first time in twenty-eight years, I’m so dead!

  My only option, as I saw it, was to buy my condoms far from where any family, friends, or associates could find me. I knew of a Pathmark located in the basement of an old converted train station in a nearby town. I figured that Pathmark would have a pharmacy and that the odds were good no one I had ever met in my entire life would have a reason to be hanging out inside a faraway subterranean Pathmark.

  I got out of my car and headed to the entrance, only to turn around and walk right back to my car. I sat down in the driver’s seat.

  “No,” I said to myself, out loud. “You have got to do this.”

  Despite my best efforts to mentally overcome my embarrassment, my body did not respond to my words. I remained sitting.

  “If you can’t do this,” I said, “then you can’t do it.”

  Begrudgingly, my body finally cooperated and I walked back toward the front entrance. This time I made it inside, and headed straight to the pharmacy.<
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  Then, I panicked. I walked around the border of the pharmacy, orbiting the condoms, for ten full minutes. I didn’t look at any other items, and only managed to examine the condoms by turning my head and reading the packages as I speed-walked past them. Otherwise, I kept my head down and continued my loop around the edge of the pharmacy.

  The workers behind the counter, two heavyset black women, were eyeing me, confused. They must have thought that I was out of my mind, or that I found supermarket pharmacies a great place to run laps.

  After I tired out, and not coincidentally after every other customer had left the pharmacy, I buckled down and made my way back toward the condoms. The choice was overwhelming, but I’d done my research and came knowing what I wanted: regular condoms with one simple frill, spermicidal lubricant. Without thinking about what I was doing, I saw my hand reach for them. I picked them up, nervously walked to the checkout, and looked at the ground as the woman behind the counter rang up my purchase.

  She continued making small talk with her coworker. Neither seemed to even notice me, and I liked that. I was doing my best to avoid eye contact and remain as nondescript as possible. I just wanted to get done with my purchase and be on my way. Remarkably, at first it seemed as simple as any other transaction I’d partaken in before that extremely terrifying one. I pushed my money across the counter, and she pushed back my change, along with a crinkly white paper bag that held a box containing my first three prophylactics. Simple as that. In and out.

  But I was wrong. The woman behind the counter did in fact take notice of me.

  As I walked out of the pharmacy, when she assumed I was out of earshot (she clearly hadn’t taken into account my adrenaline-fueled hyper-senses), she made a simple statement that tore me to pieces.

  “He ain’t ready.”

  She declared it to her friend, off-handedly. “He ain’t ready.”