THE DE-VIRGINATOR, we called her. She lived on my floor—moderately attractive and even innocent looking, but, hidden under the unassuming veneer, she was a cherry-popping superhuman, already the first for three guys after just starting her sex life.
On top of deflowering as well as Spiderman stops crime, she had a freakish ability to suck the sexual innocence out of everything. She had played Life—the benign children’s board game where you make babies by spinning a wheel—and somehow turned the match into a threesome. No, not a threesome with the little blue and pink pegs in their little red car, but the De-virginator and her friends forgetting about pay days and promissory notes to get it on. I was never involved with her, but her MO seemed to be infecting me.
I didn’t want to be De-virginator II. I didn’t want to become a cherry-popping, boardgame-interrupting crossing guard into adulthood. But drunkenly bussing on the bed of an upstate motel room with my new girlfriend April, I was about to warrant the nickname.
My first first time was during a Spring Break trip to Quebec (note to virgins: international travel and foreign languages will not make it any easier). My former girlfriend Rihanna and I were—surprise, surprise— making out on a hotel bed. I busted out something super-suave like “Do you wanna have sex?” After maybe five awkward minutes, it was over.While we were doing it, Rihanna wasn’t exactly loving the experience. She kept telling me to go slower. I was moving like a slow-motion sports highlight, except without any of the masculine physical prowess or the squiggly yellow lines John Madden draws on replays (thank God for that, at least).
“So,” she said as soon as we were done, “did it work?” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Though we kept dating for the next few months, our sex life never took off.
Virgin fetishes do not make much sense.
The virginal experience is like regular sex, just with discomfort and potential bleeding. Picking between a peanut butter sandwich and a peanut butter sandwich with discomfort and potential bleeding, who would choose the second one?
I didn’t want to have intercourse with virgins, I would tell myself. It’s coincidental and so completely acceptable. But then there was Pang, too. Pang and I had a fling several months before I met April. The night began with us idly watching the Vice-Presidential debate, two hours the entire country spent eagerly anticipating Sarah Palin saying something retarded (maybe it was the Alaska Gov.’s hotness that got us going), but the seemingly harmless wait for a political car crash spun out into an intense romp. We didn’t have full-blown sex, but it was a lot of other first times for Pang. As I discovered afterward, she probably hadn’t kissed anyone before, much less tongued what else ended up in her mouth that night.
I kept telling myself that Pang could have been the sexual equivalent of a Hoover vacuum in her hometown and I wouldn’t have known the difference (until she had accidentally started biting, I suppose). But I couldn’t shake the feeling it was something more nefarious, a cherry radar that subconsciously steered me toward the uninitiated. Worse than that, all this first-time sex was always disastrous, the Ghostbusters 2 of fucking. Was this my fate in the game of Life, I wondered: bad sex with virgins?
As I was worrying about all that, at least April and I were in a damn nice room.We were at a boutique motel, beautifully designed rooms each modeled after something from the 1960s or ’70s.When we had been reserving a room, I desperately wanted the Partridge Family suite, in which every wall and bed sheet had the design of the Partridge family bus.The lights low with “I Think I Love You” playing, I would have been more comfortable confronting the virginity specter, but April wasn’t willing to chip in for the extra cost for the Partridge suite. We ended up in vaguely sci-fi themed room with a sparkly green and orange tile mosaic over the bed and no David Cassidy to support me.
“Do you wanna have sex?” I asked, ready for disaster. She consented.
Out of nowhere, it was wonderful, as good as first times can go.
“Fuck! What happened?” she asked after we were done, sounding like she wanted it to keep going. Over time, the sex just got better and better, and April and I are still together, no less compatible for both being sexually experienced. It wasn’t until April that I discovered what good sex was—for the first time.
David James is a writer and lit student living in New York City. He loves New York Press.
