by Pete Holmes
His sermon started out relaxed, like, “Yo! I know you’re thinking about it! Let’s rap about s-e-x!” As he spoke, volunteers walked into the rows of chairs and handed out little green cards so we could “know our limits.” It seemed pretty fun, actually. The idea was for us to set our sexual boundaries before we were in the heat of the moment and did something foolish like sinking the Bismarck or not letting our meats loaf. But this was years before I would be alone with a girl or offered to cup or fondle anything—I had only just begun fondling and cupping myself—so mostly I was just flattered anyone thought this was a necessary exercise.
Up top, the card said, “What are YOU Willing to Do Before Marriage?” And below, there was a checklist:
Hand-Holding
Hugging
Kissing
“French” Kissing
Buttocks Touching
Breast Fondling
Outercourse
Oral Sex
Sexual Intercourse
I was a kid, so after I stopped giggling at words like “fondling” and “outercourse”—which was the technical term for “dry humping,” which was also hilarious—I filled out my card honestly, putting a little check mark against everything except “Sexual Intercourse.” I had heard around church that sex before marriage was bad, but everything else sounded like fair game, so why not? I mean, “Buttocks Touching”? That sounded particularly intriguing. Do we touch buttocks with our hands or do we touch our buttocks together, buttocks on buttocks? I wasn’t sure, but I checked it, hopeful of a day soon coming when I would find out.
I felt pretty good about my choices, until I peeked at the card of my church friend Joe. He was the youth group dreamboat—if anyone was going to be faced with these decisions in the real world, it was going to be him—but he had checked nothing. Nothing! Not even “Hand-Holding.” I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly, I felt ashamed, like a man leaving a 7-Eleven at two in the morning holding a clear plastic bag stuffed with Hustlers. There I was, in church, holding concrete proof that I was a degenerate horndog with aims to fornicate the first chance I got. I would’ve rather been holding a hot turd.
Maybe I could say I misunderstood the exercise and checked all the things I wouldn’t do. Or I could run home? Was it too late to pretend I didn’t speak English? I was in a panic. In the end, I bit the bullet and threw my card away, scribbling all over it and asking for a new one.
This time, I got it “right.” I knew now that the exercise wasn’t about how much you would do, it was about how much you wouldn’t. So I checked nothing, except for “Hand-Holding,” so as to not draw too much attention to the fact that I had copied Joe’s answers.
Then, just like that, I felt amazing, the opposite of shame. It was the rush of Christian conformity. I was in the club and had the correctly checked card to prove it. I wanted so badly to be a good kid, and there, that Sunday, I was given actual, tangible proof that I was decent and holy and not at all interested in touching my naked butt against a girl’s butt if the opportunity ever presented itself. Once we’d filled out the cards, we were encouraged to use them as bookmarks in our Bibles, which I was excited to do, putting it between Matthew and Mark, adding one more reminder to a book of reminders telling me that God would dropkick me into a furnace if I ever so much as brushed against a boob before my wedding day.
From that day on, even into high school, while all the other kids were obsessed with losing their virginity, me and my Christian friends were obsessed with making sure ours was still intact. We’d even brag about it!
“Oh man, Meredith came over last night, dude, and nothing happened!”
“Nothing, dude?!”
“Nothing. We watched Aladdin on separate couches!!”
“NICE!!!!”
High-fives.
If someone told a story about declining a hand job, that person would seem extra cool to me, the complete opposite reality to every other kid’s in North America. We were even worried about giving ourselves hand jobs. While the Bible doesn’t talk specifically about jerking off, Jesus did say a lot of tricky things about sex, like if you even look at a woman with lust in your heart it was the same offense as committing adultery. That one’s a real doozy, and it really shaped my early understanding of sex. Because if sex is evil, and lust in our hearts is the same as sex with our wangers, me and my preteen church buddies were going to hell for all the imagined sex we had been having regretfully in our more private moments.
This was a real concern. We were in this game to win, not burn forever. So one Sunday, my friends and I decided that one of us had to ask a youth leader a very serious question: “If you’ve masturbated, are you still a virgin?” We decided to ask John, one of the younger church volunteers, thinking someone in his early twenties might understand our predicament more readily than our pastor, who was married and could have as many God-approved orgasms as he wanted.
I was nominated to ask the question, as I was the only one in our group with enough courage to say the word “masturbated” to a youth leader. I still vividly remember where I was standing, looking down at my white sneakers sharply contrasted against the gray carpet, my voice shaky. I can see the look on church volunteer John’s face. And I remember after I asked, he had to think about it. I was really, really hoping for a quick yes, like a “What are you talking about, get out of here” yes, but there I was, waiting for news, and it didn’t look good. This is it, I thought. He’s about to tell me I’m going to hell for thinking about my Spanish teacher in a thong.
After his cavernous pause, John cleared his throat, looked and me, and said, “Well, technically . . . yes.”
Fuck.
This pretty much meant I was no longer a virgin, technically.
It was not the answer I was looking for. Sex was the worst thing you could do, the most definite no-no there was, the greatest risk of sending your soul to hell, and I was finding out, casually on a Sunday morning, that I had been, as far as God was concerned, committing myself to the flames two to three times daily. While I thought I had been a pretty good boy, I was now finding out that in the eyes of God, I was basically Jack Nicholson in the late ’70s. I thought I was a virgin, but from a moral standpoint, I was pulling down Hugh-Hefner-full-of-ludes-in-the-grotto numbers.
From that moment on, I understood the conditional nature of God’s love. It really baked in the idea that my goodness was directly linked to my sexuality, and that any sexuality was the thing keeping me from being in God’s favor. If I didn’t masturbate, God loved me. If I did, He took that love away. The answer I got in church that day left me with the feeling that every time I slipped up and took myself to dinner I had thrown hot coffee in the face of the Almighty, tempting Him to stop my heart and cast me into torment then and there.
John was probably well meaning, and he most likely jerked off all the time and felt really bad about it, too, so I’m surprised how angry I still am at this guy. But this is what happens when unpaid adults sign up to help with Sunday school. Up the street, people were literally protesting at my high school because some of the teachers didn’t have masters degrees, yet all the while the mysteries of existence and the complexities of spiritual ethics were being taught to children by guilt-ridden volunteers, and no one gave a shit.
My shame led to an obsessive, repressed, weird teenage sexuality. It was like a speedball, cocaine mixed with heroin—an upper and a downer. I would get both from any feeling of sexuality: the cocaine high of masturbating, the heroin low of feeling like God was mad at me.
And, just as with a speedball, I eventually became addicted to both.
farting through silk
THE SUMMER BEFORE MY SOPHOMORE YEAR OF HIGH school, my father took me and my friend Aaron on a road trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. It was a boys’ trip, no girls allowed, which for Aaron and me—each the other’s only friend—really just meant no moms.
I think my dad wanted us to bond as men, or maybe he just wanted an excuse to spe
nd a week away from my mom. But this trip was as close as I would ever come to the elder tribesmen taking me on my first hunt, or Royal Tenenbaum shepherding his grandchildren through a montage of mischief, shoplifting, and riding on the back of a garbage truck with “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” playing as the soundtrack.
The mantra of the trip, which my dad repeated often, was “farting through silk.” He’d buy us milkshakes and offer it as a toast: “Farting through silk!” He’d buy us gigantic roast beef sandwiches and say it in lieu of grace: “Farting through silk.” He’d say it to strangers, toll collectors, and waitresses, caring not even a little bit that they had no idea what he was talking about.
Dad would illegally park our Winnebago across five or six regular spots and take us to Hooters, where he joked to our pantyhosed waitress that Aaron was so shy he’d order the “chest of chicken.” When he couldn’t talk his way out of a lost ticket, he blew through a tollbooth, telling the attendant to kiss his ass and me and Aaron to keep an eye out for cops until we crossed state lines. My mom always hated music in the car, but on this trip, my dad played his CD collection loud and proud, tapping the gearshift to the beat or quietly tearing up to “Against the Wind,” demonstrating to me and my friend that the only safe place for a real man to show emotion is safely inside the masculine embrace of a Bob Seger song. On the more upbeat tracks, he would point at the radio the way dads do, splitting his eye contact between me and the road to emphasize his favorite lyric from “Night Moves,” a lyric about boobs, “way up firm and high.” He would look at me to see if I understood. “Do you know what that means, Pita?” he asked, one sandal-less foot perched up on the dash, airing out by the cracked window. Before I could answer, he smiled and in his deep Boston accent said, “Tits, Pita. Tits.” With that he honked the air with his free hand and waited for me to respond as I did, correctly, with “Farting through silk.”
It was fun and wild. Unfortunately, it was a little too late. I was a full-bloom church boy at that point, and while I enjoyed my father’s antics, I did so, as I had been taught, while also quietly judging him. I was in deep. So deep, in fact, that on a pit stop at a bookstore, while my dad flipped through magazines about classic cars and ads for power tools, I elected to buy The One Year Bible, a Bible-calendar hybrid that broke the scriptures into bite-size pieces so you could finally meet your goal of reading the entire thing in one year. My dad paid for it, probably wondering if he had taken his son on a road trip or my mother’s sixty-year-old prayer partner, Roberta. My pursuit of holiness was a real cockblock for my dad—it’s hard to get your son to embrace a good, old-fashioned ’90’s boys-will-be-boys trip while he’s slogging through Leviticus.
He took us to the pool and pointed out a group of girls about our age in the near distance. Maybe he thought Aaron and I would go up and approach them, or at the very least admire their boobs, both “way up” and “firm and high.” But instead—and this is true—I quoted Jesus and the verse that had shaped my sexuality so aggressively, Matthew 5:28, from memory. “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her,” I said, “has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
I was a fun kid.
“That’s for married people,” he said, perhaps for the first time realizing just how far down the rabbit hole I had gone, before breaking the tension with a joke: “Ah, you’ve seen two, you’ve seen them all”—referring, I presumed, to breasts. After which he paused, deep in thought for a moment before admitting, “I guess that’s not really true.”
Looking back, quoting Jesus at my dad probably struck a nerve. He had been raised Catholic, so he undoubtedly had more than his share of sexual shame. This was, after all, the same man who told me that married sex felt better because “you don’t feel like you’re getting away with something.”
shameful masturbator
I FELT BAD ABOUT LIKING MY OWN FACEBOOK PAGE, but that didn’t stop me from doing it.
Every single week, at the end of Bible study, our leader would ask for prayer requests, and every single week I would ask for help with “lust.” Every week.
“Pete? Anything you’re struggling with?”
“Lust.”
Okay. Moving on!
No one asked me a single follow-up question, and, worse, not one other boy in the group admitted that he, too, was struggling with the heavenly mandate to suppress his throbbing biological urges. Was I really the only one having a hard time keeping my hands to myself in a room full of teenage boys?
At a church friend’s house after school one day I finally mustered up the nerve to ask him, point blank, if he ever masturbated. “Of course,” my church friend said. “All the time. Any guy that says he doesn’t do that is a liar.”
My body flooded with relief. I had found a friend to share in this weird, hormonal, earnest, Christian journey.
I told him I did it every day.
“Me, too!” he said.
Several times a day on weekends!
“Me, too!” he said again.
Oh my God. I couldn’t believe it. I was overjoyed. No longer alone! No longer a weirdo!
“Everybody does it,” he said. “Sometimes, I’ll be watching TV with my dad, and I’ll look over, and he’s doing it.”
. . . Huh?
Oh.
After a few follow-up questions, I figured out that my church friend thought masturbation was touching your penis in any way. Any adjustment, any shift, pull, tug, over the pants or otherwise, constituted self-pleasure.
I was so disappointed, alone once again. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing,” I said. “That, or you’re not going to see your dad for a while.”
BUT I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE.
Around this time, another kid from my church youth group was arrested for public indecency after he started pleasuring himself in broad daylight on the town’s newly constructed bike path. I remember hearing that story and acting freaked out, but inside I understood the type of pressure we were all under to be good, sexless boys, while strong contradictory evidence bubbled up from within, a new batch every morning.
I didn’t need church to help me be a good person. I was naturally moral and people pleasing, and long before Jesus, I already had an overactive sense of guilt and hot, self-generated shame. I didn’t want to lie or steal or hurt anyone. But none of those sins were baked into my body’s chemistry like the urge to lock myself in my bedroom and straight jerk it. I knew sex was evil, but there’s nothing in the Bible specifically against masturbation. Believe me, I checked. Regularly. Some study Bibles even have indexes in the back, and not once did I find a passage listed under any of the hilarious names I knew for shaking hands with the senator. And with the topic being avoided no matter how many times I confessed my vague struggles with “lust,” my guilty imagination was left to run wild.
Every time I would masturbate, I would keep one eye on the sky, genuinely worried that Christ might choose that exact moment for his second coming while I was pursuing my own. Midstroke I was terrified that the clouds might part and Jesus would emerge on the back of a flaming sheep like, “Come to Me, my chi— What are you doing?!” It was my worst fear to have the King of Kings catch me lying on my bed, the Sears catalogue opened to the bra section, my ham in my sandwich, and declare, “I came to take you home, but . . . I can see you’re busy.”
But I couldn’t stop. Not because I enjoyed it, but because I was deeply uncomfortable with being horny. Cranking it wasn’t an indulgence, like eating a Cinnabon at the airport or farting in your car after a long day at the office. It was more like pouring water on a fire. I knew I was being bad, but in my mind I was only being bad for thirty seconds so I wouldn’t have to be bad all day, carrying lust around with me in my heart, sinning every time I saw a panty line or watched women’s tennis. Faving my own tweets was just my way of coming back to neutral—good, clean, and holy. I just wanted it out of the way.
The temptation got a little more ext
reme when one summer I ventured into my father’s garage—a massive, freestanding, castle-like structure that sort of looked like a Dickensian factory, with two huge wooden doors that could’ve accommodated a medium-size giraffe without ducking. This is where my dad and his buddies would restore old cars for fun, and inside I found all sorts of evidence of what men were doing: there were dirty wrenches, a pack of cigarettes that I promptly flushed down the toilet, and, holy shit, a Playboy calendar. There they were. Twelve glorious, airbrushed women with varying styles of pubes ranging from newborn to Field of Dreams.
I stared at a strawberry-blond woman in an open, transparent robe—doubly revealing—making the “Whoops, am I naked?” face as she lounged comfortably in an expensive leather chair. It was the kind of chair you’d smoke cigars in, if you were in an ornate, dark-wood mansion—a mix of lifestyle porn and porn porn.
I can’t overstate how exciting it was to see a photograph of a naked woman, hanging proudly, in public, without shame. I’d say it was just as exciting as if I had seen an actual naked woman right there in the garage, but in a way the calendar was better. The calendar I knew what to do with.
Frozen, airbrushed, and somewhere else, she wasn’t there to judge the part of me I couldn’t make sense of, so I could have my moment, uninterrupted, safe—until the shame tsunami hit me milliseconds after my joyful release.
Suddenly, standing there, my pants still at my ankles, I felt like Ron Burgundy jumping into the bear pit, whisper-shouting, “I immediately regret my decision!” The moment I should’ve been enjoying the clearheaded calm of postorgasm teenagerdom, I was scrambling for a way to destroy any evidence of what had just happened. I took the calendar down and, after one last flip through to say goodbye, tossed it in an oil pan filled with used motor oil. I sloshed it around a few times, making sure each month was covered, from the minx in the hay barns of September to the woman celebrating Christmas by masturbating. I covered them all—a precursor to deleting one’s Web history—watching the black liquid completely envelop each image and, with any luck, the memory of my indiscretions along with God’s bookkeeping of my sins.