Exes and Ohs

by Shallon Lester

  I ran out of work that day and straight to the drugstore, flying out with a shiny new box of rubbers I couldn’t wait to test out.

  The next day, a very satisfied Raylan texted me that he felt liberated by the Magnum experience, and my response will live in text-message infamy among my friends forever:

  “You are emancipated!” I wrote back. “And all thanks to me, the Abe Lincoln of sex!”

  “You wrote what?” said my best friend, Klo, not even trying to hide her horror.

  “I … I thought it was funny,” I said defensively. “Because he freed the slaves, you know? Like I freed his … never mind.” I instantly regretted sending the SMS.

  “Did he write back?”

  “Well … not yet.” I chewed my lip nervously.

  I was always doing weird things like this that I thought were hilarious but ended up creeping out my boyfriends. You’d think that most boys would be so happy to have a fun, cool girlfriend they had great sex with that they would overlook the occasional Civil War–themed text. Big deal. But apparently it, or some other phantom flaw, was a big deal, because he broke up with me two weeks later. Even worse, it was the same day that a crate—yes, a crate—of Magnums was shipped to my office as a thank-you for the glowing Trojan article.

  I am 1) probably the only girl who ever got a giant shipment of giant rubbers delivered to her work, and 2) certainly the only one ever to burst into tears upon receiving them. The boys in the office, however, were delighted and dove right into the pile, stuffing a box or two into their messenger bags as they fought over the ten Trojan vibe rings. But at the end of the day, I still had hundreds of Magnums left, all for me—and me alone. There were so many, I had to take a taxi home; I couldn’t even carry them on my own. As I sat on my bed, surrounded by hundreds of shiny gold Magnum wrappers gleaming in the summer twilight, I felt like Scrooge McDuck with his money bin. Maybe I could fill the tub with them and splash around happily, reveling in a latex fortune. Instead, I stuffed them into an old duffel bag and exiled them to a dark corner under the bed.

  Cut to two years later. I had started video-blogging for a men’s advice site called Doubleagent.com. It was basically a site for dudes who wanted insight into the female mind, and my job was to dispense my hard-won wisdom about life via three-minute webcam videos. The other girls who worked for the site were hot but dumb. One fellow vlogger would routinely lose her train of thought and would randomly start dancing in the middle of her videos. Two minutes of lucid thought was too hard for her, apparently. With that kind of competition, I quickly became the most popular contributor. Those who can’t do, teach!

  Trojan once again entered my life when my boss at Double Agent, Charles, brokered an advertising deal with the company, which included an agreement to have a Double Agent girl host Trojan-sponsored parties around the country. Being that I was one of the few who could form coherent sentences, I had a brief phone call with a Trojan rep, who was baffled and delighted by my extensive knowledge of the brand (I even knew where their corporate headquarters were—Princeton, New Jersey) and insisted that I be the one to host the parties. Charles readily agreed, mostly because I was the only vlogger who seemed like she could use a condom without somehow getting trapped in it.

  A few weeks later I was on a plane to New Orleans to host a fete during Jazz Fest. Trojan had rented out a huge nightclub for the event to lure in hoards of young, sexually active college kids. They even set up huge, carnival-like displays in the street. There was a wheel you could spin to win lube and vibrating rings, a tour bus filled with condom quiz games, even a bounce house! My job was to wear a tight, short dress and fanny around, interviewing hot girls about safe sex and why condoms are awesome.

  Of my performance at said duties, I will say this: I may be a horrible reporter, but I’m a great interviewer. I can coax odd, hilarious, wildly inappropriate comments out of almost anyone. Hell, I could get the Pope to sing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song if I really tried. So asking a bunch of drunk sluts to talk about banging dudes was cake. Delicious cake. Red velvet cake still warm from the oven and covered with frosting, but ooooh, the frosting is melting and dripping down the sides onto my hand, I’d better get—I’m sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right. Interviews. The Trojan people were thrilled that I was getting such good sound bites, and soon I was booked to host another party in Boston, and several more in other cities. They paid me a few thousand dollars for each one, too—more than Kim Kardashian was making at the time, thankyouverymuch—but the real prize was the condom goodie bag they sent me after each event. I had forgotten all about the cache of rubbers lying under my bed until, several weeks after that first New Orleans party, a big box arrived at my apartment. Inside was a Trojan-branded backpack filled to the brim with prophylactic delights. Lube! Vibrating rings! Magnums! XLs! Ultra Thins! Oh my!

  I’ve always been a bit greedy (the curse of being an only child), and suddenly I was feverish with glee at the thought of how many condoms I had amassed. My Scrooge McDuck fantasy sprang back to life, the painful memory of the post-breakup condom delivery was banished to the back of my brain, and my collection started to become a point of weird hoarder pride. Like a kid saving her pennies for a new toy, I eagerly counted each new rubber and added it to my growing heap. But soon it wasn’t just Trojans I hoarded; I began collecting condoms of all varieties at every possible chance. I’d take fistfuls of free Durexes from the clinic and swipe errant Lifestyles from my guy friends’ dressers. By the time my duties as Trojan spokesperson finished and I finally managed to pull the plug on my compulsive condom-snatching, I had amassed over 2,300 condoms. A quick calculation told me that a person would need to have sex more than six times a day for a year to use them up. And that’s not even factoring in the gallons of lube and army of vibrating rings also stowed away, as though for some sort of sexual apocalypse.

  By now I had taken up hockey, and all my available storage space was being occupied by extra gloves and pucks and Under Armour; I had no more room for all my rubbers. I briefly made the mistake of trying to store the two together … until a Magnum XL dropped out of my glove and onto the ice during a game. I lived in a spacious four-bedroom apartment in Chelsea with my friends Holly, Pfeiffer, and Marcia. But my roommates didn’t much appreciate my stuffing Ultra Thins in every nook and cranny around the house. I had to get rid of them. Begrudgingly, I tried giving them out as stocking stuffers and birthday presents and including them in gift baskets, but even still, I was barely making a dent in my supply. I had so many, I didn’t even bother storing them in duffel bags anymore; I just tossed them under the bed and vacuumed around them. Once they started to spill out from beneath my bed like dust bunnies the girls put their feet down.

  “You’re just going to have to start using them,” Marcia said with a shrug, but it sounded impossible. Between work, sleep, showering, and eating, there was no way I could fit in six sexual romps a day. I didn’t even have a boyfriend! And then, I had an idea …

  “No,” I said, “we are going to start using them.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. “Look, I don’t know what you have in mind, Shallon, but count me out.”

  I was talking about water balloon fights. It was summer and no one we knew had a pool, so what better way to make our own splish-splashy fun? Holly and Marcia and I went up to the roof one sticky afternoon with a box of Ultra Thins, prepared to cool off and pare down my mountain of cock socks.

  Unfortunately, condoms make lousy water balloons. No, let me rephrase—they make enormous lousy water balloons. If you fill them to a manageable size, they’re practically indestructible. But if you make them big enough to pop, they’re too big to throw. They’re too big to hold, actually; condoms filled with water look like huge amniotic sacs, wobbling and gurgling like an alien pod. Plus, they’re all slippery with lube, so even if we managed to corral one in our arms, it would just wiggle right out, lumbering down the sloping roof and onto the pavement four stories below.
r />   Splort!

  We cringed, crouching down behind the air-conditioning unit, and prayed no one was hurt by our Trojan waterbomb. Clearly this wasn’t working out as planned. We packed up our remaining rubbers, slunk back down to our apartment, and avoided looking out the window lest we discover a very dead, very wet body on the sidewalk.

  With water balloon fights out of the question, I had only two remaining viable options for getting rid of all my jimmy hats: fill them with heroin and become a drug mule, or get a boyfriend. I have a small esophagus, so I chose the latter.

  A few weeks later I started going out with Richie, a banker. At least I think he was. I didn’t really pay much attention, but I know he worked in finance. He could’ve been the guy refilling the deposit slips at an ATM; I didn’t really care. He was sexually active and that was all I needed to know. My roommates set us up, which at the time seemed like an altruistic gesture, but now I realize that it was more like a colossal practical joke. Richie and I were a horrible match; he slicked his hair back like Gordon Gekko and used phrases like “The talent in here is ridiculous” to indicate that a bar had a lot of pretty girls. But he had a good body. I didn’t really need to like his personality, I reasoned, as long as he put out.

  Now, you would think that finding a guy willing to sleep with a non-hunchbacked, dentally hygienic girl would not be difficult. But Richie was very odd. Very odd indeed.

  While most bankers are full of swagger and bravado, Richie was skittish and paranoid. He’d cancel dates at the last minute. He’d incessantly look over his shoulder. And it was nearly impossible to get a straight answer out of him about anything, whether you asked him about his family or what time it was.

  I wouldn’t have cared so much if this jumpiness didn’t translate to the bedroom as well. Making out was almost impossible—the second it got hot and heavy he would leap up to check his BlackBerry or rifle aimlessly through a drawer.

  I thought about my stash of condoms, ticking away like a time bomb under the bed, begging to be used.

  “What are you doing?” I’d say, sighing exasperatedly. “We are never going to get to third base if you keep rambling around!”

  Even the way he kissed me was indecisive, his tongue darting around like a scared fish. Finally I just gave up on frenching altogether and settled for awkward, open-mouth, tongue-less kisses. It was like making out with a lead pipe.

  Despite this madness, I still thought that perhaps he could be my Trojan prince. Maybe he just needed to get naked and then all the pieces would fall into place. But slowly I began to realize that Richie was … a prude.

  No matter how many times I tried to seal the deal, he somehow wriggled out of my embrace, just like my ill-advised condom water balloons. WTF was his problem? He wasn’t religious, or holding out because he wanted us to get to know each other (I can’t even remember his last name), or because he respected me sooooo much. I’m a patient woman, but it had been three weeks and I hadn’t even seen him shirtless! That might’ve been okay if he had a glittering personality with which to distract me. But no conversation and no nakedness? Nuh-uh. Not gonna fly with me. I had Magnums to use up.

  Finally, fed up with his priggish baloney, I decided to get him good and drunk and drag him home like a caveman. I was a girl on a mission, an intrepid general flanked by her legion of rubbers, ready for action!

  I plied him with tequila shots and lured him back to my house so I could begin my seduction, and at first, he seemed to comply. I peeled off his shirt, then his pants, my head swimming with victory. Things were looking good, very good, until Richie paused, saying he needed to turn off his phone.

  “I just don’t want us to be interrupted.” He smiled and leaned over the side of the bed, grabbing for his BlackBerry, which had fallen on the floor.

  I lay there on the bed, smiling serenely and looking at his perfect form in the moonlight, until …

  “Umm, why do you have all these condoms?”

  Oh. No. He must’ve been able to see under the bed and had discovered my treasure trove of contraceptives.

  “I—I’m a spokesperson for Troj—” I stammered, but it was too late. Before I could even reach for him Richie had thrown his shirt on, backward; yanked on his pants, sans boxer briefs; and was halfway out the door. Wide-eyed and disgusted, he ran out so fast he practically left a Richie-shaped hole in the wall.

  The next day, one of our mutual friends told me that Richie had shown up that night at his house, frantic and wasted, his underpants clutched tightly in his hand, babbling about rubbers. It’s one thing to get rejected; it’s another to have a man literally flee like he’s being chased by bees.

  “I think maybe it’s time you give this condom thing up,” Holly told me. “Can’t you just donate them or something?”

  I scowled. As charitable as I usually was, I had an odd attachment to my pile of prophyls. I had worked hard for them, after all. I hated the thought of turning my stash over to my local AIDS charity, even though clearly they could use them far more than the rumpled fedora from last season that I had ready to donate.

  But I trotted a few hundred of the things down there anyway, ignoring the puzzled yet grateful stares of the volunteers. As I walked home, I felt somewhat lighter and happier knowing that I’d helped others … and yet I was still nettled at the way the Richie affair had gone. It wasn’t just the way he left that was nagging me; why had he been so nervous and twitchy the entire time?

  The answer came a few weeks later, in the form of an e-mail forward from our guy friend Beef.

  “LOLZ!” he wrote. “Thought I recognized that face! Dude don’t let your boss see this!”

  It was a grainy X-rated porn screen cap featuring a busty, familiar-looking blonde writhing around with some toy that looked like a baseball bat.

  WTF? I thought, scrolling down to the beginning of the thread.

  Lo and behold, Richie had started the thread nearly a week before, sending it out to over forty people, many of whom I knew.

  “Yo playaz,” he wrote in the original message, “this is the condom chick I was telling you about. I KNEW she looked familiar, right?! Thanks for finding this pic bro. What a slut, totally dodged a bullet there.”

  Wait a minute. Wait. Does he think that I …? Does that girl look like …? Oh my god.

  Suddenly it all made sense—his prudishness, his reluctance to tell me any personal information, the total freak-out over the rubbers. He thought I was a porn star! Honestly, how anyone could mistake me and my B-cups for an adult performer was beyond me. But Richie wasn’t the brightest bulb and had assumed that my “writing” career was a euphemism for something else. For him, the stockpile of condoms under the bed was the last piece of the puzzle.

  After that, my friends expected me to wash my hands of my stash once and for all, but those jimmy hats were all that I had left. My boy, my reputation, my pride—they were all gone. Like a fading actress clinging to her old costumes and fineries, I kept the rubbers as a reminder of a better time, when boys actually wanted to sleep with me. To this day, I have enough condoms to keep me occupied well into middle age. But sometimes, when I start dating someone I really, really like, I’ll trot down to the store and buy a shiny new package, just for him. I want him to know that he’s special enough to deserve it, that I’m not just sleeping with him to whittle down my stockpile … but God help that douchebag if he dumps me before we use up the pack. I’ll pull a Magnum XL over his head ’til he suffocates.

  Still, I have yet to figure out which is worse—getting mistaken for a professional tramp or realizing that even then, I still couldn’t get laid.

  My Chemical (Peel) Romance

  Having a fervent, obsessive, teenybopper crush on a celebrity is cute when you’re thirteen. But when you’re twenty-five, it’s just creepy.

  I was never one of those little girls who thought boys were icky or had cooties. Instead, they were like a car crash on the other side of the freeway—dangerous and thrilling. I wanted to g
et closer and see what exactly these odd, grubby creatures were all about. But even at the tender age of five, I realized pretty quickly that it would be a number of years before the boys my age would catch up with me; there was no way little Joe Claytor or Eddie Lee could handle Shallon Lester, vixen in OshKosh B’gosh.

  So I turned my attention to men who would surely be worthy: celebrities.

  By first grade, I was convinced that Tom Cruise was my future husband. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what sex was—I was pretty sure it involved some sort of elaborate dance and a special pair of shoes—but I knew that one day, I’d do it with the Top Gun star.

  When I was eight, my focus shifted to Garth Brooks. He was well on his way to balding and a middle-aged paunch, but I thought he was just dreamy. I blanketed my room with his posters and tortured my mom with his music.

  But even then monogamy wasn’t my strong suit and I wasn’t faithful to Garth. I had a side thing going with the douchey lead singer of Color Me Badd until I beheld the majesty, the luminous glory, of Axl Rose.

  The full scope of my Guns N’ Roses fixation is too embarrassing to detail, but let’s just say no one in my family will ever look at a bandana or pair of leggings the same way again.

  Mama assumed that the death of hair metal would also spell the end of my ridiculous celebrity mania, but no such luck. I was like a serial killer whose crimes slowly escalated.

  After Axl came a years-long devotion to Green Day, followed by unsettling obsessions with Vince Vaughn, Prince William, and Gavin Rossdale. Freshman year of college I slept with a framed picture of Josh Hartnett next to my bed, and by junior year my room had become a shrine to Joaquin Phoenix.