by Dave Bry
By 1988, though, Sting had started the descent that would reach its nadir twelve years later with the infamous television commercial that featured him standing onstage, in front of an audience, and closing his eyes as the scene flashed to him sitting in the backseat of a chauffeured Jaguar sedan and words appeared on the screen that said, “What then do rock stars dream of?” Do you remember that one? I try to be as forgiving a person as I can be. People deserve a little slack—here I am, asking your forgiveness right now. But this, Sting’s Jaguar commercial, which tells us that while his fans, people who have presumably paid money to come see him, are watching him perform and thinking about him and his music, he is thinking about being driven around in his extremely expensive luxury car, this I will never be able to forgive. By 1988, Sting was singing smooth jazz-fusion world-music songs about the widows of Chilean political dissidents—way, way too earnestly. And taking himself way, way, way too seriously. The concert I skipped out of school to see was in support of an album that took its title from a Shakespearean sonnet. He’d recently remade the Police classic “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (which, to dock credit where it’s due to be docked, already cited Nabokov, and clumsily) into a humorless, soft-synth, elevator shell of its former self. But when he performed it at MSG that night, bathed in spotlight, arms outstretched like Jesus, wearing some sort of long white robe shirt, like an Indian kurta pajama thing, I was enrapt, clutching my hands to my chest, singing along to every word. Oy. It makes me want to puke up all the beer you can drink.
Afterward, after the blurry train trip back to Little Silver and the unsafe ride home from one of the girls, I opened the door to my house expecting my parents to be standing there, enraged. But I don’t even think they had waited up. They’d left a note. “Hope you enjoyed the concert. You’re grounded again.” You had indeed called my mom. It was to be another two weeks before I was allowed to leave the house for any reason other than to go to school. But there was no yelling or screaming or slamming of palms on the dinner table. They were quietly disappointed and didn’t know what to do. It must have been very frustrating. They were tired of me.
Soon, though, after the grounding ended, they sat me down at that table for a talk. (Or they sat down. I leaned against the kitchen island sink.) “You’re seventeen years old,” my dad said flatly. “That’s too old for us to be punishing you. Too old for us to control. So for the next year and a half, while you still have to live in this house, we’re not going to punish you anymore.”
“We know that you’re drinking and using drugs,” my mom said. “And we don’t approve. But it’s more important to us that you stay safe and that you tell us the truth.”
“We’re not saying that we like it,” my dad said. “We’re not giving you permission to do whatever you want. But we won’t be punishing you anymore. On one condition: No more lying. No more sneaking around. You tell us the truth, no more grounding from here on out.”
I was stunned. And stayed silent for a moment before leaping to accept the deal. No more punishing. No more parental authority. I had made it. I was free.
It was something I had been wanting for five years. Taking the future, not needing no teacher. And even though I would keep fucking things up for myself for a good while longer, sort of stumbling into my new, teacherless future, I did stop listening to Sting’s solo records soon thereafter—and I look back at the episode as the best thing that ever happened in terms of the relationship between me and my parents. So thank you, for the part you played.
And sorry for insulting your intelligence.
Dear Sean Something,
Sorry for having sex with your girlfriend.
It was really not like me to do something like that, to have sex with someone else’s girlfriend. In fact, up until that very moment—on a Friday night in May 1988—it was not like me to have sex with anyone. By which I mean to say that your girlfriend was the first person I ever had sex with.
A couple of weeks before school ended my junior year, two days after the prom, it was Senior Skip Day, when Red Bank Regional seniors were unofficially excused for cutting their classes and everyone usually went to the beach. WNEW was hosting their annual beach party to kick off Memorial Day weekend at the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were playing and George Thorogood and the Destroyers and the Georgia Satellites, who just the previous year had enjoyed their big MTV hit “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.” So lots of us besides the seniors cut school to go. And lots of other kids from other schools, too, apparently. We’d all left the house at the normal time and gone to a gas station or 7-Eleven to get beer and load up coolers with ice instead of going to school. So by nine o’clock in the morning, the beach out in front of the old Casino on the pier, where they had set up a stage and the broadcast equipment, was filled with drunk teenagers. And some adults, too.
It was a perfect day. Sun shining down from a bright blue sky, a breeze blowing in off the ocean. Everyone all smiles and fives and cheers-ing strangers. Propeller planes flew up and down the shore trailing advertising banners; some of them advertising the radio station and the concert itself; some of them shaped like giant beer cans: Budweiser! Coors Light Silver Bullet! We held up our matching cans as they passed and said, “Whoooooo!” We knew they were directed just at us; sometimes you could see the pilots waving. We all felt so lucky to be where we were: at a giant rock ’n’ roll party on the beach instead of school. In heaven.
That day glows in my memory like no other. For one big resultant reason obviously. But that reason, the fact that I got to have sex for the first time, seems like the result of the glowing. Something was going on that day. I’m still not exactly sure what. But somehow, for some reason, out of however many thousands of us were out there feeling lucky to be on the beach that day, I’m pretty sure I was the single luckiest one of all. I made out with five girls that day. Five girls! I know this type of tallying looks silly in twenty-four years’ hindsight. (And that to some people, Wilt Chamberlain, say, the tally itself wouldn’t much deserve an exclamation point.) It feels silly to write about. But for me back then, it was silly in a very good way. It was euphorically silly. Previously, in my entire life up to that point, outside the auspices of games of spin the bottle or truth or dare, I had made out with a total of five girls. Through three years of high school, I had made out with three girls. It didn’t make any sense, what was happening. It was like I had woken up as a different person that morning. A more attractive person. Or like the girls in our school had been hypnotized or brainwashed or had their bodies taken over by a Sumerian demigod like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.
Because girls were just walking right up to me and kissing me. My fantasies effortlessly fulfilled. I made out with a girl under the boardwalk, sunlight streaming through cracks in the slats, and of course sang the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” to myself as we were doing it. I made out with a girl on top of a parked police car, splayed out prone on the hood, in the middle of a large crowd of people at eleven o’clock in the morning. (I’d like to think I was singing N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” to myself as we were doing this, but it was more likely Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run.”) My head was spinning. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe that was the key—maybe the sun and the sand and the music and beer had put me in such a good-feeling, relaxed state that whatever tight, overthinking teenage nervousness I usually wore on my face had melted away and left me looking somehow miraculously sexual.
Needless to say, it had taken me much longer to reach this state than I would have wanted it to. Years and years longer. All my close friends had had sex by that point. (Or at least, all my close friends had told me that they had had sex by that point. And I believed them.) It was no fun at all, being the last virgin among my group of friends. I walked around in fear all the time, tangible fear, that the conversation might come up. Anyone who had had sex, or even anyone who had not had sex but who everyone else thought had had sex, all these people held a
trump card over me in any argument that turned sharp, a game-ending cudgel in any round of disses or snaps. God forbid there were girls around. At the mere mention of virginity, at the sound of the word, a wave of shameful guilt, like the feeling of being caught in a lie, would rise from my stomach to my head. I would wish I could disintegrate.
I imagine you can relate to all this. Pretty standard teenage boy stuff, I’d think. And you were a very nice guy. We were friends, you and I. Friends of a sort. Friendly. (Forgive me for not being able to remember your last name. We haven’t seen each other for twenty-two years. Perhaps it’s better that way, too, in light of my writing publicly about this. I figure it’s not such a big deal. But I realize that it is a sensitive subject.) You were a year younger than I was, a sophomore. But we were in a class together. Mrs. Dacey’s Spanish class, was it? You were a skater and sort of a goth. I remember a pair of European-looking canvas sneakers you had. And that you shaved the side of your head close and sometimes wore black nail polish. We bonded over mutual appreciation of the music of the Cure and shared a smoke sometimes at parties.
So, as I think and hope you would understand, there was no way I was going to let the opportunity to have sex with your girlfriend pass by. She was the last of the five girls I made out with that day at the beach. We found ourselves standing next to each other in the crowd, whooping and cheering and holding beers aloft in salute to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts—who I swear sounded like reckless youth and joy personified up on that stage singing “I Hate Myself for Loving You”—and the next thing I knew we were kissing, and when we broke for air, I told her she should meet me at Chris Pack’s house that night, where there had been a party in effect since the night of the prom because Chris was a senior about to graduate and his parents were out of town for the week.
Regardless of my quest to lose my virginity, though, and the all-day drunk I was on, and whether or not you’d understand my desperate thinking, this was a shitty thing for me to do. I knew she was your girlfriend. Everyone knew. She’d just moved to the area that year, had only been going to our school for a few months. She was very pretty—a blonde, big-haired rocker who wore tie-dye Zeppelin T-shirts and got a lot of attention from the harder-partying group of senior dudes that ran the commons area—and the fact that you, a quiet sophomore, had so quickly won her hand had boosted your rep along the locker-lined hallways. Judging from the expression on your face as you and she walked around together, you were aware of all of this.
When she showed up at Chris Pack’s house, I met her outside and led her to a romantic spot I found next to the neighbor’s hedges, where we lay on the ground and split a beer and kissed again. She asked me not to tell anyone. She mentioned you and swore she never did stuff like this. Then we got up and went in to the party and, after a while, went upstairs to Chris’s room. This was a crazy mind trip for me, because I had spent a great deal of time in this very room when I was younger, trading baseball cards and playing Dungeons & Dragons for hours upon hours upon days upon nights, but Chris and I had grown apart through adolescence, and I had not been there in three or four years.
She and I stretched out on Chris’s bed, which was more comfortable than the ground beneath the hedges outside and also more comfortable than the hood of a police car or the trash-strewn sand under the boardwalk. We kissed some more and took off some of our clothes and writhed around on the sheets with increasing intensity, but when I tried to get my hand inside her underpants, she stopped me. “I’m on the rag,” she said, sounding honestly disappointed.
I was disappointed, too, of course. Gauging by the writhing and our seminudity and by the general aura of sun-kissed blessedness that this long, long, wonderful day had taken on by this point, I had come to believe that perhaps my big moment had arrived. (It was as if some cosmic roll of two twenty-sided dice five years before had determined my fate and led me to this place at this time, and I was about to draw the sword from the stone and claim Camelot. Chris had a D&D character who was a wizard named Merlin. I realize that drawing the sword from the stone has this analogy anatomically backward.) But what could I do? I never wanted to be the type of guy who tried to cajole a girl into having sex. And even if I did want to, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Begging for pity didn’t seem like a good strategy.
So I just figured that I should keep doing what I was doing. Maybe she would give me a blow job. I’d never gotten one of those, either. Again, it didn’t feel quite right to ask.
We started kissing again and writhing and groping, and after another ten minutes she rolled herself on top of me and whispered all breathy into my ear, “If I didn’t have a tampon in, I’d totally fuck you right now.”
Had I not been in such a drunken daze, I’m sure I would have burst out in some giggly exclamation of shock. (Or in an even more disappointingly premature way.) No one had ever said anything like that to me before. She was obviously much more experienced in these matters than I was. But I kept my composure. The possibility of sex seemed so close, closer by far than it had ever seemed before. I couldn’t let it slip away.
“You know,” I said, trying to sound like someone who had definitely had sex before. “I don’t mind. If you wanted to take it out…”
She thought for a minute and shook her head, and we went back to kissing. Then she stopped and said, “Fuck it,” and got up and put her shirt on and walked out to the bathroom.
How to describe my thoughts in the few minutes she was gone? Like I wanted to call everyone I’d ever met and sing them the chorus of “We Are the Champions,” I guess. It’s a good thing cell phones had not yet been invented.
When she came back in, I had a moment of guilty pause: Chris’s sheets, it would be impolite to leave a mess. I mentioned this, and when she took her shirt off again, we laid it flat on the bed. Then she took off her shorts; then I took off my jeans. Then I had sex for the very first time in my life on top of a tie-dye Zeppelin T-shirt. Which still makes me smile when I think about it.
But this part doesn’t make me smile: back at school on Monday, after the bell rang to change classes between fifth and sixth periods, as I was collecting my books and getting ready to leave Mr. Ganz’s chemistry class, you walked into the room with an expression on your face very different from the one that had been there over the prior couple months.
I knew we weren’t going to fight. I was not a fighter. You didn’t seem like one, either. But I knew you had come there to see me, and I knew why. You walked right up and asked me if anything had happened.
“Were you kissing her on the beach?”
You winced when you said it, and your voice cracked a little. You knew. People had seen us, people told you.
I waited too long before answering and played cool guy more than I wish I had.
“That’s a question you’re gonna have to ask her,” I said and picked up my books and walked away.
Dear Deb,
Sorry for making you take all those waterlogged maxipads and tampons off my car.
You were only ten. I was seventeen and a new driver. I’d bought an eight-year-old, metallic-blue Toyota Corolla from our dad’s friend Alice for a dollar. It was a junker—rusted doors, yellow foam cushions poking through ripped vinyl seats, trunk that flew open around corners sometimes—but I invested $180 in a new carburetor, and it ran well enough to help me deliver Danny’s pizzas in the summer and get me to school every morning that fall.
Of course, a teenage boy’s first car offers other advantages, too. And mine earned the mostly joking, not-very-original nickname of “the Pussy Wagon” from two platonic girlfriends, Jennifer and Betsy, after I was lucky enough to have an early sexual experience in the backseat. (The episode became slightly famous among my circle of friends because Matt McCabe had come knocking on the fogged-up window, asking if there was a person there. “Yes!” I told him. “Go away!” He knocked again. “Dave, it’s Matt. Is there a person there?” I could have killed him. “Yes!” I shouted. “Fuck off!” He knocked
again, asked again. Was he deaf? Was this a prank? Did he want me to tell him her name? I stopped what I was doing, clambered into the front seat, and opened the door a crack. “What the fuck, man?!” He was standing there with his girlfriend, Mary, who I’d driven to the party we were parked outside. “Sorry, Dave,” Mary said. “But is my purse in there?”)
A couple months later, on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, Jennifer and Betsy played a good trick on me by decorating the car with fake cardboard license plates stenciled “P-WAGON” and a truly impressive number of maxipads and tampons, which they stuck all over the exterior using the little adhesive strips on the back of the maxipads and tape for the tampons. They were very thorough. There must have been five hundred maxipads on there. Fewer tampons, but you couldn’t see much metallic blue.
Dad found it in our driveway in the morning and enjoyed the joke. He was good about things like that. I got a ride to school with someone else and congratulated Jennifer and Betsy when I saw them. The problem started the next day, when Dad asked me when I was going to remove the feminine hygiene products from the already-less-than-attractive car that was parked, for all to see, in front of his house.
Like many teenage boys, I was extremely squeamish about all things related to menstruation—a position that, thinking back on it, was largely put on. I thought guys were supposed to be that way, all freaked out and uncomfortable at the first mention of a girl’s period; I associate this with Scott Valentine, the actor who played Mallory Keaton’s boyfriend Nick on Family Ties. I think he got the heebie-jeebies about the subject one episode, and I don’t know, I guess I thought he was cool. The way he said Yo all the time and stuff. (This goes pretty far toward explaining why I hadn’t had sex earlier than I did. It was hard growing up in the ’80s.) Anyway, I adopted that stance and refused to touch the pads and tampons. I told Dad I would make Jennifer and Betsy do it. He shook his head, disappointed.