How to Lose Your Virginity ...and how not to (Real Stories about the First Time)

by Wickens, Shawn

  ADDICTED

  Brett, 25

  I was with my girlfriend of about two years. We went to see the Area: Two Festival with David Bowie, Moby and The Blue Man Group and I took some E for the second time in my life. I had taken it before with another friend of mine a while back but my girlfriend had never showed any interest in it. Then in the middle of the show she asked for some, which I feel bad about. I didn’t force it on her, but it didn’t feel right. And even though the sex felt real good, I’ll never have sex on ecstasy ever again.

  The actual experience itself was pretty good but we did it while we were on drugs and that’s not the experience we were looking for. It didn’t add anything. My first time was tainted. And never again did we ever do it drunk, or high, or on pills, or anything like that.

  We were in a hotel after the show and it turned out she had her period so the sheets were bloody and we had to strip them off the bed. She was pretty bloody too so she had to shower. Our friends were next door and the next morning they told us they didn't get a wink of sleep. I didn’t realize we were being loud because I was so out of it. But… the sex was pretty amazing and from then on I knew I’d be addicted… to the sex, that is.

  SHHH… WE DON’T WANT TO WAKE UP MY EX-GIRLFRIEND

  Jen, 27

  I was 14 or 15, I was doing a bunch of drugs, you know, anything that was available and I ran away from home. Not the first time I ran away but the first time I ran away and meant it.

  Harry Harwood was older and had an apartment. Just a guy I knew from exciting drug-crazed, fun and young, good times. I planned on living with him. That’s where I imagined we’d end up, but… his ex-girlfriend was still at the apartment. They were broken up, she was sleeping in the bedroom and he was sleeping on the couch.

  I was at his place and I had such a crush on him. We were making out on the living room floor and he turned to me and said, "So do you want to have sex?" I didn’t know what to say so I replied, "What do you think?" We made out some more and then he started to push down on the top of my head. Obviously he wanted me to go down on him, but at the time I was all confused like, "Wait, I’m up here. Why are you pushing me down? We match right here by our faces."

  I went down on him then we had sex and it was terrible and my head was banging into the coffee table the whole time. It didn’t take long, maybe less than a minute and I remember him being very small. I didn’t orgasm but, then again, I went into it knowing that wasn’t going to happen. It was more about making him happy. I was just swept away by the excitement of leaving home and I was with this guy who had an apartment and he was an actor and that was all exciting. The sex didn’t hurt so much. That was good. But my head hurt from banging against the coffee table, which probably took my mind off of any other pain. And Nine Inch Nails was playing in the background so whenever I hear Pretty Hate Machine I’m like, "Yep. My first time."

  I was at least hoping it was going to be something special between us, but his ex-girlfriend was in the next room so how special is that? The next morning she told me I had to leave. On top of that, I was freaked out that we didn’t use protection and I was sure I had AIDS because he had apparently been with everybody. I immediately got tested for everything but you have to wait because most STDs are dormant for several months so I got tested every six months for the next three years. I was so self-conscious about having sex with any boyfriend after that because I swore Harry Harwood gave me AIDS.

  ***

  I mean it probably happened. I would have done it if I was sober just because she was a willing, older girl. In retrospect I definitely should not have gotten that piss-drunk. In a weird, ridiculous way I felt violated. I felt like this girl got me drunk so she could take advantage of a younger guy.

  Derek, 28

  Bristol, PA

  ***

  Chapter 10

  "IT WAS A TRAIN WRECK."

  Nobody plans to have a disastrous first time, but some disasters are unavoidable. Sometimes the disaster is immediately apparent. Other times, for example with an unexpected pregnancy, reality hits weeks later. In the case of Raul’s story, the discovery of disaster was delayed over a longer period, and that disaster snowballed and continued for years later.

  As stated in the song "Let’s Talk About Sex" by the group TLC, "Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be…" Presented here are a few cautionary tales about the first time and sex in general.

  THE SHERIFF’S DAUGHTER

  Kenneth, 40

  My parents told me nothing whatsoever about sex. Dad’s an atheist, he never verbally said I love you but he finally wrote it in a card when I was 15. Kind of a sterile family, we weren’t much into hugging. Thank god for my sister, Peggy. She was like, "Penis and vagina. You have a baby," and I thought, "Well I gotta avoid that. Don’t want that to happen.

  I loved the television show Police Woman. One night, I think I was 13, I had this wet dream that Angie Dickinson was on top of me with no clothes on. Then I realized penis and vagina, something comes out. I get it. That’s how I fit the pieces together.

  When I was 16-years-old I met a 15-year-old gal at a birthday party in Franklin, Tennessee. I liked her. And the only reason I liked her was because she liked me. I was so shy but, "Oh, someone likes me." We hang out and I turn 17, she turns 16. Then I turn 18, she turns 17. When I turned 18 her father, who was a part-time Williamson County sheriff’s officer, forbade us from seeing each other any more. Her parents figured that we were doing it or we were very close. And they were right, we had just done it a few weeks before.

  She had lied and told her parents that she was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house. Instead we got a room at a hotel, I think it was on the corner of Lafayette or maybe Murphy Spur Rd and Spence Lane, the one behind the Huddle House. It cost $39, which back then was a good chunk of change.

  We had the hymen problem. Took hours, finally we made progress with that in the morning because at one point in the evening we stopped and were exhausted from trying. In the morning we made the "break-through" and a week or two later her parents said, "We forbid you from seeing each other anymore," so we eloped. Kind of a loophole to be together, but not really the best reason to get married. The parents should have left us alone, but they forced the issue and the exact opposite of what they wanted to happen, happened.

  Anyway, we got married. It was a bizarre wedding. My friend’s homosexual father presided over the ceremony at a Methodist Church. Some transvestites were witnesses. She ran away from home, technically, and I secretly stashed her in a hotel, splitting my time between there and living at my mom’s.

  My wife’s sheriff dad calls up my mom and says, "So where’s Kenneth?" She says, bless her heart, "Oh, he works at the West End Cooker at West End Avenue." I ended up having to tell some customers, "I’m sorry but Willis will be taking over your table now. You can settle out with him because I have to go to jail." He showed up at the restaurant and arrested me for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. We head down to Williamson County and I made bail in 30 minutes after a good friend of mine came through with the money. That really pissed her dad off.

  Yeah, we eloped and were together for two years. Didn’t work out, unfortunately. Not the reason to get married but I did marry the gal I broke my virginity with.

  ***

  When I sobered up in the morning I went back to that hill and I couldn’t find any of my clothes or my wallet. I didn’t even remember exactly where I went that night but… I just remember very vividly that we were behind that house and I lost everything, almost everything I had out on that trip. Luckily this was before 9/11 and they never questioned who I was or where I was going and I walked on the plane to get home with no ID.

  Greg, 23

  New York, NY

  ***

  DAD’S "FRIEND"

  Russ, 27

  So I was about 12, 13 years old. My father has a fruit stand in the Italian market in Philly, right where Rocky runs through
in the movie. My dad says, "I know this girl." He told me to go to her house on some particular day and that she’d "take care of me." I saw her once. She opened the door. I went inside and it was very, very low, low-cost housing. She was older. She had tattoos. She had two kids, the whole nine yards. She was about 23, 24. She had a husband. A friend of hers was there and this friend took her two kids, who were like 2 years old and zero, to the backyard ‘cause I was gonna fuck their mom.

  The mother starts blowing me. She sucked it. She sucked it, she sucked it… and I never got sucked before, but I couldn’t get it going. I was laying on the floor, on the carpet, looking up at the ceiling and I’m just seeing like flies buzzing around the ceiling, mating. Finally she climbed on top of me and I’m trying to do her. I got a condom on, I’m trying to do her with the condom on. Finally I was like, "It’s not gonna work. I can’t cum." So she sucks it again for a little while and makes me cum orally. I spend the rest of the night showering at my grandmother’s house, repeatedly, ‘cause I thought I caught AIDS. I was just a child.

  I talked with my dad about it and I said, "Dad, I think I got AIDS." One of many moments in my life where my dad was like, "Maybe I made a mistake." I don't know if he paid her. I don't know who she was. Maybe he knew her from the market. I don't even want to think about it.

  THE RIPPLE EFFECT

  Raul D, 31

  SHAWN WICKENS: So tell me about the first time.

  RAUL D: The whole history?

  SW: As much as you want to give.

  RD: Think it was the summer of ’89…

  SW: High School?

  RD: Not even. I had just graduated grammar school, eighth grade. It was some girl I dated during grammar school.

  I grew up in Jersey. And uh… very attractive girl. You know, we did our puppy love dating. According to her I was her first love. You know, that’s the first time I ever got in some sort of relationship. We never did anything. We broke up, we maintained as friends ‘cause we were in the same school in the same grade. Then I think it led up to the summer when we parted ways. My best friend at the time, he was much older than me and he used to give me these stories about getting laid, how it was great. I thought, "Shit. My best friend is getting laid and not me."

  SW: He turned you on to drinking and stuff…

  RD: Oh, he turned me on to a lot of things. We don’t even talk anymore. He was my best friend, you know. I looked up to him a lot. So whatever, I was like, "Fuck. I want to get laid." So, opportunity came… I think it was actually the last day of school, maybe not summer yet.

  SW: This was after you were dating?

  RD: Yeah this was after, like we just kept on being friends. But I didn’t get laid, I was going home and jerking off. The opportunity rose when on the last day of school, she invited me over. A bunch of us were supposed to go to her house for some sun tanning on the roof of her house. And I ended up being the only one there. So the opportunity presented itself.

  SW: It was fate.

  RD: Oh, I guess. And her younger brother, she had a much younger brother, he was watching TV so I was like, "Fuck it. Let me just go for it all." And we did and we got down to it and I was all eager to getting involved and getting it done and, you know, we were in the bed fooling around and I’m trying to work it. Here I am – I got an erection, I got her naked and I’m ready to go. I’m trying to find her fucking vagina. I couldn’t find it for shit. So I was like, "Damn what’s going on?"

  In the back of my head I was thinking, you know, I hear stories that you have to break the hymen and all that stuff. So I just kept on pushing, I remember I just kept on pushing. And then I guess I finally penetrated and it just swam right in there. And it hurt me more than it hurt her. I was like in pain. And then the next thing that popped in my head was, "Wow this thing is really hot. Hot and slippery."

  I did the deed. I was all… during the time I was having sex I was loving it, but in the back of my head I like couldn’t wait to run back and tell my best friend that I finally got laid. So that’s how that happened. That day. Finally did it and that’s exactly what I did, I went to my best friend’s house and told him what happened.

  SW: Did you even tan at all?

  RD: No we went straight into it and then once I was done I bailed right out. That’s basically the first time. And the story gets a weird twist because um… she ended up, well I never saw her again. Believe it or not that last day of school was the last time I saw her.

  My sophomore year, maybe third quarter of the year and she came back to school, she started going to the same high school so I was interested in where she’d been. She said she had to talk to me about a real big thing. I was like, "Where you been? I haven’t seen you around." It ended up that time I lost my virginity, she ended up getting pregnant. So she… she bore my child, my first-born.

  SW: So she had the baby?

  RD: She had the baby. It’s kind of, this is where it gets ugly. So she was ashamed and… her father was giving her problems. So her mom shipped her off back to her country. She was Dominican. She was shipped off and she had the baby and then she came back. So I was like, "Whoa I have a kid?" you know. It was like two years later. I was like 16, man. I was like, "Holy shit." At the time I was playing all these sports. I was young, starting to be a teenager. And then it hit me, "How am I gonna explain this to my family?" I knew my mom would have kicked the shit out of me. She says we have to talk about it after school, we’ll meet up. So I felt obligated to meet up with her.

  I ended up meeting up with her and… we talked a little bit and what happened was the baby was born with a heart defect and the baby died like maybe a couple of weeks later. And it was buried over there in that country. And she handed me a picture so I actually got to see my first-born and it was a boy.

  That crushed me and it may sound fucked up, but… as much as I was scared I was kind of happy that it happened. It worked out ‘cause I would have been a teenage dad. But you also can’t help but feel horrible and responsible, in a way, for what happened to her afterwards ‘cause she was having all these problems about the baby.

  SW: Emotional problems?

  RD: I know it hit her hard. She was having all these problems emotionally and with her family and then after that I rarely ever saw her again. So I had this whole secret. I never even told anybody, really, except my best friend. My mom doesn’t even know to this day. I have this little chest that I keep the picture in, you know.

  This story gets a real twist in it. I was in high school, I was succeeding in sports, I was gonna play ball, I was a musician also, so I had this whole thing going and it’s all because I had this opportunity of what happened, you know of the baby dying, that I was able to achieve these things.

  She went through a downward spiral. She got kicked out of the house, started living in the streets. It was… it really got bad for her. I would maybe run into her once every five years or something like that, and I ran into her last summer and um… here goes the other speech, she goes, I have to talk to you. And I was like, "Whatever. What could it be?" We talked and the last time I saw her, she was dancing at a strip bar. I just ended up walking in and there she was, you know. She was talking to me and then… it ended up… and I haven’t seen her since this whole conversation… she said she wanted me to go with her, back to her country to make a special ceremony for the baby. And I was like, "I’ll give you that." And I was like, "Why? What’s going on?" And then she tells me that she was HIV-positive and she has AIDS. So… like… in that instant…

  SW: It’s heart-breaking.

  RD: I just think of that one day that it was a pure lustful act for me to… just to satisfy not only myself but to tell my best friend what I had accomplished, but what did I really accomplish? I don’t know if that little emotional damage just triggered a whole series of events for her that made things get worse. I don’t know. But I have to live with that. And it sucks. So it’s kind of a yin and yang thing, you know, it was great but… it was great short-term but th
e long-term it… not only destroyed two lives but the aftershock of it affected everyone else who was involved.

  SW: It sounded like she had a pretty unsupportive family too.

  RD: It was tumultuous. But… I don’t know. I wasn’t there. And I hate it because me being glad came at the price of the death of my first-born. And now, not only the death of my first-born but, now the death of my first-born’s mother.

  SW: No kids since then?

  RD: Me? No. After that, no. I don’t know if her condition is worse now. I haven’t seen her since maybe two years ago. I’d like to say it’s been tough for me but I didn’t really have a tough time. I wasn’t around. There was no emotional attachment. That act was done prior to my freshman year. And here I am a man, as much as I can think of myself as a man because of the situation. But I’m doing great, personally. That one little thing… it’s surprising how fragile life… the smallest detail you can do to change it. How it just… you’re not looking but behind the scenes there’s a whole other map of the series of events that you can’t control.

  SHORE LEAVE

  Billy, 59

  This was in 1965 or ’66. Something like that. Probably ’66. Maybe ’65. Stationed in Turkey and my second day there some guys took me to this brothel. It was like a brothel but the girls were actually prisoners, stuck there for breaking the law and made to work as like call girls. They had guards stationed at the gate and they’d let us in because we were American soldiers. I went in there and it was a terrible experience, I was very, very, very uptight about it. I felt so guilty for myself. But I’m sure the girl felt worse than I did.