Things at Avon High School had been just as hard for Kate, socially speaking. We, the awkward and self-conscious sisters whose only claim to fame was our inexplicable blood relation to a member of homecoming royalty, our older brother. But the biggest difference between me and Kate was that she at least had friends. Wherever she went, she made tons and tons of friends. I, however, preferred to hide in a cave and chew on the carcass of whatever guy I had temporarily dragged away to dry hump.
“Who’s this?” I asked, holding up a photo taken at some party. Kate snickered.
“Oh, my gosh.”
“What?”
“Those are my hall mates. We get so crazy.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know, jumping in the fountain. Throwing people in the lake.” Then she lowered her voice, though no one was in earshot. “Masturbating in the hot tub.”
“Jumping in the—” I interrupted, the photo going limp in my hand. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah.” She laughed.
“The hot tub. The hot tub?”
“Yup. On the jets.”
“The jets,” I echoed.
“My friend does it all the time. When she takes a bath, we all know what she’s doing. She takes for-ever.”
“Ha!” I blurted out, not really laughing. “Ha!”
“One night, she got a bunch of us to do it together. We were kinda drunk.”
“Too funny,” I mumbled, dazed.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know stuff. I had stayed at the library for four hours one afternoon so I could read the entire Kinsey Report cover to cover. I had memorized every sexual statistic ever printed since the dawn of time. Oh, I understood about masturbation all right. I just didn’t get it. At all.
“How do you do that exactly?” I asked.
My sister looked up from sorting her jewelry, a touch of dread in her eyes. But she forged ahead.
“Well, you can like, use a washcloth.”
“A washcloth.”
“Yeah,” she said, “take it in the shower. That’s what I did. You feel around, and… you know… practice.”
Practice, I thought. Practice. I was good at practicing. I practiced everything.
“It takes longer for girls.”
“But what happens?”
Sis looked at me. “What happens is, you have an orgasm.” She explained. “And trust me, it’s worth it.”
Her voice echoed for miles, across the dimensions of sight and sound. Orgasm… Orgasm… Orgasm.
I found out straightaway that standing in the shower with a limp rag did nothing for me but make me very clean. I lay in bed and put a hand on myself but all I could think about was rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I rolled onto my side, wondering how long the Greenpeace poster on my wall had been hanging crooked, and should I get up to fix it. Seriously, why hadn’t I ever fixed that?
Orgasm, my brain reminded me. Orgasm.
Back to the drawing board. I picked up my hand mirror and my latest replacement for low-grade romance: an anatomy book on female sexuality. I took them both into the bathroom and locked the door. I wasn’t here to play. I wasn’t here to shave or powder or make it pretty, or to spread the folds and cower in fear. I was going to diagram and identify my parts. I was going to document them, rope them into submission, and read to them from the Holy Book of Vagina.
I opened to the graphically enlarged, frontally positioned, leg-splayed diagram of the Female Genitalia, complete with stylish pubes. Using a tube of toothpaste to weigh down the pages, I squatted over the mirror and stared. First at me, then the diagram. Then me. Then the diagram.
Vagina. Check.
But oh my God, it was so much like guts. Guts on the outside. Pink tissue of all strange varieties and shapes, some smooth, some chewed, like overlapping pink petals, or pink-gummed fangs, depending on how you looked at it. Multiple points of entry into the dark abyss of my internal organs. Breathe. Keep going.
Urethra. Check.
Clitoris. Holy crap. I had those two completely confused. Wait. Clit-o-ris? Oh. Clit. Oh! Clit! All hidden under that tubey skin thing. I’d always wondered. Nerve bundles, stimulation. Behold, the “special place.” Behold, the orgasm button! Dammit, why didn’t they bother to mention that in health? That would’ve been kinda freaking helpful.
I stared for a while at the list of icky names, vulva and labia and mons pubis, as if scientists had gone out of their way to make women’s parts sound like organ meat cold cuts. Why not something more inviting, like a LeTigre or a Bunny?
I pulled back the sheath and poked gently at my clit-o-ris. Ouch. No way. That? That was the pleasure center? Couldn’t be. It was like jabbing the point of an ice cube into a sensitive tooth. What a joke. How would that ever feel good? You needed a guy to, like, jump-start everything. And who knew when one of those was coming along and whether or not he read anatomy books. Mystery unsolved.
Crap.
So I went back to doing what I did best: praying and baking. Cookies, of course.
One Friday night, while my fourth batch browned, I sat on the couch with one oven mitt still on, searching for something on TV to watch. I flipped past commercials and sitcoms and local news, and finally came to rest on the most interesting thing I could find: a pair of brown boobs in a white bikini bouncing to a mechanized steel drumbeat. It was only a Miami Vice rerun, but for a Tubbs-’n’-Crockett virgin like me, it was like being touched for the first time. God bless syndication.
Miami Vice, I soon discovered, was a nonstop music video in a minor key, with only occasional breaks for dialogue where someone inevitably said, “It’s going down tonight!” Only unlike MTV, it was all men: men, men, and more men, all of them troubled, tan, and windblown. And apparently going down! But none of them were more troubled or tan than Mr. Pissed-off in Pink, Sonny Crockett. Within three seconds, I was obsessed with him. I needed a poster or an injection or a bite guard or something. How could I not be in agony? He put on such a tough act, and yet according to the music, he was secretly sad and lonesome, torn by his failures! But he was so sweet sometimes, and playful too. So unbelievably, searingly, ridiculously yummy. He filled my panties with longing.
Plus, when he wasn’t loading his gun, he was strapping it onto his bare skin, cocking it, pulling it back, and snapping it into play, sliding it down his pants so the barrel rested just above his ass. Then he rolled shirtless out of some girl’s bed. I stared at the actress as she pulled the sheet up over her tits and grinned at him. Oh, my goodness, he was so much prettier than her. And yet—he still slept with her and her terrible overpermed bangs! There was hope! Holy crapballs, that could be me!
He kissed her and fastened on his shoulder holster and his leg holster—igniting a myriad of subconscious bondage fantasies—then slipped on his white linen jacket and off he went to kick ass and take names in Italian slippers, his stomach hard and his balls empty.
The commercials came on and I snapped to. There was smoke coming out of the oven, my cookies were black, and my eyes were the exact same shape as Don Johnson’s supple ass. I had but one directive: to see him seminaked as many times in a row as was humanly possible. The only way to do this, in 1993, was to transform our clunky VCR into a love-scene-splicing machine. A video collage that I would fondly name “All Things Crockett.”
It wasn’t easy to edit back then. I had to rewind and forward endlessly, rewind and forward, then rewind, then forward just a touch, then rewind again, then get pissed off and forward two touches, then pause right where I left off, and then wait by the TV until any hint of a love scene was about to start, then press Record, then stop when they switched to the drug bust, or a commercial, then record again when they went back to the bedroom. It was highly exhausting and had to be completed while Mom was walking back and forth between her office and the kitchen, without giving her any indication that I had traded homemade soft-batch cookies for homemade soft-core porn.
Finally, once I’d gotten a week’s worth of Crocke
tt on tape, I would lie on the couch on Friday night, watching Dullfest, ABC’s movie of the week, waiting until Mom and Dad were safely upstairs in bed. When all walking noises in the house ceased, I got up and pushed in my VHS tape, snuggled under the blanket, and glued my thumb to the buttons on the remote as if they were written in Braille.
First static, then the bass boomed and the surf rolled. Phil Collins crooned. Crockett sat silhouetted in the sunset, his long, massive Stinger boat idling.
I immediately imagined him naked and my eyes rolled back into my head. Oh, what his body could do to a woman. I had no idea really, but he knew. I wanted him to show me. But no, he didn’t have time for that right now! He wasn’t some womanizer; he had to reload his gun, rev his ’72 Ferrari Daytona Spyder into third gear, and rocket through the dust along a lonesome highway. Behind him, the warehouse exploded and his glistening tan grew deeper, the whites of his fingernails gleaming, secretly made for untying the bikini strings over a woman’s naked butt cheeks. And also pulling the trigger to protect them. The synthesizer began to brood over the chrome rims of his spinning wheels.
Then my tape warbled a bit, crinkling inside the VCR, then straightened out and swan-dived right into some made-for-TV sex. His strappy gun holster dropped on the dock—thud—and the white jacket too—whoosh—revealing a sleeveless baby blue T. Something only a true man would wear. He wasn’t incredibly built or anything. He was just incredibly male. There was one vein running along a biceps. The camera zeroed in on his light eyes.
Holy Crockett, I whispered. There should be a law.
Unable to take any more, I slid my hand into my pajamas over the correct locale. It was only an experiment. What would happen if you combined visual pleasure with knowledge of physiology? Hypothesis one: shame and humiliation. Hypothesis two: an answered prayer.
The electric guitar whined and Sonny pressed down on top of some chick. They shot the scene in brief, FCC-approved stages of undress, all of it masked in frustrating shadows and choreography, panning away before they showed his hands going any lower. I played it back six, seven, ten times so as not to miss his fingertips, his eyes, his teeth. I wondered about the cameraman filming them. I wondered what it felt like to be that woman. They must’ve been so embarrassed—and so turned on. So lucky! As consolation, I applied the desired pressure between my legs, gave a few test repetitions. With my free hand I hit Play, Rewind, Play, Rewind. I lay back and watched Sonny’s head moving down, presumably to suck her nipples offscreen. Pause. This is what his face looks like, I told myself, right before he devours a pair of tits. Then in the next shot he kissed her belly lower and lower and lower. Just before he dipped offscreen, I hit Pause. This is what his face looks like, I shifted out of my pajama pants, right before he devours a woman’s clit-o-ris.
I stopped to catch my breath, amazed. This little button on my body, a secret escape hatch to any sex life I wanted.
The next scene was dialogue and plot, the drug cartel this and Cortez that, blah blah blah, so I turned on my side away from the screen and continued to play the love scene in my mind, everything the censors would not allow: his hands kneading her sexy thighs, peering between her legs before he kissed her and licked her naked body. My hand moved faster. He was naked now, his straps and guns and armor gone, weakened and tender as his hard hot body jammed all the way inside her.
Houston, we are breaking up. We are breaking up, do you copy?
After all, he didn’t want to hurt her, but he had to get his fill, ramming her hard right there, right there, over and over.
A wave much bigger than my body was rising up, I could feel it coming. Just had to keep moving my hand or I would drop this delicate thread, this kite string lifting me upward, the gentle but insistent pull of a single helium balloon. The pleasure and agony swelled, twisting between my fingers tighter and sweeter until, suddenly, I caught a flash of how he looked letting go of his cool, how good he was at fucking, how everyone secretly longed to watch him doing it to her but they couldn’t. Only she could watch. Only me.
Then I came. I exploded into ecstasy, fluttered weightless, sighing, the prize of his sex delivered on a silver platter, smoothed out and throbbing in my lap. There was nothing I could do but lie there trying to hold it a few seconds longer, the tide gently receding, leaving me pulsing and hot between my legs. I breathed it out and flopped my hand over my eyes, still clutching the remote, tears rolling softly back into my hair.
The next day I ejected my Miami Vice tape from the player and wrote DO NOT ERASE on the label, staring through the plastic window at the reel of magic. Then again on the cover: DO. NOT. ERASE. I pushed it back on the shelf between all the other wholesome family home movies—my brother’s graduation, my sister’s National Honor Society banquet—but it still glimmered like a golden calf. Like the south Florida sun on Jan Hammer’s synthesizer.
Again tonight? Sonny asked, his two-day stubble promising even rougher treatment.
Yes, I answered. Sex. Again. Tonight.
Oh, it was going to be a long, hot summer. A long, hot summer at last.
13 | Soul Mates Can Be Annoying
“… and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
—GENESIS 3:16
I spent my first day of college vomiting in the sink with the shades drawn.
The week after that, I moved into the boys’ dorm to pledge my life and virginity to Justin, an eighteen-year-old spiritual baba. And by baba I mean my adult pacifier. Back in high school, my version of a hot Saturday night was sweating beside the oven in house slippers. But now I had finally arrived, swilling Malibu rum straight from the bottle by ten, walking to the frat house in a pod of females I’d just met, united in skank.
I’d never had liquor before. My brush with the dark side consisted of half a bottle of Bartles & Jaymes, and that was over a year ago. So I didn’t understand why all my new BFFs sipped their Styrofoam cups so cautiously.
“Um, don’t you think you ought to take it easy?” someone asked me.
“I don’t feel anything.” I shrugged, taking another gulp. “Stuff is weak.”
I did feel something, however. The determination to entertain!
We walked along the wire fence that cordoned off the quad, and I tried to perch on it like a pigeon. I lost my balance and landed with my legs tangled above my head, coconut rum splashed across my suddenly exposed tit, you know, hilarious. It never occurred to me that I was the protagonist at the beginning of a cautionary tale. The other girls asked me if I was okay, oh-my-God-ing about how wasted I was.
“I am not,” I said, thinking, Yay, they like me! This is me! Going to a par-tay!
“Hi!” I screamed at a passing car. “Hey, baby!”
It was an amazing sensation, bonding with females via group drunkenness. We were the sun in a heliocentric universe that emerged only at night. Bars and boys orbited our every whim. Gulping down more of the Brave New Me, I presented myself on the steps of the brotherhood. I was highly disoriented and with self-esteem roughly the size of my halter top.
“You!” I yelled. “Haul me up to the gang-rape loft for inspection.”
The band was so loud no one could hear my clever puns. I stumbled upward into the wafting perfume of beer and urine, took a hit off a freshly lit cigarette and inhaled deep. The wooden Greek letters nailed over the Confederate flag tilted and hummed. A wave of light-headedness had me spinning so fast I could not feel my face. I slapped myself on the cheek—hard. Still not there. Again. I could, however, feel the bile rising in my throat. Oh, no. The spinning. The accursed and unrelenting spinning.
“Be right there,” I told no one. The girls had gone on ahead, oblivious of their shrinking ranks. “Just a second. I’m going to… check out the fence, m-kay?”
Alarmed, I crouched in the shadows by some bushes and heaved up everything that was not connected to my spine. To the moon above me I offered sincere apologies. Please help me (bleh) oh hell (bleh) oh God help (bleh). Sever
al guys stumbling across me on their way to pee stopped to make chitchat. I tilted up my head, wiping the chunky dribbles of vomit off my chin.
“Yeah,” I moaned to one guy, “Kappa Alpha rocks.”
As the hours wore on, my puking did not abate. Like a farm animal, I merely moved a few paces to the left to find fresh grass to lie in. Some magnanimous junior ordered her boyfriend to carry me to his car and drive me to my dorm. To me, he was an angel in human form, stepping in to save what was left of God’s lost sheep and her one remaining nine-inch platform shoe.
I apologized to this stranger, my grass-stained forehead leaving a blot on his cold car window. He carried me up four flights of stairs and left. I kept asking him his name.
“I wanna send you a fricking Hallmark,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t swear, I swear. I’m a Christian.”
When I appeared in the doorway draped over the shoulder of a strange man, my new roommate sat up in bed. I could see her beady eyes peeking over her comforter as I passed out next to my bucket.
“I’m going to tell the RA,” she huffed, slipping into her bathrobe.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right here.”
At the seventy-two-hours-away-from-home mark, still queasy from the mere sound of the word coconut, I met Justin, my mate for life whom I hoped to spend my life mating with. He was a dark Jewish kid with full lips and a jarhead haircut. His massive beige Timberlands were purposefully unlaced and immaculately clean.
“Check out the army guy,” I whispered to the girl next to me at orientation.
“He’s on the floor below me,” she told me. “But he’s not in the army. He’s from Palm Beach.”
Justin was actually a militant pacifist who spent every possible second working out or reading Taoist philosophy, sometimes at the same time. To him, carefully sculpted calves were the outward manifestation of a deep and thoughtful personality. We exchanged looks. He looked like a cocky muscle head, until he smiled. Then it was plain as day: he was self-conscious. Our mutual virgin radar locked in.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 17