Thursday, August 13, 2009

Janitorial Urges and Summer Flings

The person I kinda wanted to give my virginity up to was a janitor at Yale. Janitor was fine. Dark chocolate with luscious, plum-colored lips.

Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.

I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.

I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.

I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.

The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).

I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.

But that's not all that happened.

I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.

But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.

I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.

A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.

He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."

He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?

So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."

Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.

And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.

(Virginity Diaries Part 2 of 11: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Lessons Learned 1 2 3)

Monday, August 10, 2009

Still a Virgin, But En Route to Slut

On spring break of my freshman year, I had a mild sexual experimentation on a tour bus. I say mild because now, from a grown woman's vantage point, it seems mild and normal. But at the time, it was bewildering. Not normal. Evidence that something was clearly wrong with me.

I had no sexual filter, no sexual context, no sexual education, no sexual role models.

All I had was a deep desire for my first real boyfriend. To my 18-year-old mind, it was a long overdue rite of passage. I was supposed to have a boyfriend. Something was clearly wrong with me that I'd never had one.

I'd been devastated when Valentine's Day had come and gone with no sweetheart to sweeten it up.

I'd confided my feelings to one of my new, few college friends: an equally rare low-income black girl with the smarts to get into Yale – and the unmitigated gall to accept the acceptance letter. She was quirky, quiet, slow-moving ... and deep. Deeply intelligent, but without the type-A competitive fire that animated me and most of our classmates.

Deep had chuckled at my angst. "Maybe you need to stop being in love with love."

Huh?

Of course I was in love with love.

I had a perfect Catholic idea that I would find The Boyfriend who would quickly become The Husband, and together we'd spit out 2-7 kids. On our 50th wedding anniversary, we'd toddle down the main aisle during mass to celebrate our living embodiment of the Sacrament of Marriage.

This dream was absolutely, positively inconsistent with the reality that transpired.

In a desperate, lonely attempt to make friends and fit in, I'd joined the Yale Gospel Choir on its spring-break bus tour. A few days in, I ended up sharing a seat with Med School.

Med School was 8-10 years older than me. A nice guy. From Michigan. Average attractiveness. A future anesthesiologist who'd chosen anesthesiology as his specialty because it paid well enough to offset the gazillions of dollars he now owed in student loans.

My looking-for-my-first-boyfriend mind calculated, "He's nice, he'd probably treat you right, and wow – he's even a doctor."

To my surprise, and probably his, I grabbed his hand underneath the blanket that covered us.

Holding hands gradually led to him stroking my fingers and my wrists. Then stroking my breasts over my sweatshirt, then gradually and tentatively, stroking me under my sweatshirt and over my bra, then inside my bra. Not to mention stroking the Down South place over my jeans.

A soon-to-become-familiar sexual tug-of-war played in my head.
I deserve to be touched. I shouldn't feel guilty. I'm not doing anything wrong.

Followed by:

What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why do you seem to have a thing for older men whom you don't find physically attractive?

That night, Daddy visited me in a nightmare yelling, "Sin, sin, sin!"

What bothered me was that I didn't know Med School very well and I didn't feel a strong attachment to him, yet I had willingly engaged in a purely physical encounter.

It was time #3. My first sexual experimentation had been with 40-something Johnnie Walker when I was 16. Shortly thereafter, I'd shared my newfound familiarity with oral sex with one of my childhood friends, after dark in a local park. After those two experiences, I'd sworn that the next man who touched my body would be someone I was either madly in love or in lust with.

Med School didn't fall into either category, so I felt a guilty sensation of eww and ick that caused me to self-consciously avoid him for the rest of the tour and the rest of the semester.

(Virginity Diaries Part 1 of 11: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Lessons Learned 1 2 3)