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)