Part 1:

I wish to God these marks were callouses or only on my hands.

This proof is about a series of scars but I feel like they are connected, and if they aren’t, well, more power to me. I overdo it for points. (I want some level four superpowers micky-ficky.)

They first started appearing around some quirky events. Well that’s not true, I was born, as far as I can tell with the scar across my belly-ish area. Jake, this artist friend of mine, is always like, “It’s not your belly, it’s your side!” But it’s my scar. Fuck him. Close enough. Honestly, it’s a kind of cool one, it never breaks open (like the others) and looks a little like I got poked by a hot rod or a sword in an old knight duel/battle! Like maybe in a past life I was Ivanhoe and I felled some dudes for some bitches.

But the rest of them suck it long and suck it hard. So when I was say fifteen or so I decided to be a very good boy because I was really into the idea of Santa (don’t laugh, Santa has been good to me) and there were tons of toys that I had to get. Plus I needed a new bike to meet up with Sally Hultburg on the weekends. She was into Jerry Holkins at the time and I was sure it wasn’t because of his cock ring size. He had a sixteen speed. (I lived in that kind of world when I was fifteen. Into girls but not into cock ring size.)



I was a crazy good kid. I’d help these old ladies across the street. It was like my whole town was filled with whores, like just total dirty sluts everywhere, and they’d love to bitch and moan to me about how they were busy with this and that and so I’d go to the food pantry for them and bring them water and general grocery shopping when they needed. (They’d give me their Link card.)

And then I’d get into these situations that were really awkward where people would come up sand start offering me things, peer pressure style, only usually it would be creepy looking adults.

Like, this one time! Man, I can’t believe I almost forgot this. I was up on the roof of our high school, just meditating and looking out into the cold blue sky when this creepster janitor comes out and rests his hand all on my shoulder and says something like, “All this could be yours. I’d give it to you.”

No way, Creep-O. Anyway, sometime after that—and with me still being really good: like doing the dishes and making dinner and breakfast for my bratty little brother—it was like what the fuck, right? Oh I haven’t explained it yet. I start getting these crazy weeping wounds in my hands. And there are always marks there, but they don’t always puss and bleed. But boy, when they do! It will ruin a good make out session. Girls hate that shit.

I had one friend ask to paint it.



Sure, why not, my pain better be good for something, right?

Okay, so fast forward a little bit and the same cock & bull story starts going down with my feet. I’m talking triple socks isn’t good enough to sop this mess up. (No, I don’t have a foot fetish. No I won’t upload videos to your pedal pushers porn site. Sicko!) And I tell Jake, my artist buddy, enough is enough, if you can’t even come close to my skin tones. You’re not my artist anymore.



Anyway. That’s my “I wish they were callouses on the hands” story.

I almost told the story about this crazy scar on my forehead and how these wiz teenage gangster wannabees with sticks are always challenging me to “duals” but something about today felt like the above was more appropriate.

Too Long; Didn't Read

People are scared of aids.

Comment with your hearts, vote with your points, and remember—if the giving doesn’t hurt a little, it doesn’t count.

Or if you prefer: Part 2

---

---

---

I’m standing next to this girl during my freshman year orientation; I’m standing next to her because she’s got hair the color of Vermont autumn leaves—two days after the fall. I’m standing next to this good Charlotte, whose name I don’t know at the time because she’s about to say, “Ha, fucking virgin,” in a way that is both colluding and hurtful. I believe the world conspires against me in this way.

There is this episode of Friends where it comes out that Chandler—this arguably sexy, definitely charismatic man—hasn’t had sex for over a year and everyone acts like it’s an indescribable Cuthulian horror beyond imagine. No sex, for a year? No way. (Before the scar experience, which is tangential but true, every day of my life was like this.)

There is always some girl rolling her eyes, using the word virgin like it’s a pejorative and me trying to pretend that I’m not this horrible unspeakable monster by blushing too much. Blushing too much rarely works well for me here.

Unless this well worn conversation equals working well.

“You haven’t had sex?” Cued laughter as if from a soundtrack

“”

“Why not? You’re a handsome guy.”

“I’m guessing you’re not single.”

And then she has some variation of, “I’m not going to take your virginity, Loser,” always with the capitol L.

I looked at her, Charlotte, and I winced. “How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. I’m just using it like Fag.”

“Right.” I frowned and looked at the speaker. It was a guy with this big white flat toothed grin.

“Wait, you’re a virgin?” she asked me.

“I mean, yeah.” I was eighteen at this point. It wasn’t even that absurd then. Why did people act like this? Did they know I wasn’t going to have sex till I was past twenty-five? Could they smell it on me?

She gave out a sort of high pitched half ha before she apologized. “Sucks to be you.”

And it’s like, I would wake up and think, “It’s great to be me.” Until someone reminded me that I was a virgin. And when you’ve got a complex about this sort of thing, whether it’s because you look at too much porn, or girls are constantly talking smack, or whatever, you notice it more. There is a confirmation bias going on. You see it everywhere. Virgins. Like they are a disease you keep catching.

For like ten minutes, when I was a sophomore, I thought, “You know what, this is just a life choice I’m making.” But then I started hanging out with those sorts of ‘life choice’ people. And beyond the sneaking inclination that most of them were having pretty intense sex lives, you know, despite their pledges, prayers, unflattering petticoats, and protestations or the fact that they set up these strangely copped-from-the-movies-AA-style meetings to psychologically whip themselves into guilt frenzies: it was just clear they were not me. I didn’t feel bad about being a virgin except when others reminded me that I should. But that was often. Like every fucking day.

I remember there was this one girl at the abstinence club who would always make these impassioned pleas about how AWESOME sex was then add, “But only for married people.” It was like a sitcom. But me too I was an integral part of the sitcom façade. I couldn’t get laid. No matter how hard I tried. And trying hard to get laid is an absurd thing to do. It makes everything you do look stupid and feel awkward. You’ve got all this built up tension and there is this perceived mysticsm to the whole thing that men’s and women’s magazines reveal in arcane bulleted lists monthly. TEN THINGS SHE WANTS YOU TO SAY. I wasn’t saying them right. TEN THINGS HE WANTS YOU TO DO. Why wasn’t kissing me on the list? Let’s start there, huh?

That’s what I was thinking, and meanwhile—everyone was doing done and loving it, even the abstinence club girl, loved sex. God, the way that girl would bite her lip and talk about how orgasms are a gift from Heaven.

Not everyone was doing it. I wasn’t doing it, for example.

I started being able to spidey-sense the virgins from the sexers. See the things in them that I saw in myself, the things I didn’t like, the things that outed me and them as one in the same. I didn’t want to be associated with the virgins. In part because I knew I was.

There are moves, ways of walking, ways of talking, a certain confidence in action, that those who have “done it” perform on a regular basis that those of us who haven’t done it, can’t pull off. We reveal ourselves with our blushes, our stammers, our, “ha-ha, Right!” Which is meant to sound like, I know what you’re talking about, but people who know what you’re talking about never say, “Ha-ha, Right!” Not like a virgin at any rate.

And it’s about six years later that I meet Dana, the girl who is about to take my virginity. And it’s like—how do girls ever get like this, how can a girl like this even exist, this can’t be real—why me?

I’m at a bar with six friends, all guys, all bros. All my bro friends sitting in a circle dropping Jagger bombs down their throats. I am such a virgin I can’t even spell Jagger bomb correctly, right? And there are hot girls everywhere, it’s one of those places where girls are getting drunk and rubbing up against guys they have no intention of bringing home—only Dana seems to have intentions of brining me home because she whispers in my ear, “Do you like the way my breasts feel against your back?”

And I do, sure, but I’m also a little skeeved out, because I haven’t even seen this girl yet. She’s just ontop of me. Her slender arms slinking over my shoulders, hands like serpent maws, one filled with Corona and lime, the other free to suck at my teet. This girl is tweeking my nipple. Who does that? I don’t know, but it’s hot.

When you are nearing 30 and still a virgin. You’ve been through a number of prolonged pathetic stages. One of which is the best friend who really doesn’t want to be the best friend. That stage sucks, it’s not becoming for any of the parties involved, but it’s all your fault. When you are in love with a girl named Charlotte or one of a million Jennies who isn’t in love with you, you do it to yourself, you do. And part of what you do to yourself is have psychotic and inappropriate dreams of how good it would be to have this unrequited significant other fondle you drunkenly.

Skeezed out or not by a stranger pushing my limits, I think to myself, say what you’d never say to Charlotte. And I croak out a little, “Yes.” Croak.

This Dana girl laughs and kisses me on the cheek. “You are as adorable as I knew you’d be.” I’ve still yet to see her.

And so I turn us to facing each other and we start to dance. I take her in all while saying, “Just wait till you take me home. We’ll both be adorable, like puppies.” That can’t be a good line but it’s what I said and whether this is beer, or what, it seemingly worked.

Now, because, after countless tellings of this story, I know it’s important to give some description of Dana. Let me start off by saying, I am not on the Brad Pitt—Morgan Freeman scale of hot. But I’m not fat and I sort of feel like, that’s all a guy needs to be handsome. A nice pair of jeans, a shirt that fits, and don’t be fat. But maybe I don’t get what a guy needs to be hot to a girl. It's not money. I know a ton of poor guys who are in great relationships with super cool chicks.

Anyway, Dana is attractive. She isn’t a supermodel but I do not have to confirm with my six bros that this girl is hittable. They will be disappointed if I don’t attempt. I feel the peer pressure, palpable, it tastes kind of like grape in my mouth. It's like I’m twelve, on the high dive for the first time and everyone is in line waiting for me to jump, not saying “Jump” but you know you’ve got ten seconds before they start saying, “Jump.” I know this because these are the sorts of friends that will cock block you if they think a girl is too ugly. And then on the way home say things like,

“We’ve got to preserve the sanctity of the pack, bro.” There was no blocking of my cock on this sorti. Just dancing.

It was unbelievable. A fucking vixen. This girl took me home. She seduced me and took me home.

Well, basically, I mean, she was a little drunk, and saying things like, “How am I going to get home, my car is here,” when Jacob Hess, the king of my bro males, slips me condoms and pats my ass—all while saying this guy was going to be our DD, he’ll be good to take you home. We will cab it.

And the next thing is we are there and I’m pretending to know what I’m doing when she isn’t in total control, which she pretty much always is. And she’s all saying harder harder and it’s nonsense, because up until this part it’s been impossible to have this happen and at this point it seems like I couldn’t have this not happen. Girls loved me. Not just this girl, all girls. That’s how it felt, in that moment. Like I was really the shit. I mean, all those feelings of insignificance and demasculination out the fucking window. Like it never happened. It was weird. It’s weird to look back on.

Then Bam. She is bent over the bed, she’s got this wooden foot board and my knee cracks into it.

I am bleeding and on her floor.

She’s laughing and no girl will ever want to have sex with me ever for this is the inevitable way of the sitcom. She lays me out onto the bed,

“Oh sweety. ”

“Sorry.”

“Shhhhh,” she tells me as she climbs up ontop. Shhh, like she’ll fix me up later, like she’s on her way to accomplish a very important mission. I’m about to ask her where she came from when she slows her rocking down and answers the phone. She’s saying shhhh, because she doesn’t want her husband to know she’s boning me. “Oh, it’s soooo good to hear from you, Honey.” She never says his name.

Know why it’s so good to hear from this guy? BECAUSE HE’S IN FUCKING IRAQ! So who knows, he could have been dead, rather than, say, I don't know, calling his wife. That was a distinct possibility for this guy. Not calling, due to a bad case of the death. And I am helping his wife cheat. Because I’m a putz who after 26 years of virginity thinks of zero questions, when propositioned by a girl whose way out of his league.

She drops, I love you on this guy, and my dick is inside her. She asks him about the mess hall food, and he explains it’s not like that, I think? And they talk about sand being shitty for a good fifteen minutes. I know because it was at the first mention of sand that I look at that big red digital clock. As far as I can tell, he’s assuring her, they are never going to the beach ever again.

Maybe this is too much information but I am limp. I am trapped inside this girl, but I am limp, and I have this bloody knee and she is talking to her fucking husband in Iraq for a good 30 minutes. And when she hits click, I lift her up and set her down to my right, groan out of bed and put on my Khakis.

“Where are you going?” Her voice isn’t as hot as it used to be, suddenly.

“?Home?”

“You don’t have a car.”

I’m not arguing about this. I waited 26 years to have sex. I didn’t even kiss Jenny Kay because I’d never want to ruin our friendship. And now my first time is this girl? No sex on first dates, people. There are a lot of reasons for this. But we are coming to the best part here.

So I’m leaving, right?

She questions me, “What the fuck?”

I’m ignoring and walking away, out the door, and she calls out, down the walkway, “Are you a faggot or something?”

I turn around, look at all those graceful lines contorted into the weirdest sort of hate and anger and tell her, “If not wanting to fuck you makes me gay—I guess we should tattoo a rainbow on my dick. Because I want to be a lifetime subscriber.”

Too Long; Didn't Read

I’ve obviously had time to reflect on this. I still have a lot of mixed feelings about it. But… it’s certainly one of those good for me in the long run experiences. It’s brought me a lot of peace and clarity on how sex should be viewed, in general, and more importantly, for me personally. Because I think sex is a super personal deal where generalizations are relatively worthless. If that isn’t using too many wiki weasel words.

But all that is to say, maybe I shouldn’t have been so bitter at the end. Maybe I should have said thanks but no thanks. I don’t know. Maybe there was stuff going on that-- had she been Jenny Kay-- I would have asked about and been the friend she needed, rather than the lay she didn’t.