Crazy Enough (8 page)

Back at Sadville, John and I sat in the car, hot as a fevered ear from baking in the parking lot. I broke down, hot tears spitting through my stinging eyes. “Something's got to give, and it was almost
her
. She did it again; I can't believe she did it again.”

John must've thought I meant the attempt itself. I didn't. I meant that I had just started to get my footing that summer, where I could
laugh and be okay with the way things were. Giving the world the finger from a nice, sarcastic place to hide. Mom got her sad, little girl fingers into my guts, to fuck me up again. “I fucking wish she'd done it, man,
fuck
her.” She got me to care. Again.

Gotcha.

S
ince I knew I was going to lose my mind, I figured the best thing to do was lose my virginity. Fast. I wasn't super attached to it anyway.

In the provincial enclave of Southborough, Massachusetts, there was a lot of chatter one year about
the white van
. Ask anyone who was around St. Mark's School in the seventies and say, “Remember
the white van
?” Chances are someone will, and say, ‘“Oh yes, the rapist.” By all accounts, nobody was ever raped by anyone in any white van, but it was a hot topic for awhile, and Mom loved it. Rape was a big thing with my mom. It's how she told me about sex.

“I'm going to catch snakes.”

“Oh, no, you're not. You'll get raped.”

“God, Mom. There is no guy in a white van at the pond.”

“The answer is no.”

“
Mom!
”

“He will hold you down and stick his penis right in your vagina,” Mom said, as if there would be a dramatic swell of music and we would go to an Ovaltine commercial. I was eight, and I knew it was horseshit.

“And what if I like it?” I said in a snotty voice to Bowser in bed that night, pretending I was smarting off to my mom. Bowser was my huge teddy bear I practiced making out with.

Fast forward to twelve years old. My childish ideas of sex were not at all on par with my advanced ability to please myself. I was a genius masturbatrix. But though I knew what everything was and where everything went, I had no tangible idea of how it was all supposed to happen.

Thank god for porn.

Watching grownups have sex with no subtlety or innuendo, just straight up doing it, was a huge leap in my awareness. The film was
Candy Goes to Hollywood
. Not a terribly clever story, or superattractive people, but in the twenty odd minutes I sat glued to it, I learned everything I needed to know about sex before I actually did it. The only bummer was, I was getting this deep education while wedged, shoulder to shoulder, between my mom and my aunt Bitsy.

My father's family lived in rural Pennsylvania, about five hours from Southborough. We spent some summers and many Christmases there. My grandparents and aunt and uncle lived in these huge old farmhouses, filled with generations of antique furniture, silver, and gleaming lemon-oiled wood floors. There were wide fields and golf courses, tennis clubs where we could have watercress tea sandwiches with the crusts neatly trimmed. It was a blue-blooded WASP-y land, but my dad's family were farmers and railroad workers and some of the best people I had ever known. My aunt Bitsy, Dad's sister, was a tall, gorgeous blonde with a filthy sense of humor and a heart too big
for this world. She had the porn tape hidden in the study, behind the red- leather encyclopedias.

The details of how I ended up watching the porn with my mother and my dad's sister I cannot recall. However, I remember absolutely everything about Candy and all the misadventures she and her giant droopy boobs got into.

She was a big dumb blonde from nowhere, stepping off a bus on Hollywood and Vine. Her fake Marilyn Monroe-isms were not lost on me. “Hollywood! I can't believe it! Here I am in Hollywood!” heaving her chest with every H. In no time, a talent scout sees her and gets her on the casting couch. He hypnotizes her to get her over her stage fright. “By the way, what's your favorite flavor ice cream?”

“Va-NILLA!” Heave-heave-heave.

Later, as the talent scout crams his joint into her mouth, telling her it's a vanilla ice cream cone, my mom whispers into my ear, “
That's
not making love.”

I nodded slightly, making a mental note that, yes, yes, it was. I was all tingly and hot and couldn't wait to scoot my butt under a bathtub faucet.

I kept my tingles and prickles well to myself throughout the stretch of film we watched. My aunt finally clicked it off and put the VHS tape back behind the encyclopedias on the bookshelf. Both women feigned disgust and I quietly agreed, mumbling something like, “Yeah, she was so stupid.” I couldn't wait to try it all out on somebody.

Valuable lesson number one: I learned that when the guy is done,
everybody's
done. Lesson number two: When he's shot his stuff in or all over you and is kneeling or standing over you panting, you need to stare at him or just his dick, with a mixture of fear and total amazement. Lesson three: No matter what is happening to you sexually, you must respond in all excited affirmatives,
Yes!
and
Yeah!
or
Oh, yeah!!!
were all you needed to say to stoke the action further, and keep things positive.

My only concern was the whole penetration thing. Besides my fingers, nothing had actually been
in
me, and that was worrisome.

What if it hurt? What if I said
ouch
or, worse, cried? I had heard that you bleed when you lose your virginity and that was way too embarrassing to even remain in the realm of possibility.

I'd have to break myself in.

I found a plastic, tapered cylinder in an old junk drawer in our guest room in Southborough. It was cream-colored and hollow with a screw-off bottom. When I opened it, I saw a place for two C batteries. “Personal Massager” was embossed around the bottom along with “Johnson and Johnson.”

I never put batteries in it, but I washed it really well and took it to bed with me every night for a long time. Every day I would wash, dry, and return it to the junk drawer. Just in case. After a few weeks, I was confident that I was ready for my first time.

Sex was already important to me. It was my thing. And I believed once I got past the physical initiation, once I was
cocked and loaded,
as I liked to call it, the old me would dissolve, leaving a pink and fresh new me. A me that might not go crazy, but wherever I went, I would definitely not go alone.

He was twenty, I think. I met him in a cloud of college kids outside of a concert. He got a six-pack and we walked into the huge park called the Boston Common. He seemed cute enough, not too big, dark, spiked hair, his collar pointed upwards on his jacket. I noticed he had acne under his jaw and down his neck a bit, but he had beer, and that
made him perfect. I told him my name was Nina and I was nineteen years old and would he like to go hijack a swan boat?

Nineteen was my go-to lying age
until
I was nineteen, then I told everyone I was twenty-two. This night, however, I was a few months into thirteen.

We couldn't find the swan boats in the dark, so we ended up in a nice dewy patch of grass near some Hare Krishna twirl-off. They chanted and sang and hopped around in their saffron sheets about twenty yards from us. I could smell the incense as we sipped beer and talked about music we liked. I told him how it was so cool to meet him, but, “Gosh, it is such a shame I have to leave day after tomorrow, back to London.”

Because of course, during this entire exchange, I was faking an English accent.

Besides my lie “I'm nineteen,” the accent was something else I did constantly when I was on my own in the city, or when Daphne and I met new people. We watched a lot of Monty Python; I can still recite huge chunks of
Holy Grail
and
Life of Brian
. John Cleese was my dialect coach for snowing guys and sounding as cool as possible.

And though I only suspected it at the time, there is nothing quite so hot as a girl who's going to be leaving soon, and going far, far away.

We made out. We lay down and he got on top of me. My heart sank when his hands went up my shirt. I was wearing a padded bra with basically bee-sting boobs underneath. At this point, though my body was long (I was as tall as he was), in his fumbling hands I probably felt like a squashy ribbed ironing board . . . an ironing board with a hole in it. He looked for that next.

“Yes,” I tried to say, but the weight of him on top of me was a thing I hadn't yet encountered. I had made out before, but only sitting up, or leaning against something. In this position, everything I would try to say sounded strained. So I was quiet.

My tightest and sluttiest corduroys were probably not the best choice for this adventure, but they got pulled down past my bum eventually, and far enough to get my legs open, just enough.

I steeled myself.

Hare Kriiishnaaa! Hare Kriiishnaaa!
Thrumming in the background.

My bare butt in the cool wet grass.

Hare raammaaaHare raaammaaaarammaraaammaaa. . . .

Desperate breathing in my ear, and Storm, the virgin, was gone.

It didn't hurt.

I did get to say
yes,
and
oh yeah
a couple of times (in my fake accent) when he would do a push-up over me and I could breathe. I bit his chin at one point, he seemed to like that, so I decided later it would become my signature move.

The moments leading up to his finish line, I felt this weird burst of feverish heat push out of him and onto me. He made a sharp, surprised sound, shook, then collapsed. His breathing became long and happy-sounding, like he'd just run to catch up with someone he loved and truly missed. It felt amazing to me to be buried under a big hot body that felt so grateful.

It took me awhile, after getting cocked and loaded, to figure out how to get more of that transient, love-you-for-a-split-second action. I was determined to become
good
in bed. I hadn't the foggiest idea what that even meant, but knew the power was in that. And like anything else, I knew with practice, I could become a pro, a passionista, and, in
time, a dick whisperer. I would be in demand, like the cool kid who gets chosen first for dodgeball.

On television, girls always got mad at boys for kissing and telling. Me, I wanted a full-on word-of-mouth campaign. I wanted guys to call each other and marvel at my skills. “Dude. Isn't she fucking amazing? Did she bite your chin?”

I lived for that moment when the guy was about to get off. Simultaneously melting and exploding, he became simple. The world would disappear, but I wouldn't. And whoever he was, for a brief bit of time, he was so glad I was there.

Those sweet, pounding seconds, to me, were like little drops of love. The only love I understood. I know it wasn't really love per se, it was more carnal gratitude than anything, but it was all I had, so it was enough.