THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN
When Jeromy turned twenty-three he realized he was still a virgin and had never seen a living naked lady unless you counted the pictures of them in Playboy and Penthouse he was able to sneak into his bedroom and hide under the mattress for later. On that birthday he began planning to end that detail like he was preparing for a vacation or a career, thinking out every possible way to end this embarrassing predicament.
The baseball team had gotten together on their own and hired a prostitute to service the team on a weekend before the season began at a hotel in town, but it didn’t seem like the way he wanted to lose his virginity, standing inline in the hall waiting his turn like a kid getting into the circus.
He promised himself by his next birthday he would correct those two failures that he considered major disappointments in a life not lived to the fullest. The only girl he’d kissed was Roxanne Rogers in the fifth grade on a field trip to the Santa Barbara Zoo. It was actually a case of her kissing him and him blushing so he was afraid to ride the bus back to school because everyone would know what he just did.
He also felt he must not be the only one, especially the guys who talked about it the most, like Randy, who claimed he lost his virginity at 13 to a “lady” of 23. He figured Randy was as crazy as the guy who claimed to be Jesus, but he figured there was more of a chance that guy was Jesus than there was of Randy fucking a lady of any age, let alone a mature woman of 23.
He began thinking of it as his crusade, his goal in life to get naked with a member of the opposite sex and to do things he had only read and fantasized about doing. When he met Brenda in English class he was smitten, and he set his sights immediately on the classy blond in the front row who had actually smiled at him the first day of class and asked him if he had a spare pen the second class. He would have given her the only one he had, but thankfully he had a spare which he handed over gleefully.
She sat in front and actually took notes, unless she was drawing squiggles on her note pad. She also asked smart questions and seemed to always know the answers because she probably had actually read the assignments.
It was in the third class meeting when she turned around and smiled at him, unless she was smiling at the football quarterback who sat against the back wall with his chair back on two legs and a smart ass grin on his face all through class.
He had thought of going back to hiring out the job to a professional, but he had very little money and he could probably only afford a hug or a kiss on the cheek. Randy said he’d had a whore give him a blowjob when he was fifteen, but he thought he’d seen that in a movie and integrated it into his own life.
He longingly drove by the massage parlor where he was told they sold more than rubdowns, and he tried a few times to build up the nerve to go in, just walk in bravely and ask for a head job, or a screw, but whenever he even headed in that direction his nerves fell apart and he turned the opposite way. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but desperation drove it up to first place.
Was he the only virgin 23 year old in the country? Maybe the other guys, like Randy, weren’t lying. Maybe they really had put it in a wet vagina like they bragged. He couldn’t believe it was only him, but he only had the word of guys like Randy who had pretty much done everything there was to do. You say you went to Yellowstone, he’s been there ten times, twice this week.
That was what mostly convinced Jeromy that they were also only getting sex by their own hand, and that most guys his age were as inept with the opposite sex as he was. When he tried to talk to Brenda his tongue got swollen and his mouth dried up so recognizable words just wouldn’t come out.
He knew his older brother had sex, because at 20 he was a dad. He never bragged to Jeromy, just one day he said Nancy was pregnant and then the next month they got married and Jeromy was the Best Man. James never bragged about a thing, Never said, “Guess what, Nancy is a great fuck, gives good head, or loves to screw.” He was way too classy for that, but he did have sex, at least once, and now he is a father.
Jeromy was thankful to have someone like James in his life. He was a much better role model than someone who boasted he’d had sex with an older woman when he couldn’t even drive a car. Someone who told stories about the many women he’d “been” with but seemed to not be so popular around actual female people.
Jeromy had been obsessed with sex since he first discovered his penis could actually get bigger, especially when it brushed against the sheets of his bed and seemed to get hard. Not big, but bigger. Also from the time he discovered the girls playing volleyball at school was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, especially Diana Hunt. It could not be a coincidence what her last name rhymed with. When she’d sit to put on her tennis shoes, she would expose more than a horny seventeen year old male could take.
When he turned twenty-three he made a pact with himself: find a way to make it happen, but preferably with a nonprofessional, someone who really, actually liked him. He could just walk into the massage parlor and get it done, say, “I am here to lose my virginity. Anyone interested in fucking?”
But no one would be, not without being paid, and he didn’t have much money. They’d only be interested in the money in his pocket. Somehow that made even sex seem not worth it. He didn’t want to have to pay someone to pretend they liked him to get them to have sex with him. He wanted it more than just about anything else in the world, but he wanted them to have it with him, not just because he paid them, but because it was him and they liked who he was.
It was the dilemma of his lifetime. Achieve something you think about daily, but do it and not in the least attractive way. Why did he care, he asked himself. He wished he didn’t. The guys on the baseball team who pitched in and bought a whore no longer had to wonder, but they’d had a “sex in a bottle” kind of gratification. He wanted the real thing: someone’s genuine desire for him.
He wanted Brenda to want to give herself to him, to introduce him to the world of reproduction, but he wanted her to desire him as much as he did her. Maybe it was never going to happen. That might be the reality of it. He’d just become the only ninety year old virgin in America. He may someday be written about in books. “The Last American Virgin.” He imagined his picture next to the article in a book on virgins.
He wet his hand with saliva and slid his fist over his erect cock, imagining it was the glove-like feel of a vagina gripping him lovingly. Was that it? Did it feel like that? He came, it seemed in quarts, although it was really only a few drops, and afterward he pretended they were kissing and savoring the “afterglow.”
He knew all the terms. Had studied the anatomy of the female genitalia. He had trouble calling it the pussy. He had memorized the structure, imagined the picture in the book when he closed his eyes. At night when he looked up into the dark that is what he saw. He went to sleep to it. He was, he admitted to himself, obsessed with the vagina.
And then one day Brenda was waiting for him after class, her books held in front of her lovely chest, and he thought his heart would stop. She looked delicious.
“I thought your answer to Professor Brown’s question about motivating people was brilliant,” she said. “When you said, ‘You’ve got to make them think it was their idea.’ That was brilliant.” Then she asked him if he wanted to go for cokes or a malt. Of course he had dreamed about that very thing for a year. He tried to appear like he was thinking it over.
He didn’t tell her he had read that line. That she thought he had made it up was fine with him. When she said she had cokes at home and asked if he’d rather just have a coke at her house he was almost speechless. He didn’t know her mother worked, but he could hope for a least some time with her at her house, maybe alone in her bedroom or even the backyard.
When they got there she explained her mother worked and he had to promise not to tell anyone they had been there alone. Of course, he swore he would keep their secret forever. Once in her bedroom she told him she was going to take a shower and he spent the next twenty minutes imagining her naked under the stream of water in the next room. When she came out she was wearing a robe and although there was a cord around her waist, it didn’t seem to be tied all that tight. When they sat on the bed facing one another, the robe rode up on her bare leg and his heart rate went up to marathon pace.
“Would you like to get naked?” she asked, undoing the tie around her waist, opening the robe and revealing his first look at a naked female person who didn’t have a caption under a picture in a magazine. She reached out and undid his belt and there was a lump in his throat the size of a softball.
She unbuttoned his pants and his already erect penis stuck out the top of his shorts and she took ahold of it and held it in her hand. He could feel her hand all the way to the top of his head, and he felt just a little lightheaded. She slipped the robe off her shoulders and let it drop on the bed, then it slid to the floor.
She helped him out of his pants, lifted his shirt off of his back, and pulled his underpants to his ankles. He kicked them off and sat there naked, not knowing what to do next. Sensing his indecision, she lay back on the bed and reached up to him.
“My mom won’t be home until six,” she said. “Do you want to?” He simply nodded, not able to actually form a word or make a sentence. When he crawled on top of her, his penis, as if it knew where to go, was in the exact right position and seemed to be actually pulled into her by some magnetic force of suction. Instinctively he began to move in and out, sliding his erection as far into her as it would go, then pulling it out quick, then pushing it back all the way. She seemed to like that and her breathing got more ragged and hurried.
It felt to him as if she was holding his erect penis in a gloved hand, squeezing it tight and massaging him with her fingers. It was the most glorious and exciting feeling he had ever had in all of his twenty-three years on earth. Nothing, not winning the race at the Fourth of July Picnic, even being chosen by the best team captain for basketball, compared to it. The muscles of her vagina held him, massaged him, and gave him a feeling he would never forget or come close to feeling again. The first would always be the first.
Like he had imagined all these years, it was simply the best feeling ever. The Best of Show as his mother liked to say. He wondered if his mother would be ashamed of him for for doing “it” with a naked girl. Somehow he thought not. She would probably say, “It’s all part of growing up,” which she seems to say a lot.
He almost came and pulled out quickly. Finally, Brenda seemed to know when to stop and he rolled off of her without her having to tell him to. “You ever done that before?” she asked.
“Never,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
“I thought I was the only one who hadn’t,” he said. “I thought I was the last virgin in America.”
“I guess we both were,” she said with a blush.
He kissed her at her front door, then slipped outside like a spy in the dark. He wondered as he walked down Flower street from her house if everyone could tell what he’d just done. In one way he wanted them to know, but in another he hoped they didn’t. As he walked the six blocks home, he could still feel the sensation of being inside of her, as if he was still inserted in her body. He could still feel the grip of her vagina on his penis and he hoped it would never go away. It stayed with him well into the night.
At home his mother asked him what he was smiling about. “School just went good,” he said, trying to avoid her eyes, like she could read the truth if he looked at her, which she seemed to be able to do way too often.
That night he lay in bed and the feeling was still there. Looking up into the night he could think of nothing but Brenda opening her robe and leaning back on her bed, opening her legs for him and him sliding in as if it was vacuumed in by a mysterious force of nature.
That was sixty-two years ago and Brenda just passed. It, of course, was not his last, he has two children now, but it was his first, and that makes it the most memorable of all.