Two

Late summer, 1980. I was sixteen.

In the summer of my fifteenth year, a teen disco opened in a strip mall near my house. That became my all time favorite place to hang out.

I had disco fever. Bad.

On that dance floor, I met my first ongoing girlfriend, Rachel. She was a great improvement on Roxanne. My mom liked that she was sweet and responsible. I liked that she laughed a lot, kissed well, and could drive.

I was no longer dependent upon my parents to go out.

She encouraged me to keep making art. At her suggestion, I applied for and received a scholarship to study with a local artist. The artist was a great eccentric, and I learned a lot from her. She taught me to use pastels, to read The New Yorker, and to put lime wedges in my iced tea.

Rachel was also a student, so we saw a lot of each other.

We got fast into heavy petting, but she was keen to save her virginity for marriage. This frustrated us both, until we stumbled onto something that made us happy and kept her virginity intact: oral sex.

She didn’t go down on me; that seemed odd to her. But I went down on her. At first, she would just lay back and let me do it. Then she got more at ease—soon she was riding my face like a rodeo star.

I ate that girl’s pussy for two years.

One summer night when I was sixteen, we were parked in my Chevette. The back seat folded down so that we could fashion a bed. We could lay there and look up through the hatch window at the stars.

I kept blankets and pillows in the trunk.

I was buried between her legs, sucking and licking her to orgasm. After she came, I moved up to hold and kiss her.

I lowered my body into her embrace and it happened: my cock slid into her wet pussy.

I pulled back. She recoiled.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t on purpose . . .”

“Oh my God!” she fretted. Now she was not only not a virgin, she had to worry about getting pregnant.

We were scared stiff all month. Her period came.

I thought: well, either I lost my virginity with Roxanne or I didn’t. But there was no doubt that, for a split second, I was in Rachel.

But could that count? It was over in a flash.

Rachel graduated and went off to college. By that time, we had already grown apart—probably because I was preoccupied with my new friends at my new school.