05 Oct. Written Post 2007
“This is an Essay About Sex”
When I grew to eleven or twelve years old, my dealings with the fairer sex took on a new flavor. I was now allowed to rent PG-13 movies (I would sneak R’s whenever I could). My secondary school was filled to the brim with mature fourteen year olds and high school girls that would as soon step on me as see me. I had health class. I held my first gushingly sweaty hand the year before, and kissed my first girlfriend outside of the subway. Later, there would be tongue. And from then on, I had a mission. A sole preoccupation with which to while away my hours. I was on a crusade. I was going to have sex. I was going to get laid, get some, do the nasty, bust a nut, tup, bone, tap that, hit dat, screw, bang, get it on and get off.
So was the focus of my romantic life. Hours, full days were spent planning and hoping, talking trash with my friends, not a scent of estrogen within a mile. Beginning with my first serious relationship in the seventh grade, I was dick-driven with no hope of return. I would trip at the buxom and choke at the callipygian. My movie watching experience had changed completely. My mission was no longer to find the funniest Kung Fu movie of all time (Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain). No, my mission had changed dramatically: breasts. Everywhere onscreen appeared breasts. There was a seemingly limitless supply streaming from Hollywood onto my television screen. The movies all blended together until my memory of those years became a blur. I can’t pick out a single movie, but I can still recall some of the exact scenes when the nipple makes its first appearance.
I became a joke, crawling back to my first girlfriend over and over again, for her welcoming arms and lips. Hell, we just about hated each other, but the kissing was good, much too much fun to abandon for the purposes of happiness. I was king of the one-party hook-up relationship, which managed only to tide me over and turn clique after clique of females against me. There were no pretend promises, no thought of anything in the future, and everybody involved knew it, but the girls all felt I should be boxed out as a matter of principle.
When I entered the ninth grade, my hunger for the slightest physical contact was as voracious as ever. Tenth grade I began a major decline. The greasy hair and depression did little to aid in my search for poon, until one day I had to sit myself down and declare bankruptcy. The Great Drought had begun. But I was not to be deterred from my longstanding goal. I did what any true devotee to my dream would have. I transferred schools.
I kid. The reasons behind my transfer were diverse and plentiful, and I would be lying if I said sex was a prime motive. But the end result was a step in the right direction. My new school was an art school. An art school. Perfect. I arrived, brother to the hottest piece of man-candy to walk its halls in recent memory. This gave me an immediate in with sexy artsy types that had devoted themselves to my brother when he was a senior and they were but sophomores. I saw distinct possibility, but I was determined not to waste any chances. I played it cool, I didn’t rush into anything.
And then it happened. Towards the end of my junior year of high school, an opportunity presented itself and I knew it was time. If I had any kind of coherent thought as I sat, slightly chilly, in the basement of her house, in nothing but my cannabis-leaf patterned boxers, I think I would have wondered: Is this going to be anything, anything at all, like that scene in Matrix: Reloaded? Because in all honesty, I think that was what I expected. I expected gongs and timpani, celebrating masses and thronging hordes. I expected fireworks, both real and symbolic.
I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I had no vision of what to expect, no idea what would be on the other side. My thinking ended at the moment I lost my virginity. I had no idea if life would even continue. What was it like over there? Am I welcome? Do they have free t-shirts? What kind of buffet do they have for the sexually active? It would last forever, sex. There was no reason to think otherwise.
It was okay.
It was slightly awkward. There was a little fumbling, some repositioning, a cramp in my right hamstring. But it was okay.
The disturbing part wasn’t really the lack of prizes and music after it was done, but a completely unexpected turn of events that followed. It was all downhill from there. I continued to see the girl, and we continued to engage in our form of making love under the stars – mostly more basement sex. But slowly but surely the sex was less satisfying but more involving. The relationship deteriorated. We didn’t talk, just fucked. Piles and piles of awkward deteriorating sex.
So in a surprisingly short amount of time the relationship ended, as they seem to do. It ended in a flurry of tears, screaming, and tales of faked orgasms. I was hurt. Not because the relationship ended, I was ready for that. And not even because she said she faked her orgasms. I was just very simply hurt by the sex. Why? Why had my dream abandoned me? What was this rubbing of skin that was masquerading as sex in my life? I wept for the fanfare that never came, for the non-existent masses, the silent throngs.
What a disappointment.
That summer, following a profoundly awkward one night stand, I found my priorities changing for the first time since my entrance into my teen years. My font of desire ran dry. I had a genuine friendship with a heterosexual female who I hadn’t already made out with. For the first time I found art in movies.
One such movie was Love and Death, a Woody Allen movie from the seventies, which I watched with that very good female friend of mine. We were seized with laughter for two solid hours. Oh those Russians, oh that Woody Allen. When the movie was over, neither of us wanted to move and find something better to do, so we switched the language to Spanish and started the movie over again. In an unexpected twist of fate, my hand brushed briefly across her lower arm at the exact same moment that we heard the first notes of Woody Allen’s deep, rumbling, silky Castilian voice.
And O! it all came flooding back, breaking the walls of my self control, and hers as well. We dove into each other with a starving ferocity. Trumpets! Fanfare! Gongs and bells! Timpani rolls and choir chords! Music and magic! Fireworks! Fireworks!
And there was an afterward, a beautiful calm lovely afterward. We went out to dinner, Chinese food at the longest mall on the east coast. There were little fireworks blasting through my fried rice. I kissed her goodbye at the train station and my mouth felt like I had Pop-Rocks in it. Trumpets and fanfare!
An even more magical thing happened over the course of the next months. When we made love again, it got better. It got better each and every time. We made love under the stars, even if we were in her basement. There were stars everywhere. I grew closer and closer to her. My love grew greater and greater. For a year and two months as of three days ago it’s grown.
There are free t-shirts where I live. There’s a twenty-four hour buffet where I live, in the land of the loved, the loving.
-Brendan Sullivan, University of Pittsburgh, PA, Class of ‘11.
—
“Cookie Cutter”
Hey, You with the Cookie Cutter…
I had a magic beanstalk
But my house isn’t zoned
For super vegetation
I had a pretty bright Neirid
But municipal tap water
Is too chlorinated for imagination
I had a vintage Green Rosetta
But they don’t take to hydroponics
At a modern gas station
I’ve hidden my one last chimera
In a golden diving bell, safe from your plastic, oil spills, caustics,
kill orders, briefcases and standardization.
- Dylan Chapp, Newark High School, DE, Class of ‘08.
—
“A Work of Art”
Man has created weapons
Man has created toys
But no man could ever create
The serenity of no noise
Pink skies of cotton
Purple clouds of night
No, man could not create
The beauty of nature’s light
Soft evening waters
Reflecting heaven’s gold—
Only He could create this masterpiece
And never have it sold.
-Lisa Ulan, Wissahickon Senior High School, PA, Class of ‘08.
