I Hate This Story, But Here You Go...

I have been getting an absolutely ridiculous amount of phishing (you have no idea how I loathe that word for the way it's spelled) spam lately. My inbox is cluttered with missives from various banks to which I don't belong telling me my password is corrupted, I get the ebay and PayPal ones, but the most aggressive ones lately are the emails from SUPPORT@GAMBLINGBLUES.COM or ADMIN or SECURITY or whatever else they hope lures me in.

Considering I am all those things, I think it's safe to say I can ignore them.

I really wish there was some respect for the purity of my inbox. These come ons are so sordid.

Maybe that's just the Mormon in me talking. I mean, I'm not and never have been a Mormon, but you live long enough in Salt Lake City, and the infection is hard to cure. It's kinda like my Uncle Gary, who had as thick a "Yooper" accent (think "Fargo" crossed with Canadian) as you could imagine, but picked up a twang less than two years into his Tennessee residency. Salt Lake City just gives you that Pollyanna-esque wide-eyed disbelief that's impossible to fight.

It's been awhile since I told an embarrassing story, and I've been saving this one up for awhile because I have been doing my damndest to block it from my head for about the last fourteen or fifteen years. It very well might be one of those symbolic moments that not only spoke volumes about the warped teen years in which I was mired, but also set the stage for the enormous dysfunction with women I seem to have as a recurring theme since.

Anyway.

I was a sixteen year old virgin. Well, to be fair, I was a nineteen year old virgin at one point too, but we're winding back the clock here. I was this skinny self-conscious kid with a mean streak a mile wide. There were no limits to my cruelty. All I wanted to do was take a swipe at you before you had a chance to do the same to me. It was a hell of a way to get through my teen years, especially in an environment where I just didn't belong to begin with.

First off, I wasn't Mormon. Ninety percent plus of the people I encountered in Middle and High School were. Secondly, my High School was something right out of a fucking John Hughes movie, save the sex and profanity. It was nestled in the foothills of a pretty tony area of the Salt Lake suburbs. Million dollar homes dotted the mountainside, and various country clubbing executives kept their kids in Girbaud and Guess and brand new Beemers.

I knew the proverbial "girl who never wore an article of clothing twice." I went to a "Sweet Sixteen" party where dinner was easily $75 a plate (and over 50 kids attended).

My dad earned a good living, my mom chipped in, and we were comfortable. Comfortable, but $85k a year as a family income might as well be poverty level in this school district.

The kids there were brutal as well. I'm really not exaggerating when I say that the football team had little better to do than talk about me. Me. In a school with 2,500 students, I was a topic of discussion with the football team. Bob was friends with the brother of one of the captains and he told me once that the captain's friends just walked in his house without knocking. I said, "Wow, that's weird. Even Nate knocks, and he's over every day."

I was thrown up against a locker by an offensive lineman the next day. He snapped, "I heard you've been saying bad things about (the captain)."

It's unbelievable I didn't get my ass handed to me once. I probably deserved some of it, but not stuff like that.

Since we're talking Utah here, I can vouch that I didn't know anyone who drank, smoked anything, had sex, or even really dated outside of doing things in groups.

Until I met Steve.

Steve was a senior when I was a sophomore, but we shared the back row in theatre class as well as wicked senses of humor. He wasn't Mormon, which was a plus, and our theatre class alliance became a friendship.

One of the things I liked best about hanging with Steve was that he had a completely different set of life experiences compared to all of my other friends to that point. He had been on drugs - pot and hallucinogens - and had twice been kidnapped off the street by paid thugs and dropped off in one of those teen rehab desert survival Bataan death marches in his mother's futile effort to get him cleaned up.

We had a mutual respect, and never once did I see him do or on drugs despite what my parents thought.

Anyway, dating in Utah was a funny thing. The formula goes: pine for a chick for six months, finally work up the nerve to ask her to a dance, if she likes you back maybe you can do homework together a few times a week. Very innocent, leave-it-to-beaver sort of shit. Not in Steve's world. He was easily the most normal teenager I had met out there, and managed to find the girls who got shipped out to those "alternative" high schools. Bad girls - or at least ones who fancied themselves that way. Steve would always give me crap about the latest girl for whom I was carrying a torch, and his joking enthusiasm became a mantra.

"We have got to get you laid."

God bless him, he actually tried.

Some summer Tuesday afternoon I get a call from Steve, telling me he's going to hook me up with his latest girlfriend's friend. Real easy he tells me. Sure thing. She's a slut. I ask him if she's cute, and he says sure. Sure she's cute. I nervously accept the invite for an afternoon of bad horror movies at his mom's place on Thursday. She'll be at work all day, we'll have the run of the house.

This could be it, I thought. I'm finally going to get laid.

These weren't comforting thoughts. I didn't have a smooth or predatory bone in my body, and started fretting about the encounter. What if I didn't think she was cute? What if I blew it? Do I even know what I'm doing? I haven't so much as gotten a girl's shirt off before. What if I'm terrible? What if she didn't like me?

Thursday came, and I drove over to Steve's. I was early. Real early. Early enough to try to soak up some of Steve's cool to quell my own fears about this whole thing.

I wanted to run. This isn't how it's supposed to go. I'm supposed to meet a girl, we get to know each other, get to like each other, then I get her pants off. Can all this happen before Ash chops his possessed hand off?

Still, the thought that I might actually get laid out of all of this mess was appealing enough to swallow the rock in my throat and hop in the car to go pick up the girls.

We drove a few miles into another district to my "date's" house with Steve in my ear the whole time. "Play it cool, girls dig a guy who's cool." Is that Steve McQueen cool? Miles Davis cool? Shecky Green? I can do Shecky Green. "Just relax and have a good time. Everything is all set up."

Whoa whoa whoa... All set up? What is that supposed to mean? I didn't ask this out loud, but all of a sudden this whole thing felt cheap. Cheap like Steve had just paid off a prostitute and gave her my room key. It was too late to turn around, but those five words, "Everything is all set up," were enough to make me mentally dig my heels in and promise myself that whatever happened today - I wouldn't enjoy it.

We pulled up to a weatherbeaten stucco ranch with a dead lawn and honked the horn. The girls were waiting, and came out to the car. True to alternative high school form, my "date" was in jeans and a black heavy metal t-shirt, wearing a bleached blonde haircut real short. She was a year or so younger than I was, maybe a ninth grader, and still had the slight stockiness a short girl has before the baby fat is outgrown. She had this blank look in her eyes, just a sign to me that maybe "easy" was all she was.

She wasn't bad looking I guess - if you're into girls who like Poison. She wasn't my type, and Steve should have known that right off.

Then again, type doesn't matter if she's supposedly easy, right?

I knew Steve's girlfriend already, and she made what was easily the most awkward introduction I've ever been a part of. "This is BG, he's the one you're supposed to fuck today. BG, this is (whatever her name was). She'll be taking your virginity later." Okay, it didn't happen like that verbatim, but it certainly felt that way.

Since I was driving, Steve hopped in the backseat with his girl to play a little kissy-face. I was left up front to try and make small talk with my quarry.

I couldn't. I had nothing at all in common with this girl. I think we talked Pink Floyd for a few minutes, and I pulled the "I love this song" bit in order to turn up the radio - both to cover the uncomfortable silence as well as the slurping and sucking noises from Steve and his girl.

We got back to Steve's, where in a slick move he had cranked the air conditioning up past the point of "meat locker." Completely intentional, this was the only way we were getting the girls under blankets for the movies in the middle of June. Steve and his girl took a spot on a futon, me and mine on the floor.

I think "Evil Dead" was probably the first movie.

I was side by side under a blanket with a sure thing. An easy girl. A slut. One who was brought to me specifically for the taking. And I wasn't trying anything. At all.

I couldn't even watch the movie. I had seen it a dozen times, but I was fighting an internal struggle in my head. "Don't you want to get laid? Are you ever going to get an opportunity like this one again? What the hell is wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you? You don't even know this girl, you don't know where she's been! She's not your type, and she was only brought here to hook up with you. That basically makes her a hooker!"

"So? At least try something for chrissakes! You've got a ready and willing girl right next to you here, you haven't so much as tried to touch her, and the movie is half over! Do not screw this up for me. You hear me? You don't have to like a girl to get laid."

"What if I want to like a girl before I sleep with her? What if I don't want this one? What if she doesn't like me anyway?"

"Does that matter? She's waiting for you to do something, SO DO SOMETHING ALREADY! Goddamn you're a pussy, I swear to god."

"Asshole. Fine. Have it your way."

Unfortunately, I didn't know what to do to "get things started." I had already laid next to her, stiff as a board, for almost an hour. I assessed my options. I could just roll over on top of her and start kissing, but that was probably a little too forward at this point. I could maybe just lean in and start kissing her on the neck and ears, but I didn't know at this point how my advances would be taken.

I decided to float a test balloon.

Under the blanket I found her hand with mine and held it.

ASIDE: Can I tell you how sad I am to have a story like this? I mean, throw the lack of self-confidence on top of that bullshit Pollyanna Utah mentality, and you've got a guy who has to hold hands with a hooker just to find out if "she likes him" before he can do anything else. This one little tiny incident in my life is quite possibly a top two to four most embarrassing moment. Easy.

Needless to say, going from step one to step two took a little more time, and it was all baby steps from there. And no, I didn't get laid. I did get a shirt off, which was a milestone I suppose, but for something that was supposed to be a sure thing, I just whiffed on my chance.

I got to make out with a girl, had what was in effect my first "one night stand," got under a bra for the first time, but still feel incredibly ashamed that I had talked myself out of anything more than what I got. I mean, my first time ended up being pretty damn good all things considered, but I looked the gift horse in the mouth on this one.

I never saw the girl again, which is how this was supposed to go. And I'm sure that somewhere... some women's prison, halfway house, trailer park, somewhere... there's a pudgy lady in a ratty Warrant t-shirt that's telling the tale of the guy that would rather hold hands than get her pants off.

Goddamn I hate myself sometimes. Thank you Utah, you certainly did what you could to help me deal with women in a constructive fashion.