I spent my first semester of college at a half-legitimate school in Hawaii. I didn’t have a lot of options, given that I had failed math or science (or math and science) every semester of high school save one, and even then I was only given two 60s out of pity. Looking back now I’m not sure why I didn’t just do then what I eventually did, go to community college for a year and then on to the local nondescript lesser state university system. I guess it just felt like I had beaten the system - Hawaii! And it made people’s faces light up when I told them, they seemed to feel real joy in imagining me out there. I suspect, though, that the core of my motivation was that Hawaii seemed as far as I could possibly get from my ex-stepmother.
That is of course a terrible reason to go anywhere, and pretty quickly it became clear to me that I had made a terrible mistake. In an era where AOL was still a dominant force, we didn’t have the internet in our “dorm,” which is to say our apartment, a drab high-rise that the school was partially leasing. You had to go to the computer lab to access the glacially slow desktops there and wait while ESPN.com (such as it was in 1999) loaded up at dial-up speeds. I talked to my sister on the phone maybe every other week, and otherwise sent mournful emails that went mostly unreturned. I had run far away and been rudely awakened to the fact that the people I missed were in fact now far away. The perfect weather wore on you, as weird as that is to say, and being so far from the mainland made me antsy. Everything was expensive; I would tell friends back home about my astonishment that the homeless people would come up to you and ask for $10, but then a McDonald’s extra value meal was $12 and this was a quarter-century of inflation ago. Nothing you bought, save maybe coffee and marijuana, did not come with a plane ticket attached to it, so that the gallon of milk that had been $1.50 back home was $6 there. Honolulu was a lonely and seemingly impenetrable city, filled with scowling faces and the perpetual drunkenness and entitlement of tourists, and I was a scared and lonely boy.
I was friendly with precisely three people there, none of which were among my three roommates, who like most people at the college justifiably assumed that everyone knew it was mostly a bullshit school for people who wanted to smoke weed and sit on the beach. I’m sure my theatrical dissatisfaction with the academics there and the disinterest of most of my classmates was obnoxious and self-serving. I did hang out with a few people, but all of it in the haze of “partying,” which had gone from an intimate and joyful practice among close friends to a strained and dispiriting way to pass the time among people who did not like me. I did my first lines of cocaine out there and found it to be an alienating experience; it was only years later that I learned that you could do coke with your soulmate and still feel lonely. I barely drank back then, but I ended up being comforted by a complete stranger as I heaved Goldschlager into the bushes behind one of the depressing rental houses we used to frequent. She cooed at me and reassured me that she had been there and I called her an angel and she laughed, warmly and without judgment. I never knew her name.
There was a blonde-haired guy, my age, with a deep tan and a name right out of a surfer movie, and it always seemed amazing to me that he was born and raised in Chicago. He was sweet to me and we talked about sports but he never stopped mocking my tendency to do the homework in our classes. There was also a girl there who I would have identified as a fine girlfriend prospect and someone who flirted with me was I not afflicted with the impossible myopia of the teenage boy. She was a Hawaii lifer and ate the spam sushi that came out of vending machines and would translate local slang for me. And the third person who I ever felt warmth towards and from was the woman who took my virginity.
She was, I believe, half native Hawaiian and half Thai, not that she ever broke it down for me personally; I just picked up on it from things she said. She was also six years older than I was, at 24. She was in my freshman humanities seminar, but her class status was something of a mystery even to her, as she had collected a variety of credits at that college and another over several years without apparent progress. She was by repeated admission a terrible student and, in time, she would stop showing up to class. But not before she had befriended me for reasons that struck me as mysterious even then.
Mysterious, that is, because at a time in my life when I was uncomfortable with everything about me - my impossibly thin limbs, my little bird chest, my terrible haircut, my complete inability to even conceive of a personal style, my abundant back acne - she was the picture of ease, ease with herself. She laughed constantly and everyone was clearly charmed by her, even the frustrated instructor who could never seem to get her to do the work. This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that she was very pretty, with perfect mocha skin and dark eyes and (forgive me) very nice tits. She was full-figured and very poised and confident in her body. And she was just effortlessly cool. It helped that she was native. Living in Hawaii was a weird experience, for several reasons, and part of it was my constant understanding that I wasn’t really welcomed by some and my additional understanding that they had a very good reason for why. She called herself hapa, but there was no doubt that she was comfortably Hawaiian. I was only in the state for five months but even so I can tell you from experience that there are intuitive racial politics at play there that are impossible to understand without experience. In any event, she was older, beautiful, and cool, and you can imagine how a lonely and awkward white kid might have thought about her.
You’ll forgive me for that soliloquy. This is a subject of obvious emotional investment and memories that are heavy with nostalgia. A few times in the years ahead I would hunt through Facebook to try and find her, but I never did, and honestly I’m glad; I don’t quite remember what her face looked like, really, and I’m sure I would be a little disappointed if I saw it again.
She also was always making fun of me, calling me a haole and making fun of my “babyface,” but never unkindly. I was tongue-tied and my limbs were unruly and forever tripping over my feet in a body that as a first-semester college freshman was some 8 inches taller than it had been when I started junior year of high school. She would bring in dried fruits in big plastic packs from the supermarket and hand them out to the people seated around her, and when she gave me mine she would giggle and say “monsieur.” This tendency to hold court in the middle of an ongoing class was part of her charm and, as you can imagine, a regular frustration for the instructor. I found myself consistently tongue-tied around her, and that made her laugh at me, and when the teacher would grow aggravated and try to bring class back under control I would get a serious look on my face and bear down on my book, and that made her laugh at me, and she laughed at my ill-fitting jeans and my filthy sneakers and my fantasy novels with absurd titles. Days when she did not find time to make fun of me put me into a foul mood.
She asked me to go get a bite to eat with her at a nearby cafe, and I was all aflutter, and then a couple of other dudes showed up and sat with us and I chewed my food in childish anger, which she could not have failed to notice. Then a few days later I showed up to class upset. I had gone to get cash at the ATM in a nearby supermarket and had been staring ahead blankly while the old woman ahead of me made her withdrawal, but she turned and saw me and immediately accused me of trying to defraud her. “He’s stolen my code!” she shouted again and again, and I stammered and sweated and grew more and more frustrated, and a tired-looking employee eventually turned up and started talking to her and I slipped away and headed to class. It seems like such a simple, stupid thing now, but I thudded down into my chair at class with my heart racing, and when she sat down she saw my face and asked me if I was OK. I said that of course I was, irritably, and she rose and took me by the hand and led me out of class just as it was starting. I told her what happened and she laughed, but she was also comforting and rubbed the back of my hand in a way that lit up my insides.
A week or two later she invited me to a party. She lived in some crowded rental house with a bunch of roommates in a place called Aina Haina. Some part of my brain complained that she was probably just asking out of pity, but she was right there and asking me and I said yes, of course, I’d love to come. It was just a couple days away. And I fretted for those days and worried that I’d be terribly lonely and look out of place, and when the party rolled around I was and I did. But I found a quiet corner where some guys were watching Sportscenter and I dug myself into the couch and tried to look inconspicuous and drank my disgustingly sweet punch. I would likely have tried to sneak out and find a way home before too long, but then she sauntered in and chatted with those dudes for some time, speaking that inscrutable Hawaiian English I had such trouble following, and when I had stewed long enough thinking that she was going to ignore me entirely she wordlessly stuck her hand out and led me out of the room.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said, and I imagine I grunted out something meant to sound casual. We had talked about music a lot and she told me she wanted to show me her CD collection. (There was such a thing as a CD collection back then.) And she led me upstairs to her room, which had no physical door but was curtained off with some sort of sheer and exotic-seeming fabric, and her space smelled like coconut oil and girls. There were sticks of incense hanging out of a brass Buddha statue but they were not burning. I could hear the gentle thud of the party below. She sat down on the edge of her bed. I did what seemed natural, which was to crouch down next to the bookcase that housed her CDs and begin laboriously cataloging each one, occasionally muttering a “nice” or “great record.” I heard her sigh, and I looked up, and I suddenly felt very foolish to be pawing through her CDs, but I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to do.
And then - and I swear that this is true, as goofy as it sounds - she patted the bed next to her. She was gazing at me with this bemused look on her face, like she couldn’t quite believe I could be that dumb or passive or both. But whether it was half-sarcastic or not, the gesture worked, as I understood it immediately and with considerable force. There was this little bulb that lit up in my brain and all of my conscious thoughts turned off, other than “this is happening now,” and I’m glad that I at least knew enough to sit down and start kissing her without awkward conversation. She smiled when I did, a big generous smile, and for once I didn’t feel that she was half making fun of me, and she was sweet and kind and it was over quickly. And then we laid in bed for a little bit and the body of hers that I had just been invited into suddenly seemed impossible and out of reach to me, so gently cradling her hip felt like a task I was at risk of failing at any moment, and I’m pretty sure my hand shook, and then she asked the question I was dreading. And I lied and said no, it was not my first time, and I have always wondered whether she believed me or not. But she didn’t say anything, at all, until after another five minutes or so she rose to put her clothes back on and go down to the party. Then she only said, “come on.”
I was a wreck for the remaining couple of hours I was at the party. I felt like she was being distant with me; looking back, she was just hosting a party, but I had A Lot Of Feelings. They would have to wait. She avoided my repeated attempts to peel her off from the pack to have a conversation. Eventually a friend of hers said he was leaving, and without asking me she told him to give me a ride home. This felt pretty definitive to me, like a punch to the gut, and I resolved to get over it all, but when we were heading out the door she hugged me and quietly told me she wanted to see me that weekend. And I flew high inside myself on the drive home, stupidly, a little drunk. When I got home I felt the desire to talk, to anyone, about anything, but all I saw were the faces of my stoned roommates waiting for me. I went and laid on the bed and thought to myself “I lost my virginity tonight,” trying to make that reality have some sort of meaning, but for all my horny and lonely teenage years the act itself seemed entirely inert to me; I just couldn’t care, at all. I felt it meant nothing. The only thing that I could think of was her. I could not make myself comprehend how that lovely and sarcastic creature could see something worth desiring in my thin and awkward body.
A couple days later we met up and walked on Waikiki beach. I bought us Jack in the Box and we ate it and then she said she wanted to have sex. She didn’t want to go up to her house; perhaps she didn’t want to turn up with me at her house for all her roommates to see, but maybe she just legitimately didn’t want to drive all the way to her house and then bring me back only to drive home again. So we went to my apartment, which was a quad, two double bedrooms attached to a common room. There had been four of us but my roommate Stuart and I got on so badly he moved out halfway through that semester. The bedrooms had separate doors to the hallway, in our apartment, but we kept those chained shut and came in through the common room, for reasons I can’t recall. So I went into the common room alone, grunted towards my stoned roommate on the couch, and let her in through the bedroom door. I would have been thrilled to stride in the door with her, and she had not asked me to hide her in any way, but for some reason I felt deeply uncomfortable with asking her to walk by my roommates, uncomfortable on her behalf. We had sex again and I’d like to think it was longer and better than the first time. Again while we were having sex I felt briefly as though she wasn’t gently mocking me, and this immediacy and sincerity were something I felt I could get used to. Afterwards we lay in bed and she talked about her future, which was somehow vaguely related to the fashion industry. I asked her when I could see her again, and she said, “don’t get attached to me.”
I laughed; I could not think of anything else to do. She had said it with simple patience and the way she said it was not at all unkind. It was, in fact, the opposite of unkind. It was an older person who understood my emotions better than I did, trying to gently make me understand what was happening and what was not. I resolved to not be the young fool who couldn’t take the hint. Of course, that’s exactly what I was.
It seems impossible to me now but this was all before most people had cellphones. Neither of us did, at any rate. I felt like I had an intimate relationship with this person and that we knew each other well and talked all the time. But because I never sent her a text message or DM, because I had no constant digital connection to her, I probably talked to her less overall than I have with many would-be paramours over the years that I met over the internet. (It’s remarkable, the number of people you meet online and chat up for months and maybe eventually have a sex weekend with before you both realize it’s going nowhere.) We had a phone at my apartment, but one of my roommates would talk endlessly with his girlfriend back in Pennsylvania, and I would stamp around and huff and eventually tell him it was rude to be on the phone all the time. She lived in her crowded share house and was rarely there to take a call, and I frequently would decide that she was screening me out, avoiding me. At this point she had stopped coming to class altogether and I felt like my solid connection to her had dissolved. But I would eventually get in touch with her and she would see me and we’d have sex and she would call me a silly boy and tell me there were lots of nice Asian girls on the island who would love to have me for a boyfriend.
And then eventually I couldn’t get in touch with her at all. It was nearing Thanksgiving and the end of the semester and I had already made some sort of deposit for taking classes in the spring, but inside I knew that I was dying in that place and needed to go home. The one thing that kept me from admitting it to myself was my attachment to her, which was precisely the kind of responsibility she had repeatedly and fairly insisted to me she could not take on. I can’t imagine that she consciously stopped seeing me for fear of causing me to stick around for another semester, but her timing was just right anyway. The sting of that rejection was just the kick I needed to realize that it had all been a big expensive wasteful mistake and it was time to go.
I’m very glad there was no SMS or Facebook back then; I can promise you that I would have sent her some pathetic and overwrought messages. I did eventually get her on the phone, right before I was set to leave, and I stammered for awhile and she asked me how I was and after a few moments she told me she had to go. And I was left with my first real broken heart, after a high school career filled with the pain of unrequited love, which I had foolishly assumed was worse.
What made all of this harder for me was that I couldn’t even wallow in the unfairness of it all, couldn’t just resent her. It probably would have been healthier for me if I could have just believed that she had wronged me, if I could have simply decided she was an awful person and felt shitty for a couple months and moved on. But I was all too aware that she had been very straight with me from the beginning, too honest with myself for my own good. And so I had all of the heartache and none of the satisfaction that comes with just hating the person who has spurned you. I was heartbroken and simultaneously too cognizant of the fact that I had no right to be heartbroken, adding guilt and shame to the heartache, so I was feeling the pain but had access to none of the emotional defense mechanisms that might make it easier. When they talk about the cruelty of self-knowledge, this is what they mean.
I have, at times, been on the other side of that general scenario - I have made it clear that I was interested in only a casual and affectionate regular sexual relationship with another person that entailed no commitment and was not destined to go anywhere and found that those terms were acceptable to the other party. I have been the one to accept another person’s wanting without fully committing to wanting myself. Eli S. Evans wrote a great essay for n+1 on the subject, years ago, about different kinds of wanting, desire without commitment, consent that is informed and explicit and yet which somehow leaves us feeling rejected all the same. And you’d like to think that I would have been resolutely kind to those people, given my own experience of falling hard for a lovely woman who wanted only to have sex with me and enjoy my company for a little while, and who told me so the whole time. But I’m afraid I was not always kind. I have at times mistaken their consent for the sum total of my responsibility to them, and it’s never that simple.
Still: she didn’t owe me anything, and she never did anything wrong. She blessed me with her uncomplicated and unapologetic attraction, and in time I became glad that I had lost my virginity to an older and more experienced person. She had warned me and warned me and I had nodded my head and told her I understood and internally congratulated myself for my maturity and understanding, and the whole time I was falling for her just as she had told me not to, just as I had said I wouldn’t. It hurt, a lot, for months afterward. And then I got over it, just like that, the way you do. I think I fell for a different girl, one who was not on the other side of an ocean, as she was by the time I moved on emotionally. Now I’m glad to look back at her only as a phantom, an apparition; she is now a quasi-mystical figure, a virginity fairy who glided into my life not only to say yes but to get me to ask, and I’m grateful to her and to the universe.
If you’ve read this and can’t quite understand why someone as desirable as that would start a sexual relationship with a shy 18-year-old goof, well, I know how you feel. Some women have a thing for lost causes. The heart wants what it wants. Attraction is mysterious. I was white and blonde and blue-eyed and the beneficiary of internalized patriarchy and white supremacy. She was getting back at an on-and-off boyfriend. Take your pick. I don’t really put much stock in the conscious mind’s ability to suss that stuff out. Not after a lifetime of observing the absurd tangle of human attraction.
Years after, late in my 20s I guess, I would come to recognize that girls had in their own ways been patting the bed for me for a long time, even back in high school; I had always just been too clueless and scared to realize they were doing it. Not coincidentally, this was also when sex stopped being a cause of anxiety and became instead something fun and relaxed, something I knew I could often have when I got a little lucky and played my cards right, which in turn made me fairer and more compassionate with women I was involved with. It did take those years, though. I’d love to say that being invited into a sexual relationship with a cool and beautiful woman made me instantly recognize that women too were sexual beings and that I too could be desired, but it took years more of being stupid and failing to listen for that understanding to really take. I did eventually realize that women were putting it out there, sometimes, and the polite thing to do was to notice and either take the bait or find some way to graciously decline. I suppose this will sound to some like I’m saying that I’m some great lady’s man, but longtime readers will know that my core philosophy about this stuff is that being desired as a heterosexual man is not a rare or delicate condition, and indeed that many men have trouble with women precisely because they think that it is. I know there’s something deeply obnoxious about a guy saying that it’s not hard to get laid, but I will persist in my belief that if you’re open and receptive and you acknowledge that you are a being that some people will inevitably desire, and if you never act on that with aggression or entitlement, good things will happen.
Anyway. I am now happily partnered off, and being a skinny unhappy virgin who perpetually studied his shoes seems as far away as Hawaii. Among abundant other virtues my girlfriend has that attractive quality that I could never have grasped when I was young, which is corporeality - she’s real, to me, not three-quarters a projection of my fantasies and fears like the woman who took my virginity, but a lovely flesh-and-blood human who demands to be taken in just as she is. I think one of the hardest things for young men to understand and accept is that there is something inherently aggressive and threatening about their love, that they can fixate on a person completely and decide they love every last thing about her and yet never comprehend a single inch of her, herself, as an authentic and conscious person who never asked them to project perfection onto her. My defense, in all of this, is that I was 18, and now I’m not. Well - I thought that things would get easier, afterwards, after I lost it. You hang so much massive importance on it, before you lose it. In a lot of ways things did get easier. And in some ways, they got harder.
This is a piece about aging. Today I turn 41.