Sex

The day I lost my virginity was also the day I nearly lost my life. It’s easy to look back and shake my head at the succession of bad choices my girlfriend and I made that day (starting with using her parents’ bed for our first time), but that’s because I’m older and despite that first traumatic experience I’ve had sex enough times to diminish its brainfreezing strangulation of reason, at least for longer periods of time. At the very least, I’ve long gotten over my fear I had from the age of 12 to 17: that I would die in some freak accident before I had a chance to make love to a person other than myself. The girlfriend, being a gorgeous female, didn’t share my irrational fear, but was equally witless if only in her choice of christening. We were both under the influence of the Sex Drug that body-brewed pharmaceutical substance that propels us all toward procreation, disguised as “a really good time.” The house was empty a great start. Her father, a man who liked me as much as any man with a lovely daughter could like an adolescent male with a perpetual erection, was on a long distance truck run and wouldn’t be back for days We’d barely begun when I heard a car pull up and a door slam. The next events were like stop-frame movie effects: “Daddy’s home!” girlfriend throws on shorts and shirt pushes my clothes under the bed shoves me in her parents’ closet. Naked. As I crouched on the balls of my feet, I heard muffled sounds from the living room “Back early how was the trip bathroom no, use the hall one ” I stayed still and tried to control my breathing, which was coming in gasps loud enough, I was convinced, to be heard throughout the house. The closet was full of dust, shoes, and clothes, many in plastic bags. It was dark, but I could still tell I was squatting between two long dresses, which I realized belonged to the man’s wife. As my calf muscles began to tremble from the strain of crouching, I took my mind off the pain by imagining what would enrage him more: having sex with his daughter or rolling naked in his wife’s clothing. If it were the former (as I suspected), I could possibly confuse him by wrapping myself in a skirt, throwing open the door and yelling “God, I’ve always wanted to do this!” before running out the back way. I’m joking, of course. What I actually thought was that either thing would enrage him equally, and that taken together, they meant certain death. It was the most terrifying thought I’ve had to this day, and what happened next heightened it deliciously for an extended period.

 Daddy had been on the road for two weeks, and he had many phone calls to make. The only private phone was, of course, on the nightstand between the bed and what I now thought of as My Closet. As the bedroom door opened, I slowly settled from a crouch to a sitting position, knees up and bare bottom resting on several pairs of high-heeled shoes. The room was deathly quiet, and I was trying so very hard not to let the shoes clunk on the floor. He was sitting on the bed about three feet from me, so I got to hear his side of each phone conversation for the next 30 minutes. The hot closet became a sweatbox, and a plastic laundry bag stuck to my back as the shoes dug into my buttocks. I concentrated on breathing and stillness and wondered if yoga began life like this. At last the girlfriend called him to the kitchen on a repair ruse (a fork she jammed in the garbage disposal or something) and he left long enough for her younger sister to open the bedroom window from the outside and whisper to me in the closet to make a break for it. I had just enough time to put on my pants when I heard footsteps in the hall. I jumped out of the window and ran around the corner of the house, and remembered that I was supposed to be at work in 20 minutes. It was my first job, cooking at a burger joint within walking distance, so I headed out wearing nothing but my khaki trousers and made it to work just in time. The manager looked at me and said “I don’t want to know” and found me a shirt and shoes to wear during my shift. There, in a small girl’s T shirt and flip-flops, I stood and watched the parade of dead meat wind its way through the grill on the chain-driven conveyor toward its rendezvous with sesame buns, while I prayed that this would be my life’s scariest day. So far, my prayer has been answered.

Steve Stoeckel, poet and bassist for The Spongetones, resides in NC with his wife, two cats, and ten thousand bees. See spongetones.com and myspace.com/hofnerboy.