In the years that followed, I would have more sex like this. Sex that felt good and right. And I noticed when I was with a person I felt comfortable with, I could walk across the room without smothering myself in a blanket. I could let myself be seen. And I noticed when I stopped worrying so much about how I looked, I could lose myself more in how I felt.
I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but instead it was more like a 4 pm sun flare. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain. The flood of serotonin and dopamine creates a white-hot burst of ecstasy. For decades, I drank myself to reach that place of oblivion. Why hadn’t I known? The oblivion could come to me.
ONE AFTERNOON, JENNIFER showed up at my front gate, holding a Fuji cassette that was dated in her small, careful script: August 23, 1988.
“I can’t believe you still have this,” I told her.
She smiled. “It’s yours now.”
I knew what was on the tape. It was a story I didn’t like. One that explained a lot about my mixed-up history with drinking, men, and sex. I recorded it two days shy of my fourteenth birthday, when I sat in Jennifer’s bedroom with a jambox on my lap, sharing details that would haunt me for decades.
“It probably won’t even work anymore,” I said, as Jennifer slotted the tape in the deck of an old creaky jambox, once so familiar to us and now quaint as an abacus. She pressed rewind, and the tape chugged backward violently, like an unsteady aircraft preparing to take off.
She pressed the play button, and there was a buzz, followed by a loud clunk. And then, my voice floating back to me from more than a quarter century ago.
“Hi. I’m over at Jennifer’s house. It’s August 20 -something or the other.” I do not sound two days away from being 14. My voice sounds more like 17. “There’s really not much to say here. I can’t wait for my birthday. I got a sweater.”
On the tape, Jennifer says something from across the room I can’t quite make out. It sounds like, “Tell our friends about your summer.”
“It was the best summer of my life,” I start. “I went down to visit my cousin in Michigan. I met this guy named Brad. He was wonderful. A wonderful person.”
Brad was a sweet stoner type with feathered blond hair and a nod that was about two beats slower than everyone else’s. He was 18. The night I met him, he said, “So you’re Kimberley’s older cousin,” and I laughed and corrected him. Younger. For weeks, whenever I ran into him, he would pantomime picking his jaw off the floor. “No way you’re 13,” he would say.
I’d smile, blush. Yup, really 13. One afternoon, he kissed me in Kimberley’s room, and I couldn’t believe it: He had picked me. It was everything the movies had promised.
My last night in town was not. We went to a party, had a few drinks, and things got much more confusing.
The story that follows is one I’ve thought about countless times over the years. I’ve wrestled with its meaning, rewrote its nuance, tried to erase it from memory. But this was the first time in 25 years I’d sat down and listened to myself tell it:
We were in this vacant apartment. There was no furniture whatsoever. There were chairs. A beanbag. Foldout chairs. We went into this bedroom. I forgot to close the door. I thought we were just going to talk for a while, but the first thing he did when we got in the room was to take my shirt off. He got down on the floor to take his shoes off, and I guess he noticed the door was open, and I thought he was going to leave. And I was like, Oh my god, what did I do? Do my feet stink? [Jennifer laughs]
So he closes the door, and I go, “Oh I’m sorry,” and he goes, “Oh it’s no problem.” He took off his shoes. I don’t know how my pants came off. I never figured it out. I was on the ground somehow. I don’t know how I got there, either. He took my underpants off, and he took his underpants off. He was on top of me, and he was trying to do it, but it just hurt so much. It was like a bowling ball stuck up your nostrils. I mean, that is the analogy that I have come to be at one with. I mean, it really, really hurt. I started breathing really, really drastically. And I started making noises, and he told me to be quiet. Well, he didn’t tell me to be quiet. He said “Shhhh.” And I couldn’t exactly be quiet, because when someone’s doing that, you don’t want to just go, “Oh yes, this is nice, real nice.” I mean, he was like, “Shh, be quiet,” and I go, “It hurts,” and he goes, “I know, I’m sorry,” and I’m like, “You don’t know. You could never know.”