But he wasn’t hard enough. I don’t know if that’s a personal insult to me, or to him, whether he’s impotent or not, I don’t know. But he wasn’t hard enough, so he turned over and I gave him a hand job, and I guess he liked that, and he tried again, but I couldn’t. I mean, not that I physically couldn’t, but first of all, it hurt, and second of all, he didn’t have protection, and I didn’t want to get pregnant, and I didn’t know if he had AIDS or whatever. I mean, I’m sure he didn’t have AIDS. But I didn’t want to lose it that early.
So he never came. I mean he never went that deep in, and then he asked me to give him a blow job, and at first I didn’t, but he kept asking me, and I thought, poor guy, he’s not going to get it tonight, I guess I’ll give him some head. So I did, and that was really gross. It gagged me. In a big way. I was like, “Oh, this is real fun.”
And then we had to get up and go. I left the room, but I had to come back for my shoes. And when I came back he kissed me, which made me feel good. Because that made me feel like he didn’t regret anything. And then I left, and I’ve never seen him since, or heard about him. This has got to be boring for anyone who is listening, and this tape is almost out.
I could spend a lifetime unwinding what I heard on the tape. From the fact he had trouble getting hard to the part where he told me to be quiet, to the way I couldn’t recall key details of how I wound up on the floor.
I’d had three wine coolers before we went into the room, not enough to black out but enough to have a warm buzz. I remember feeling grateful for the drinks, because otherwise my heart might have punched out of my mouth. I remember lying on the floor, his bare shoulder shifting back and forth in my line of vision, and the voice screaming in my brain: Am I having sex right now?
The part that kills me is near the end, when he kisses me. Because that made me feel like he didn’t regret anything. It was all I cared about at 13. That I wouldn’t be someone he’d regret.
There are reasons for statutory rape laws. One is that 18-year-olds have very different expectations of dark and empty rooms than 13-year-old girls. But I was the kind of 13-year-old girl who didn’t want to be protected. Forget your laws and your conventions. I was ready for the “best summer of my life.” And I wanted to seem unfazed by what was happening. I didn’t want him to know how utterly inexperienced I was. I wanted to look cool.
My underpants were bloody when I got home. I spent years wondering if I’d lost my virginity, and if I’d consented, just as I would spend years wondering how I ended up in that Paris hotel room, and why I let Johnson stay in mine.
Was it rape? I don’t think so, though part of me still doubts my interpretation. I know some people will read it another way. But one of the great powers we have is the ability to give meaning to our own experience. To me, this was a bad and fumbling early sexual episode that has many meanings. But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years. And every time I did, alcohol was there.
ABOUT THREE YEARS into my sobriety, I was on a plane from DFW to New York. The guy beside me was 23. Rumpled and exhausted from staying up all night. He slumped beside me and flashed the sideways grin of a boy who gets what he wants. “I’m moving to New York,” he said. “Have you been before?”
“I have,” I said, and left it at that.
He was moving there to be an actor. Oh baby, you are screwed, I thought, but I didn’t say this. Instead, we talked about leaps of faith. We talked about Denzel, his favorite actor. I tried to prepare him for disappointment, as I’m sure everyone did: Don’t make fame the measure of success, I told him; make this move about learning something.
It was an early morning flight, and around us, heads tilted back with eyes closed and mouths open, so we whispered like two kids talking behind the teacher’s back. We talked so long that a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride felt like 30 minutes. I noticed all the times he touched my knee.
I was nearly 40, used up in some corners of history, and men my age were often chasing women with luscious rumps and tits that had yet to sag. I wasn’t looking for younger guys, but they seemed to find me anyway, and I wondered why. Maybe they sensed I was not interested in commitment yet. Or maybe they liked the grooves of a hand that knew its own strength. I was done trying to be anyone else.
“Do you think the mile-high club really exists?” he asked, raising his eyebrow.
“I hope not,” I said. “Fucking in an airplane bathroom sounds terrible.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, you’re right.”