I am also not sexy. At least not in the traditional sense, not in the way that makes erections jump to attention the moment I walk into a room. I feel like my sexiness is a thing that creeps up on you, like mold on a loaf of corner-store bread you thought you’d get three more days out of. One day you’re slapping me on the back like I just pitched the shit out of a Little League game, then the next you’re like, “Holy shit, this lumbering laundry bag full of damp tennis balls actually has reproductive parts, and, boy, do I want to touch them.”
Which is why the dick thing was so weird. We’d had a passing introduction when I walked past the door as my mom was letting him in, certainly nowhere near long enough for him to graduate from slyly convincing me to write his social studies paper to awkwardly putting his hand up my shirt in the far corner of the playground. But when I rounded the corner to see what he needed, dude was just standing there with the damp slug of his thick penis stretched across his palm, a smug, satisfied smile plastered across his face. He’d obviously been peeing in the toilet he’d just fixed.
A champion masturbator by that point, I recognized what I used to think of as “the sparkle feeling” stirring to life in my flooded basement as I studied it from root to tip: tufts of dark curly hair nestling a ridged, veiny shaft that curved to a pale, smooth tip, still glistening with drops of urine. My immediate reaction was a desire to stroke it with my fingertips before gently taking it into my mouth, but other than a limited knowledge of some of the dirtier passages in an illicit copy of Wifey obtained from the library down the street, I didn’t know anything about sex or men or where a penis goes in your actual acne-studded, oily T-zoned body.
Theoretical television penises slip painlessly into women as they moan and writhe in ecstasy beneath someone they obviously love very deeply, but I had read enough magazines to know that it can be bloody and clumsy and embarrassing in real life. Also heterosexual intercourse definitely leads to fertilized eggs, and my mom and I were still sharing a bed, so where the fuck would we even put a baby? And while it might be good to have a baby with a skilled laborer who could stop leaks and put up drywall and apparently come to work in a freshly ironed shirt, I had gotten a B minus in science at the end of the school year. I was a thirteen-year-old who still sucked her thumb and was definitely not ready to be anyone’s mother.
“You wanna touch it?” he offered hopefully.
“Oh, no, thank you!” I replied with a forced cheerfulness, like I was at a friend’s house turning down his mom’s offer of a second helping of peas. (JUST GET TO THE DESSERT, DIANE.)
“No? Really?!” he asked in disbelief. “Not even a chubby girl like you?”
What does that even mean? It’s not like he was standing there holding a warm loaf of banana bread—I might have taken him up on that. But it was just an old, semi-flaccid pervert penis: What the fuck did my chubby have to do with his chubby?!
I stood on the threshold of the bathroom, trying to gauge how mad I should be at his insult. Why was he so shocked by my refusal—do fat girls like sex more than skinny ones? Does touching a penis lower your blood pressure or lessen your risk of developing type 2 diabetes? As a fat, gawky adolescent who was surely destined to live the rest of her life as a fat, gawky adult, would this be my last chance at sex? SHOULD I JUST TAKE WHAT I COULD GET?
As one of the few early possessors of breasts, I had certainly had them furtively felt up in various dark hallways and unmonitored bedrooms, but I wasn’t interested in racking up more physical conquests. I used to read a lot of dreamy romance novels, and so who cares about touching a cock if the person attached to it wasn’t going to fall madly in love with the beautiful princess buried under these unlovable layers of processed foods and self-loathing? Years of watching shows like Degrassi and Fifteen alone in my bedroom while my friends were trying out for the cross-country team taught me that it was okay to keep eating Cheetos for dinner because, one day, some hot young man would transfer to our school, and I’d trip adorably in front of him. I’d drop my adorably unorganized books and papers on his socially acceptable footwear, our eyes would meet as he crouched to help me pick them up, and he’d realize he should take me to prom and love me for the rest of my life. I spent the entirety of 1993 to 1997 biding my time waiting for Drake to get out of that wheelchair, slide my glasses off, and see the real me.
A semi-detailed manifest of a few smoking-hot dudes I’ve banged who thought I should have thanked them for the pleasure:
1.
“You really don’t know how lucky you are to be with me.” M was talking to me from the bathroom doorway, pulling his dick and balls taut so he wouldn’t nick them as he attended to his pubic hair with an electric beard trimmer.
I took a bite of my night doughnut, pensive. “Why, because you have six percent body fat?”
He laughed, which made his pecs flex, causing me to feel sorry for us both. “Man, kind of? I’m just, like, a really good catch.”
“But you wax your eyebrows. And you work at Best Buy.”
I’m not shitting on people who work in mass-market consumer electronics, because I have an hourly job, too, but dude, you were wearing a shirt with your name on it when you met me. What is all this “you should be grateful” bullshit? Also, you are the type of person who doesn’t understand that artfully styling one’s pubes is a shameful thing that should be done in private.