The This-Is-What-I-Saved-It-For? Blues
By Jack Mauro

I’ve known people who claim to have had amazing first times. That, I can handle. It’s repulsive, yes. But I can roll it down my back without too much effort, and move on.

What is less easy to stomach is when these lottery winners in the virginity sweepstakes want – and the arrogance of it is Napoleonic in scope – a little sympathy. They will never again recapture the thrill of that initial, earth-stopping experience, you see. This is a sad situation, an albatross for life. This is their curse.

The hubris. The stinking gall. As though one’s heart should go to such unfortunates, doomed to wander the planet in a quest for a repeat performance of something quite a few of us never fucking got to begin with. Better to have soared and waved at the stars once, I think, than to go through life not entirely sure the virginity is actually gone. And with a disproportionate hatred of men who wear black socks.

I speak from experience. The bitter kind. I will tell you all about it. Both of us will wish it were a raunchier tale to tell.

It is a steamy summer night. It is New York City. It is 1979. I am freshly twenty years old, and more steam is virtually pouring out of my nostrils because I am in a daily state of unrequited lust over hundreds of strangers with huge mustaches. I am slim and curly-haired and darkly Italian. I am, if not way hot, in hot’s neighborhood. And I am still a virgin. It’s time.

It is in fact too goddamn well past time. It isn’t good, waiting so long. Twenty translates to a fatal three or four years too many spent in imagining, in dreaming, in setting yourself up for a spectacular fall. Oh, I’m ready, and have been for a while. But no one has asked me yet. And I sort of think that, if one is to give it up for the first time, somebody else should be tapping at the windowpane.

But no one’s asked. It is getting ridiculous. All a boy can do, then, is schedule it in and get it done.

Now, there are millions of men for the taking in New York City on this multiply steaming night. Dozens of them, I reason, will be at the Dakota. Which is a plain, pseudo-Country gay bar on Third Avenue, and which is the only gay bar I know. It will do. It will have to; I’d already penciled it in.

The Dakota is a sea of tight denim and boots shuffling over sawdust. Country music moans from the jukebox, and beer bottles dangle from hanging hands like ripe fruit. It is all gloom, twang, jeans, and desire. I find an empty seat and order a Scotch. Let the bidding begin.

An hour passes. I drink two more drinks and begin liking Hank Williams. The bartender gets hotter and I make a mental note to keep him on reserve, if nothing else happens. Bartenders aren’t hustlers – some aren’t, anyway – but we give them money in a sexually charged atmosphere. After a few drinks, it’s not much of a stretch to consider throwing down more in order to get more.

Another hour passes. Nothing else happens. I drink on, for greater and greater courage for what is becoming less and less likely. I pump money into the jukebox. Hank Williams. The situation is becoming desperate; I am sending out a message to that fan of his in the crowd and gambling that he isn’t fat.

The wee hours come and the crowd gets…wee, too. It’s over, I think. I will once again love my pillow this evening. Then: a voice to my right salutes me. I turn to see the same arch, elderly, supercilious, bitchy/witty queen found in every gay bar since time began. He asks, by way of introduction and in a tone inexpressibly amused by his own mockery of triteness, what the last book I read was.

“The Brown bio of Shakespeare. I’m re-reading it.” I am honest.

He snorts gleefully. “Isn’t that a little sophomoric?”

I puzzle. “Maybe. But you didn’t come here looking for post-graduates, did you?”

He cackles in queenly delight. I have matched him in drollery; I am in. He sheds his condescending shell and becomes real, and nice. And he asks me if I know that I am being cruised from every direction. I look around. Well, now. The queen is right.

Your cheatin’ heart will tell on yew... It bellows into air thick with smoke and horniness, and I scan the room with no pretense at all of indifference. It’s not personal, Sonny – it’s business. Two cowboy eyes meet mine. I like these eyes. I like the cowboy around them, too. He saunters over, all jeans, flannel shirt, boots and ranch hand shyness. The bar lights explode in a closing time super nova and we are all horribly exposed. My cowboy’s eyes dilate, but remain seductive. I say, for the first and only time in my life: Let’s go to your place. I feel triumphant.

My cowboy’s name is Larry. He waves down a cab to take us to his apartment on Ninth Avenue. And I know, even then, that I’m in trouble. Cowboys aren’t named Larry, they don’t live in midtown Manhattan, and the cushion-y illusion of booze is behind us, in the locked-up, swept-up, Dakota.

But a chore is a chore. I am committed to do this thing. Besides, Larry has those great, soft, black eyes. I pray to whatever god looks after virgins: please, let the eyes be enough.

We sit in his living room. It is very white. I am very soft. We begin to make out. At which point a theory I’ve clung to for life is born: the Law of the Shirt. That is, if you can’t really tell what the guy’s body is like because of the shirt, it’s going to be worse than you thought. The body, I mean.

Larry then breaks off. He wants to show me something, and I am hoping beyond hope that it is a scrapbook of snaps of him roping a steer. I am sort of close. He wants me to see pictures, all right. But these reveal, not bulls and lassoes, but himself and Linda Ronstadt. At that moment I have a misty, half-formed remembrance of what a hard-on is and feels like, as old people become unsure if youth was real, or only a sweet dream.

The Ronstadt slideshow is packed away at last, and Larry goes to the bathroom. For a very long time. I am sitting on his white sofa and thinking that, if I move fast, the interesting and slender piece of statuary on his coffee table could help me accomplish my goal for the evening, and in a more all-around satisfying and manly way. I could be done and gone before he returns and the Cher portfolio comes out.

But, no. Larry is back. I look at his eyes one last time, wanting them to be and do a million things eyes aren’t, and can’t. Then my own eyes look down to see that the forty-five minutes of bathroom time was needed, it seems, to get the cowboy boots off. Under them are black dress socks, adorning skinny white calves under skinnier white thighs. He comes to me and, like a POW frantic to reach a level a spiritual plane and thusly remove himself from the grim physicality of torture, I send my mind and my soul far away, or at least to Seventh Avenue. 

A neutered dawn paints Larry’s window. We shake hands – not a farewell customarily following great sex, you understand - and part. I cross to Eleventh Avenue, heading for the Empire Diner. Over coffee and eggs and misery, I’m all right. It has been lousy, to be sure. It may not even qualify as a deflowering; flowers have to deserve better. But it is done.

There’s this to be said, too, for the rotten first time: recapturing the experience won’t be an issue. 


© Jack Mauro, All Rights Reserved. Article provided by GayLinkContent.com.