I lost my virginity in New Jersey at a strip mall motel replete with a red heart-shaped bathtub and a water bed. I thought it was the most romantic place in the world because I was with the first man I ever trusted, Johnnie.
Now here I was, 33 years later, sitting with him on the front porch of his house in our tiny beach town on the Jersey Shore, laughing and crying while drinking a beer as we recalled our first time. Johnnie sat next to me in his wheelchair. He couldn’t actually laugh or drink as he had A.L.S., but he could blink his responses through the screen attached to his chair.
What a horrible disease A.L.S. is. Over the course of four years, the most vibrant, handsome man lost his ability to speak, eat and walk and would soon lose his ability to breathe.
Though we hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, our families were still close, so I made a special visit to the town where our family spent every summer since I was a child to see him one last time.
My mother and I had come to say goodbye that morning. After an hour of forced conversation, we were still stuck with pleasantries. I knew when we got up to leave that I needed to say something I had wanted to express for a long time. I bent down and whispered in his ear, “How lucky were we? You taught me many things, but a huge one was trust. And — sex.”
He replied with the smiling emoji that has hearts for eyes.
On that night in the motel room with John, I finally trusted and was blessed to discover my own body’s pleasure and sex borne out of deep vulnerability. I was finally able to let go.
Decades later, a few hours after my mother and I visited, I sat on the balcony of my parents’ new home, staring out at the beach where Johnnie and I first fell in love. I felt alone and bereft and needed to speak to someone about all the memories rushing back. My life had changed radically since my Jersey Shore days, but the past was newly alive from seeing Johnnie. I thought about reaching out to one of my friends in Los Angeles or New York, but they would never be able to understand.
Who would? Johnnie. So I texted him, “what ya doing?”
“Oh, just sitting around,” he texted with a smiling emoji. “Want to grab a six-pack and come over?”
It must be hard to write banter by blinking your eyes, but he was still excellent at it, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
And that’s what I did. I went to Wawa and got a six-pack of Bud Light and met him as his caretaker rolled him out onto the front porch. I sat in a rocking chair with my feet propped up on an old bench. We sat like that “talking,” laughing and crying until the sun came up — me drinking beer and him wanting to drink beer, as he said. It would take a while for him to blink back answers and questions on the screen, but I didn’t mind the empty spaces. It felt safe between us. It always had.
We talked about when we first met. It was the summer after I graduated high school. I fell in love with him down the shore in Sea Isle City, where we now sat. Back then, my family owned a pizzeria called the Charcoal House, an appropriate name as my family was going up in flames that summer.
My parents and we four teenagers slept in a one-bedroom apartment next door to the restaurant. It wasn’t ideal to fall in love with someone when I slept in a double bed with my sister as my father snored on the bed next to us.
Johnnie was the hot, rich boy who lived in (what looked to me then) a mansion on the next block. I would finish my 12-hour shift making cheese steaks and walk past his house to the beach until one day I tripped over the sand dunes, my nose in a book, and ran right into him.
He was tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed with a movie-star smile, yet he was even more beautiful on the inside. And soon after our first encounter, we were pretty much inseparable.
That was the same summer my mother was told she had five months to live and started going back and forth to Philly for chemo treatments while continuing to work to try to keep us all afloat. The same summer that my father went even more off the rails, raging drunkenly over every not-perfect pizza.
On Labor Day 1985, all of us teenagers were exhausted from working such long hours at the pizzeria. My mother was bald and throwing up, and I was tasked with closing the restaurant for the season. I decided to close an hour early and started storing the pizza pans when my ornery, drunken father stumbled in.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he hollered. “We’re not closed yet. We still have one hour.”
“We’re tired, Dad,” I said. “I’m closing.”
And he hauled off and slapped me across the face. I fell onto the floor and hit my head on the pizza dough mixer.
Maybe hitting my head made me lose my mind because suddenly I became Wonder Woman. I got up and pushed his 225-pound body out of the back screen door and onto the rocks outside. I screamed at him and punched him on the ground, and I just kept screaming and punching until someone pulled me off.
That someone was Johnnie.
He and the entire neighborhood had come running. Twenty or so people, including his parents, were just staring at me. I saw their pity and was so ashamed. I was humiliated. They knew the secret. That my father was wounded and rageful, and that I was just like him.
And still Johnnie loved me. He was my protector. My knight in shining armor. And from what I heard over the years, he was a knight for a lot of people.
That night on the porch, we talked about our past and about our children. He had gone on to have two wonderful children that were the light of his life. He was sad that they would not grow up with a father. He knew he was going soon. We talked about our mothers, his who had died too young and mine who had miraculously survived. And my father, who eventually healed from the abuse he’d suffered as a child, stopped the drugs and alcohol and became a wonderful grandfather.
But no matter how heavy things got as Johnnie and I talked, his eyes still sparkled with the wit and wisdom he’d always had. Even though he was now gray-haired and very thin, the sexual energy between us was palpable, electric.
I kept reaching out to touch him, rubbing his chest, shoulders and knee. He wished he could touch me back, he wrote. I took my feet off the broken bench, propped them on his knee and placed his hand on me.
Oddly, A.L.S. affects voluntary muscle movement, and because sexual arousal is an involuntary response, sexual function essentially remains intact. His was definitely intact.
If I hadn’t had just fallen in love with my future wife, and if he didn’t have a wife, who knows what would have happened?
After reliving that infamous Labor Day, there was a long pause as I wiped my tears while he wrote, “I hurt for you but was so proud of you that day.”
And as I got older, I became proud of me too.
My complication from growing up with a wounded father made me terrified to let any man close. My passion veered toward rage and distrust. But Johnnie, who died a few months later, helped me hold people to a higher standard, and I went on to pick loving and kind partners for the rest of my life.
He and I flirted until the sun came up, reminiscing about our first time in that seedy motel room, but we couldn’t remember the name of it.
“The Feather Inn,” he typed as I was getting up to leave.
How many women can say that their first time was amazing?
Every person deserves a Johnnie — for their first time or anytime or every time. Someone patient and kind who is willing to hold all of you. All your broken and beautiful pieces. I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to be loved like that.
I still can’t.
The post Touching My First Time for the Last Time appeared first on New York Times.
