Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (3 page)

M
y first couple of experiences with sex didn’t exactly go as planned. Then again, neither did the next forty. When I hear about women who have tidy, pretty, lingerie-infused sexual encounters, all I think is,
Where’s the part where you break your toe and have to mop up?
Some women’s torrid love affairs belong in movies with James Bond. Others of us, with Will Ferrell.

At the beginning of August, I began counting down the days to the start of high school. I couldn’t wait to walk down the hallways in slow motion with my posse, like in a John Hughes movie, and I didn’t even have that many friends. It was the
potential
that fueled my enthusiasm. Take this entry from my high school diary, dated September 1: “I know this year is going to be amazing. I want an amazing life, full of the most wonderful times, friends, boyfriends, laughs and tears, boyfriends, and for the upcoming years to be the best years EVER!”

Yes, I wrote
boyfriends
and
amazing
twice.

Western Canada High was not only the biggest high school in Calgary but also the coolest, situated in the heart of the city and surrounded by cute dress shops, restaurants, and cafés. Taking the public bus there every morning made me feel so grown-up—like I was going to my sexy job at a detective agency rather than to a dry biology class taught by a teacher so boring that the chapter on reproductive organs wasn’t even funny. My mother gave me fifty dollars for first-day-of-school clothes. My challenge: find an outfit that would communicate a unique sense of style that everyone wanted to copy but couldn’t, no matter how hard they tried. I’d be untouchable. The answer was Le Chateau, a retail chain that sold cheap, trendy clothing to high school girls whose parents had given them fifty dollars. It was also where all my friends shopped. Somehow we believed that the mass-produced lacey tops and identical jewel-toned felt berets we wore marked us as individuals. Lucky for me, I was able to set myself apart by being one of the few who looked good in mustard.

Although the standard cliques were well represented at our school—jocks, headbangers, stoners, nerds—the student body was essentially divided into two groups: the smart people and the rest of us. The smart people were enrolled in this Geneva-based International Baccalaureate Program, or the IB Program. Fortunately for them, it was before irritable bowel syndrome was a household name. This education program offered advanced classes for the more gifted students, ensuring them acceptance into prestigious colleges, and all but guaranteeing them plum careers at companies like AIG, Lehman Brothers,
Pfizer, and other top-notch corporate empires. The rest of us would have to settle for a shitty education at a mediocre college and a future working at some podunk company where our uncle knew the manager.

The clincher was that my application for the IB Program was rejected. During my interview with the Ministry of Swiss Intelligence, or whatever they called themselves, they claimed that the amount of time I spent in ballet classes would distract me from my studies. To which I blurted, “Listen, I’m a terrible dancer, not very flexible, and I can barely keep my balance in a double pirouette!” In retrospect, pleading mediocrity probably wasn’t the best strategy, but I accepted my fate. It was just as well. I didn’t fit their profile. I had decent grades but no specific plans to make anything of myself. This is not to say I didn’t have ambition—my focus was deeper. Per my journal, I had goals. Secure a boyfriend. Spiral-perm my hair. Lose my virginity. Probably in reverse order.

As with most high schools, the popular students at mine were the athletic rich kids, and I can tell you, I was neither of those things. It didn’t matter. I had no interest in being popular. I related more to the math whizzes, chemistry lab nuts, and drama geeks anyway. Ferris Bueller was my social role model, and I aspired to be a friend to all, without having to conform to any one clique. The ultimate self-assured outsider. Who knew this would prepare me for the life of a stand-up comic?

Also, I wanted to get my virginity
over with
, lose the new-car smell of my adolescence, shower, and start living
real
life. I worshipped my older sister, who moved back home after a fight with her
boyfriend when she was twenty-seven. The fight was so monumental that he apologized for it by buying her a nose job, a toy poodle, and a massive diamond ring. She accepted all the gifts but wasn’t interested in moving back in with him right away. I looked up to her so much, it surprised me that we were the same height. Even though we lived under the same roof, she existed in an alternate universe, one in which a looping conveyer belt ferried her daily from her bed, to her makeup vanity, through her extensive closet, then out the other side bedecked in spandex and sequins, where she’d be whooshed out the front door to a vast network of parties and bars—then back again for another round. She spoke to me like a fortuneteller, warning me of my future. It didn’t look promising. Before I’d even swallowed one drop of alcohol, she predicted that vodka would make me argue with my boyfriend (she was right), and that I’d also suffer a falling out when in the presence of Jose Cuervo and Captain Morgan. She promised me that losing my virginity would not be the beautiful and romantic experience movies made it out to be. Instead, it would be more akin to how English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in his natural state: nasty, brutish, and short. “Don’t waste it on someone special that you really love,” she advised. “Just get it over with so you can move on to better sex.”

The realization that I had control over how and when I lost my virginity empowered me. If my thighs were actually going to balloon out as much as my sister said they would over the next ten years, I needed to get sexually proactive.

Up to that point, I’d done my fair share of kissing, and even skipped
past second base with a Latino guy I met at a teenage nightclub called The Flipside. This was one of those all-ages dance clubs where fourteen-and fifteen-year-old kids would go to bop around to Madonna, Depeche Mode, and The Cure while downing five-dollar sodas.

Guys we didn’t know would ask us to dance, including this Latino kid who resembled my music idol, Prince. While Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar” segued into Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones,” he held me close, reached under my denim pencil skirt, and proceeded to finger me. I was fascinated that I could get to third base while standing vertically on a dance floor. It was more shocking than titillating, but it was progress. I applauded his dexterity. His hand snaked in there like an electrician finding a light switch in the dark. While he continued, my mind wandered to what would happen next. Would I have a boyfriend at a different high school? It had never occurred to me to look beyond the blue-lockered confines of our hallways. Would I go to two proms? I hoped he was from one of those bad schools in the Northwest.

The song ended, and Boy George’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” came on next. Not knowing what to do or say, I thanked him and dashed away to regale my friends with the details of my dance-floor diddle. They were in awe and asked me to point out the handy bandit, hoping he’d ask them to dance next. I looked around but my Latino lover had disappeared into the throng of dancing teenagers, perhaps to find a bathroom to wash his hands. We didn’t exchange numbers, and after thinking about that finger-bang moment over and over again for a couple of days, I learned that The Flipside had been shut down because some
kids had smuggled in shampoo bottles filled with alcohol. We’d hit the end of an era before it had even gained traction and settled back into our routine of scanning the gymnasium’s bleachers for potential suitors.

Most of my friends were appalled that I wanted to “get rid of” my virginity as soon as I could, as if I were talking about back acne or a sticker collection. To them, casting off my chastity so flagrantly sounded sinful and slutty. They stressed that popping your cherry with just anyone would be yucky and depressing and I’d regret it forever. My friend Cheryl was the only one who agreed with me. She was in the IB Program. She was also considered one of the prettiest girls in our high school and was a math and science wizard. Her logical brain saw the strengths of my theory. Either that or she was an enabler. It didn’t matter—Cheryl and I instantly became inseparable.

One Saturday afternoon, we were hanging out in Cheryl’s basement doing what we always did: listening to Prince while working on our Lotus 123 spreadsheet titled “Potent.wk1” (“potentials” being too long for the file name conventions of that era). We used it to rate guys on their looks, personality (which we called the “nice quotient”), and type of car they drove, and then converted these stats into a pie chart so we could see whose slice came up the biggest. I suggested that we should try losing our virginity on the same night—not to the same guy, of course, or in any scenario worthy of pay-per-view programming, but more as an intellectual data-gathering experiment. Cheryl agreed this was an excellent plan. But where could we set up our lab? It clearly had to be somewhere away from our parents, school, and prissy friends. And where would we find these lab-rat guys to begin with? While
our game of sexual Sudoku was missing a few numbers, we could still prepare for it, so we came up with a code phrase to signal each other if the moment was right: “Expand your horizons.” Brilliant.

To set the plan in motion, we met at Cheryl’s locker every lunch hour, located on the floor that was allocated to the IB Program, and ate our sandwiches while a bunch of the gifted and talented boys buzzed around us. What I lacked in blonde hair and high school ambition, I made up for in my ability to do silly impressions—especially of my family. I soon became known as “Cheryl’s jokey friend Ophira.” Did this win me dates? Not exactly, but at least they knew my name.

Among this small swarm of IB boys were a pair of twins named Jake and Matt. While they weren’t lab-trial quality, they had very high nice-quotients and were constantly trying to impress Cheryl. One day, they mentioned that they played in a rock band with two other guys.
A rock band?!
Cheryl and I were instantly intrigued. When could we see their band in action? we asked, and who
were
these other members? Jake told us (Or was it Matt? Who could tell.) that the lead singer and bassist ate their lunch in the cafeteria. No wonder we’d never met them! Since we brought our own bag lunch, we rarely ventured into the high school equivalent of a mess hall. It was time for a field trip. Cheryl and I grabbed our notebooks, reteased our bangs, and descended down to the lunchroom. Here, Jake and Matt motioned toward a couple of unoccupied gray enamel stools attached to the folding cafeteria table that the band claimed as their own.

Like any teenage girl worthy of her Jordache skinny jeans, I instantly fell for Robby, the band’s lead singer. He had dark-brown hair
that he gelled out into a spiky halo like The Cure’s Robert Smith—just a little shorter in the front to conform to the grooming code of the chain restaurant he worked at on weekends. The band, we learned, played U2 covers exclusively and called itself “B4”—a name that Robby had come up with, which in my notebook meant he was a borderline genius. I was smitten. Unfortunately for me, Cheryl had a crush on him too, which made mine all the more acute because Cheryl’s was reciprocated.

This left me with Robby’s dorky best friend, Cameron.

Tall and lanky, with dirty-blond hair that was more Robert Plant than Robert Smith, Cameron was the bass player for B4. He was nerdy. He was smart. But he liked me, and I figured anyone in the band was close enough. It bothered me that he was so quiet, but it would later turn out to be a valuable trait.

The first time I saw B4 play live was at a house party—a house party that
I’d
booked them for. It was spring, and my mother decided she needed a break from working long days at the grocery story and dealing with her two sour teenagers—me and my eighteen-year-old brother, the last of the six children she’d raised. Who could blame her? She booked herself a ten-day trip to visit her family in Holland. My older sister went on a vacation to Mazatlán with her on-and-off-again diamond-nose job-poodle-buying boyfriend, leaving my brother and me alone for half a month. The timing couldn’t have been better. I was going to do the one thing that I’d promised my mother I would never ever do: throw a party. A big one. In addition to recruiting B4 to play, I also planned to serve alcohol—courtesy of my brother. Before I had the nerve to ask him (I’d even rehearsed my plea), he’d already taken it
upon himself to bring home a case of beer and a case of wine coolers—the latter for my inner circle of girlfriends. He was a good brother. He was also a
stoned
brother, and he figured that the more drunk we were, the less we’d notice him hot-knifing hash on the kitchen stove. We had booze, a band, and a basement. It was more than any fifteen-year-old could ask for.

I loved the idea of breaking the rules, and I say “idea” because by the morning of the party I was a nervous wreck, scared stiff that nobody would come, and if they did, that something would get damaged, someone would spray-paint our lawn, or one of my drunk girlfriends would throw up under a couch cushion. I went nuts, preparing the house as if I were expecting an army of toddlers to arrive. I removed all the vases, taped up sharp corners, and moved out of harm’s way anything that could be crushed, broken, or vomited on. It was a smart move because at seven o’clock the entire school showed up. Instead of losing myself in the revelry, I ran around policing different rooms to make sure no one had too much fun. I actually started to wish my mother were there. She could have controlled the party while I rebelled against her, and we’d both relax.

A few hours later, when B4 plugged in their instruments to tune them, it hit me that this was one hell of a good party and I should try to enjoy myself. They started their set with U2’s hit of the year, “With or Without You.” Cheryl and I leaned against the basement support beam and swayed to the music, sipping our fizzy coolers. I was mesmerized by Robby’s singing but made sure to smile a lot at Cameron. When the set ended, as a treat I passed around a bottle of Schnapps
I’d found in my mom’s liquor cabinet. Judging by the layer of dust on the label, it had probably been sitting there since the first Star Wars movie came out in theaters. After sharing a swig with Cameron, I led him into the “makeout room”—my mother’s sewing room—where we necked and dry humped in between quilt squares and sprigs of crinoline from my ballet costumes. We were both such novices, our groping ended up being too licky and fast paced. Occasionally our teeth would collide. At the end of the night when I puked, it was from the combination of worry, wine coolers, and a dash of melon Schnapps. Cameron biked home on his beat-up ten-speed, and I scrubbed the house and my mouth for two days. It was a near-perfect teenage evening.