Josh emails: Within seconds of meeting an attractive girl, I get a feeling about whether or not I’ll be able to sleep with her and how much effort it will take to accomplish this. I can be a bit of a womanizer but I am a very lazy one. I prefer to save my energy for writing rather than seducing.
My intuition has rarely been wrong. I’ve never bedded a woman who I initially determined was out of my league. I have, however, managed to bollix up numerous potential seductions by being too crude, too forward, too shy, too wimpy, too aggressive, or just plain too Josh.
I’ve always feared women. I’m scared by how much I want them. I’m scared by how awkward I can feel around them. I’m scared by their ability to cut me down and blow me off.
It’s much easier to masturbate to pornography. Starting in 11th grade, I kept a collection of Penthouse and Hustler magazines in the bushes outside my home to visit as the need arose.
I kept myself very busy after high school, so busy I was rarely in a situation to lose my virginity. When my one chance arrived on New Year’s Eve 1986, my hands were so cold from the adrenalin coursing through my system that they freaked her out when I applied them to her chest and I got no further.
In February 1988 my life slowed down forever when I came down with what doctors later diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. From here on, I would spend half of my life in bed.
I figured I might as well make the most of it.
I transferred to UCLA in the fall and lived on a special quiet floor in ***** Hall for serious students. I met a girl from Asia. She became my first.
We got together the week of Valentine’s Day, 1989. I was 22.
We spent our first night together. The next evening, my roommate was gone. This would be it.
I had hoped for more from my first. I had hoped for a beauty or at least a brain. I had hoped for a woman who’d become my wife and the mother of my children. I had hoped for a woman I could show off.
She was nothing like what I had hoped. She was just sweet and cuddly and most important of all, she was willing.
I had talked a very big game at UCLA, pretending that I was the biggest stud in the world. I had read lots of books about sex. And magazines. I’d watched porn movies. I’d tied me kangaroo down sport from the age of 16, sometimes three times a day.
Now I headed down to the scary zone. Oy, how it smelled of rotten fish.
I’m a vegetarian. I have a very delicate sensibility. I have vaginaphobia.
She was embarrassed and pulled me up.
I tried to slide inside of her but it was no go. She was dry. Even though I knew it could damage the condom, I generously applied Perfect Choice Dry Skin Lotion. I was frantic to succeed in this last area of manly endeavor left to me, but it still wouldn’t work.
She took charge and put me on my back. She lay on top of me and with her little hands guided me inside of her.
Now I was a man.
I hugged her and we laughed and talked for what seemed like 30 minutes. Then she waved her hands for me to finish. I did quickly and felt glorious.
As has become my lifetime practice, I got off the bed quickly and went to wash my hands. Outside my door in the hallway, I ran into friends who’d overheard our exertions. One guy, Tom, a fellow Asian, high-fived me by the sink. My new girlfriend, however, he could not look at for the rest of the school year.
