Straight No Chaser

July 2000

it's campaigning season around here. this is almost completely uninteresting to me, except that two of my close friends are running for offices. marcus will win this year, i think, because he's well-known on campus and has built up tons of clout with most of the higher-ups. treesje is a different story. she's running for junior class treasurer, which is inherently and situationally hilarious--inherently because she's disorganized and irresponsible (which so far has made for an interesting campaign); situationally because she is the WORST at dealing with money. the absolute worst. we make incessant fun of her for having absolutely no financial skills. she mooches and mooches and mooches for most of the month, and then as soon as her parents send her money (always in a gigantic windfall, a mistake on their parts) she blows it all on a new outfit or gifts for sean; same thing when she gets a paycheck or gets a few dollars for doing someone's hair.

as far as the voting process goes, i'm not the type to start worrying about my own integrity when it comes time to cast my vote. true, she's my friend (she was my roommate last year; i know her better than anyone else on this campus does) and she deserves my support, but helping her campaign is enough. i sat at her information table for two fruitless hours this afternoon while she took a midterm and spent even longer cutting up powerade labels to put together a batch of her gimmicky campaign handouts. i think she'd make the world's worst treasurer, and a year isn't long enough for her to "grow into the role," since that would involve shedding nineteen years' worth of heinously bad habits. so i probably just won't vote for anyone. i'd feel bad if i actually voted against her.

anyway, like i said, all that is pretty much entirely uninteresting.

grim's posts about creagh and claudia got me thinking back over my own short, ugly romantic history, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong, and how it happened without my noticing it. the commonest question i get, from friends and strangers alike (small campus means everyone knows the intimate details of everyone else's life), is that of why, at age twenty and with no inhibiting deformities, i'm still a virgin. my answer? randy.

i've probably mentioned him before, in cursory contexts because he was in and out of my life within a month. i was fifteen and the youngest counselor at a five-week camp up in massachusetts; he was the twenty-two-year-old tennis instructor who, being a jamaican transplant, held far more allure than any of the other males on staff that year. of which there were quite a few, kitchen staff and maintenance crew members who naturally got horny every so often, being stranded in the woods for weeks on end. everyone, i think, gets one summer of being the object of mass affection in a contained environment like that. you don't even have to be cute--it's summertime and the men haven't seen outside women in ages, so all you really have to do is put on a skirt to be instantly sexy. 2000 was my summer. i was thin but not skinny (one last height leap was still a few months ahead of me), my hair was braided and i'd just figured out lip gloss. for the first and last time in my life, i was a sexual commodity. but i was deathly afraid of boys, and over a span of a couple weeks i turned down countless drinks, smokes, tokes and quickies.

randy was the last to approach me, and caught me completely off guard. he was SO much older, SO much taller, SO sought after (all the other female counselors had been trying since day one) and SO exotic. i snuck around with him for a few days, finding random little hidden places to "talk"; he told me about his university days and his girlfriend and his plans to be a high-powered ambassador, and, in bizarrely explicit detail, his sex life. again, i was fifteen. i'd never even been frenched at that point, but you'd never know it from the way i kept up with him in conversation. i was vague and aloof about everything he said, and got him good and convinced that i was some kind of tiny precocious nympho.

perfect. we started getting stranded in weird places, alone: the parking lot at six flags during a cancelled field trip, the laundry hut during a terrible thunderstorm, the freezer room in the mess hall...he started kissing me without making me uncomfortable, and stealing my clothes without making me uncomfortable, and on a couple occasions he showed me his penis (which eventually i'd come to find out was unnaturally huge). and on and on. i was a little kid playing a game, trite but true, and then the next thing i knew he had me pinned to a couch in one of the unused huts at four in the morning, and was daring me to do anything but what he wanted me to, and instead of getting panicky (since for some reason, all that summer i couldn't seem to work myself up to necessary terror) i just told him, very levelly, that i was saving sex for marriage for the following reasons: [insert reasons as they would have sounded coming from a fifteen-year-old whose mental dictionary had more entries than her mental encyclopedia, if you know what i mean]. and just like that, they were all true; i fooled him with one charade and then myself with the other, because up till that point i'd never thought about it seriously, hadn't ever been propositioned, hadn't considered that sex would ever be part of my life.

(he tried to rape me, is what happened next, and i'll never quite figure out how i got out of that one, since in addition to being seven years older than i he weighed at least a hundred pounds more, and was high on ganja and just basically wasn't taking no for an answer. i ended up in a different building, in front of the camp coordinator's door about to knock, and what i was going to say was "randy sexually assaulted me in the murphy hut, and he's been drinking and smoking after the kids go to bed," and he would have been fired, but instead i got the shakes and i just slept on the floor, right there outside of the coordinator's bedroom, and didn't go anywhere till the next morning. and almost got fired and sent home for not being in the hut where i belonged. and didn't look randy in the face for the remaining week, or allow myself to wind up alone with him--or any shady male--for like the next year.)

five years later i've grown up a lot. there was an ugly boyfriend situation in there, one that i dealt with well, and now there is marcus and i love him; he's restored my faith in masculinity and i no longer believe that every guy wants to rape me (even down here, where it happens every day on the streets just off campus). but i'm holding on to this marriage thing for a variety of reasons, and while i get sick of fielding the questions, and of defending what is probably a circumstantially wise decision anyway(the std rate in my school's zip code is 85%), it's totally worth it if it means an extra gift to one day give someone like marcus (who, by the way, is waiting also, and expects the same of his future wife--and yeah, that's an added bonus, that it means i get to stay on his list of potentials. but i promise that's not entirely why).

anyway, yeah. it's late and i've rambled. felt good to share that story, though.