I’d had close to no sex when I got to college. When I was seventeen, I lost my virginity to my girlfriend and she to me. The experience was “nice” and we drove around and smoked unfiltered Camels afterward. About a year later I got drunk at a party and had sex with a girl I didn’t know terribly well on my friend’s waterbed. I’m sure I was both flailing and unskilled, but I can at least tell today’s teens that I had sex on a waterbed—something they’ll never do since nobody buys waterbeds anymore because they’re stupid. In other words, my penis had been inside a couple of girls, but I didn’t really know what to do with it, and I could have been charitably described as “very awful” at sex.
When it came time for me to pick a college, I chose NYU. I’d decided I wanted to be an actor and NYU had a renowned musical theater program. I figured if I wanted to act, and do it well, why not train the hell out of my body and voice rather than just study scripts, frown, and pretend an empty glass was filled with orange juice. From what I understand, that’s what one does in a regular acting class. I, on the other hand, wanted to sing and dance all day, every day—which is exactly what I did. During my college search, I only looked at schools in Boston and New York. As great as the schools in Boston were, I thought it would be more edifying to venture a little farther from home to a city I knew roughly nothing about. It proved to be a good decision, since merely living in New York City forced me to constantly vacuum up nonstop stimuli through every sensory door. Add college to that equation and you can see how it was a very thorough educational experience.
When I arrived at NYU, I made a concerted effort—as part of my well-rounded education—to get my dinky stinky as often as possible. I was AS A RULE drunk anytime I even kissed a girl my freshman year, and none of those sexual experiences stand out in my mind as anything other than clumsy and desperate. That said, I definitely got some fuckin’ done.
Early in my first semester I wound up having drunken and somewhat athletic unprotected sex with a girl who was in about forty of my classes. I wanted to make sure we could relive the horror eleven or twelve times a day when we made unintentional eye contact. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that we were firmly established pals before we got fucked-up and curdled our relationship with drunk sex. College!
A couple of days later I noticed some little red bumps peeking out among my pubic hair. I was eighteen and had begun puberty at that magic time in the 1980s when kids were taught that having unprotected sex even once meant you’d die of AIDS within six months, and then your mom would have to light a picture of your face on fire in front of the White House and disown your memory in a special ceremony. I was sincerely terrified and I figured the extreme fatigue I was feeling wasn’t from my terrible hangover or from being up late studying, but rather from my rapidly diminishing T-cell count.
I was too ashamed and scared to talk to any friends or family, so all I could think to do was to go to NYU’s health services and find out how fast-acting my particular strand of AIDS was. I sat in the waiting room imagining how, exactly, I would tell my mom I arrived at college and, as my first order of business, immediately went out and got AIDS. The doctor who saw me was an older gentleman who didn’t seem shocked by my AIDS. In fact, he said pretty quickly that it didn’t look like any STD he knew of. He thought it was probably just a heat rash or a skin irritation of some kind, but just to be safe, he suggested that I go to a dermatologist.
I walked a half a block to the dermatologist’s office and sat in the waiting room, still figuring that I had some type of advanced AIDS rash which would perhaps take many forms before it finally appeared as Death bearing a scythe and a wheelbarrow to cart me off to the particular hell reserved for naughty eighteen-year-old boys who drink alcohol, do marijuana, and then put their penis in nice people. I was eventually sent to an examination room where a ravishingly beautiful young woman, not possibly over twenty-seven years old, walked in.
“Hello. How can we help you today?”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, um, I really wish that you were an old man and not a young woman.”
“Don’t be silly; I have all sorts of patients. Young and old, male and female. No reason to be embarrassed about anything.”
“Okay …”
“So you have a rash?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see it?”
I unzipped my pants and pulled down my boxers so that the top of my pubic hair was just visible.
“Take them all the way down.”
I pulled my pants and underwear down, fully exposing my eighteen-year-old penis and testicles to an extraordinarily beautiful young doctor with long brown hair and green eyes who smelled very good.
She stuck her face right on in there and checked everything thoroughly. Then she said this to me: “Is there any irritation around your anus?”
“NO. NO, THERE IS NOT. MY ANUS IS FINE.”
“How do you know? You can’t see it. Let me take a quick look.”
“I am certain there is no rash there.”
“Turn around.”
I turned around.
“Spread your buttocks open.”
I peeled apart my fear-clamped butt cheeks and showed her my shameful little butthole. She leaned over in her chair and gazed into it. I prayed fervently that God would give me a fatal stroke.
“Looks okay to me. Nothing out of the ordinary back there. You can pull your pants up.”
I pulled my pants up and she wrote out a prescription for a topical cream that she claimed should clear the rash right up. I ran from her Washington Square Park office.
Why, I asked myself, WHY did she need to look at my butthole? Couldn’t she have prescribed the cream based on what she saw up front? Was she some type of butthole enthusiast? Should a doctor be allowed to be so beautiful? Was she really a doctor at all or had I been tricked and filmed by the Candid Camera: Special Butthole Unit? I was on fire with embarrassment and shame. I had spread open my most secret of areas and a beautiful woman I had just met had CAREFULLY STUDIED IT. She could draw my butthole from memory! Later that night, as she lay in bed replaying her day, she might think about my butthole. Over lunch, with another beautiful young doctor, she might say, “I saw the weirdest butthole today.” Perhaps the girl I’d had athletic sex with had been unsatisfied and hired an actress to dress up as a doctor and shame me. ALL THESE WERE POSSIBILITIES.
The third place I visited that day was a clinic where they drew a vial of my blood.
They sent me a letter a week later that said, “Congratulations! You do not have AIDS.” I’m paraphrasing; I really should have saved it. It probably said something like “HIV STATUS: NEGATIVE” or something clinical and deliciously severe.
After my inaugural AIDS test at age eighteen, I became a diligent condom carrier and when most subsequent lovers had the good fortune to lie under my grunting, sweaty mass, they were always the grimacing recipient of an eager and rubber-sheathed penis boner.