Setting: The Berkshires. 2002. Summer.
The players:
Alexandra: New York City actress. Aggressive in a bisexual vampire kind of way
Allison: The bisexual slutty stoner from the hippie school
Earl: The sweet but simple innkeeper
Kevin: The virgin
By the third year of my college career, I had gotten used to Friday night escapades that could have been scripted by bad porn writers.
“You have such nice boobs! Can I feel them? Here, feel mine!”
That kind of thing.
I headed off to summer stock expecting to keep this trend going. After all, summer stock is basically spring break for theater nerds. It’s dozens of ensembles of hot, talented people coming together to make art in the woods for three months. How could I not get laid?
There’s a lot of great performance that happens in the Berkshires in the summer: Molière, Shakespeare, light opera, ballet, symphonies, and on and on. The show I was working on was not any of those things. I interned at a dinner theater musical revue that satirized current events. It was the kind of show that used the song La Bamba to parody the India/Pakistan conflict. Real classy stuff. Each table had a different “topical” name, like “The White House,” “Gaza,” and “Silicon Valley.”
At this show, we had two main customers: Old New York theater queens and older New York theater Jews. One night, I was working the door when one of the latter kinds of patrons refused to sit at her assigned table, Palestine.
“How can I sit at a table,” she exclaimed, “that doesn’t exist?!”
The production housed all the interns in a ski lodge in a tiny town called Otis. The residents of Otis had bumper stickers on their cars that said “Notice Otis.” It wasn’t a touristy thing. It was a desperate plea for recognition.
Our lodging, as everything related to the interns, was clearly a way to stretch a budget to its breaking point while squeezing out as much underpaid labor as possible. The ski lodge was likely beautiful with a light dusting of snow, but at the height of summer it looked like a shrunken version of the hotel in The Shining. The place was called The Grouse House, but we interns took to calling it the Gross Houss.
The rooms were upstairs, and the downstairs held a bar and restaurant. I never saw anyone in the bar or restaurant other than Earl. When he didn’t have anything better to do, Earl would bartend for us, which just added to the whole Shining ambiance.
Earl was a tall, grizzled man. He was, as country folk would say, “simple.” I don’t mean that as an insult; he was just a simple dude who tended to the Gross Houss in a white undershirt and sweatpants. I envied him. Earl was both sweet and creepy in that horror movie way, where you didn’t know if he was the serial killer or the dude who’d save everyone at the end with a well-timed shovel to the killer’s head. He liked the company of us four college rapscallions, particularly since three of the four of us were pretty girls. Earl was simple, but he was no fool.
On the first night in the Gross Houss, we lost an intern after Earl told us about George, the Native American ghost who lived upstairs. Lucille was back in her car so fast, she didn’t even turn her head when she said, “Black folk don’t suffer ghosts.”
Lucille was replaced by Alexandra, a New York City actress who imagined herself a star. She reminded me of Carrie Bradshaw, all wacky outfits and self-importance, but brunette and stretched to nearly six feet tall.
Alexandra and I got along because we both loved drugs and sex. These two things have a way of bridging even the widest gap between women. The problem was, all the good drugs were still in New York, and the only thing with a reasonable cock in a twenty mile radius was Kevin, the virgin. Neither Alexandra nor Kevin were my type, but summer stock has a way of changing a woman.
Kevin was a classic musical theater virgin: the kind of guy whose own mother assumed was gay, whose first kiss was a stage kiss, and whose idea of a good time was transcribing Top 40 hits for his a cappella group. Being a posh kid, Kevin brought a big TV and video games to the Gross Houss. When it was his shift at the theater, he let me play Legend of Zelda in his room.
I had slept with virgins before, but I’d since sworn them off. They were never, ever worth the trouble.
Alexandra seemed resolved, however, to make that cock carry her through the humid Massachusetts summer.
One afternoon I was swashbuckling through Hyrule with a joint hanging from my lips when Kevin rushed into the room, sweaty and awkward. I didn’t think anyone else was home but took his weirdness as my cue to save and quit.
I went to the kitchenette to find Alexandra, fighting with a bag of baby carrots. This kind of low-level drama continued for a few days until I realized something was going on.
Everything came to head on the fourth of July. It was a brutally humid night, and the interns celebrated our nation’s birth by drinking Yellow Tail out of the bottle in our underwear, holding sparklers.
We went on a drunken twilight walk through the eerily quiet town, climbed a tree in the Otis cemetery, and talked trash about the actors and producers of the show.
Back at the Gross Houss, the fourth intern passed out, leaving me, Alexandra, and Kevin in his room. The three of us undressed and started making out. To my delight, Alexandra was a good kisser and had a phenomenal body, too often hidden by tutus and pleather corsets.
At this point I think it’s important to acknowledge that queer women hate being exoticized by straight guys. The whole, “Let’s make out to get these guys horny” is an obnoxious trend that puts our sexuality fully in the realm of patriarchal sex fantasy, and most of us resent it. That said, when the straight dude is a virgin, it can be pretty funny to watch his brain explode. Alexandra seemed to be on the same page with me on that.
I cuddled up on one side of Kevin while Alexandra was on the other. She and leaned over to kiss above his chest. I reached over his bare torso and slid my fingers into Alexandra, giving Kevin a friendly tug along the way. Kevin stared in wide-eyed wonder at Alexandra’s face as it moved through contortions of pleasure he had obviously yet to see. She moaned and squealed as she came on my hand.
Alexandra cooed, coming down from her orgasm. She returned to lucidity just in time to hear Kevin grunt and moan.
I glanced down to see his belly covered in jizz. Alexandra and I shared a confused look. We had barely touched the kid.
Really? we said to each other with a silent look.
Figuring he was going to have to sit this game out for the next five to ten minutes, I crawled over his chest so I could lay on top of Alexandra and get better leverage. We kept fucking until Kevin was hard again. Though I hadn’t been particularly attracted to Alexandra, and I’m sure she felt the same way about me, sex with her felt like a fun diversion, a minor escape from the celibate hellscape that was summerstock in the Birkshires. We enjoyed a slutty solidarity, and it was our duty to support each other through those dark days and dry nights.
At this point I figured I should tap out and let Alexandra take the lead, so I excused myself with some pecks on the lips and went back to my room.
The shouts from Kevin’s room continued. I slipped my Velvet Goldmine DVD in my laptop for a little soft-core dandy-on-dandy action, rolled a joint, and cranked open the windows. Warm night air and Al Green on the bar’s stereo wafted into my room. I jacked off. Nothing quite like Christian Bale taking it up the ass from Ewan McGregor to get the juices flowing, amirite? I enjoyed a loud, boisterous orgasm, containing a whole summer’s worth of sexual frustration, to let the kids down the hall know I was still appreciating their vibe. Alexandra responded with another gregarious orgasm.
I picked up my laptop, pulled down the sheets to get into bed, and discovered a giant earwig on my pillow. I screamed.
“You okay, Allison?” a man’s voice queried.
“Yeah,” I called out, trying to calm my blood chemistry. “Just a bug.”
My panic passed and I looked around, wondering where the voice came from. It wasn’t Kevin.
I stuck my head out my open window. On the deck just below, Earl was entertaining the first guests the Gross Houss had seen all summer. Dinner and cocktails all around. Earl looked up and smiled.
“You having a fun fourth?” he asked, a cheeky grin on his stubbled face.
The seven patrons at the table looked up too.
I waved, hoping the night hid my blush. “Um. Okay. Happy Fourth.”
Kevin and Alexandra’s romance didn’t last the summer. Alexandra and I never hooked up again either. Like many queers before me, I ended up having to visit NYC to get properly laid.
But Kevin did finally bid adieu to the big V, which warms my heart.
At the curtain of that summer, all I can add is,
If my words have offended,
think of this and all is mended.
A musical theater virgin is no more,
once he has the chance
to enjoy a good score.