Ex Boyfriends Who Liked to Wear My Underwear

Today's column is a little off topic, and when Tracy said I could write about sex this may not have been what she was thinking! I wrote this to perform at a long-running reading series in NYC called In The Flesh. It's held in a crazy fun bar, there are free cupcakes, and people tell the most bizarre stories. This is from a memoir I'm working on and since I read it last night for an audience I figured I'd share it with SheWired too.

Ex Boyfriends Who Liked to Wear My Underwear, Part 1
    
I lost my virginity to an oil rigger named Sonny. I was living in Hobbs, New Mexico at the time; a town on the Texas/New Mexico border most notable for the incredibly gory Passion Plays put on at the local High School. Every Easter the entire population of Hobbs turned out to watch a bloody reenactment of the crucifixion, like a high concept snuff film.

The convenience store carried fake maps that showed Hobbs as if it was two miles from hell.  My friend Sam and I moved there right after we graduated from high school. It seemed like an adventure. Sam's dad had taught classes at the community college but got fired for being a socialist so we moved into a house he still owned. He'd been unable to sell it when he left town.

The day Sam and I moved in there were three boys leaning against a flat primer black mustang on blocks in the front yard next door. Metallica's Master of Puppets blared out of the crappy speakers. Two of them had longish hair and looked like your typical next-door neighbor heshers. Imagine a skull shaped bong on the nightstand and some black light posters from Spencers of naked women or maybe wizards on horseback.

But not Sonny, he just looked like a good ol' boy. Like a character out of Smokey and the Bandit. I dug him because I loved Smokey and the Bandit almost as much as I loved Cannonball Run. I'm pretty sure Adrienne Barbeau in Cannonball Run, driving that black Lamborghini, in that pink racing jumpsuit, unzipping it to her navel to show off her red lace bra every time she got pulled over, yeah, I'm pretty sure that made me gay. Burt Reynolds movies made me gay.

But I was only 18 and still mostly confused about everything having to do with sex. Sonny had short brown hair and wore a pressed plaid shirt. He looked clean cut, as much as rednecks are able to pull off clean cut. And he was wearing an NRA "I'll Give Up My Gun When They Pry it From My Cold Dead Hand" belt buckle without irony.

Excited to meet some guys, Sam and I tarted up a bit. Curling iron still cooling on the bathroom counter we tromped outside ready to wow them with our performance of West Coast sophistication, California blondes in cut offs and dangly chandelier earrings.

Sam was braver than me around guys, so she posed with a hand on her hip, facing the entire group and said "So what's fun to do in this town?"
Sonny took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked us up and down with approval. He wasn't very tall, maybe 5'8".  He looked over at Sam and drawled "smoke pot, play pool, get drunk, screw." 

Sam said, "Thanks" and headed off to the Alpha Beta to buy diet coke.

I invited him over as soon as I saw him again. I was 18 and had decided it was high time I got laid, mostly because none of my friends were virgins and I was starting to feel like a freak. Sonny was 25 and happy to oblige.

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(continued)

Hobbs had nothing going for it, no jobs, nothing. Sam and I couldn't find any work at all. We went to the local career center once a week but even McDonalds wouldn't hire us. I was bored out of my fucking mind.

When Sonny wasn't around I worked out at the local rec center and watched BET, until even that became unbearable and I started staying home all the time and reading the novels that Sam's dad had left behind. His bookshelves had a lot of hippy stuff like Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Call Me Ishmael, Jonathon Livingston Seagull, a lot of Marx, some Khahil Gibran, some Carlos Castenda.

I started with the Hesse books. Siddartha is Hesse's novel about the search for enlightenment. It appealed to the California teenage hippy intellectual in me, so I applied the teachings to my life in Hobbs. It was a good way for me to deal with my abject ennui and complete lack of direction.

In the beginning of the book Siddhartha and his best friend Govinda seek out physical pain, because they believed that when pain looses itself over the body, the self recedes and a calm is attained.

But then their pain fades and they still aren't enlightened, and they have to look around for other stuff to do the trick. Siddhartha goes through a faze where he realizes how alone man really is, and then he embraces hedonism. Eventually, at the end of the book he understands that we are all one.

I got through my days by seeing them as similar to Siddhartha's journey. I was using sex and a diet of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese as a path to a greater understanding of self.

The sex was fun. Or at least I was enjoying it, and I didn't know enough about sex to be critical. Sonny was very experienced and oil rigging was something I'd only seen in Urban Cowboy, so he seemed very exotic. He was like a cartoon man, he loved God, his momma, guns, dogs, and girls. He had a huge cock.

Usually I'd just lay there thinking "so this is sex." Anyway, Sonny didn't always get hard right away. Looking back, maybe he drank too much or something, but at the time I was sexually inexperienced enough to not really understand what the deal was.

We used to do it on the back porch of the house and screw in this old brown recliner that lived out there. My favorite position was him lying back in the seat, and me straddling the cracked vinyl arms, which I now know is called a reverse cowgirl.

One day when Sonny couldn't manage a boner he said to me "hand me them panties" motioning at the discarded red lacey thong I'd bought at Kmart.

He pulled them on squished that limp monster of his into the front part and fingered himself through the lace until he got a boner. He kind of danced around until it straightened out and started poking out over the top. It got so he started doing that every time, like foreplay. He'd dance around on the porch in my red lace thong and then we'd screw while I was bent over either the recliner or a BBQ that also lived on the porch.

Sometimes I wore high heels while we did it, which helped the bent over position since it made me taller. I had these bright red leather pumps that I'd gotten on sale in San Diego. I brought them with me in case I needed to dress up for a job interview, but since I didn't have a job I just wore them for sex.
Sonny was the very first boyfriend who liked wearing my underwear.