I lost my virginity to an ex-girlfriend (call her Miss X) who considered the whole implant business a terrible mistake. From the beginning, Miss X's version of the facts went like this: I never needed an operation. What I needed was an intimate relationship built on trust. Her position was that I could probably have intercourse without an implant, given a lover who was patient enough and with some serious soul-searching on my own part. Miss X never bought the theory of the bicycle accident. Miss X — who continued to weigh in long after she'd ceased to be an official partner in my life — thought my seduction by the promises of medical science wasn't just sad but immoral. The doctors were playing to my worst side — not the side of me she called her perfect lover, i.e., someone who'd go down on her for hours, without expecting anything in return, and count himself extremely lucky — but the bitter, unsensual little kid who dreamed of proving his manhood in the arms of every woman he could find. "Wait a couple of years, till you've had more experience," she told me. "Then see if you still want them to rip you up."
     The night she gamely relieved me of my virginity, for old-time's sake, Miss X and I did some stuff we used to do a lot, then I reached between my legs and erected myself, as far as I could. I hooked her ankles over my shoulders and she was able to squeeze me in, but it hurt her, so she turned over and instructed me to take her from behind. But that hurt, too, so she climbed on top of me, the way she always did, and ground herself against me, the way she always did, but this time with me inside her, sort of teetering back and forth in her body, like a broomstick balanced on the palm of the hand.
     Afterward, lying there beside her, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that she may have had a point all along.
     Miss X's opinion, despite what seemed to me some basically kooky premises, mattered a whole lot to me because she taught me almost everything I knew about how people actually have sex. Months before the operation, she gave me my first orgasm from another person, having persuaded me through sheer will to let her try. She always gave more thought to my sex life than I had ever been able to. Once she decided that, by dumping her, I had pretty much lifted whatever gag order exists between boyfriends and girlfriends, she talked about my sex life incessantly to anyone who would listen — the old guys I played poker with, the bellhop in the residential hotel where I lived, the students and the real people who haunt the fringes of that old East Coast college town. She even put on a play about me and what she perceived as my doomed attempts at overcompensation. Thanks to Miss X, everyone I knew, and probably a few I didn't, was totally bored with the subject of my sex life. And so was I. But she generally forced me to decide what to do about it. For her, the lesson of our "first time" was crystalline. When I wrote the surgeon a pleading letter, begging him to try again, to make me whole, I knew I placed myself beyond redemption in her eyes. I did it anyway.

From the time of my accident, through most of my first year of college, I felt walled off from actual sex. I remember settling around age fourteen on the word asexual to describe myself — no matter that I could hardly get through a school day without rushing to the men's room to jack off.
     This confusion, in itself, can't be so unusual; I was an ungainly, unathletic kid, and where I grew up, kids like that didn't have a lot of sex. But even after I grew up, spurted past chubbiness, mandatory phys ed and the other small humiliations known as childhood, I still didn't really understand how sex worked. I mean, I understood in theory. It's true, there were some steps between arousal and intercourse that eluded me, but I never stopped and wondered what those might be. When I kissed a girl, or fondled her breasts or touched her pussy, it was all more or less by way of rehearsal. I never expected her to touch me back. That, I thought, would come later, if ever, in some foggy, basically science-fictional future that involved me as an entirely different person from the pale, bespectacled doof with the borrowed ID. By the time I got to college, my failure to respond may have discouraged the more enterprising young women who went for walks with me after parties, or let me crash with them after a night out — but weird as it may sound, it never occurred to me that anything was out of the ordinary.
     What was I thinking? I suppose I imagined that I'd get a hard-on when I needed one. Or when I was brave enough. On the whole, though, I don't think I gave the matter much conscious thought. I couldn't have put into words what made me different from my more sexually active friends. In high school, I wondered, without much evidence or alarm, whether I might be gay. In college — if I still tried to put the reasons for my inexperience into words — I probably would have said that I was awkward or self-conscious. I would almost certainly have said I was shy.
     But, in fact, I wasn't shy. I spent my freshman year of college inviting myself into the beds of absolute strangers. I didn't have words for the desire to bury my tongue in a woman's pussy or her ass, to sleep beside her, to share the complicity of lovers — that desire attached sometimes to one person, sometimes, almost as painfully, to no one in particular — but I didn't consider any of it sex. Sex — sex involving dicks — still seemed an exotic act, with an exaggerated, if not apocryphal, relation to everyday life. As for my own dick, I instinctively kept it out of reach, behind clothing; and none of those girls, in high school or college, ever brought the obvious (was it obvious? it must have been) to my attention. Or, if they did, I didn't notice. The one time a woman mentioned the possibility of intercourse during a one-night stand, I was shocked.

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