I lost my virginity in the same Sunday school where, as the minister's son, I had once been mock-crucified by my classmates during an Easter pageant. As Christ, my death was rehearsed on a cross made out of a couple of two-by-fours. My fellow sixth-graders lashed my ankles and wrists with twine and then carried me around on their shoulders, like pallbearers, before I was ultimately hoisted before the congregation for the entire, protracted five-verse duration of "All Hail King Jesus." My eleven-year-old ego took this martyrdom in stride, maybe with a certain sense of entitlement, only tainted by my fear, given the feeble insurance of a loincloth, that I would pop wood in front of my dad's flock.
     It was several years later, in high school, when my girlfriend, Katie, and I snuck into the church with the key that my dad had given me to use his typewriter. She grew up in a godless home so I gave her a private tour of the sanctuary, choir loft and nursery — where, delighting in each other's sick humor, we abused the dolls, forcing Barbie to perform obscenities upon Babar and clamping Raggedy Anne's nipple area with clothespins. It was this penchant for perversity that had attracted me to Katie in the first place, along with her Faye Dunaway looks. We met as lab partners over the body of a dead frog. Despite the reek of formaldehyde, I remember being vaguely turned on when, as I slit open its belly, Katie suggestively stroked the frog between its legs, cooing "nice boy." Our misfit fortunes fused immediately. At the church, I showed her the pastor's office where my dad hid a bottle of whisky, which we took liberty of before I showed off my cacophonous talent on the two-hundred-year-old pipe organ. I remember she did a little spinning dance on the altar in bare feet. On our way up to the steeple, we stopped off at the second-floor Sunday school, where, under a picture of Jesus surrounded by fluffy doe-eyed sheep, she unzipped my pants and gave me my first blowjob.
     It was only a matter of weeks before Katie and I finally fucked, in the passenger seat of her stepfather's blue Colt. The driver's side door had a faulty latch and was kept shut by a rope that crossed behind the driver's seat, wound around the emergency brake lever, and tied off on the passenger's seat head rest. The rear left-hand window had been punched out and replaced with plastic, so anything over fifteen mph sounded like we were in a schooner under full gale. When we fucked, parked in the cemetery, Katie clung to the rope and twisted against it like a patient in traction.
     In Vermont, there are plenty of places for concupiscent teens to writhe. Given good weather, we fucked in the woods, in dales, in leaf piles, on rotted logs, on mountain crags, against trees smooth enough to lean against, in the cold marmoreal shade of ivy-covered mausoleums in the cemetery. Once, along the bank of a stream where I went fly-fishing with my dad, I fucked her with an empty wine bottle. We thought we were far enough off the road until a truck going over the bridge slowed and a couple of rednecks hooted and yipped appreciatively. I don't know if they saw the bottle or just the nebulae of naked bodies in the weeds. Another time, with no place else to go, I borrowed the key to the restroom at the Texaco and we fucked on the cold fetid tile, cramped by the ceramic bowl.
     But we were mostly drawn to the church where our bodies were dyed by the stained glass like mood gems. We would drive by and if the church looked empty we would park the Colt in the lot of the drugstore two blocks away. Then we'd walk the long way around, through the cemetery, avoiding the front of the church and thereby the risk of being seen by my parents, since my home, the parsonage, was just across the town green. We entered through the back, through the nursery, and tiptoed upstairs through the banquet hall where worshippers met for coffee hour after service and for potluck suppers on Saturday nights. Normally, the church was empty six days a week, and if we were certain we were safe, we'd go to the upstairs school room (our cloistered nook), take off our clothes and lie on the orange shag carpet, surrounded by macaroni-and-toothpick handicrafts.
     Being a pantheist, and therefore believing that I (and by extension, my penis) was no less holy than an altar candle, I had no more compunction about having sex in church than in a gas station rest room. I had a key, it was convenient, not to mention atmospheric in a Goth sort of way. Besides, Katie and I were unashamed, our bodies were holy, Edenic, our consciences unmolested. The thought that God would be bored enough to peep in on us and judge our youthful indiscretions simply never crossed my mind. That we occasionally had to dodge my father, God's agent, was just an extra thrill.
     Once, mid-coitus, we heard the door downstairs. I had Katie bent over one of the plastic kiddy chairs that circled the dwarf-sized worktable. We were naked except for a blanket I'd borrowed from the nursery and kept stashed on a top shelf in the supply closet with all the other craft junk. My first instinct was to flee down the fire escape, a route that passed the window to my father's office. I crept down the metal stairs, cautiously, and peeked. Sure enough, there was the Reverend at his desk, looking over a sermon, twiddling a pencil. But before I could worry about how to get past him, Katie — now dressed — signaled that someone else was coming up the stairs. Knowing we were trapped, I grabbed her and we ducked into the supply closet. From the dark, we could hear metal chairs being set up and we could smell the tinny brewed coffee from the church kitchen. We had just escaped exposure by the church planning committee. Settling into the closet and the grim reality that we were going to be trapped by an hour or more of budgetary talk, I started getting hard. She hiked up her skirt and we wriggled into the only feasible position: my cock in her ass. And so, slightly intoxicated by the smell of Elmer's glue and the murmur of fund raising proposals, we sacrificed yet another virginity on the altar of the Methodist church.
     When we weren't having sex, we were fighting. I remember one night, parked in a cow pasture, long after she'd missed her Friday ten o'clock curfew, she started panicking about her bastard stepfather and what he was going to do to her for being late. I argued that if she was going to be late, then what was an extra hour? Truthfully, I just wanted to have sex, and my obvious motives made her angry, but she also looked beside herself with terror. She thought that she was going to die. She wanted to escape. She wanted everything to change, she said, or she would kill herself, but she could not say what that change would be. There was something airless about that night, and I remember feeling vaguely threatened by the stillness of a nearby cornfield, as if we were being watched from the outer dark. She told me that she wanted me to save her, to be her escape, to come to her rescue. As a teenager, I wanted escape too: it was my existential constant, yet her frenzy made me feel impatient and dull for not having a way out. I accused her of being over-dramatic and then, cruelly, of being childish for wanting to live in a fairy tale. She ran off into the pasture. I chased after her and we ended up wrestling on the ground, each of us getting in at least two slaps, for which I felt both guilt and cold satisfaction. After we made up, instead of having sex, she lay with her head on my lap and I told her an embellished version of Hansel and Gretel. I told her that I wanted her to imagine leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs when she went home, so if she became lost I would be able to find her. Still, she was too scared to go home. I took her to my house and somehow talked my parents into letting her sleep in the guest room. When she tried to sneak up to my room, she was caught halfway up the stairs by the good Reverend who'd woken to take a leak. My dad, buck naked, shouted at her from the top of the stairs as if she were a stray dog. She mumbled that she just needed a toothbrush and then slunk back downstairs. When I heard her cower under my father's wrath, I hated myself for not coming to her defense.
     Before we'd been together a year, I broke up with Katie. She was too much, unpredictable; she was too tortured, too gloomy. Her violent mood swings tangled us in senseless arguments that as often as not ended by Katie spreading her legs and demanding, in tears, that I fuck her. After her sobs were stifled and I apologized awkwardly — for I thought I had taken advantage of her — she ridiculed my priggish guilt until I felt I was the one being taken advantage of, that my cock was a pacifier, and then I was the one who wanted to lie in the dark and murmur in quiet code about bread crumbs and dark woods and cannibal witches.