Quantcast
Link To: Home
 
featured personal

search articles
Untitled Document

media blogs

photo blogs

Rose & Olive
Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other’s lives.
Scanner
Your daily cup of WTF?
Date Machine
Putting your baggage to good use.
The Modern Materialist
Almost everything you want.
Autumn Sonnichsen
A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
ScreenGrab
The Nerve Film Blog
Chase
The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island
Nerve's TV blog.
61 Frames Per Second
Smarter gaming.
ScreenGrab
The Nerve Film Blog
Slice
Each month a new artist; each image a new angle. This month: M. Sharkey.
Paper Airplane Crush
A San Francisco photographer on the eternal search for the girls of summer.
Brandonland
A California boy in L.A. capturing beach parties, sunsets and plenty of skin.

new this week
Dating Advice From . . . Prop 8 Protesters by Meghan Pleticha
Q: What makes a protest a good date? A: Nothing makes people connect like a common enemy.
Ginger Red by Aaron Cansler
/photography/
Screengrab by Various
Today in Nerve's film blog: Mickey Rourke in Iron Man 2.
The Modern Materialist by Various
Almost everything you want. Today: A plethora of ways to feel so good.
61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine
Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian
Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
Date Machine by Various
Today in Nerve's dating blog: Are all women GAY?
The Truth is Out There by Iris Smyles
First-date love, lies and X-files. /personal essays/
 PERSONAL ESSAYS






Today, I'm surprised that I didn't spontaneously explode before losing my virginity. Before I had any kind of handle on what sex actually was, before I knew anything beyond the fact that it was called "humping" by those in the know and involved moving up and down while on top of another naked person, before I had any inkling that it might even involve my genitals, I wanted it. I wanted it bad. I wanted it so bad that in the summer of 1985, at seven-and-a-half years old, I dug a hole in my neighbor's back yard.

promotion
    The people next door were an eccentric family of three Mormons. Ward, the patriarch, was an amateur beekeeper who listened to The Coasters on A.M. radio and would occasionally have "spells" which led him into our house searching for his parents. His wife, Julie, was a round woman who spent much of her time on the phone with a grown son from her previous marriage; he always seemed to be getting out of jail. Their son Luke, oddly the only redhead in the family, was pasty and freckled with a permanent Kool-Aid mustache. He was my age, though a grade behind me. Because he was also the only other boy on my block, we were friends by default.
    Filled with energy and imagination and offered few constructive outlets for the two, we spent most summer days on mischievous nonsense — trying to build a time machine from rusty junk found in my garage, melting action figures on a recently used barbecue grill. So it wasn't out of the ordinary that one day we just started digging in his backyard. Using a garden tool that I can't identify and haven't seen since, we were able to reach pretty deep into the ground despite our seven-year-old statures, so the hole grew.
    After we dug for a few days, the hole became substantial. One of us decided that there had to be a logical end to our digging, some sort of goal we were trying to reach. Cue hormones.
    "A sex pit!"
We continued digging for several days, never stopping to consider such minor logistical issues as who we would have sex with.
    I don't know which of us thought of it or who named it. I do know that we agreed that it was the finest idea we'd encountered in our short lives: an underground lair where we could take girls and hump. We would furnish this sex pit with couches and beds, and these couches and beds would be made of dirt. We'd also build bookshelves of dirt where we could store Playboys smuggled from my father's stash.
    With this promise, we were encouraged to continue digging for several days, never stopping to consider such minor logistical issues as who we would have sex with. We eagerly dug and dug until one day, without warning, we were told by Luke's mother to fill the pit back in. Unable to argue that without the giant hole in the yard we wouldn't be able to lose our virginities a decade early, we begrudgingly complied. The sex pit, our brilliant and magnificent dream, would forever remain just that.
    A few years later, Luke and his parents moved to Arizona, but not before he was caught trying to convince a younger neighborhood girl to show him her vagina. At that point, I was told never to play with him again. Looking back, I use that to comfort me. It's proof in my mind that he was the twisted mastermind, and I was merely a horny accomplice. Not that there's anything inherently devious about being a curious kid, but I can't help but imagine that while I've grown up to have a mostly normal, fairly satisfying sex life, Luke is somewhere right now, struggling to find a woman who is understanding of the fact that he can only come if they fuck in the hole in his backyard.  






ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
You are Matthew Tobey . You are an editor at Haypenny.com. You are married and enjoy writing about yourself in the second person.




Read other features from the No Sex issue!



©2003 Matthew Tobey and Nerve.com
promotion


partner links
sponsored links

Advertisers, click here to get listed!


advertise on nerve | affiliate program | home | photography | personal essays | fiction | dispatches | video | opinions | regulars | search | personals | horoscopes | retronerve | NerveShop | about us |

account status
| login | join | TOS | help

©2009 Nerve.com, Inc.