Now I'm not a virgin anymore

On my second trip home from the University of Illinois down state in Urbana, it was during our break between semesters, I remember it was a particularly freezing cold and miserable January (1963.) I had a date with Lynda. We both wanted to have sex, and both of us knew it. We'd been sending steamy letters back and forth between Lombard and Urbana. She had the exact day planned that we were going to do it. I could barely keep my mind on my final exams, and totally blew my grade in German altogether, ending up with a "D."  I called my brother, Herb, from school and made an arrangement to use his house in Lockport, so that nothing would interfere with this rendezvous with Lynda.

            "You sly dog," I remember my brother saying. He was very encouraging. During his fraternity days with A.T.O. at Northwestern, he'd been a hell of a swinger, often driving all the way down to the whorehouses in Indiana in the '55 Oldsmobile my dad had given him, a car they came to label the "Barfmobile," because of all the whoring and boozing and resultant sickness that car took from his frat-rat brothers.

            It was bitter cold out that night when I picked up Lynda from her grandparents' house in Lombard. "Don't be out too late," her grandmother said at the door. She seemed very warm and inviting to me. She looked like everybody's grandmother, with her hair curled up in a white perm. She had an endearing heavy Swedish accent when she spoke.

            A howling wind was tearing through the bleak landscape out of the north, sweeping down along Lake Michigan. No one in his right mind dared to go out on nights like this in the Midwest. It was a landscape unfit for normal human habitation under those circumstances. Nevertheless, there we were plowing our way out to Lockport on a narrow, windswept road, Lynda glued to my side, the heater and defroster going full blast in my '55 Chevy, trying desperately to keep up with the ice forming on the windshield. You could feel the static electricity in the frozen wasteland air. It hurt up inside your nostrils when you took a breath, it was so cold.

            But tonight I was paying the weather no mind whatsoever. To me, I was like anybody else. Here was a normal eighteen year old on his way to getting laid for the first time. (This was normal, at eighteen, you ask? Don't be so jaded. Possibly this was considered normal.) As I drove out to my brother's house, my mind was racing in pure oxygen ahead of me. I had planned out everything in advance. My saintly brother had helped set me up with the perfect place to achieve the deflowering of this girl. I use the word "deflowering," for Lynda had insisted she was a virgin. That's what she'd said — a virgin — insisting on it over and over the first night I'd been out with her.

            I was skeptical, of course. But I didn't care, I thought, whether she was or wasn't. What did it matter? I'd become amazingly goal-oriented. I was determined to lose my virginity, and not even a blizzard, if it came down to that, was going to put a stop to it. Herb's little brother was going to get deflowered that very night. My brother seemed to be especially proud of me, almost like a father.

            When we got there, we started by making out on my brother's living room couch. The lights had been dimmed. My brother and his wife left wine out for us, and some beer. We drank everything in sight, and I had Lynda's clothes off before I knew it. This time she did not resist. I peeled off my own clothes and lifted her up. She was small and thin and very light. I carried her into my brother's bedroom and loaded her onto the bed. We never even stripped away the bedspread. I'd taken a condom along with me and ripped open the foil package with my teeth and rolled the condom down along the stiffness of my erection.

            I nearly fell on top of the girl. It didn't take long. I got up on my elbows, and somehow between the two of us we maneuvered my penis inside her, and I remember thinking — Now what? I didn't know what you were supposed to do. Then I felt Lynda beginning to move underneath me, and I felt my penis slipping inside her a little further. I pulled back a little, then let myself slide forward, and that was how it began.

            I remember little else, except that after some time I felt the pressure suddenly rushing forward inside of me, and it made me hesitate a little, but her insides seemed to grab hold of me, and I felt the sudden extreme thrill of the sensation of coming inside someone. Pools of sweat had built up between our bodies, and we were both laughing from all the sucking and squishing noises being made between us. And I felt tremendous, just tremendous. I felt like a man for a change. That was how I felt. I understood how it felt to be a man.

            When I went into the bathroom, I pulled off the condom, stuck it under the tap, and filled it with water to be sure it wasn't leaking. Then Lynda said: "You'd better come back in here."

            She had the ceiling light turned on and was standing completely naked next to the bed with her ample breasts hanging down, proudly pointing at a red spot in the center of the bedspread. "Your brother is going to kill us," she said. "I told you I was a virgin." Her breasts wobbled when she moved.

            I couldn't believe what I was seeing at first.

            "See?" she repeated, and she came up to me and stuck her breasts right under my ribcage, hooking her arms around my back. "I told you," she said. She looked up into my face with those weird half-oriental eyes, her lips parted for effect. "See? Now I'm not a virgin anymore, Jerry."

            "We'd better leave a note for my brother," I laughed.

            "I've got to use the bathroom," she said. "You find a piece of paper and tell them how sorry I was to get blood on their bedspread. I couldn't help it. We can buy them a new one." And she let out that breathy laughter of hers. With that laugh she could challenge the wind. She had the guts to do nearly anything.