We parked out in front of the banner and went inside. “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, suddenly turning the wheel hard and making a screeching U-turn in the middle of the street. We drove along quietly for a few moments. “That’d be funny, if we applied to a Hooters,” Dan said as the light turned green. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a strip mall, was a giant banner: As we drove home from the last hotel just before sunset, we stopped at a stoplight near the beach. On the first day of summer break, Dan and I drove around in his Mazda putting in applications at every restaurant, retail store, and hotel we could find. That didn’t leave much time for a job, so when summer rolled around, I had to make all the money I’d need for the year.
During my sophomore year, I had played on the baseball team and spent fifty-plus hours a week practicing, playing, attending classes, and studying. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsess over having sex, hoping it would just happen.Ī couple months later, I finished my second year at San Diego State. I’d always been terrified of talking to women and usually just avoided it. It’s not like I had some special being-awesome-with-the-ladies gear that I just hadn’t chosen to shift into. Nobody was getting laid that regularly, and even Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for a reason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag about it because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like they had stepped into manhood and I was on the outside looking in. I never felt pressure from my friends to have sex. Now I was the only member left in the club, and it was awful. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. That is exactly how I felt in that moment. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughs and waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. Then one day you wake up and saw your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddling toward a rescue ship. Imagine if you and a friend were stranded on a desert island for the last five years.
“Well, fuck you too, dude,” Jeff replied.
“Jeff had sex? Jeff?” I said, in disbelief. I looked at Jeff, who was standing in the corner of the room sipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it was no joke. “Jeff had sex last night,” my friend Dan said. “Any milk left?” I asked, hoping to drown my hangover with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The morning after a party we threw celebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommates hanging out in the grease-stained kitchen. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. One by one they fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virgins left. A Man Takes His Shots and Then He Scrubs the Shit out of Some Dishesīetween the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each of my friends lost his virginity.