First, let me get this out of the way: I was a virgin until the ripe old age of nineteen, which even by the standards of those days (late 80s), was fairly old—at least compared to my friends. That's not to say I didn't try hard, or that I didn't come real damned close on a few occassions. I’d done almost everything else. It's just that each of those times I got real damned close something would go terribly, terribly wrong and the deed always went undone. Those are actually fairly humorous stories too. I've posted many of them here: Never Too Short to Get Cock Blocked by God, Part I, Never Too Short to Get Cock Blocked by God, Part II & Never Too Short to Get Cock Blocked by God, Part III. Suffice it to say that it was hard for a little, geeky Puerto Rican like me to get laid in Baltimore.
At the time I was living with Chris, a graffiti artist with whom I vandalized (¡Beautified!) most of East Baltimore and plenty of Eastern Baltimore County. Chris was this scrawny blonde-haired, blue-eyed sixteen year old whose long skater bangs and upturned nose made him look just like Hermey, the misfit elf who wanted to be a dentist from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Our friendship was starting to fall apart once I realized that Chris was using me. I had a job and money. He didn’t. I paid for food. I paid for clubs. I even paid for a cab ride from Highlandtown to a party in Perry Hall that didn't exist so he could screw with his girlfriend while I was forced to lie on the floor next to their bed and try not to listen.
A couple of weeks after that fiasco I was taking a break from my job at this little coffee shop Downtown when I noticed this hot Latina sitting on a bench filling out a job app. She had dark brown, almost-black hair, a gorgeous cappuccino complexion, and a pointed chin I just wanted to nibble on. I wanted to get her attention, so I looped around and passed by her again. She didn't look up, but she reached out, grabbed my wrist and yanked me down to the seat beside her. She introduced herself as Maria. She had seen me go past the first time and had recognized me. Maria reminded me that we had met previously, a little over a year before, at St. Elizabeth's Carnival.
I immediately remembered her. She had been sitting on the steps of St. E’s and had yanked me down to her as I walked by, not unlike the move she pulled near the coffee shop. She had tried to speak to me in Spanish, but it was so broken I could barely make it out. She was about to miss her curfew that night, so we couldn't talk long that first time. It didn't matter because that same night I hooked up with Marilyn, a girl I had been crushing on for the previous three years who I consider my first adult love. You can find that story on Never Too Short to Get Cock Blocked by God, Part III.
Maria decided to stick to English this time, and I was able to understand her a bit better. Apparently, she remembered me from my skateboarding days when I would roll past her house on Chester Street. She had seemingly spent some considerable amount of time learning about me because it looked as if she knew more about me than I did. It was more than enough to feed my hungry, young ego. We exchanged numbers and made arrangements to meet up at Chris' place that coming Saturday.
I should have suspected something was a little off with Maria when I invited her into Chris' apartment, and the first thing she did was rummage through the cabinets and fridge for food without bothering to ask. Chris gave me a disapproving look, and I just shrugged. Finding nothing to satisfy her there, we all left and jumped on the number 23 to Eastpoint Mall where I bought her dinner, which she ate ravenously—simultaneously disgusting me and turning me on. We hung out for a little while, then I brought her back to Chris' where we went into his room and started making out. This is the first time I allowed myself to believe that it was actually going to happen. I was gonna get some, and God wasn't going to cock block me like he had been doing throughout my youth.
Chris left to give us some privacy, and I pulled out the only condom I owned, which had been sitting in my wallet waiting for this moment for over a year. I never did get to use it. "You don't need that," Maria told me, "I had this accident at Patterson Park Pool when I was a little girl, and my doctor told me I will probably never be able to have children." (Yeah, I know, but remember I was nineteen and horny—& STOOPID). I didn't care. Even better, I thought. I'd prefer to go bareback my first time.
Mind you, I didn't let on I was a virgin. It wasn't an issue because, like I said, I'd done almost everything else, and I'd read enough of the articles in porno mags (¡It pays to read, people!) to have an idea of how I wanted to, um, work it. Suffice it to say there were no complaints, unless you count the ones that came from Chris. When he came back at around 2 a.m., we were still going at it, so he left again. Chris' stepfather even walked in on us while Maria was riding me like a lust-crazed coffee bean picker on a rabid burro in heat. An hour and a half later, when Chris came back, again, we still weren't done. Tired, he decided to crash on his bed with the pillow over his head. I didn’t care. This was payback for him screwing that Perry Hall girl right over my head. We fucked so hard that I know his parents heard Maria yelling, so I know Chris didn't get any sleep, regardless of how hard he pretended.
Maria was insatiable, which was ironic considering she only ever got to the brink of an orgasm, at which point we would have to stop for a few until she was ready to go again. It was no surprise when Chris told me I would have to move out the next day. But we didn't need Chris' room. We screwed anywhere and everywhere: the Rain House in Patterson Park, all three floors of her father's house, including on her father's bed, the Number 14 bus stop on Howard Street near the Inner Harbor (okay, that was just a blowjob, but still). My absolute favorite though was in my mother's bedroom while my mother and sister were still in it.
The reason I had been staying with Chris in the first place was because my mother had taken my sister and moved out of her boyfriend's house, leaving me behind. Not long after I'd hooked up with Maria, I ran into my sister downtown. She told me where she was staying with our mother, sharing a duplex in Park Heights with a couple. I took Maria over there one weekend around Christmas to meet her. It got late, so my mom offered to set up this little rollaway bed in the small bedroom she and my sister were sharing.
¿Did I mention Maria and I couldn't keep our hands off each other? Needless to say, once we felt sure mom & sis were in lost in Lalaland, we decided that a little spooning would likely make the least noise. Everything was going swimmingly until Maria let out this yelp. Instinctively, I clamped a hand over her mouth. We stood perfectly still for a few seconds to see if anybody had heard us. Then we started giggling uncontrollably. Mom woke up long enough to shout, "If you two don't stop fucking around I'm going to beat both of your asses!"
Anyway, the fun kind of stopped that Spring when I found out Maria was pregnant. Apparently, she had wanted a baby—she had wanted my baby—and was willing to lie to me to have it. What she didn't count on was that I was too responsible to take her suggestion that I walk away and forget about her and our child. Having grown up without a father, I wasn't the type to abandon my own offspring, conceived through deception or not. Besides, I did love her, and I wanted to make it work. At the suggestion (insistence) of her father, Jupiter (appropriately named considering his massive frame and an ego to match), we got married in October of 1989, just weeks before Maria gave birth.
The magic lasted until I found out she was pregnant a second time, this time because of her inconsistent use of the pill. (Jupiter told me she took them like Tic Tacs, popping two or three at a time when she missed a few days.) At that point, I took things into my own hands getting a vasectomy at twenty-one.
The relationship chilled for good when I found out she had cheated on me with six men after we'd gotten married. She had played me to get what she wanted—a child, played along when I wouldn't just turn my back on that child, and didn't want to play anymore when the unexpected second child came along.
There are some important lessons here kids. First, don't fall in love with the first person you screw. Second, always, always, ALWAYS wrap it before you tap it. And finally, when someone offers you a copy of your girlfriend's psychiatric evaluation and it starts off with terms like narcissistic paranoid & borderline psychotic, don't think, maybe I can help her get past all that. Scrap all the Night-in-Shining-Armor delusions. ¡Just RUN!
Originally published in Smile Hon, You're in Flagrante
