Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [12]
One summer Jesse introduced me to masturbation. I was in his furnished basement when he put on some bootleg porn, got under a blanket and started moving around furiously.
“What are you doing?”
“Jerking off.”
“What?”
“Grab a sock from that drawer.”
“Why?”
“To jerk off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you touch your dick?”
“Sure.”
“Till white stuff comes out?”
“I think so?” I hadn’t. But I played along.
I grabbed a sock, put it on, and then jerked off until white stuff came out. That was very satisfying, I thought. I’m going to do that a lot.
And I did.
At one point Jesse introduced props into the solo-sex trade. He took out a banana-shaped “vibrating muscle massager” from the Sharper Image catalogue that his dad used for his sore back.
Jesse said, “You can use this.”
“For what?”
“To put against your dick.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Go in the bathroom and use it. It’s great.”
“Um, okay.”
I went into the bathroom and tried to use this muscle massager. It didn’t feel too great. I felt like I had when Jesse tricked me into trading my George Brett rookie card for assorted Boston Red Sox “future stars.” Also, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure that massager was intended for women.
So in the seventh grade when people started making out, this came as a complete shock. It just seemed so intangible—like this alien ritual, where these two aliens just attached orifices all of a sudden. I was like, “I am not doing that!” And collectively all the girls in my class were like, “That is fine. You are not on the list. You’re not exactly a first-round draft pick for this new activity.” Making out always seemed kind of gross to me. It still does. I’ve always heard this homophobic argument, “I don’t like it when I see two dudes makin’ out in the street!” I feel that way about anyone. Making out is sloppy. It’s like a dog eating spaghetti.
The only prerequisite for a makeout party was a furnished basement, a two-liter bottle of Fanta, and a Debbie Gibson CD. I remember kids I had known my whole life suddenly started making out with each other. It was as though this had been their plan all along. Like there was this secret conspiracy. “Once we’re twelve years old, we’re going to just start making out with each other. But don’t tell Mike Birbiglia. He might try to get involved.” Everyone I knew was losing their mouth virginity.
These makeout parties took place about once a month and one by one I lost my closest friends to the makeout club. For a while, my closest ally was Matthew Sullivan. We would regularly write off the members of the makeout club: “Making out is stupid.” “Frenching is for losers.” (Since when do kids know anything about French culture?) I felt like one of those kids who proudly wears a chastity ring but secretly hopes that someone will just start having sex with them. So Matthew was in the non-makeout club with me. Informal, of course. There were no meetings of the non-makeout club. Those would be sad meetings. “I call this non-makeout meeting to order. First order of business: Nintendo. Second order of business: Why doesn’t anyone like us?”
So Sullivan and I were in the non-makeout club, but I knew it was only a matter of time. Michelle Calandria was on his tail. Michelle planned an end-of-the-year birthday party, timed with a New Kids on the Block concert she had gone to the night before. Romance was in the air, and Matt would need every bit of strength he had to hang tough.
I remember being in Michelle’s basement, listening to “Stairway to Heaven” and pouring myself