The twentieth anniversary of my sexual awakening was about to arrive and I felt the burning urge to celebrate. The third of April was a date I never needed to circle on my calendar. It was imbedded in my memory as firmly as my own birthday. Twenty Aprils have passed in a rush of blurred memories, but I still remember the night I gave myself to Jun Tagpuno. The phrase “lost my virginity” seems inappropriate in my case. It wasn’t a loss at all. The momentary sting of penetration ushered in a lifetime of pleasure. More than that, it gave my life definition. Sex was a revelation, a transformation, the birth of a new Charlene Watts, a woman empowered.
Everyone in school liked Jun. Teachers liked him because he was smart and polite. Other students liked him because he was friendly, funny, and unthreatening. Born in the Philippines but raised in Ventura, Jun was the smallest boy in class. His Asian features were cute but most of the girls in my class were attracted to the jocks, the hunky surfers who worked out in the weight room or battled each other on the basketball court. Jun couldn’t match their strength or speed so he shied away from sports. Lacking self-confidence, he’d never asked a girl on a date, and they’d offered him no encouragement. Jun’s soft features and sensitive nature caused some girls in our class to wonder whether he was gay, but I never doubted his desire. Sitting at his homeroom desk in the row next to mine, I could see the tent rising in his crotch when I pretended to adjust my bra, allowing my finger to linger inside my blouse just long enough for Jun to see that I was caressing my nipple. He blushed and looked away when I smiled at him, held a book in his lap to conceal the effect of my little show.
I was sixteen before I had a chance to look inside the tent. I was a late bloomer -- in fact, I had hardly bloomed at all. I eventually grew into a small B-cup, but at sixteen my breasts were just beginning to bud. I was the second-shortest girl in my class (thank the Lord for Mae Bascomb, who saved me from the “shortest” label by a quarter inch) and one of the skinniest (although I outweighed the anorexic Lori Mandelbaum by a good ten pounds). The surfer dudes were not lining up to relieve me of my virginity, the geeks were too busy organizing Star Trek conventions to notice me, and the fat pimply kid named Hector … well, I was curious, not desperate.
Even at sixteen, I had a realistic, drama-free sense of myself. I didn’t believe I was entirely unappealing, despite the lack of attention I received from any boy but Jun. I was gawky, awkward, and underdeveloped, but my face had symmetrical features, my pointy ears didn’t stick out, and my hair was a shade of chestnut that I like to think of as rich and luxurious even if it tended to be frizzy and limp. True, I’d never overheard a boy saying “Charlene Watts is sexy as all fuck,” a description of blonde goddess Abby Martin I’d heard at least three times, but none of the boys had ever compared me to a barnyard animal, unlike poor Helen “Heifer” Lindquist. Boys can be cruel, but they were never mean to me. They just didn’t notice my existence.
Before Jun, my only physical experience with a boy was provided by Skip Rodriquez. I was fifteen. My brother Galen played on a Little League team during the summer. Skip attended a school in a neighboring district where houses were smaller and refrigerators emptier, so he gladly accepted Galen’s invitation to come to our house after practice. Galen and Skip would go to the basement to play ping pong, although they were more interested in smoking the quarter ounce of weed that Galen bought every Saturday morning. They did their best to hide the smell by standing on a chair and exhaling through a window Galen opened, but our parents were probably smoking their own joints in their bedroom and didn’t make an issue of Galen’s indulgence. He was almost seventeen, an honors student, and a decent athlete. If he wanted to smoke a little reefer, they weren’t wired to be hypocrites about it.
I was a good student too, but at fifteen, my mother kept a sharp eye on me. She also had a keen nose and I knew better than to have marijuana on my breath. One evening, though, they went to a party and told us they’d be home late. I trailed Galen and Skip down the basement and nonchalantly asked if I could have a toke. Galen gave me a big brother look and was about to tell me to go upstairs when Skip gallantly said, “Ah, let your little sister get a little buzz on, better she do it with us than with strangers.” I was pretty sure Skip called me “your little sister” because he didn’t know my name, but I didn’t care because in that moment, he was my hero.
The guys played ping pong until they were swatting the air with their paddles, then played foosball until they were spinning the little men without remembering to put a ball on the table. I was listening to Alanis Morissette on headphones, settling on an occasional word and thinking about how profound it was before I realized that a different song was playing with an entirely new set of profound words. I couldn’t keep enough words in my head to make a sentence, much less understand what the song was about, but it didn’t seem to matter.
At some point Galen realized that the Doritos were gone and that his emergency snack reserve had been depleted. He told us he was going to the Seven-Eleven to restock and asked Skip if he wanted to come along. Skip stretched out on an old sofa and said he’d take a nap until Galen returned. The Alanis Morissette CD began to play for a third time but I couldn’t remember any of the songs, so I kept listening. The world was new and fresh.
A few minutes after Galen left, Skip sat up, turned his unsteady gaze in my direction, and said, “Hey, um … hey.” Not knowing my name, he settled for another “hey.” I looked at him, pulled the headset away from my left ear and said, “Hmmm?”
Skip patted the Naugahyde cushion and said, “C’mere. Sit next to me.”
I shrugged and said “Okay.” I wasn’t thinking clearly, probably wasn’t thinking at all, but sitting there was no different from sitting anywhere else, so I removed the headset, hung it over the back of my chair, and moved to the couch. The imitation leather had been polished to a reflective shine by all the butts that had been there before mine. I sat.
Skip put his arm around me and said, “Want to make out until your brother comes back?”