Barfly May 2005

The Dead Boy in My Bed:

I was fifteen and attempting to be worldly. The virginity pledge I had signed in middle school, I had decided, had become passé. Sure, I was still under the spell of the hetro-AIDS panic, which had health teachers and pundits inflating statistics right and left, but the desire to rid myself of my virginity was greater. All my friends were “doing it.” Even at that age, I was strangely unsentimental about sex (in my twenties, I became attached to my lovers. I always seem to do everything backwards). I found a suitable partner: a skinny, gothic, odd boy named Allan. He wasn’t anything special, but I was a geeky, outspoken, feminist at a conservative suburban high school. My options were somewhat limited.

Allan and I dated for a month, if by dated you mean sitting on his parents’ couch watching movies while he felt me up. We had one remarkably unremarkable sexual encounter, which I remember mostly for its length. While brevity may be the soul of wit, it’s not the hallmark of a great fuck. We split, I lost track of him, and he dropped out of school shortly thereafter.

Years went by and the boy was reduced to a footnote in my history, an unflattering comparison to other lovers. I knew him as the boy who made losing my virginity boring. During winter break of my senior year of college, I was lounging around my parents’ house reading the Whoregonian and sipping coffee. It took a few minutes to recognize that name on the obit page…Allan, Allan…oh, shit.

It was an unremarkable death; he had been driving too fast one night and wrapped his car around a tree. I can’t say I was heartbroken or even mourned; I hadn’t seen him in five years. Still, he haunts me, in some small way.

I could feed you the usual bullshit about how it’s always tragic when someone dies too young, without fulfilling his or her potential. According to his obituary, he had been turning his life around at the time of his death; after struggles with drugs, he had sobered up and was attending community college. Stories like his are legend in some circles: the myth of the kid who cleaned up just to die in some freak accident. More superstitious addicts that I’ve known use this as an example and an excuse not to go straight. It does seem like a mighty karma-fuck, in the grand scheme of things.

I think in the end, I mostly just felt guilty for slagging his sexual performance so repeatedly. When I tell people my first boyfriend died, they always perform the requisite dance of sympathy; I can’t very well say “well, he was a lousy lay and that’s all I remember. Oh, and he liked Marilyn Manson.”

I’ve lost track of enough lovers to wonder if any of the other men I’ve shared my body with are no longer with us. I’m always reminded of the scene in Igby Goes Down, where Sookie tells Igby that she likes being close to men after sex because she knows that one day, they’ll die and she will have shared that moment with them. No matter how brief the moment, in the end, for those ten seconds, we were the closest people on earth.