This is the house I spent the first 12 years of my life in. Despite the fact that I have not lived there in 15 years does not change the fact that it still feels like home. I was girl crazy very early. In preschool I was in love with a girl named Bette who I asked to marry me. She said yes. One time we were hanging out in my basement and I went into a closet and took off all clothes and then I opened the door so she could see me naked. Her reaction? She told my mom on me. After I went to kindergarden I never saw her again. Last I heard she had joined a Latino gang.

In the 1st grade I met the next love of my life. Her name was Maris. I thought of nothing but her from 1st-3rd grade. That was three years of my life… when I was 9. It seemed like my entire life was spent on that girl when I was that age. She lived at 3-2-5 Mansion Drive. I always remembered that because it rhymed. I had this book that had a photo of a naked boy in it, and I showed it to her because I thought she would be turned on by that or something. Even when I was this young I knew I liked boobs and sex and that I knew that these things were not available to me as a 3rd grader. I used to fantasize about meeting her again when she was in college and had boobs. I run in to Maris from time to time. She lives in New Jersey and came to see the band I manage a few times in the city. I wanted to make out with her because she was my first real serious crush. Unfortunately she was not so into that idea and she told a mutual friend that she stopped hanging out with me because of my failed attempts.

I heard a rumor at school when I was in the 2nd grade that this kid Sean found his dads old Playboys and buried one of them in his back yard under a bush. As you can see from the map he lived pretty far from me. I knew my mom would never let me travel there on my own, so when my grandmother was babysitting me I told her I was going for a bike ride around the neighborhood. My friend Marshall and I got on our bikes and made the journey to his house. We snuck into his back yard and dug up the Playboy. It was wet and it smelled very mildewy. We ripped out some pages and hid them in our shoes. We couldn’t bike all the way back because it was up hill all the way and we were little kids so we called my parents, (who had returned home and were freaking out that my grandmother had lost us) and got them to pick us up at a park up the street. I remember sitting in the bathtub feeling extremely guilty about the whole thing and I told my dad what I had done. He just asked me what I thought and was not mad. I carried those scraps of paper around with me everywhere after that and to this day the mildew smell takes me back to that time. Also, to this day, my grandmother is constantly reminding me about the time my parents yelled at her because Marshall and I escaped. Now THAT I feel guilty about.

When I moved in 1992 Emily was my neighbor. My friend Erik introduced us. They went to school together and he had a big crush on her… and as soon as I met her so did I. She was a year older than me and beautiful. She introduced me to the Pixies and I saw her in her bra. She was the first girl I ever spent any time alone with. She used to tell me about guys she kissed and things and I was so obsessed with her. I knew she wasn’t into me, but I would still get to see her every day and that was enough. One day she met my friend Tom and they hit it off. I was pretty upset by this, but I thought it was better to live vicariously than not it all so I helped her write a love letter to him which I delivered to him at school. One of the teachers saw us reading it and contacted our parents. Emily had made two drafts of the steamy letter and her parents found the rough draft. After that Tom was no longer allowed to spend the night at my house and Emily’s parents forbid her from seeing me. She pretty much disappeared from my life after that. Until my parents turned my old bedroom into a guest room I had a picture of her hanging above my bed. I guess it is pretty creepy to have a picture of a 14 year old in your room as a grown man, but she always meant so much to me. In high school I had a record label and she dated pretty much everyone in one of the bands I worked with. After a few chance meetings at their shows I never saw her again.

In 1997 my now best friend Marshall got a job at this Baskin Robbins ice cream shop. Other than Marshall I was pretty much only friends with a handful of kids my school and a few kids in the DC punk scene. Marshall and I went to school together until the fourth grade when he went to the local public school and I went to a private school in McLean, VA. Marshall didn’t really ever make any friends at his school until he started working at Baskin Robbins. Over night he, and now I, had a bunch of new friends. One of these friends was a girl named Shanna. She was the first girl ever to show any interest in me at all and I was so into her. She kissed me at a punk show and then again on this subway platform afterwords. I couldn’t believe it. I was 17 years old at the time and I though no girl would ever be into me, and here was this amazing girl kissing on me. I put a photo of her in my binder at school and told everyone I had a girlfriend. Unfortunately, she did not see it that way.

When I met Shanna I was lifting weights after school every day. My brother did the play, and our school was a half hour away from our house so I would wait for him at school and lift and then drive him home. As soon as I started kissing on Shanna I would drive as fast as I could over to her house make out with her for 45 minutes and then drive back and pick up my brother. One day I was zooming a long Quaker Lane on the way to her house and I was stopped for my first speeding ticket. A long with the fact that I had never had a ticket before and I was scared to death of my parents reaction, I was no where near where I was supposed to be and I had no idea how I was going to explain where I was to my parents. When I showed up to Shanna’s house I was visibly upset. I sat down with her and that is when she decided to inform me that she could no longer hang out with me because she was into my best friend. Her and Marshall started dating two days later.

A few months after things ended with Shanna I got my first girlfriend Tiffa. She was Moroccan and had pink hair and was one of the cutest girls I had ever seen. She had been with a bunch of guys before and I had only had one really bad sexual experience before her. I remember when we first made our relationship “official” she said something about how we were going to have sex soon. We both lived with our parents, so doing sexy things was not easy. We went to this park by my house and she gave me my first real blowjob. Every time she would get near my penis I would just start giggling. I had never really been touched there and I just kept laughing when ever her mouth got near me. She asked if she wanted me to stop but it was the best thing ever. I just couldn’t stop laughing.

While I was dating Tiffa I went off for a week to train for football season. When I got back Tiffa brought me to this playground to have sex. We had been apart for a week which seemed like ages. The strange thing was this was the park I learned to play football in. When I was in the 4th grade my mom would drop me off here and I would play tackle football with 6th and 7th graders who were twice my size. Tiffa was on the pill and we had unprotected sex constantly, but this was the first and only time she ever let me cum inside her. While I was gone at camp she started hanging out with our mutual friend Dylan and a few weeks later after my football practices kept us away from each other, she broke up with me and started dating him. They ended up dating for 7 years so I don’t feel too bad about it.

I can’t get too specific about the location of my second girlfriends house because her parents still live there. But the second girl I ever dated was named Sarah. When I met Sarah I thought she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever met. Unfortunately she hated me. Still today I have no idea why. She had a sister named Molly that I started crushing on. I went to a play that Molly was in so that I could flirt with her after. I sat next to Sarah during the play. By the time the curtain went up Sarah and I were making out in the back row. It was winter and Sarah smoked a lot. We would sit on her back stoop and I would watch her smoke. To this day when I smell cigarettes in cold weather I think of her. It is a great feeling.

This house was just being built when I was dating Sarah. Her and I spent most of our time at her house and her parents were always home. One time they caught us making out on the couch and I became completely terrified of them. Sarah and I had been dating for a while and we had still not had sex. We broke into this almost finished house and fooled around on a blanket in one of the bedrooms. I learned one of the most important lessons of my sexual life there. She started to give me a blow job and I thought I would do the polite thing and say “you don’t have to do that”. She stopped and never did it again. Big mistake; Lesson learned. We didn’t have sex that night, but we did a few weeks later. It was awful and was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Many years later though, we had sex again, and it was pretty much the best thing ever. I still think about Sarah all the time.

I used to bring girls to this place to make out all the time. I kissed my biggest high school crush there for the first and only time and I used to have sex with Tiffa there pretty much daily. My strongest memory from my times there was with my third girlfriend Chanelle. I was dating Chanelle and her best friend Kendra was dating my best friend Jamie. Chanelle was a virgin, as was Jamie. Eventually Kendra and Jamie had sex but Chanelle and I had not. The four of us went to an amusement park one day and we met at the Masonic Temple and parked our cars there. When we got back a group decision was made that Chanelle and I were to have sex. While Jamie and Kendra waited, we went into some bushes and had what amounted to the worst sex of either of our lives. And I don’t mean then, I mean now. In fact when ever I see Chanelle I bring up loudly in public conversation about how I took her virginity and then she reminds me loudly that I was the worst lay of her life. Oh how I miss her.

Chanelle also probably created the defining moment of my life. While we were dating she had to return home to Hawaii for a month. She did not want me to stray from her during that time so she bought me a Barbie themed Polaroid camera and let me take naked photos of her with it. They were the first naked pictures I ever took. She then told me I could take as many pictures of girls naked I wanted to as long as I didn't touch them. I went around to all the girls who liked me and took Polaroids of them. After that whenever I was in a relationship I used nude photos as a way of flirting with girls, without cheating on the ones I was dating. I think I felt like after a lifetime of being ignored by girls, taking these topless photos seemed to be some sort of validation. After taking these Polaroids for 8 years I have hundreds of them and am trying to turn them into a book which would feature the pictures as well as short blurbs like these. A few of them are online here. Chanelle and I broke up when I went to college, but we ended up living in Richmond, VA so I used to see her all the time.

This playground was a place that I spent so much of my youth. I had soccer practice here. The day after we found the Playboy Marshall and I met back up at this school and looked at it on the roof. I made out with the second girl I ever kissed here. I had sex with Tiffa here. This park has so many memories it is unbelievable, but the one I wanted to talk about happened the year after I moved from Alexandria. I was in college and I met the first girl I ever loved and we dated for two years. She lived in Maryland and she cheated on me a bunch of times. The second time she cheated on me, we met up and came to this park and she just cried and cried on my shoulder. Her mascara stained one of my favorite shirts forever. I just held her there and just felt bad for her more than anything. I didn't break up with her or anything, and I don't regret it. We had a lot of bad times after that, but a lot of better ones. She changed the way I dealt with girls forever after that and I am a changed man. I was a serial monogamist before then and I haven't really been in a real relationship since her... and we broke up in 2001. I just though she was the perfect ending to a story on my nascent sexuality, because after her I was never the same again.