Sleeping With A Virgin: What It's Really Like

I was twenty-seven when I met "David." He lived in my neighborhood and we seemed to have the same schedule and/or routine, because we would see each other all the time. Whether I was grocery shopping, getting cash from an ATM, enjoying Happy Hour, or just simply wandering around on a Saturday, I would always see him. It became a running joke with my friends that I was stalking the pretty boy. It also became a joke between David and me, because after several months of awkwardness (it was really that often), we finally started acknowledging each other with smiles and nods that eventually evolved into waves and small talk, and soon, full-fledged banter.

One night, while waiting for my roommate to meet me at a bar just a block away from my apartment, David approached me. He had definitely been putting a few back and was, apparently, ready to officially introduce himself. He was from New Hampshire, like me; and had only been in the city for the six months that I had seem him around the neighborhood. We didn't really talk about our present lives, or what we did professionally, but more about the things from our past we had in common: the summers along the Kangamagus, the high school trips to Canobie Lake Park and Bill Cahill's Super Subs in a town not far from both of ours. We made out on the sidewalk that night, exchanged numbers and went for brunch the following day.

Soberly, over o'batzda and reiberdatschi, I realized David was a little younger than I originally thought. At twenty-seven, I had lost that idealistic way of looking at the world, and yet he still clung to that perspective. I assumed he was maybe twenty-four, so I asked him. He agreed he was twenty-four, then he laughed and said it was more like twenty-three, then he laughed again and said he wasn't quite twenty-three either. I was getting nervous. I wasn't sure what the New York State laws were on making out with an underage boy and started figuring out what I would do if he finally revealed he was seventeen or something. He kept laughing; I did not. I was not about to be the neighborhood Humbert Humbert, I told him. The literary reference went completely over his head.

Finally, after much discussion, and several fits of laughter on his part, and my threats of getting up and leaving, he handed over his license. I'm not so good at math, so it took me a second to figure it out based on his birth year: he was nineteen. And not just that, he had just turned nineteen a couple months before, while I would be twenty-eight in a few months. I was appalled. I was an adult, I was a woman, I had been out of college for years, I practically had a career, if one considers "answering phones and reading Gawker all day for $15 an hour" a career. I decided I would finish out the meal, and walk on home; and when I told my friends the story later, he'd be a respectable twenty-three, and we would laugh, and I would have been able to say I once made out with a boy born in the mid-80s.