[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 19 - The Night I Almost Lost My Virginity]

At age fourteen, the two primary causes of stress in my life were the police, as they unexpectedly popped up at the most inappropriate times, and my penis, for much of the same reason. In any case, a man can’t talk about his adolescence without talking about sex, or lack thereof, as sex consumes 90 percent of a boy’s life, mind, and destiny—and in my case was the next chapter in the “awesome” to “weird” to “fucked up” journey of my sexual awakening.

Had getting laid solved my sexual energy problems, life would’ve been grand. This was not to be the case. When my body became capable of absorbing this life force energy, the intensity was often greater than I could bear. Perhaps the armor I’d developed over the previous four to five years was buckling under the strain, but over the next six years, when the energy moved through me, I became emotionally, mentally, and physically disabled. I felt like an ant being fried by the sun through a magnifying glass. I would often have what’s been described as symptoms of kundalini syndrome, the side effects of awakening one’s kundalini too soon or too quickly.

Those symptoms include: involuntary jerks, tremors, shaking, itching, and tingling and crawling sensations, especially in the arms and legs, headache, migraine, or pressure inside the skull (in my case, at the base of the skull or the top of the spine), disrupted sleep patterns, trance-like altered states of consciousness, emotional numbness, antisocial tendencies, mood swings with periods of depression or mania, diminished or conversely (and usually) extreme sexual desire, and auditory hallucinations (which continue to this day in the form of hearing elaborate and beautiful musical compositions, sometimes so clearly that I can’t concentrate because it sounds like my neighbors radio is too loud). Of course, these symptoms may simply describe male adolescence in general.

These symptoms could last for up to a period of months. Over time, they subsided, but it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was able to handle these energies in a more constructive manner. Not coincidentally, my OOBEs grew in frequency and intensity during this time.

I had a good excuse for the insanity of my adolescence: I was permanently under the influence of a powerful gateway drug that led to the desire for wanton sex and often resulted in irrational, dangerous acts of stupidity, violence, and confusion. Technically known as (8R,9S,10R,13S,14S,17S)-17-hydroxy-10,13-dimethyl-1,2,6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-dodecahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthren-3-one, this drug is epidemic among 10 to 16 year old boys as the supply was free, constant, and absolutely uncontrollable. Its street name is testosterone.

I’m hard pressed to find one positive aspect about puberty other than the fact that the rest of my problems paled in comparison to my obsession with sex and an ever-growing sense of confusion and frustration. My brain seemed too weak to focus on anything other than getting laid, perhaps due to my brains lack of needed blood that was trapped in my permanent erection.

Soon, thanks to my friend Jim, all my problems would be taken care of. Jim was a French Canadian with a long family history in the area who had managed to set up a rendezvous with two girls. We were to meet at 11 p.m. in the basement of one of the girls’ houses. We would have to sneak quietly in through the basement window, as the girl’s parents would be upstairs. We were crazy with excitement—we would’ve crawled through gunfire to get laid.

These girls weren’t just any girls. They were Rachel and Debby. Debby had a reputation as a “slut” among her schoolmates, and Rachel had the biggest breasts of any girl in her grade. Jim wanted Rachel and I wanted Debby. I found women of her type exhilarating, and still do. Apparently so did others; she ended up marrying a wealthy man who delivered her out of that bottomless-pit-of-hopelessness town.

That evening we snuck in through the basement window like professional cat burglars. We spent some awkward minutes talking before we heard steps heading toward the room. Jim and I hid in a closet and with heart, and cock, pounding anticipation waiting for Debby’s mother to leave, and hope she didn’t notice any smoke from the cigarette I was smoking leaking out of the closet doors. We barely escaped discovery when the mother went to get something out of the closet, but Debby’s quick thinking saved us. She may have been a slut but certainly not a dumb one.

We came out, Rachel took some pills, and the lights went off. I moved close to Debby. She stopped for a moment and began whispering to Rachel. Then she announced, “Let’s switch.” I hadn’t yet developed enough of a male ego to feel too insulted; after all, I was still going to get laid. So switch we did, but I was disappointed because I had a major crush on Debby. To this day I have fond memories of her. Thinking back, there were a lot of “sluts” in that small town high school, but Debby had a fire that few people noticed. I certainly did.

Within minutes, Debby and Jim were having a grand time. Rachel, on the other hand, lay on her back motionless, like a scared rabbit. I caressed and kissed her and did the things I thought I was supposed to do to get a woman fired up, but Rachel didn’t move. I kept feeling Jim hit my leg with his hand. I had no idea why. He later told me that every time he hit me she was doing something else to him. First, a hand job—smack—then a blowjob—smack—then doggie style, missionary, sixty-nine—smack, smack, smack! Meanwhile, I’d only managed to undress Rachel down to her underwear, which was not easy as she refused to move either in cooperation or resistance. She was pretending to have passed out from taking too many pills. I’d happened to see, though she tried to hide it, that the pills were aspirins. She would groan every now and then that she was too high to move. I whispered in her ear that I knew she was faking it and that she didn’t have to. She didn’t respond. I didn’t want to fuck this girl like this, but I sure wasn’t putting my pants on and just sitting there, not in the state I was in. I pulled off her underwear and attempted to give her head, which I had no idea how to do. I’d only seen pictures in porno magazines. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a clitoris. I was convinced that merely touching her between her legs would send her into wild ecstasy. My tongue moved in and out of her pussy like it was doing push-ups. I waited for her to lose control and attack me like an animal. She never moved. My mouth was starting to cramp, and all the while Jim was smacking my leg, my ass, my head. It was the first time for both of us, and he was getting the fuck of his life while I was being introduced to necrophilia. I was so worked up at this point that I just got on top and tried to slide my cock into her. As soon as the tip of my cock touched her pussy, it was all over. In pitch blackness I sat at the end of the bed smoking a cigarette, listening to Jim and Debby go at it for the next half hour. When they were through, we turned the lights on, and miraculously, in her “drugged stupor,” Rachel had gotten half dressed. She continued to lie there, eyes closed. Jim and I left the way we’d gone in.

I had to endure listening to Jim’s excruciatingly detailed description of Debby’s sexual prowess, how many times he came, etc., etc. He wanted to hear my story as well, and I obliged him by making up all sorts of adventures lest the truth be known, which was that the entire experience was depressing, humiliating, and painful—a rerun of the first time I masturbated, but with an audience. At least I didn’t leave with blisters on my penis, but little did I know that dick blisters were far from the worst experience one’s cock could drag one into, as Eddie would soon demonstrate.

Eddie was feared by everyone. He was our age and rather small in build, but he was crazy—honestly and truly crazy. He had the look that so clearly marked the children of incest, which he and most of his relatives were the product of. He had cigarette-burn scars up and down both his arms from being the cigarette chicken champ. Cigarette chicken was a game of guts in which two stupid people put their arms side by side and then drop a lit cigarette on them. The first person to pull away was obviously a chicken. I played this a couple of times and won, then decided it was ultimately a no-win game. Eddie had scars the length of an entire cigarette! Where there weren’t scars there were homemade tattoos. His entire family was like that. Half of them were in jail for some sort of assault, including murder, and the other half had yet to be caught. Eddie never traveled without his entourage of groupies and would-be tough guys who didn’t have a thought in their heads other than what he told them. He had the extortion racket down by age fourteen.

As luck would have it, Eddie saw himself as Rachel’s boyfriend. Rachel wanted nothing to do with him, but that didn’t have the slightest effect on his perception of reality. When Eddie heard I’d fucked Rachel—no doubt from the fabricated stories I’d told Jim who’d then shared it with every one of our friends, thinking he was doing me a favor by bragging about my conquest—Eddie and his goons came looking for me.

They found me in the most unfortunate of places, behind the public pool building where no one would ever think to look, or worse, hear my screams. I was surrounded by seven of his punks, while Eddie interrogated me between punches. I knew if I lifted a finger toward him, his boys would descend on me like coyotes. I never returned a punch, thereby saving myself from a gang beating, but Eddie let it be known far and wide that I was a gutless wimp who refused to fight. My first ever sexual experience not only was not a sexual experience but ended up getting me thrashed and labeled as a namby-pamby coward. This didn’t contribute to my overall sense of well-being and self-esteem, both of which teetered on the edge of a cliff. My experience with Rachel was now a complete humiliation, inside and out.

This whole nightmare was not out of line with my bizarre history with Rachel. Shortly before that fateful beating, Jim and I were at Rachel’s house. As soon as Jim and I were left alone in the den, he rummaged through the drawers to see if there was anything worth stealing. What he found instead was a handgun. “Whoa! Look at this,” he said as he pulled out the gun and placed the barrel to my temple. I didn’t think much of it—Jim and I played with guns all the time. He had an arsenal at home—semiautomatic shotguns, .30-30s, .22s, double barrels. We went hunting often. Actually, it wasn’t hunting; it was getting drunk and jerking off in the woods, followed by slaughtering anything that moved, usually chipmunks and small birds—your typical country-boy bonding experience. By this time I had grown such a hard shell around my soft heart that no longer did the act of killing cause me pain. Rather, I felt some of my misery being lifted and sent to another creature, as if there was a finite amount of misery in the world and the more others suffered, the less I had to.

Although I didn’t freak when Jim put the gun to my head, I moved my head back an inch or two—BANG! The bullet must have missed me by microns. Now there was nice hole in the den wall. Rachel came running in. We went running out. Jim was almost crying. I yelled at him a bit, but we got a lot of good story mileage out of it after. Jim went on to be a Whitehouse Advisor of labor issues.

Somehow, Rachel had become the focal point of my life where sex, violence, and death all came together in one big clusterfuck. I never could’ve imagined so much disaster from one woman in my life…but my life with women was just beginning.

Fifteen years later, freed from the humiliation but still tormented by the memory of my own callousness and insensitivity, and in need of closure, I tracked Rachel down through a friend. Through that friend I sent Rachel a heartfelt letter expressing my sorrow and compassion, asking for her forgiveness. I never heard back from Rachel, but a few weeks later I visited her in an OOBE. In the experience, I went to her house and knocked on the front door. She opened the door. I could see into the house enough to notice that her whole family was at the dinner table, military fashion (her father was an army officer), and waiting for her to return. I asked if I could come in and talk to her. She said “no” with no emotion or hesitation, then unceremoniously closed the door. That would have to suffice as closure.

Given the state of my fourteen-year-old reality up to that point, had someone come along and offered me a magic pill that would transport me to a completely different reality, I would have happily taken two without asking any questions…and that is just what happened.