I lost my virginity in New Jersey at a strip mall motel complete with red heart-shaped bathtubs and water beds. I thought it was the most romantic place in the world because I was with the first person I trusted, Johnny.
Now here I was, 33 years later, sitting with them on the front porch of their home in our little beach town on the Jersey Shore, laughing and crying over beers as we reminisced about our first time. Johnny sat next to me in his wheelchair. He couldn’t actually laugh or drink because he had ALS, but he could flash his responses through a screen attached to his chair.
What a horrible disease ALS is. Over the course of four years, the most vibrant, handsome man lost the ability to speak, eat and walk, and soon lost the ability to breathe.
Although we hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, our families were still close, so I made a special visit to the town where our families had spent every summer since I was a child to see them one last time.
Me and my mother came to say goodbye that morning. After an hour of forced conversation, we were still happily stuck. I knew as we stood up to leave that I needed to say something that I had wanted to express for a long time. I leaned down and whispered in his ear, “How lucky were we? You taught me many things, but one huge thing was faith. And – sex.”
He replied with a smiling emoji that has hearts for eyes.
That night in a motel room with John, I finally believed and was blessed to discover sex born from the pleasure and deep vulnerability of my own body. I was finally able to let go.
Decades later, a few hours after my mother and I visited, I sat on the balcony of my parents’ new house, overlooking the beach where Johnny and I first fell in love. I felt alone and depressed and needed someone to talk to about all the memories rushing back. My life had changed drastically since my Jersey Shore days, but seeing Johnny brought the past back to life. I thought about contacting a friend of mine in Los Angeles or New York, but they would never understand.
Who will? Johnny. So I texted him, “What are you doing?”
“Oh, just sitting around,” he texted with a smiling emoji. “Do you want to come up with a six-pack?”
It must be hard to write a joke with your eyes closed, but he was still great at it, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
And that’s what I did. I went to Wawa and got a six-pack of Bud Light and met him when his caretaker took him to the front porch. I sat in a rocking chair with my feet propped up on an old bench. We sat “talking”, laughing and crying until the sun came up – I was drinking beer and he wanted to drink beer, as he said. It would take a while for him to blink past the answers and questions on the screen, but I didn’t mind the blank spaces. It felt safe between us. It always was.
We talked when we first met. It was the summer after I graduated high school. I fell in love with her on the shore in Sea Isle City, where we now sit. At the time, my family owned a pizzeria called Charcoal House, aptly named because that summer my family was on fire.
My parents and we four teenagers slept in a one bedroom apartment next to the restaurant. Falling in love with someone while I slept in a double bed with my sister while my father snored on the bed next to us was not ideal.
Johnny was the hot, rich boy who lived in the mansion on the next block (what I thought at the time). I would finish my 12-hour shift making cheesesteaks and walk past his house to the beach until one day I ran into the sand dunes, my nose in a book, and him.
He was tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed with a movie-star smile, yet even more handsome on the inside. And right after our first meeting, we were pretty much inseparable.
That same summer my mother was told she had five months to live and began going back and forth to Philly for chemo treatments while continuing to work to keep us all afloat. That same summer my father went even further off the rails, going on a drunken raging binge over every not-so-perfect pizza.
On Labor Day 1985, all of us teenagers were tired from working so long at the pizzeria. My mother was bald and passed out, and I was tasked with closing the restaurant for the season. I decided to close an hour early and started to store the pizza pans while my ornie, drunk father stumbled by.
“Who do you think you are?” He hollowed out. “We are not closed yet. We still have an hour.”
“We’re tired, Dad,” I said. “I’m closing.”
And he slapped my face. I fell to the floor and hit my head on the pizza dough mixer.
Maybe the head banging made me lose my mind because suddenly I became Wonder Woman. I stood up and pushed his 225-pound body out the back screen door and onto the rocks outside. I screamed at him and punched him on the ground, and I just kept screaming until someone pulled me away.
That someone was Johnny.
He and the whole neighborhood came running. Twenty or so people, including his parents, were staring at me. I saw their kindness and felt very ashamed. I was insulted. They knew the secret. That my father was hurt and angry, and I was just like him.
And still Johnny loved me. He was my protector. My knight in shining armor. And from what I heard over the years, he was a knight to many.
That night on the porch, we talked about our past and our children. She had two wonderful children who were the light of her life. He was sad that he would not grow up with a father. He knew he was leaving soon. We talked about our mothers, who died at a very young age, and my miraculous survival. And my father, who finally recovered from the abuse he suffered as a child, stopped drugs and alcohol and became a wonderful grandfather.
But no matter how heavy things got when Johnny and I talked, his eyes still sparkled with the intelligence and wisdom he always had. Even though he was now gray-haired and very thin, the sexual energy between us was palpable, electric.
I kept rubbing his chest, shoulders and knees to touch him. He wishes he could touch me back, he wrote. I took my feet off the broken bench, bent over his knees and put my hands on mine.
Oddly enough, ALS affects voluntary muscle movement, and since sexual arousal is an involuntary response, sexual function remains essentially intact. It was definitely intact.
If I hadn’t fallen in love with my future wife, and if he didn’t have a wife, who knows what would have happened?
After recalling that infamous Labor Day, there was a long pause as I wiped away tears as she wrote, “I hurt for you but was so proud of you that day.”
And as I grew up, I also became proud of myself.
My complications from growing up with an injured father made me afraid to let any man get close. My passion turned to anger and disbelief. But Johnny, who died a few months later, helped me hold people to a higher standard, and I continued to choose a loving and kind partner for the rest of my life.
He and I flirted until the sun came up, reminiscent of our first time in that seedy motel room, but we couldn’t remember his name.
“The Feather Inn,” he typed as I stood to leave.
How many women can say their first time was amazing?
Everyone deserves a Johnny – their first time or anytime or every time. Someone patient and kind who is willing to hold you all. All the broken and beautiful pieces of you. I couldn’t believe that I was so lucky to be loved like this.
I still can’t.
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