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trying to get laid. After months of rejection and masturbation, I met a blond cheerleader named Louise when I was drunk on Colt 45 during a high school football game in a farming community outside of Canton called Louisville. Though I didn’t know it at the time, she was the Tina Potts of Louisville: the local slut. She had thick lips, a flat nose and big, smoldering eyes, as if she was part mulatto and part Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles. She also had a Shirley Temple quality to her, because she was short with curly hair, but she seemed more into lap dancing than tap dancing. She was the first girl to give me a blow job. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t all she gave me.

    Nearly every day I picked her up and brought her down to my bedroom while my parents were still at work. We would listen to Rush’s Moving Pictures or David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and, now that I was more experienced in orgasm control, have normal teenage sex. She gave me so many hickeys that at one point my neck was too sore to even move. But I didn’t mind, since I was able to wear them like badges of honor at school. She also swallowed, which gave me more bragging rights. One day she brought me a blue glitter bow tie that looked like something a Chippendale would wear. I think she wanted to try role-playing, but the only role-playing I was familiar with was Dungeons & Dragons.
    After a solid week of fucking, Louise stopped returning my calls. I was worried I had gotten her pregnant, because I hadn’t used a condom every time. I had this image of her mother sending her away to a convent and putting her—our—child up for adoption. Or maybe Louise was going to make me pay child support for the rest of my life. There was also the possibility that she’d gotten an abortion, something had gone wrong, she had died, and now her parents wanted to murder me. After I hadn’t heard from her for several weeks, I decided to call her one more time, disguising my voice with a cloth over the telephone in case her parents answered.
    Fortunately, she picked up the phone.
    â€œI’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long,” she apologized. “I’ve been sick.”
    â€œWhat kind of sick?” I panicked. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Are you throwing up in the morning or anything like that?”
    It turned out that she was simply avoiding me because she was a slut and having a boyfriend would ruin her reputation. Those weren’t her words exactly, but that was basically what she meant.
    A few days later during math class, my balls started itching. It continued all day, spreading throughout my pubic hair. When I returned home, I went straight to the bathroom, dropped my pants and stood on the sink to examine myself. I instantly spotted three or four black scabs directly above my dick. I picked one off, and as I was looking at it, a little blood bubbled out.
    I still thought it was a piece of dead skin, but when I held it up closer to the light, I noticed that it had legs—and they were moving. I screamed in shock and disgust. Then I smashed it into the sink, but it didn’t splatter like I thought it would. It crunched like a little shellfish. Not knowing any better, I brought it to my mother and asked her what it was.
    â€œOh, well, you’ve got lice,” she sighed good-naturedly. “You probably picked it up from the tanning bed.”
    As shameful as this is to admit, I was going for indoor tans regularly at the time. I had a terrible complexion—my face was literally swollen with acne—and the dermatologist told me there was a new type of tanning bed that would dry out my skin and help my social life.
    My mother was clearly in denial that her young son had been fucking girls and getting crabs. Even my father, who always promised that the day I got laid we were going to celebrate with a bottle of champagne he had tucked away while working at Kmart, didn’t really