My song? It was Jack Johnson’s Bubble Toes from Brushfire Fairytales. It was 2002. I drank way too much cheap beer at a rather unsavoury club in Canberra and… well… sex was a very common side effect of getting wasted at the seediest drinking hole in Civic. For those Canberrans out there, I’m talking about South Pacific. This club was so gross, it had it’s own ID card. You could cross international borders with your passport but if you didn’t have your South Pacs card… no cheap beer for you!
So how old was I in 2002 when I became a stranger no more to the ways of a man? Why I was nineteen, thanks for asking. I know what you’re thinking. Late bloomer right? I was certainly a lot older than most of my friends when I lost my V-plates but it’s not for any of the usual reasons like moral high-groundness or an uncanny physical resemblance to Shrek. I’m not the type of gal who ever saw my virginity as some kind of prize or something to be savoured for marriage. That was never the issue. It didn’t have much to do with my appearance either. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the most attractive teenager but I wasn’t completely repellent. The hot footballers with cars weren’t exactly lining up to ask me to the formal but there were a few drama geeks who made it quite clear that my chubby cheeks and frizzy hair totally floated their nerd boat, so you know, I had options. Back in the late 90s, any gal with a normal libido, no morals and a decent rack would be pushing it to keep her hymen in tact until her 16th birthday, but not me. You know who’s fault that is? Mama Smaggle’s. I’m about to share a story with you that scarred me for life.
When I was 16 years old, Mama Smaggle worked as a community health nurse. She used to go to the brothels and make sure the ladies had clean poonanies and all that jazz. So one day, she came home from work with two over stuffed display folders, full of tatty printed photographs. No, I was not about to have ‘the talk’. I never actually had ‘the talk’. The children of nurses rarely get ‘the talk’. There were never any secrets in my house and I can’t actually remember a time when I didn’t know about sex. Don’t think I got off lightly though. I’ve had my share of embarrassing conversations with my mother. In my house, a simple question like ‘Why is that man wearing high heels?’ could lead to a full explanation of the particulars of anal sex. Often with accompanying diagrams.
Anyway, back to the books. On this particular day, my mother casually handed me the first book of two, saying it was something interesting she found at work. It was filled with photographs of food complaints. Bags of lollies with rusty nails in them, jars of jam with band aids floating on the surface and my personal favourite, the mouse wheat bix where a mouse had fallen in the machinery at the factory and had been punched into a perfect oblong of half mouse/half wheat bix. There was also a picture of a residential swimming pool that was filled with 82 dead pigeons. It was the greatest book ever. I eagerly reached for the second book, wondering how it could possibly get any better than the first.
It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
The second book was filled with page after page of photos of rotting genitals. It was like The Big Technicolour Book of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. There was every size, every shape, every colour of the rainbow… including green. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell if I was looking at a taco or a sausage. I can’t look away from a train wreck so I eyeballed every photo, masses of unrecognisable flesh burning into my retinas. I silently closed the book and stared up at my mother.
She took the book from me, triumphantly chirping ‘And…. that’s what happens if you have unprotected sex!’ and joyfully skipped from the room.
And that, my friends is why I didn’t let a snake into my lady garden until I was nearly twenty years old. I was terrified of my nether regions turning into some kind of horrible herpes lasagne. This is another reason why, I have never ever, not once in my life had unprotected sex.
Well played, Mama Smaggle. Well played.
This article was supposed to be about losing my virginity but to be honest, I had really bad sex three times that year and I can’t tell when the official event occurred. The Jack Johnson time was my favourite, so let’s pretend it was then.