On being a virgin at the orgy

“I had this idea that sex was for people better than me, more beautiful, more whole, and the reason I couldn’t seem to stick the landing was because I hadn’t yet earned it.”

Ivy Wolk is a stand up comedian, actress, and writer from Los Angeles living in Brooklyn.

Jay FaceTimed me from the floor below my dorm around 2 a.m. on a Friday to let me know that a few minutes before calling, while he was having sex with Allie in the gender neutral bathroom, his frenulum — the little bridge of tissue that connects the foreskin to the tip of the penis — tore in half upon reinsertion.

I was immediately all in on this, as this is not a lede you abandon, and I was also hot off my sixth round of feverish masturbation with a $20 fire hazard bullet vibrator so I was not held up by anything else. Through the screen, all I could see were the overhead fluorescent bathroom lights, his half-shut bloodshot eyes, and his hairline, which was for once not strategically-yet-precariously covered by pieces of hair pulled from the back of his head to form a faux-bang. That alone told me everything I needed to know about the situation’s severity.

“Do you need me to come help you?” I asked, stifling my laughter with concern.

“Dude, no. I’m bleeding into the toilet bowl!”

He rambled on about the mechanics of the sex: the choreography that got him in such a position, the vigor, the speed, and the viscera. I listened to it all completely scandalized, mouth agape, tears of laughter crowning in my eyes. This is the kind of guy who fucks you so hard that his penis rips?

I was still a virgin at this point, one whose icebreaker fun-fact was that I had done cocaine more times than I’d seen a penis in the flesh, and I was scared, very scared, of anything sexual… whether it be scheduled, clinical sex between two married adults, or whatever this was. It all weighed the same. It was something elusive, daunting, a force greater than me and a force surely greater than who my neuroses could ever allow me to become. And I could make everything work on my own just fine, thank you.

My fear was overwhelming but so was the shame; I felt dwarfed by my own virginity. I had this idea that sex was for people better than me, more beautiful, more whole, and the reason I couldn’t seem to stick the landing was because I hadn’t yet earned it.

I somehow carried this belief through to my second semester of freshman year, even after 7 months of hearing testimony from very stupid and very unattractive and very maladjusted people about their fittingly stupid and unattractive and maladjusted sex. Everyone, anyone, could hack it here, but I was still watching it all through the glass. I’d squirm in my seat in class, sitting up and forward a bit to let the seam of my jeans rub against my underwear, chewing the inside of my cheek in anxiety, as I strained my ears to catch whispered gossip about people I only passed by in hallways holding hands at a dorm party or experimenting with chintzy sex shop handcuffs.

Being the subject of one of these stories felt so potentially invasive and exposing to me, and I would get nauseous imagining being the center of the conversation, but my peers seemed to revel in perpetuating their own sexual fodder. Discretion was not a tenet of our liberal arts curriculum. I had no real images to allude to when piecing these stories together in my head. Anything I could ideate would start to look like a Tom and Jerry bit as the orated detail got quicker and more complicated, and porn didn’t seem like the right referential analogue either. I knew it would be crass to ask to see Jay’s injury and that the visual wouldn’t apply anywhere else for me, so I refrained, replacing my morbid curiosity with a more pragmatic and caring tone.

“Where.. where did Allie go?” I asked.

“She tried to help for a minute but said I was going to make her late for the lesbian orgy on the 10th floor so she dipped,” Jay groaned.

These fabled “lesbian orgies” at Emerson weren’t unusual, though I hadn’t heard tell of one happening since the first semester. It seemed everybody had gotten used to each other by now and had grown bored of group sex, picking one or two partners from a group of friends and just seeing them individually. The lesbian orgies were said to typically consist of one friend group of girls, their more virile but uglier adjacents, and one lucky guy. I always wondered about the clown car logistics of fitting everyone in there, as having one roommate was already so cramped and ergonomically unsound. At that point, what’s the damage of one more?

Why couldn’t I satiate my curiosity? I had rendered myself an aggregator of secondhand experience, but never really tried that hard to get in on the action myself. If gore wasn’t a dealbreaker for people like Allie and Jay, why would I be where everyone drew the line?

Before I could stop myself, “Who is throwing it? I want to go,” sped out of my mouth.

“I dunno,” Jay said. “Probably at Lizzy’s. What are you gonna do? Fuck?”

I considered the truth of this for a moment. Maybe they’d all be so distracted that I could just lick an earlobe for participation credit. Even that seemed so hard.

“Hmm... don’t know. I’m bored. Guess I’ll just watch,” I replied, “and see if they tag me in.”

I heard a knock at the door off-camera and Jay hung up. I fucked myself by saying that idea aloud, because now I had to go through with it. A story promised is a story delivered. After all of my studying and ruminating, I figured I deserved a tale of my own to disseminate loudly in the dining hall for some other cuckolded virgin’s enjoyment. I texted Lizzy: Heard you guys are throwing something. Can I join? and immediately got a text back that said, 1002. Let’s have fun!!!

It was so inviting. She seemed excited to welcome me, which proved her judgement was poor. I searched my room for a housewarming gift and resolved to bring a half-empty vial of poppers and a warm bottle of Two Buck Chuck, because if they’d open their door to me they’d open their noses and mouths to literally anything.

I knocked at Lizzy’s door three times and didn’t get an answer. I texted a quick I’m here and got back a one second and about a minute later, with the wine tucked under my arm and the poppers digging into my pelvis through the front left pocket of my too-tight pants, she opened the door and was fully naked. She was smiling warmly, and the immediate intimacy of it was almost blinding, so I broke eye contact and let my eyes drift downward only to end up staring instead at a tampon string dangling between her slightly parted thighs. I realized I should’ve stayed at eye-level but it was too late now and whatever was beyond that door would be just as (if not more) confronting, so I stepped beyond the threshold with my breath held.

It was a triple-bed room with one large tinted window overlooking the Guy Fieri restaurant across from the Boston Common. I averted my gaze from the room’s back corner where the action was taking place and where the rest of the evening’s cast would be revealed for as long as I could, but I eventually ran out of interest for the My Bloody Valentine poster and adjacent white-girl mandala wall tapestry and decided to turn around and be polite. Laying in bed against the wall closest to the door I’d barrelled past was Lizzy, Tanner, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Lizzy were both legally named Elizabeth, were both half-Black, half Mexican, and both had the same haircut, which was thick black curls cut into a shag with blunt bangs. Both women began their time at Emerson identifying as lesbians, having only dated other girls throughout high school, and now dabbled in bisexuality. During orientation week, while still purporting herself to be a dyke of epic proportions, a very drunk Elizabeth had begged in front of a group of people to finger me in the same gender neutral bathroom this very story began in, right after she had just come out of there with another girl. When I asked her if she’d at least washed her hands she said no, which gave me a better excuse to decline the proposition. I wasn’t so happy to see her here tonight, I thought about spinning on my heels and marching right out the door to evade her inevitable advances, but if I’d shut her down once I could do it again. Tanner was the boy that Lizzy usually chose as the male addition to these group sex endeavors, and he was a peripheral enough member of my own friend group where I wasn’t too terrified to see him nude tonight, as he spent most of his time with the lesbians and only tagged along with me and mine when the lesbians excluded him to cry and get stoned amongst mammaried fellows.

Everyone was naked — not even socks on — but Tanner did have a very tight rolled beanie around his head which I refrained from joking about for this was not my territory and I had to be kind tonight. I presented my gifts. Everyone gladly took sniffs and sips, and the conversation was amiable and small. Lizzy asked me if I’d finished my research paper for our writing class, Tanner said he liked my boots, and Elizabeth, expectedly, shifted the meandering conversation to an attempt at persuading me to join. I declined, said I was only there to observe, but I'd let the class know if anything changed. When I realized this was it and shit was about to commence, I realized three is not quite enough for an orgy and Allie was nowhere to be found. Upon asking, Lizzy said as if she was reciting the weather, “Oh! She’s at Riley’s orgy down the hall!” Apparently I was at the wrong group sex event and there was no thought to merge the two, so I resigned to stay.

I sat on the middlemost bed, criss-cross-apple-sauce, seemingly disappearing from view as they all fell into place with one another. It began with Lizzy and Elizabeth mashing their identical heads into each other, hands trailing from the back of a neck to the underside of a boob to tufts of pubic hair. Tanner sipped the wine I brought and watched in stunned silence as Lizzy laid Elizabeth onto her back. None of it was titillating or hot to me, really, but it was interesting... In imagining what it would feel like to have that done I noticed my shoulders getting tight and my jaw squaring, like I was blocking any energetic entrances in my body that could maybe receive the pleasure from a few feet away. I wanted to remain objective; I could not be so interested in this that I allowed feeling to trump motion and observation.

I shifted my gaze a bit and saw Tanner was half-heartedly masturbating with a dry hand, using the free one to hold the wine bottle. He caught my eye and started giggling. The girls didn’t seem to notice.

“Sorry, sorry. This is just weird. Not bad-weird though. Just funny...” he trailed off.

I nodded in agreement, coyly shrugging.

“I’m new to all of this shit, I guess. So this,” he said, gesturing to me, “is just another new thing. You know I grew up Mormon, right?”

“Woah, really?” I said.

“Yeah. When my parents split my mom left the church and I left with her. And now I do stuff like this. My parents don’t speak at all. I’m tight with my sister, though. If my dad found out the shit I got up to here he’d make me go to state college for sure.”

It was unnerving to find out that this guy, who was regarded as an ethically nonmonogamous Casanova of sorts on campus, was seeing everything with new eyes just as I was. When a guy skateboards to get around you figure that his body count has been accruing since puberty struck.

“I didn’t have sex until I got here last semester. And now I do it all the time. But, like, part of me feels fucked up about it. Like God and my parents are watching,” Tanner said, “but I guess tonight it’s just you!”

He laughed, his face flushing and his eyes narrowing. He dove in toward Lizzy and lifted her face with her chin and kissed her. Elizabeth got up from beneath them and watched for a moment before hopping off the bed and grabbing my poppers from the nightstand, bringing them over to me. She put a hand on my thigh and offered me the vial. I took a half-sniff, careful not to go so hard that they made me gassy, and passed the bottle back to her. She inhaled deep and hard and looked back toward me.

“You should join us. Take your clothes off.”

“That’s um, not really my thing,” I murmured.

“But watching is?” she said, with a smile.

“I guess so,” I replied.

Elizabeth popped back up onto the bed and the three of them made out all at once in a triangle of faces, hands and knees and elbows bumping like a game of Twister. I had nothing to contribute here and resolved to go on my phone. I again tried to picture what it would look like for me to disrobe and involve myself in a real way, but the images came up grey and blurry behind my eyes and my body tensed at the notion. I noticed I was abrading deep into a scab on my finger and like a terrible house guest I tossed the torn skin behind whoever’s bed I had spread out on. The makeout rub-and-tug stopped and Tanner got up to change the music and grab a condom. As he unwrapped it, Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place came on over the JBL speaker.

For a guy on the shorter side he was really packing in both length and girth, having to stretch the condom with a finger to cover his entire dick. Elizabeth lay down again and wordlessly Tanner got on top of her. I couldn’t place this feeling in my own body at all. Fingers I understood, tongues I could maybe wrap my head around because I’d kissed before, but the weight of an entire dick inside of me or anyone was something I could not rationalize. It seemed like the biggest, gravest deal in the world. I wanted it so badly but was so scared that once it happened everything would change; I’d heard from girlfriends who only had a few more notches on their belts than I that once you get fucked for the first time everyone can tell, they can sense it on you, in your scent and in your swagger, and they treat you accordingly. If I wanted people to read me differently I’d just get a bad haircut or become really mean. It could start and end with me, the big change, and I wouldn’t have to involve anyone else or go through the trouble of expanding myself around another person.

“I again tried to picture what it would look like for me to disrobe and involve myself in a real way, but the images came up grey and blurry behind my eyes and my body tensed at the notion.”

“Isn’t this beautiful?” Lizzy said, turning to me.

I blinked back at her.

“I mean, isn’t it great to share this? Sex is so beautiful. We all get to be here and watch this happen. We all get to do this awesome thing!” She grinned.

“I’ve never had sex before, actually. I’ve only ever seen this type of thing in porn,” I replied.

“You could join us! If you wanted this to be your first time!” she said.

I shook my head.

“Yeah, no offense, Ivy, but I don’t think I can fuck you just because until now we’ve mostly done homie shit,” Tanner chimed in breathlessly.

“None taken,” I answered him.

“Well,” said Lizzy, “If you’re ever interested and he’s not here, we can reconvene. You should try it.”

It was so cavalier, eerily so. I can try new vape flavors and new rises of jeans but this, whatever it was, didn’t seem like something one could merely sample. When it was over, the three of them resolved to sit against the wall in a row and catch their breath. Lizzy ran her fingers through Elizabeth’s hair. Something came over me, maybe it was the sense that the festivity was all done, and I decided to pull my shirt off and sit on the bed next to them, my pants and shoes still on. Lizzy put her head on my shoulder and placed a hand on my knee, stroking it sweetly. The waistband of my pants dug into my stomach causing a muffin top so I crossed my arms over it. I looked to my left and saw stomachs jutting and sweat dripping and thighs spreading, and I realized I was being fearful and stupid. No one was looking at me like that; I was the looker. I uncovered my stomach and let the velcro closure pop open on a grand exhale, Lizzy still tapping her fingers on my knee.

“You guys wanna know something?” Elizabeth chimed in suddenly. “That was my first time having sex with a man!”

Lizzy reached over me and high fived her. I looked at Tanner and his face was stark-fucking-white.

In the elevator heading back down to my room with Tanner and Elizabeth returning to theirs, we stood equidistant from one another and said nothing. Tanner got off at 9, Elizabeth at 8, and as the lift pressed toward 7 and I was suddenly alone, I burst out laughing. I doubled over into a squat on my heels, my head dangling between my thighs, and I just cackled and cackled until the doors parted and I was in the hallway, no other noise but the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. A month later I’d have sex for the first time and it too would be bloody and gossiped about, but I would not anymore be afraid.