Boys Like That by Hope Edelman

Author:Hope Edelman [Edelman, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: memoir, coming of age, teen love, virginity, bad boys
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2014-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

When I met Jimmy T. I was seventeen and still a virgin. Three weeks later, I was neither of those things. We did it for the first time on a Saturday afternoon in his lumpy double bed beneath guitars that hung suspended from a ceiling rack, like electric pots and pans. He had a chair jammed under the doorknob and WPLJ turned up loud enough to mask our noise, and sometimes, when the radio hit a bass note, a guitar string buzzed above my head. Two hours of songs must have played that afternoon, but the only one I remember is Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” because as soon as he heard the opening chords, Jimmy T. started to hum and thrust in rhythm to the song. Before we’d started, he’d assured me that losing his virginity at 13 made him eminently qualified to relieve me of mine without unnecessary pain or pomp. He was right, on both counts, but I was disappointed nonetheless. I’d been prepared for several unsuccessful attempts, searing pain, and the kind of hysterical bleeding Sylvia Plath had described in The Bell Jar. The ease of it made me wonder, at first, if we’d done it right.

I was the last among his friends to lose it but the first among mine, and when I left his parents’ house, I drove straight to my friend Jody’s, walked down the hall to her room, sat down carefully on her white-ruffled canopy bed, and started to cry.

“Holy shit...” she whispered, and when I nodded, she threw her arms around me and hugged me, hard.

“Holy shit!” she shouted, bouncing her butt up and down on the bed. “Holy shit! Tell me what it’s like!”

What was it like? What was any of it like? Like one long manic car ride on an open stretch of road with a driver whose license had wisely been revoked. And I’m not talking only about the sex. It was like that all the time with Jimmy T. He could get a whole room of people singing with no more than five words of encouragement and a chord on his guitar, and when we went to the movies he’d have met everyone in our row and even collected a phone number or two by the time I came back with the popcorn and Junior Mints. The intersection of a precocious intellect and a cool-guy delivery had him performing monologues about hypothetical conversations between Hitler, Santayana, and Christ to his small group of smoking-section disciples during lunchtime (“So, the Nazi dude would have said to the formerly Jewish dude, ‘Man,...’ ”). His mother once told me his I.Q. was 145, a fact I found suspicious considering he’d never learned how to spell.

Jimmy T. Just look at his name. James Anthony Spinelli in full, but he wouldn’t answer to James or Jim, and he always included the T. For Tony. When I reminded him that his middle name was Anthony, and shouldn’t he then be Jimmy A.? he would give me a crooked half smile and raised his open palms in a shrug.

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