Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child by Bert Kreischer Read Free Book Online

never really heard the details, how they went about it, the logistics. And so when I got down to business on that ride, I felt like a World War II soldier dropped on Omaha Beach without ever having seen either combat training … or a beach. I spent the majority of the time surveying the perimeter, taking in just how beautiful the beachfront property was, looking for a path to the beach rather than storming said beach. I found the path a lot lower than I expected it to be. When it was time to act, I invaded that beach—and stayed. I remained there, not moving at all, for the rest of the ride, staring at her awkwardly as if I were taking her temperature. That night I told no one what had happened, having learned my lesson. I was also overly concerned that I had somehow acquired testicular cancer throughout the night, because my testicles throbbed in pain. That was my first case of blue balls.
    After sinking my hands in the sand, I realized it was time to go surfing. I graduated eighth grade and moved on to an all-boys Catholic high school, where losing your virginity was as mandatory as avoiding sexual contact with the priests. Sean Hooker and Ty Rodriguez had already had sex, and they held court at our lunchroom tables, explaining the fundamentals. First and foremost, you needed protection—because apparently AIDS was running rampant throughout the ninth grade. Second, you needed to find a girl from a public school. Catholic-school girls were prudes, and their parents cared about them way too much for them to ever give up their virginity to us.
    So, like a nineteen-year-old with a pound of cheap weed to sell, the public schools were where I set my sights. I very quickly started dating a girl named Alison Williams, who my friends had known from their middle-school years. She was pretty in a duchess kind of way, not that I knew that at the time. What I knew at the time was she had tits and that is all that mattered. We dated for what seemed like a lifetime (roughly two months), and though I tried to find a crack in her morals, they remained more or less intact. I tried my hardest to break her like a settler tries to break a wild stallion. But the call of the wild was too strong with this one, so I left her on her mountaintop. My attempts to get her to succumb to sex were mostly made over the phone. Let’s not forget I was in ninth grade. My best work involved surreptiously asking her about virginity, her virginity, how she felt about her virginity, did she know anyone who had lost theirs, and how they felt about it. She told me her best friend Jenny Powers had lost hers already and it had been a good experience, so like a gentleman, I dumped Alison and started dating her best friend, Jenny Powers—not the coolest move, I realize now. But at fifteen, a man has to do what a man has to do.
    Jenny Powers, it was rumored, had had sex with upwards of two people. The most recent guy was dead set on keeping her. But I had broken up with Alison for Jenny, and Jenny broke up with the guy that loved her, and she and I started dating. I’m not quite sure what the shelf life of a ninth grader’s virginity is supposed to be, once he’s dating a girl, but at the time I ballparked it at about a week.
    Our first night together was at a party at the aptly named Jason Stoner’s house. It was a public school party and though I was a Catholic-school boy, my friends had gone to school with these kids, so I figured it would be cool for me to crash. Then she directed my attention to her ex-boyfriend, Chris, who charged me like I had just tied his nuts. Like a rodeo clown and a bull, I spent the next hour dodging errant swings and the drunken stumbling of a heartbroken ninth grader—a boy who had been given the body of a fighter but not the coordination or heart. Not wanting to start a fight, especially in the company of a bunch of dudes who knew him and not me, Jenny and I made a hasty retreat and ended up at an abandoned house two doors