A Bad Idea I'm About to Do by Chris Gethard

right,” Crazy Chris said. “Christmas candy gets sucked.” And with that, he walked out the door. No lesson, no moral, nothing like the other guys had given us. Just a threat of mouth rape and he was out. The guards came back and shuffled us away, and soon the gates shut behind us as we trembled in shock.
    Thirty seconds after we got back on the bus, the thugs got back to business.
    â€œKnutsen,” someone shouted, “call them bitches back and tell them I said fuck you.” Knutsen smirked. He knew he was days away from his escape. I smiled, knowing that I would never feel the satisfaction he was feeling, because I would never put myself in a position to need it. Knutsen and I were similar people in many ways. We were both nerdy, stiff, socially awkward goofballs. It was easy to imagine his present as my future. Seeing the frustration all over his face, watching him come into class every day resigned and defeated, I knew I had to avoid that future at all costs. Knutsen was a very good man, but there was no way I could allow myself to fall into a similarly dreary routine.
    In that sense, Scared Straight worked on me. I’ve also never been incarcerated, though admittedly I wasn’t a high-risk candidate.
    It’s for the best. I don’t even like Christmas candy.

Virginity
    I spent the first seventeen years of my life firmly believing that my penis would never know the smooth, moist contours of vaginal walls.
    This wasn’t an outlandish thought. I grew up in North Jersey. The people who became sexually active at a young age were tanned and athletic and chewed their gum loudly. I was pale and shy and never managed to run with the sort of crowd that spent their middle school years fucking in public parks.
    My father never gave me “the talk.” To this day, I don’t think he’s ever acknowledged the existence of sex in my presence. He’s more concerned with things like Steven Seagal movies and the pH balance of the water in our backyard pool. One time around 1999, he mumbled something about “hope you’re careful.” That’s the only indication I’ve ever received that he recognizes sexual activity is a real thing I might actually partake in.
    My mother once tried to broach the subject, but it was a vague, off-putting discussion. I was on the phone in our kitchen,
and when I hung up she was sitting at the table waiting to speak with me.
    â€œYou know, your body’s going to start changing soon,” she said.
    â€œYeah, I know,” I replied.
    She paused. She looked down, her eyes scanning the table for some hint of what to do or say. She looked back up.
    â€œSometimes I find stuff in your brother’s sheets,” she blurted out.
    She grimaced. I grimaced. We looked away from each other.
    â€œWhat do you do?” I finally asked.
    â€œI throw them in the laundry machine!” she said, before standing and literally running away.
    My aforementioned brother, two years my senior, could have served as my guide to matters such as these, but frankly, he wasn’t much help. Most brothers probably had heart-to-hearts about sex and girls and whatnot. My brother and I had bigger fish to fry.
    After he left for LaSalle University, a typical phone conversation with him would go like this: “Yo,” he’d start out, “can you believe Jerry the King Lawler showed up in ECW? He’s a WWF guy!”
    â€œYou meet any girls down there?” I would try to slip in.
    â€œNah,” he would quickly say. “But can you believe that Cactus Jack took that bump from Sabu? Man, ECW is the best.”
    Even if Gregg was more concerned with filling me in on the events of the third most popular professional wrestling league in America than with talking about girls, he still could have given me slivers of advice along the way. Where was I supposed to take girls on dates, for example? Where should I go to meet them in the first