Play Me Backwards by Adam Selzer Page B

erotic places to do it in the world, but I really, really don’t want to do it in any of them. But rather than encouraging me or helping out, she rolled her eyes, reached out, took a hold of me, and tried a few tricks with all the enthusiasm of a repairman working on the engine of a car. I half expected her to give my nuts a quarter-turn and say, “Here’s you’re problem, right here. You should be having these rotated every six months.”
    I should have just put my pants on and left, but what would she tell everyone if I did? There wasn’t much to do but close my eyes and try to focus and think about someone else.
    Even after I finally got hard enough to get the condom on, it took way more effort than I would have imagined trying to get inside of her. I kept trying to, like, slip it in, and she kept saying, “Just push .” And then I’d push at the wrong place and feel like an idiot. When I finally got it in, I couldn’t imagine she was enjoying herself too much. I sure wasn’t.
    After about five minutes I went “Uhhhh” and shook around a bit, effectively faking my own orgasm before pulling out. Brenda either believed it or just didn’t care—either way, it made me feel like an even bigger loser than usual. It was sort of a relief to me when shedropped out of school and moved to Council Bluffs with some thirty-year-old guy a few months later.
    So that was my first time. My second wasn’t any better.
    For part of junior year I went out with Mindy, a girl I actually sort of liked—or, anyway, didn’t actively dis like, at least at first. Some girls seem great when you’re not going out with them, but as soon as they start kissing you, they turn really, really mean.
    Mindy, for instance, was nice and occasionally funny when we were just hanging out as friends in the break room, but once we started going out, she started constantly telling me how big her ex-boyfriend Darren’s dick was. Every time we were near a large, cylindrical object, like a water bottle, a tube of cookie dough, or a roll of paper towels, she would point it out and compare it to him. He was usually said to be bigger. Over time Darren’s member began to take on nearly inhuman proportions in Mindy’s stories. If they were to be believed, the guy must have needed underwear specially designed by a team of engineers just to walk down the street without getting curvature of the spine. He would have had to commission John Deere to make him a special wheelbarrow he could lug his nards around in. If he wanted to text someone a picture of his scrotum, he would’ve needed to set the camera up on auto-timer and then hike half a block away to get them to fit in the frame.
    Needless to say, I did not measure up.
    When she saw me with my pants down for the first time, she shrugged and said, “You’d probably be fine for most girls. I just kind of got spoiled by Darren.”
    Maybe I shouldn’t have been so offended. It’s not like I wasn’t thinking to myself that her face wasn’t as cute as Anna’s, or that herhair didn’t glow the same way, or that she wasn’t as smart, or anything like that. I was spoiled too, having my first girlfriend be the girl of my dreams. But at least I had the sense not tell Mindy out loud that she didn’t measure up.
    By the time we actually had sex, instead of just fooling around, I had gotten to where I really didn’t like her very much at all anymore. The first time we did it she rolled off me after a while and said, “Well, it’s not what I’m used to. I couldn’t really feel that much. But it’s not your fault.” I guess this was her being nice.
    After that I just couldn’t get it up around her at all anymore. Every attempt to do it was embarrassing and ended in failure.
    This is something they don’t put into brochures about why having teen sex is a bad idea: If you turn