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Would you lose your virginity earlier or later than you did the first time around? …and by how many years?
Am I going to die a virgin…? As if - I’m no scrub! But how is a 16-year-old conservative, Mormon boy - whose sole understanding of women’s anatomy is comprised of just a few Playboy pages that found on his way home from school - how is he going to persuade his crush to help him indefinitely misplace his virginity?
Mixtapes!
They were going to be my secret weapon to losing my virginity just before Y2K hit. Well, technically burnt CD’s, being that it was the late 90’s but mixtape has fewer syllables and it sounds cooler so suspend your disbelief and roll with me into the scare of Y2K, casually referred to and believed to be“the end of the world.”
This, of course, was a scary time for all of us virgins.
“Music influences your thoughts and thoughts lead to actions” my mom would say whenever she’d catch me singing along to the lyrics of 2 Pac and Eminem…or anything that wasn't, quote - wholesome - unquote. I was a good kid, I listened to my mom - took her word for gospel.
And her sermons were daily.
“Music influences your thoughts, music influences your thoughts,” her words were bouncing around one day in my head when suddenly they awkwardly landed backward and I had a classic 90’s “Oh Snap!” moment. Oh Snap, “Thoughts lead to actions…and music influences your thoughts.” If I want to lose my virginity before Y2K hits, all I need to do is influence my crushes thoughts through music and I won't die a virgin.
Which brings me to Mixtapes.
In an ideal world, I would just give my crush a mixtape with one song on it, “ Salt N Pepper - Push It ” and get on to proposition of us having sex or not but this was a matter of “love”…and at 16 years old sex only come after you loved someone and love is a game of gentle persuasion – hence the need for the mixtape in the first place. And if I was clever about the order, she might think about love then later about sex and then finally about sex with me.
So following love’s delicate protocol as a guide, I set out to make Mixtape: lose-my-virginity
I started it off slow with, KC & Jo-Jo “All My Life” fertile soil for the seed of romance to blossom into love but how to transition from romance to love. I needed her to consider what I was considering, “the world is coming to an end and it would be ‘hella lame’ to die a virgin.”
“Boo-freak’n-ya my dudes,”
That’s likely how I responded when I found what I was looking for. Cleverly tucked in the lyrics of a Heavy D and The Boys song I found the bridge from romance to love and even better it came with an open-ended question “now that we found love what are we going to do…with it?” It was perfect.
Virgin or not I knew without a doubt what song came next.
it had to be the lyrics of “ I don’t like his message,” Mom agai but Sir-Mix-A-Lot’s lyrics, “my anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun” was the perfect message to transition from love to sex.
It was all too good….borderline wrong?
I started thinking. Frick ( fuck for Mormons) is this so wrong that I shouldn’t do it? Without this mixtape am I going to die a virgin before Y2K hits? Guilt, like a weed, started taking over, started choking out my freshly planted seed of romance.
Days went by and Mixtape: lose-my-virginity was wilting in the heavy, dry desert of Mormon guilt. Days turned to weeks and the whole mastermind seemed shameful, ridiculous and worse, wrong. That is of course until my older brother came to stay at the house during one of his college breaks.
The day it all clicked wasn’t anything special.
My brother and I were listening to the radio, he was driving me to something - probably basketball practice cuz “ball-is-life” and in the off chance the world didn’t end with Y2K, it was pretty obvious to me that I was going to play in NBA - but as fate would have it, rays of sun tore back the clouds and the heavens opened up and I saw Jesus. (Proverbially guys, I know I can’t see Jesus until I do everything the Mormon church teaches, pay 10% of my earnings and earn my way through works and grace till I’ve made it back to heaven - we all know that!)
Either way, miraculously and inexplicably so, Jesus was on my side. He supported Mixtape: lose-my-virginity. Amidst concords of angles, Jesus looked at me and in His tender mercies began to sing, which threw me off …” wait, what? Why does Jesus sound like John Michael Stipe, the lead singer for R.E.M…?”
But as I listened closer, the purpose of the vision was clear…
“It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
Well, hot damn! John Micheal Stipe Jesus sure does works in mysterious ways. Mixtape: lose-my-virginity was back on and fully supported by the highest of authorities. A perfect justification to not die a virgin. So I rushed home after practicing my future NBA moves to add R.E.M’s “ Its the end of the world as we know it” just after Sir Mix-A-Lot “ Buns Hun” and finally delivered Mixtape: Lose-My-Virginity under its new name, “Lovers Take Action” to my crush…and we broke up 1 week later.
It was sudden. And I was shocked.
Y2K happened and none of the experts prophesies came to pass. I lost faith in computer science experts and seven years later, sober and 23 I lost my virginity in my college dorm room. Lost it under 10 pumps, just like my friend Paul predicted.
So if I could lose my virginity earlier or later than I did and by how many years?
It would be earlier and by 7 years. Because if I had lost it back in the day of the Y2K scare, thanks to a mixtape of songs intended to persuade my 16-year old crush to have sex with me, I think that would have been a pretty bang’n “how did you lose your virginity” story.
The End
Come back next time and I’ll have another story and photos, maybe even a short film to go with it.
*Story and visuals created by Brooks Forester for Told By Story