High Price

said, then mercifully filled me in on the facts of life.
    Because masturbation was seen as less than manly in our circle and because my parents hadn’t educated me about puberty and what to expect, I’d had my first orgasm in the company of a girl. I had no preparation for what had happened. My first experiences of pleasure and desire had occurred in total ignorance, completely without expectations or even language. But as soon as I knew what was going on, I was immediately on my way to becoming that heartbreaker those girls had predicted I would be. And although many of them would never know it, my girlfriends played a key role in my success, keeping me out of harm’s way and boosting me up when I really needed nurturing.
    I had very few conventional people to look up to in my life, male or female, to show me how to have a committed, loving relationship. My parents’ breakup and the fighting that led up to it had been driven largely by infidelity: I still don’t know what caused that but I’d certainly seen it. Most men I knew had women on the side. I didn’t really know anyone who practiced what was preached at church and I didn’t know how to navigate this treacherous emotional terrain. Sometimes, I’m not sure that anyone really does.
    Although I didn’t know about it until I was an adult, my maternal grandfather had long had a mistress whom he spent early evenings with, returning home to his wife by a certain time. He also had children with other women. And several years after my parents split, my mother herself became involved with a married man. I don’t mention this to judge my family: if you look closely at virtually any family history, there are complex, tangled relationships and secrets everyone wants to keep hidden.
    But in the world I grew up in, people had multiple partners and their relationships were just as often sources of conflict as they were of comfort. For me, my sexual relationships also kept me busy, when hanging out with male friends might well have gotten me involved in much riskier activity. Since my sisters and cousins all stressed the importance of using condoms (although I could have used more direct instruction; the first time I tried one I failed to leave enough room at the end), being with girls was actually a much safer situation.
    My mother’s boyfriend then was a man named Johnson. Starting when I was about ten or eleven, I worked for his roofing company. Installing and repairing roofs in the relentlessly humid South Florida summer was brutal. But what was almost worse was listening to the guys I worked with talk shit about the boss. They were in their twenties and they’d talk about how if Johnson was in a bad mood, that was because he couldn’t decide who he was going to be with that night. They’d go on and on about all the women he was seeing, in what I now know are extremely misogynistic terms. And even though I knew then that my mom was just one of his many options, I couldn’t say or do anything about it. It was infuriating.
    Consequently, much of what I learned about relationships was learned the same way I’d learned about sex: by watching others, by copying the behavior of the men I looked up to, with very little explicit instruction, discussion, or even thought. From the start, one thing was very clear: you didn’t get too attached to women—or if you did catch feelings, you certainly didn’t let anyone else know about it.
    Sex was a sport and love was a sucker’s game. You might profess love if it would get you sex and you might even do things girls wanted you to do that represented commitment to them, like giving them teddy bears or your class ring. But you kept your feelings in check no matter what, and the best way to do that was to always have more than one lady. Cool guys didn’t fall in love or limit themselves to just one. They didn’t masturbate; they had girls to take care of their sexual needs—and the cooler you were, the more ladies you had. As a star athlete who was soon to become a popular DJ, I was on my way to becoming very, very cool. In fact, my DJ name would soon be Cool Carl.
    I lost my virginity for real when I was fourteen. A friend told me that a friend of hers named Kim liked me, and that her mom wasn’t going to be home that afternoon, so I should stop by. Kim wasn’t really my type, but I thought it might be interesting.
    She was clearly experienced. That day, she took the lead. The sex wasn’t anything special. But