The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

boy. I was a desperate man.
    I didn’t talk much to Tina after that. But I soon got a taste of my own medicine—courtesy of the richest and most popular girl in school, Mary Beth Kroger. After staring wantonly at her for three years, I summoned all my courage and asked her out to a party when we were seniors. To my amazement, she accepted. We ended up at my house drinking beer, with me sitting next to her uncomfortable and too scared to make a move because she seemed like a complete prude. But my ideal of Mary Beth Kroger quickly disintegrated as she tore off her clothes, jumped on top of me and, without even bothering to use a condom, fucked me like a wild animal astride a high-speed rowing machine. The next day in school, Mary Beth put her prissy facade back on and proceeded to ignore me just as she always had. All I got out of it was deep scratch marks all over my back, which I proudly displayed to my friends, who, in honor of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, renamed her Mary Beth Krueger.
    By this time, my first fuck, Tina, was seven months pregnant. The father, ironically, was the person who had set me up with her: John Crowell. I didn’t see much of John after that, because he was stuck dealing with the consequences of not using a rubber. I sometimes wonder whether they ever married, settled down and raised big-titted burnouts together.
PUNISHING THE WORM
    Once Tina opened up the floodgates, I went on a rampage. Not a rampage of getting laid, but of trying to get laid. After months of rejection and masturbation, I met a blond cheerleader named Louise when I was drunk on Colt 45 during a high school football game in a farming community outside of Canton called Louisville. Though I didn’t know it at the time, she was the Tina Potts of Louisville: the local slut. She had thick lips, a flat nose and big, smoldering eyes, as if she was part mulatto and part Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles. She also had a Shirley Temple quality to her, because she was short with curly hair, but she seemed more into lap dancing than tap dancing. She was the first girl to give me a blow job. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t all she gave me.

    Nearly every day I picked her up and brought her down to my bedroom while my parents were still at work. We would listen to Rush’s Moving Pictures or David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and, now that I was more experienced in orgasm control, have normal teenage sex. She gave me so many hickeys that at one point my neck was too sore to even move. But I didn’t mind, since I was able to wear them like badges of honor at school. She also swallowed, which gave me more bragging rights. One day she brought me a blue glitter bow tie that looked like something a Chippendale would wear. I think she wanted to try role-playing, but the only role-playing I was familiar with was Dungeons & Dragons.
    After a solid week of fucking, Louise stopped returning my calls. I was worried I had gotten her pregnant, because I hadn’t used a condom every time. I had this image of her mother sending her away to a convent and putting her—our—child up for adoption. Or maybe Louise was going to make me pay child support for the rest of my life. There was also the possibility that she’d gotten an abortion, something had gone wrong, she had died, and now her parents wanted to murder me. After I hadn’t heard from her for several weeks, I decided to call her one more time, disguising my voice with a cloth over the telephone in case her parents answered.
    Fortunately, she picked up the phone.
    â€œI’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long,” she apologized. “I’ve been sick.”
    â€œWhat kind of sick?” I panicked. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Are you throwing up in the morning or anything like that?”
    It turned out that she was simply avoiding me because she was a slut and having a boyfriend would ruin her reputation. Those weren’t her words exactly, but that was basically what she meant.
    A few days later during math class, my balls started itching. It continued all day, spreading throughout my pubic hair. When I returned home, I went straight to the bathroom, dropped my pants and stood on the sink to examine myself. I instantly spotted three or four black scabs directly above my dick. I picked one off, and as I was looking at it, a little blood bubbled out.
    I still thought it was a piece of dead skin, but