You see, puberty hit me like a box of bricks. I was obsessed with sex by twelve, and thought of little else by seventeen, but in thinking and dreaming about sex and how it worked, I was very confused by the penis. It was a long muscly thing that hung down, right? And the vagina was a tunnel that went up, right? So how was it possible that something hanging down goes up into a tunnel?

I solved that puzzle by imagining that the man got on top of the woman upside down; that way his penis could go into her vagina. For years I thought people fucked head to foot.

Thank God for Tracy Ellstaff and her mother, who never fucked Tracy Ellstaff's father.

---

I was seventeen years old when I met my first boyfriend, Eddie. We we quite mad about each other from the start, he being radically tattooed and pierced everywhere, being older and naughtier than any of the boys at my high school. He made my parents squirm and I loved him for it.

We had been dating for a few months when it became quite obvious that I had done little in the way of sex, and that he had done it all. I think it happened like this:

We were kissing on the couch in his basement, a room with a foldaway couch, a Nintendo and various Rage against the Machine posters. We had been "sucking face" for quite a while, hours maybe, so much so that the back of my hair had raveled itself into a rat's nest. Eddie decided to put his hand down my pants, and I reacted by jerking my leg forth and kneeing him is his balls, and blue balls they were. I couldn't help it.

After that, I became rather self conscious about my inexperience. But rather than play the shrinking violet, skulk back into my sexual comfort zone, I decided to rethink its boundaries.

I rethought its boundaries by deciding to suck dick.

I tried to tackle the subject the way I would any subject, by doing research. Our World Book Encyclopedias were just like sex ed, forensic and boring, and nothing was mentioned of oral sex. There were no porn stores in my town. Or, at least, there were none that I had heard of, and even if they did exist, I was only seventeen. I wasn't of age to rent or buy porn. I checked the James Prendergast Public Library, but you can imagine, there wasn't much in the way of "How to suck dick."

I asked my friend Jenny how to do it, because she was a professed "slut" and would surely know. She had recently been grounded when her mother walked into her bedroom, heard a rustle in her closet and opened it to find Jenny's naked and aroused boyfriend. Jenny told me, "You just put it in your mouth like a popsicle and suck on it. But don't bite it, cuz that really hurts. That's what my boyfriend says."

So I went to the "Quality Markets" down the street, which incidentally, Eddie's father ran. I bought two boxes of popsicles and practiced till my lips went gangrenous. I was going to be the greatest dick sucker ever.

---

A few nights later, Eddie and I went out on a date. Miniature golf was really the only thing you could do after six in my town if you weren't eighteen and had no fake ID. When we were finished golfing, or rather flirting rapaciously, and sometimes hitting our pink and blue technicolor balls into the holes, we went to Denny's up the street to split a milkshake.

Eddie: [slurrrrrp] "So whadduya wanna do now?"
Me: "Let's go to my house and watch Showtime" Because Showtime was the "naughty" channel with the "Red Shoe Diaries."

My house was quiet and dark when we arrived. It was midnight, so my parents had long since gone to bed, and my sister was away at college in Syracuse, thus we had the living room to ourselves. We took full advantage of it, turned the television on to a medium sound level, so that the smacking sounds of teenage makeout would be obscured, but the television wouldn't be so loud as to waken my parents. I got out blankets because it was fall, and my father likes to keep our house arctic to save on energy bills. We sat on the floor, got under the blankets and went to work "sucking face."

It took a long time to summon the courage to suck elsewhere. I found myself endlessly kissing his stomach and chest, too shaky and unconfident in my skills to make the move.

Eventually I steeled myself and went for it. His belt took forever to undo, as did the button fly of his second hand jeans because my hands were trembling so much. Between the folds of jean was this chubby muscle. This must have been his penis, but... wait... it couldn't have been.

I took a closer look because the light was low. Surely I was seeing his penis AND balls.

I reached down to pull the penis away from the balls, but somehow they were stuck together. I decided to get all of it out of the jeans so that I could separate the penis and balls, but when I did that, boing! the whole thing stood straight up, at attention, an eager soldier nearly twice the length and girth of the purply porn version. It was as if he had taken one of those oversized summer sausages off the shelves of his dad's grocery store and shoved it into his pants. I was shocked. Even if I wanted to put it in my mouth, it wouldn't have fit.

But I was not going to back down. I put my hand at the base of it like Jenny had told me to do, opened my mouth as wide as was possible and shoved it in. Jenny said I was supposed to be covering my teeth and licking the head, but it was so big that technique wasn't possible. All I could to was shove it in and drool down the shaft. I couldn't even control the slurping noises I was making.

And so the noises from the Tyler family living room wafted up the stairs like so:

-Sexy Sax playing over an episode of Red Shoe Diaries...
-Suck, slurp, suck...
-Sexy Sax playing over an episode of Red Shoe Diaries...
-Gurgle, slurp, suck...

And then I heard the sound of body weight creak on the hard wood floors of my parents' bedroom. Oh no...someone heard us!

I took the monster out of my mouth. It flicked backward onto his belly with a great thud...

And then I saw two male feet descending the stair case. Oh shit!

I panicked, and jumped on top the thing...

And then my father, bleary eyed and actually oblivious that anyone was in the living room, came walking into it in tightie whitie underpants and nothing else... Oh God no. Which was worse, the embarrassment of getting caught or the embarrassment of my father's tightie whities?

I leaned onto Eddie's stomach as if it were a normal place to lounge, smiled and said "Hi dad," as cheerfully as I could while he grimaced and made his way over to the thermostat to double check on its "off" state. He knew I was sucking dick, I knew he knew I was sucking dick, Eddie knew he knew I was sucking dick. The penis beneath me deflated.

He made another grimace and trodded back up the stairs, too startled and embarrassed about the tightie whities to make an issue of it.

Mercifully.