My First Time
by John Newnham
"I have something for you."
The image formed in my fifteen-year-old mind by these words was vivid. Here it was at last. She had recognized my worthiness. The stolen glances, the half-smiles, and finally the natural culmination of a year-long infatuation with my very own Mrs. Robinson. Her name was Gay. She taught English Literature, sometimes in her bare feet.
She touched me on the shoulder, and handed me…a book. I kept looking at her with somewhat turgid expectancy. At any minute she would leave to slip into something more comfortable. Another two minutes after that she would gently take my hand and lead me into the bedroom where ...
"I think you will like it", she said. I turned it over in my hand and read the title, Atlas Shrugged. I flipped through a few pages. When I looked up she had left the room. Aha! I did a quick breath check and began to take deep calming breaths. She returned, fully clothed. In her arms was a small stack of yet more books. Each by someone named Ayn Rand.
I looked around the small flat and something registered in my reluctant brain. Boxes, paintings off the wall. "Are you ... leaving?" Her eyes reflected my sadness. Then I heard it. Movement in the other room. A head poked around the corner. A man's head. Smiling. No shirt. Muscled. Still smiling. Shithead.
"Hey mate! Hon, I need a hand." She brushed my arm as she walked away, in that way women do. I yelled goodbye and hit the road.
Later that night I sat in bed with the pile of books. I opened Atlas Shrugged and spent a few minutes flipping through for the good parts. A well-trained eye (for those keywords) and fast fingers turned up nothing steamy.
Four hours later I was reading in earnest, aware that something different was happening in my thoughts and feelings. So different from the night before. Then, I had sat in bed in the dark trying not to hear the tornado of hurt and pain and anger swirling in the next room, fearing that it would soon be directed at me. I had measured my options and found them wanting. There was simply nothing to do and nowhere to go. I was sinking. This was my life for the next couple years.
In the next few days I devoured Atlas, then The Fountainhead. The words were clean and powerful, and spoke of a kind of heroism in living I had never experienced before. What Rand was saying about who I could be, could not be true. It went against everything I had heard from my parents, my family, and my church. What she was saying about the individual, I had not heard before. It felt slightly, thrillingly blasphemous to read about rational self-interest, and love. Did I really own this life of mine? I realized that I had come home. I read passages over and over, then closed my eyes and dreamed of a world where this was true.
I walked by her flat one afternoon, and she was standing in the doorway. Almost as it she knew. "I’ve been wondering about you!" Said with such openness that old feelings, and a joy in seeing her, were rekindled along with something else: jealousy, and something Rand would educate me on further, envy. I drank a Coke awkwardly, while she told me about the bastard boyfriend. He was a drummer in a band in Birmingham. She would be moving there by the end of the week. But it was really I whom she loved and would I take her into the house and make hot sweet love to her ...
My daydream was broken suddenly by the words she said next,
"When you start being more of who you really are things will seem different, better. I hope you enjoy the books. She will change your life."
I have never forgotten her. I have never forgotten the walk away, the bus-ride home. Never forgotten emptying the pills, flushing the drugs with which I had been dulling life and with whose help I planned eventually to take my own. Of reading Ayn Rand with a renewed vision of what man and life, could and should be. Of being led to philosophy rather than to bed (though just slightly wishing it had been both).
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