I'm a 21-year-old virgin. But don't judge me. I've had some problems that have held me back, romantically. Other than those problems, I'm a healthy, extremely horny young man. I keep myself physically fit, and I think I am lovable. At least my mama says so.
My life was pretty normal until Junior year in high school. I had friends and a lot of girls seemed to like me. I was getting kissed quite regularly from 8th grade on, and I was beginning to round the bases the summer before 11th.
Then my life, as I knew it, stopped.
It was in the chemistry lab. We were doing an experiment with nitric acid and copper. The Cu2+ ions and nitrate ions had just changed the solution to green. As we watched, it became brownish-green. The next step was to make the solution blue, by diluting it with water. Fun experiment, right? Not exactly life changing. I always will wonder what the FUCK they thought they were teaching us.
I grabbed the water beaker, idly noticing Chuck Lantry giggling behind his hand. Chuck's an asshole, was my thought as I poured the water into the beaker, just before it exploded in my face. In my memories of the moment, I hear screaming. I always wonder if it was me, but it's hard to tell what's happening when your face is on fire.
Turned out good old Chuck thought it'd be funny to replace my beaker of water with one filled with isopropanol. He later claimed that while he knew it would react violently with the nitric acid, he thought it would just make a puff of smoke. He didn't know it would actually explode.
They saved my eyesight, which was miraculous considering I got a face full of acid and glass. They thought I must have blinked at the right time. My face was horribly scared, even my eyelids. My eyes would never open fully again, as the scar tissue on the lids drags, keeping my eyes looking like evil slits.
They've tried plastic surgery to correct it and the rest of the facial scarring, but I'm prone to keloids. Everything they attempted just seemed to make it worse. I went from being a handsome young man to the thing that scares children on the street.
Understand why at 21 I'm virginal? As pure as the driven snow?
My friends tried to be around me when I returned to school, but with the exception of my friend Bruno, they all drifted away. I guess it's hard to keep your lunch down around someone the town was referring to as "hamburger face". My mama said it was just hard for some people to be reminded of just how fragile their existence can be.
I even had to give up Bruno. He started dating Mandy Robbins, but whenever I came over or met up with Bruno, she'd excuse herself. I realized that if he insisted on hanging out with me, we'd both end up being virgins forever. I began distancing myself from my friend.
It was senior year when we were reading Victor Hugo's 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' in English class. Some wag suggested, to some of my classmates' amusement, although I thought most of them looked uncomfortable, that they should find a clock tower for me. Shortly thereafter, I heard myself referred to as Quasi, as in Quasimodo. By the end of term, even the teachers were using the nickname.
My mother was ready to torch the school when she found out, when one of the neighbors used that moniker for me. I tried to calm her down, smiling (or giving the grimace that the scar tissue made of my beaming smile) about it and telling her it was okay. She was still picking up the phone to call the principal when I burst into tears, begging her not to make it more difficult for me. What were they going to do? Announce over the PA system that the nickname hurt my feelings? Spare me that kindness.
The nickname followed me to college, because my mother insisted, I go locally. I complied, since my mother was alone. My father was married when he seduced my 18-year-old mother -- she didn't know until she showed up at his door to tell him she was pregnant, and it was the wife who answered her knock. He contributed to my upbringing for the first few years, until his wife caught him cheating again and divorced him. He left the county, and we haven't heard from him since.
The only thing he left me was a legacy to Pi Phi Pi fraternity. If not for the legacy, I would never have been in a frat. I wouldn't have been in one anyway, if my mama hadn't insisted. She was afraid I'd just slink in the shadows at college, and she wanted me to have some kind of support system, even if it was a bunch of drunk frat boys.
The ByeByeByes (as they were derogatorily known) really didn't want me, but when they found I was an ace at math, the officers who were all on the verge of flunking out, decided I was ByeBye material.
I lived in the dorm freshman year, even having a double room to myself. I had been assigned a roommate, who disappeared after the first night. I found out later that I had given him nightmares, and he dropped out when they wouldn't assign him another room. Belonging to the Pi Phi Pi frat gave me a place to hang out, when not in class or tutoring the brothers in calculus or statistics.
It was Bill Blake, the Pledge Master, who brought the name Quasi to the frat. He had a friend on the football team who had been a year ahead of me in high school, who clued him in to my story. Bill would have liked Chuck Lantry; they shared a sense of humor. He thought the whole thing, including the nickname, hilarious. My pledge task was to spend Hell Week with a lump attached to my back. I had to walk around hunched over, swinging my lower arm (my back hurt, so I kept shifting sides), and yelling "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" at inappropriate times. If my face wasn't already well known on campus before, I was infamous by the end of Hell Week.
Why did I put up with it? Two reasons. My mother wanted me in a frat, and I wanted, no, needed, a degree. Probably a couple of degrees, to get a decent job where my face wouldn't matter. I'd applied for all the usual high school and college jobs, to help my mother. At retail stores, I was told that they wanted to keep customers, not chase them away. They said it PC terms, but that was the gist.
Fast food outlets weren't so kind. I was told several times, in very plain terms, that they wanted their customers to be able to retain their lunch.
No, I needed a job that required me to use my brains, without having to deal with people face to face.
Once I was a brother, Bill and the other brothers thought it was their duty to get me laid. When every 'easy' sorority girl who the guys tried to hook me up with ran away screaming, they tried to put me on top of whatever girl had imbibed too much and had passed out. When I refused to be a rapist, they resorted to hiring a hooker. They'd even gone to the lengths of showing her my pictures, to ensure she'd stick around. They found one old, ugly whore who finally agreed for double the price. The brothers thought it was going to be hilarious, but it was too late.
I mean, I chose to believe that the frat had my best interest in mind. I chose to believe that the nanny cams I could spot in the room weren't there to capture my or the whore's humiliation. I can choose to take the high road in all this, because it was all too late, anyway. The brothers wasted their money and were very unhappy when I refused the hooker's services.
No, I hadn't gotten laid. I wish. No, I had fallen in love. I had seen the object of all my dreams and desires personified, in the most loving and caring person I could ever imagine. No way was I going to dirty myself with some prostitute when there was a goddess to adore.
