A whore's remorse.

(Originally published 3/16/2006)

Recently I was celebrating a friend’s birthday at a Mexican restaurant when the birthday boy’s new boyfriend, whom I thought that I’d never met, showed up. Sitting two people down from me, he said, "I think I know you. You slept with a friend of mine."

"Really?" I said. "Could you pass the salsa?"

"His name is Michael," the new boyfriend continued, although unencouraged.

"You’ll need to be more specific," I said between gulps of my margarita.

"It was about a year ago. We all met out and he went home with you."

"That really narrows it down," I thought, then asked, "Where were we?"

He told me the name of the bar, a bar I’m known to frequent with a fairly steady success rate for meeting people. He continued on, describing the way the fellow looked, what he did for a living, how old he was, etc… All I could really determine from the conversation was the guy sounded somewhat hot and interesting and I briefly entertained the thought of being set up on a "blind" date. But given the unique situation I refrained from asking the guy’s current marital status.

"Look," I finally said, the topic exhausted, "We could do this all night. But truth be told your buddy was not the only guy I’ve met out at a bar, took home, then completely forgot existed. I may own more shoes than Ivana Trump, but, the bottom line is, I’m a dude."

My level of disinterest frightened me the next day (at the time my brain was absorbed in tequila and nothing whatsoever really seemed to matter). Have years and years of one-night stands beaten me down to a level where sex no longer matters? How did this happen? And when did this happen?

I remember sitting in a Geology class my sophomore year of college and instead of listening to the teacher drone on and on about how fascinating rocks are, I decided to make a list of the men I’d been with up to that point. Much debate surrounds defining what actually "being with" consists of, but at that time in my life I subscribed to the school of of thought that if by any means someone has an orgasm around someone else, it counted as sex. Since then, for the sake of avoiding astronomical figures and staggering calculations, I have modified my thinking. I don’t even count oral anymore.

But even at that time, at the ripe age of 19, I’d made an impressive dent in my own purity and the number startled me. I vowed to be more chaste.

At 21, I revisited the list and amended my definition of sex. At 22, I modified what sex was yet again in order to avoid the list becoming a weekend project. At 23, I threw the list away. I chose to pretend that the list, as most of the boys whose names appeared on it, never existed.

So I pushed all those names on those sheets of paper right out of my life. What was the point anyway? The list served no other purpose but to validate someone else’s definitions of right and wrong. I think I was born without the guilt gene anyway, so I often leave it up to others to tell me when I should or shouldn’t "feel" guilty. With the list literally and figuratively in the trash, I stopped counting. It must’ve been then that sex became some standard function, a "no big whoop" type of event, like playing cards or doing the laundry. As long as it was safe and we were consenting adults (or a consenting 16 year old who plowed the field behind my mother’s house), then it wasn’t an issue.

But I spent most of the Sunday that followed that party wondering just how many Michaels were out there. My recollection of the ones that I remembered was already enough to make a porn star blush. I’d never even considered having forgotten any of them. I decided, seven years having past, to revisit the list. So I ran downstairs, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a coffee, and braced myself for the world’s most perverse and dirty research project ever. I decided that I would use the definition of sex that I’d used at 19, just to make it more interesting.

Starting out was a breeze and somewhat encouraging. This wasn’t going to be so hard. I’m not that bad! I ran through numbers one through eight with eeze. I even remembered all of their names! And number eight was in my 20th year, which was also encouraging. But by the time I got around to age 22 the list had started to read like the actors’ credits in a film.

- Guy at park
- Guy with red Toyota
- Guy with dog
- Guy from Boston (oh wait, there’s gonna eventually be at least four more from Boston, so I’ll just make this one Guy from Boston 1)
- Guy from Australia 1
- Guy in New Orleans
- Guy in New Orlean’s friend
- Guy in New Orlean’s father

The number seemed to double between ages 22 and 24, which I found odd considering that I had a boyfriend at the time. They peaked dramatically at 27, when I moved to Chicago. Upon completion, I decided that I’d use a margin of error like they do in newspaper polls to factor in any Michaels I may have forgotten.

And with that, it was all laid out before me. I couldn’t ignore it and pretend that it never existed. There they were. Every penis, every dirty towel, every mom or boyfriend that walked in, every back seat, every dog that seemed to like watching, every time I was too drunk to finish, every time I really didn’t want to but I was just being nice because he paid for dinner, every fake phone number, every photo of Grandma on the nightstand, every pick-up line, every song that might’ve been playing in the background.

There was some that stuck out though, the ones that might’ve been or could’ve turned into love. And there were a few of them. Ones who moved or met someone else or who I was mean to or who simply stopped calling. The entire list could’ve stretched from my tiny apartment on the north side of Chicago all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico (and, believe you me, it was close), and those few, the ones that I allowed myself to pause and think fondly of, were the only ones on there that really even mattered. How could I group "Guy who lived next door to Uncle Scotty" with the last person I ever said "I love you" to?

I couldn’t. And that’s when it made sense. The flip side of casual sex (besides STDs, pregnancies, stained clothing, etc…) is that if you are in love, then sex is no longer something special because you’ve already had it six times this week (and it’s only Tuesday). This, I realized, is why some people see sex as something more than a simple bodily function. It turns out that it’s not just like blowing your nose after all. Sex, I learned from my little experiment, has very little relation to brushing one’s teeth or burping.

I decided that the list, although useful, was better in memory alone. I didn’t need all those ghosts looking up at me from a piece of paper (OK, it was a stack of paper). So I ceremoniously burned it.

I felt enlightened and moral for about an hour. Then I decided to go drink beer and try to pick up guys.