Sheila

A Question of Performance

My rather short and unimpressive life as a womanizer began with Sheila. We attended the same college. I was active in the civil rights movement, was recognized as something of an intellectual, and was generally a bit rebellious. I was deemed something of a colorful character, but this was a small but noteworthy liberal arts college so I was only a big fish in a small pond. But for all this, I had a hidden shame.

I was a virgin.

Not only that but I knew very little about sex and had no confidence in my capacity to perform. That one word contained it all. Perform.

One day an extremely attractive young lady came up to me and introduced herself as Sheila. She felt we should be boyfriend and girlfriend and said as much in front of her present boyfriend. Sheila threw off her old boyfriend and we started seeing each other. She was more than open to our consummating our relationship and may have wondered about my timidity. As long as a woman did not “come on” to me too aggressively I was reasonably confident. I enjoyed “making out” and always push things to the limits – which were more limiting those days that in the modern times. It was those very limits that gave me a sense of security.

But she was not the sort to hold back. She began taunting me in a strange way.”I know what it is. You’re another Walter, unquote she would say. She never specified exactly what faults I shared with Walter but it was clearly a sexual issue of some sort. So she declared that we had to put the matter to the test. At that time I lived in a off-campus bedroom rented out by a local resident who happened to know my parents. It was an easy matter to slip a girl into my room without my landlady noticing. She seemed actually, to make a point of not noticing things. So it was not long before we landed in bed with nothing at all to limit what we did. And to make a long story short, I was unable to perform.

That was, I think, the most devastating experience in my entire life. Even so, we continued to go together and when circumstances were less demanding I was able to perform just fine. I just needed a little training and fine-tuning. We made plans to get married. But it did not go well for long. She developed a fondness for my best friend who must have been more manly or more intelligent or more profound, or more something that I was. And the moon in my world came crashing into the sun.