Curvy Jones on:The College Years & Beyond

Post 2! Thanks for reading and commenting. Again, if you’d like to comment but you’d rather not do so in public, please feel free to email me at curvyjones[at]diaryofcurvyjones or mocahgirl[at]gmail.

At the top of this post on the right hand side you’ll see  a directory of sorts. All posts in this series will be tied together. You can view other posts in this series by clicking on the link in the directory.

This is a long entry, I apologize. I was going to cut it but decided to let it be. It’ll be here if you get tired of reading and want to come back later! ;)

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The whole nerd, mousy thing did not go away when I went to college. I was social with my roommate, the students I worked with, co workers. I was never into the college party scene. I wasn’t a drinker or a smoker or a dater. My friends tended to be nerdy, quiet people. I was just happy to be out of the house and away from home– I wasn’t really thinking about going wild. I had moved out and then moved back when it turned out that I wasn’t allowed to stay in the apartment my friends had, and was moving out again. In an odd show of closeness, my parents drove me to the University and dropped me off.  I was supposed to go off to school and become a teacher. One of the best teaching programs in the nation is at a University not far from my hometown. My college town was only about 25 miles away. I wasn’t going far.

A few days after I moved into my dorm room, met my roommate, had my experience with group feeding, otherwise known as The Commons (where, by the way, I could eat cereal for dinner, if I wanted. HEAVEN), I noticed a guy kind of hanging around up on the main floor. He seemed to be waiting for me when I came upstairs to check my mail. He was on the maintenance crew; I think he wore overalls with the University logo on them. I managed to chat with him off and on and he was friendly. He was from Africa. I know some of you know where this is going.

In my experience, Africans have a different method of approaching women and relating to them. They are aggressive and straightforward. I found them to be pushy and brash and overly eager. I am sure they have sentiments about black American women. The similar skin color gives a false sense of familiarity and closeness. The cultural difference creates a giant crevasse.

He lived in an apartment off campus but since he worked for the University, he was around a lot. One evening, he was hanging around the dorms and stopped by to see me. I would never let him in my room, mostly because I had a roommate, and because I didn’t want to be trapped in a room with a man. We talked in the hall, and after awhile, I begged off because I had to study. There was an interior door, a stairwell, and then the exterior door. He cornered me in the stairwell, between the two doors, leaned into kiss me and palmed both of my breasts. And squeezed.

I have always had a pretty rockin’ rack but no one had ever touched me there. All of a sudden everything my mom ever told me and everything I had ever been afraid of popped up in my mind. I was pretty sure I was about to be attacked or something. He scared me so bad I punched him and ran. He didn’t even know me and he put his hands on me. The groan that came out of him was… ugh. I wanted to throw up and I felt like I had done something wrong.

Weeks later at a campus dance, he sidled up beside me. All smiles and laughs and grabby hands. There was alcohol on his breath. I was disgusted. I pulled away from him and tried to walk away. He grabbed my arm roughly, tightly.  I pulled harder, yelling over the music, and he let go. I left him standing in the middle of the gathering room-cum-dance hall, left the dance and ran back to my room. I never saw him again. That was the last campus dance that I attended except for a Homecoming dance that I would attend much later.

The next four years were full of classes and work and friends, movies and papers and campus activities, ski trips and working with English language programs. I had friends, even some guy friends. A few guy friends I liked as more than a friend, but the feeling was never mutual. That was when I started hearing the phrase that stars in my nightmares: I just like you as a friend. If I never hear that phrase ever again, it will be too soon. I do anything and everything to avoid hearing it. You don’t have to say it. I already know.

I got through my entire college experience, the post-college crap jobs, the tiny apartment,  the beat up car, the “searching for the meaning of life” phases without so much as a hormone-ridden backseat make out session. I had never been kissed. I had never had sex. A man had never seen my body. I had never seen a fully grown nude male. I was so, so behind, but at around age 24, I’d say, I was catching up.

I finally got pretty.

I’m not saying that to be vain. I’m just saying that I knew, growing up, that I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t even cute. I am legally blind and I have to wear glasses to correct my vision. There were no such thing as thin lenses when I was growing up. I wore big pink coke bottle glasses that were entirely too huge for my face.  I had buck teeth and an overbite and scoliosis, so everything hung off of my body in a weird way. I was always sort of in my own mind, so I never had any idea about fashion or trends. I couldn’t buy those clothes anyway, so there was no sense in paying attention to them. I wore donated clothes from people who had grown out of their stuff and were buying new things. All through high school I wore what was called a ‘Care Free Curl’ which was like a jheri curl but wasn’t drippy and wet. What it really amounted to was an afro me because I didn’t really know how to manage it.  I alternated between a Curly hairdo and braids. I have a Tyra Banks FiveHead © (a forehead so big it’s really a fivehead), so I just had an altogether weird face, odd shape, lost and nerdy look about me. I was never surprised that boys didn’t like me.

It took me until I was in my 20′s to grow into my head (though I still have a Fivehead, I just don’t care, lol or I cover it with bangs)  and my buck teeth and my big ass and big boobs and hourglass shape. I learned how to do my hair. I got new glasses that fit my face. I started wearing makeup (I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup when I lived at home and at college I just never found the time to learn how). I had braces my last two years of high school, which helped considerably with the buck teeth. I had a great job and I was having fun, which helped immensely with confidence. When I looked in the mirror, I was starting to like what I saw staring back at me.

I was 25 when I experienced my first kiss. He was almost twice my age. I had NO business messing with him.

I was working for a group of AM/FM radio stations, owned by a TV station. MB worked in the creative department—if I remember right, he made all of the graphics that are used on-air during a broadcast. He was well into his 40’s. White guy. Kind of short. Thin. Funny. He and I would talk at station gatherings. He must have sensed my naiveté, because as soon as he found an opportunity, he pounced.

What I didn’t know was that MB had recently spent some time away from work, at a treatment center for drugs and alcohol. He was a big time talent in New York, had been married, and had a great home, nice car, bright future. Life would have been great, except he snorted it all away. His marriage, his family, his home, all gone thanks to his cocaine habit. He was back in Podunk, WA, living with his parents in his childhood home, working for this small time TV station.

It was humiliating for him to be back working local news after working for a major station in NYC. He was unhappy. He was in recovery. He was looking for someone to hang onto, I guess. Use up some time and energy. Everyone else at the station seemed to be hip to his game. I was the only one, apparently, who didn’t know. I love how no one said anything until after it was over. I was so, so naïve.

The details of how I came to be spending time with him are jumbled in my mind. This happened over ten years ago. Some things I remember like it happened yesterday. Some things I can’t seem to remember no matter how hard I try. I remember we were extra friendly right before the company Christmas party. He was making the video that they showed at the end of the party every year and I stopped in to watch it. We sat really close on the couch in his office. He laid a hand on my thigh and I thought my heart was going to explode, it was beating so fast. It took everything in me not to get up and run out. I probably should have.

After the annual party, I’d stop in and see him in his office if I happened to be walking by. His office was on the way to the front desk and I had to go to the front desk 10-12 times a day to deliver prizes to radio contest winners. I don’t remember if we talked on the phone first or… what… but he ended up at my house one night. We sat and talked and watched TV. Casual

He tried to kiss me. I pulled away. He tried again. I pulled away. He asked me what was wrong. I said I didn’t know how to kiss. He laughed and laughed and then realized that I was serious. I know it’s not rocket surgery, and it’s mostly instinct but still, I didn’t know how. He tried to talk me into it, said it was natural and easy and I’d like it. Press, press, press. I don’t do pressure. The more you try to press me into doing something, the less likely I am to do it. He was pushing so hard that I was completely turned off and I made him leave.

I rolled into bed that night feeling really stupid and amateur and immature. I felt about 12 yrs old. I was 25 and had never been kissed and some guy wanted to kiss me and I wouldn’t let him.

The next night, or a few nights later, he was back. This time, I let him kiss me. It was okay. Really, just okay. Some lips on mine. Alright. I felt nothing. Probably should have been some kind of sign? And then I let him really kiss me, tongue and all. And that was okay, too. I’ve been told that I’ve never really been kissed if I don’t enjoy it, but I think I have been kissed enough to know that I just don’t like it. I have issues, and I am averse to saliva (even my own) and most of the time, guys can’t kiss. It’s just a fact, jack. When I meet someone new, I have to brace myself for the kissing. Oh my GOD, I am weird. Well, we made out for awhile and then his hands started to wander and against my better judgment, I let him creep up under my shirt.

Over the next week or so, I saw a lot of him. And I don’t mean that we had a lot of dates. :/ I had never seen an erect penis before. He happily showed me his. I remember asking if it hurt. *shrug* He laughed at me! I do remember that after this guy, I stopped asking questions and started doing my own research. I guess it was pretty weird for a woman in her mid twenties to ask such a juvenile question. I just… didn’t know. Anyway, he also saw some of me, but only the top half. The bottom always stays covered.

The things happened with MB were all about him. It was about him getting what he wanted and he wasn’t, at all, concerned about me. I was basically just some titillation for him.

One of the statistics that the Sextistics special talked about, that I really wanted to see was the section on the effect of an orgasm on the brain. Drug addicts are known to develop rampant and sometimes deviant sexual behaviors after or during recovery. I watched this happen with a friend of mine. The list of her sexual partners tops 100. I’m not sure if it’s still climbing, but man or woman, married or single, she’s done them. This person now claims to be a sex addict. I don’t know about all of that, I just know that sex seems to become a huge deal to an addict because an orgasm affects the same part of the brain that a cocaine high would. When MB pleasured himself, it fed the same part of his brain that cocaine fed. The high would not be as intense, but it would be the release he was looking for.

MB was fiending. He needed me to get off, to get his high. It was like he was using, all over again. He was using me. I was none the wiser.

After awhile though, I got tired of him. He was unavailable until he decided he needed to come over. We couldn’t be ‘out’ at work and he wasn’t all that affectionate. He wasn’t particularly interested in me or my life or the details thereof. It was really all about him. He would come over, talk me out of my top and bra, and masturbate. I got nothing out of it at all, just some bad kissing. Not even an orgasm. He didn’t even touch me, just looked. Then had the nerve to call and ask if I would ‘dress up’ for him. LOL WHUT?

I was frustrated, since I had an idea that there should be much, much more to this. We stopped seeing each other in early 1999. It was relatively painless, but he avoided me most of the time after that.

One Saturday morning in May of that same year I got a call from my Supervisor. MB had collapsed that morning and was unable to be revived. We suspect he had been dabbling in cocaine again in the previous months. Maybe drinking again, too. After being clean for awhile, going back to it must have been an intense, incredible high. His already damaged heart couldn’t take it. I attended my first Catholic funeral. It was surreal, watching that casket roll by.

I certainly felt sad for him but, I can’t say that I felt guilty or anything. I had long since figured that there was nothing I could have done for him. I got no joy out of what we did. In my mind it was pretty much good riddance. I saw him every day after we stopped seeing each other and felt nothing.

That experience awakened something in me, though. If that guy could want to be with me, surely there were others.  I would locate these ‘others’ and have experiences!  I didn’t enjoy the kissing much, but I liked being kissed, if that made sense. I liked the expectation of feelings coming and I liked being close to someone. And while MB was relatively harmless anyway, I had gone through, albeit short, an evolution of a relationship and come out unscathed. I was primed to try it again. It was exciting to me, deciding that I could set aside so much of what I thought and believed about men.

I started dating, after that. Since I was quiet and shy, I tried the online dating thing. It would allow me to get to know men before I had to meet them and talk to them. The problem was that my hometown is kind of a small town that is spread out. There really aren’t a lot of men to choose from, and few of those are black. Few of those black men wanted to date black women. If the woman was black, she had to be thin, athletic, bubbly personality– even if he was 5’2, had one leg shorter than the other, a  dried up jheri curl, three missing teeth, a lazy eye and a job as a security guard. I kid you not– the sense of entitlement among ugly men is astounding.

The hardest part about dating, for me, was… the dating. I didn’t know how to have fun with a guy. I didn’t know how to talk to them- what kinds of things was I supposed to say? I didn’t know how to be charming and mysterious. I had no clue how to flirt. I spent every date with my mental dukes up, waiting to fight him off. I was just always wary that he was going to try to have sex with me. And oh my God, that is an awful thing, isn’t it, for a man to want that? For a long time, I was absolutely offended that a man wanted to have sex with me.

I realized, years later, that it wasn’t about the sex. It was that I didn’t feel special. He didn’t know me and he wanted me to lay down with him and let him violate me. And then? Nothing. It would mean nothing and be about nothing. He would pick up his clothes and tiptoe out and I’d never hear from him again and there I’d be with my slightly used virginity hangin’ out.  To me, that was a waste of my time and affection. At that point I couldn’t just go to bed with someone. I had to know and trust him enough to even want to be alone with him. And maybe that wasn’t fair to him, but that’s how it was, for me. Maybe it wasn’t fair to me for anyone to expect me to lay back and spread my legs without knowing anything about me. I’m not a machine.

I knew what they wanted by how fast they ran away. I met person after person after person, each who immediately fell off of the edge of the planet the minute they found out I was a virgin. By this point, I was too old to toss it away on some horny ass who wouldn’t remember my name the next week. I wasn’t hard up for sex at all, so I wasn’t giving it up just to have it.

I didn’t want anyone wasting my time, but I wanted to at least get a few dates in before he ran away. Maybe he could just get to know me and decide I was worth the wait, or something. I varied the approach I would take in revealing my “situation”. Sometimes I’d wait a few dates to tell him. Sometimes I’d tell him up front. Sometimes I’d wait awhile. No matter. The second he found out, the shoulders sagged, the eyes closed, the chest heaved a sigh, and I got the gentle hand pat and the words that are supposed to be warm and comforting, but amount to nothing. Platitudes that are supposed to make me feel better. Something about how I will meet a man who will really appreciate that, someday. Awesome. What you’re saying, without saying it, is that you’re not that man.

What amazed me, I think, was how sex has become some sort of ritual in dating. It’s up there with the first kiss, now. You meet someone, exchange numbers, talk, meet for a drink, have sex. There is nothing in between. There is no getting to know me, there is no making sure I am comfortable with you, there is no span of time for us to become close enough to share a bed. I used to say I wasn’t having sex until marriage. Then I said I wasn’t having sex until I loved him.

Now? I don’t know. I’m not having sex until I’m ready. But for my first time, I am most definitely not hopping into bed with someone after only knowing them for 13 hours. This situation complicates dating like you wouldn’t believe… and it led to my decision to stop dating altogether.

But that will come later. It took a lot of experiences to get to that point and make that decision.

Post September 11, the economy anywhere, everywhere, but especially in my small town were so many companies had moved their headquarters because the Inland Northwest was cheap, was dismal and dropping. People were being laid off left and right. The company I was working for was slowly going under. I couldn’t compete in the market. And I couldn’t find a damn MAN. So I decided to bring my behind on down to Georgia.

I had a million reasons to move to Georgia. The sun and warmth was the biggest, because I suffer from S.A.D and I needed longer days and warm weather. It starts getting dark at 3:30 in the winter back home. By 4:30 it is pitch black outside. I could not spend another winter in a corner of the closet sobbing my head off. I had to leave or I was going to kill myself.

I was immediately giddy about my choice. I was encouraged by the possibility of starting over with a Big Sexy New Life, far and away from my family. I could wipe the slate clean. I could live a diferent life and be a different person and be vibrant and successful. I really wanted that. I really wanted to shed the former me.

The other reason was that black men here date black women. This is not to say that I am against interracial dating. While I do have some issues with the reasoning behind a person exclusively dating outside their race, I am not against it at all. I have done it and if I met a man who was not black that I liked and got along with, would happily do it again. I think my only issue was the same with the African men that I met– the cultural differences can create such a divide. Unless there is openness and understanding and a willingness to accept and learn, these things can drive people apart. I’ve seen many a successful interracial couple, and– confession– my heart smiles when I see a black woman with a white man. You go girl, it says to her. We hear so much about a) how black men don’t want black women and b) how white men are afraid of black women, that seeing that combination out destroying myths and stereotypes gives me hope.

There’s something about a black man, though. I can’t and won’t apologize for being attracted to and wanting a man of my own race. If I listen to ABC news and every other survey/self help book/Oprah broadcast, the chances of me finding my Chocolate Nerd, and him wanting to marry me and stay faithful to me for the rest of our lives is slim. Even slimmer is the chance that he’ll have hair, teeth, any kind of relationship with his mother/father but those are other subjects…. In the words of one of my new favorite blogs, though… Hope Dies Last. I choose to hope. I’m holding out for my Chocolate Nerd. I’d take a Vanilla one, though, if he comes first. I’m just saying.

I thought, when I moved to Georgia and I had established my Big Sexy New Life, that things would change for me. I would have more opportunities and more dates and I would be able to grow and flourish. For the most part, in every area but where men are concerned, I have. I drove to Georgia this same week 7 years ago. I am a completely different person than I was in ’03.

I’m still changing and growing, but that feels good, at least.

Coming soon: Getting Down To The Nitty Gritty

Curvy Jones is a northerner playing a southerner who is living, working, playing in metro Atlanta.

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Tags:  2010 · Big Sexy New Life · dating · Georgia · relationships · Series: All About Curvy · sex · virginity