Keep your powder dry, don't relax, or go too far.

I lost my virginity with a woman. I was dating her, but I never told her that she was my first time. Luckily, my performance was kinda superlative, so she had no reason to suspect otherwise.

I lost it at 22. I was finally defrocked of my altar boy purity during this, my last Catholic year. A few years earlier, I was a 15 year old, confused as to why my body was forcing me to do horrible, sinful things. There were days I masturbated to the point of chafing, but in church, I learned that as long as I hated myself each time I sinned and remembered to divulge all my sins in the confessional, my soul would be renewed with the powerful antibacterial cleansing properties of what my faith defined as healing grace.

This was especially poignant during the "Free The Hostages" sticker campaign that swept America in 1981. Because so many people hate one another these days, I think the evening news now comes with MPAA ratings, but it didn't during the first 9 years of my life. I remember digesting the gory NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, so that I might "learn what was going on in the world," according to Dad. We placed American Flag stickers (with the words "FREE THE HOSTAGES" at the bottom) on everything. They were everywhere. It was almost like what happened with American Flags after the Anthrax Outbreak of 2001. My mother was very upset when I stuck one on the bumper of her car, because it left behind a sticky white residue that was difficult to remove. When I asked her what masturbation was, she told me she didn't know, but helped me look it up in the dictionary, and next consulted the Catechism. Once we had both learned together the definition of this word, the Catechism warned me not to do it because it was a sin, and if I had sinned, I would become a sinner.

I next learned in school from an Nun with Alheimer's that if someone from Iran were to come to town and take us hostage and kill us, we would be saved from the fiery pits of Hell, but only if we had just recently confessed our sins. I sometimes wonder if the other people around me confessed their sins with the same frequency I attempted. I don't know why I was the only one taking the Catechism so seriously, and why nobody else was as acutely aware of their own guilt like I was. Unlike their sins, jacking off didn't hurt anybody else, but I'll never know, because I didn't dare talk about masturbation to anyone, and once the Iran hostages were freed, I had the Falkland Islands War to be afraid of, so my guilt soon became a full time job.

There just wasn't time for "Sorry," so I never did confess my sin of masturbation. I was not about to take that risk, and this is probably where the real trouble began since concealing sins is concealment. And that’s a sin too.