A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Sixty-three Times

I went out with Pam for about nine months. She was the kind of girl who still slept with oversize teddy bears, wrote in huge loopy cursive, and whose favorite food was pancakes. I often went to her house after school and we’d make out in her room. She lived with her mom, who had a British accent for some reason, and didn’t seem to mind if Pam locked her bedroom door while I was there. Her younger sister lived there too, and she was much more attractive than Pam.

After we had sex for the first time, I went to school the next day feeling like a new person—the excitement of the sex, and the promise of more sex to come, made me feel like I was neon-lit from the inside.

On the back of Pam’s school photo (her hair parted in the middle and wind-swept back, her baby blue sweater with the shoulder pads, her ill-fitting blue jeans) I took a pen and drew a mark. A few days after that, another mark. I’m not sure why, but I felt the need to document, to count, the times we did it. I never told Pam I was keeping track. Perhaps I thought I was going to keep track forever, with every girlfriend, every crash-and-burn monthlong failure, every one-night stand. When other people talked about how many people they’d had sex with, I could tell them exactly how many times I’d had it.

Once when I was at the mall with Pam, we were paying for food at Orange Julius when her photo fell out of my Velcro wallet. She noticed the marks and asked me what they were and I told her it was the number of records I’d bought that year. Cassettes and records, I had to tell her.

At some point, I told a friend of mine about the count. Since none of my friends liked Pam, it was only a matter of time before this friend told a few others. To embarrass me at any time they’d ask, “How many times has it been now?”

When my relationship with Pam ended bitterly, the count was over. The final number was sixty-three. Eventually, after I started seeing other girls, I felt disgusted by the number. Sometimes, just to put me in my place, a friend of mine would still smile and laugh and say to me, “Sixty-three times.”