There is a play opening in town this week called My First Time.
It is about people's first times.
Not at skiing or using a chainsaw.
I seriously doubt any of the first times I will hear about in this play will come close to my own.
And I have sat through some pretty wild talk about first times when I have been with The Guys.
If you haven't got a story involving hanging by your feet from a Strauss crystal chandelier, or doing the business on the running board of a Citroen, you're not a real man, trust me.
Do women really know how we talk? Surely not.
She's got legs right up to her neck.
You will hear that one a lot in the man cave, especially from a leg man.
The answer to this should be - "Really? No bottom, no stomach, no ribcage, no lungs? Just legs?" But it never is.
Instead, another man will say, "Hey, that's nothing, I had one with legs right up to the eye."
It was in the basement of our house.
A few of us had been playing table tennis and, all except the girl next door, had gone home.
She was leaning awkwardly by the wall and I was pretending to adjust the table tennis net.
"Whaddya wanna do now?" I muffled at her through chattering teeth.
"I don't know.
"What do you want to do?" she riposted, almost as though she had passed this way before.
"I moved around the table and sorted a few things with my left hand on the shelf beside her shoulder.
"Who's your favourite Beatle?" I asked casually, as if I had passed this way before.
"I like them all," she said haughtily, as if any girl who liked less than all four was a halfwit.
I moved my right hand to the shelf on the other side.
I was trying to look like I was fossicking absently.
She was now pinned against the wall in a sensitive, gentlemanly and almost accidental, kind of way.
"I thought you fancied my sister," she said sarcastically, with a trace of hurt in her voice.
It was true.
I had been trying to get her sister against the shelves for two years.
"No, I have always fancied you more," I exclaimed, with as much hurt in my voice as I could muster.
She must have felt the hurt for she began to console me eagerly, even though my arms were still tidying the shelves.
"Have you got a, you know . . . ?" she asked, almost as if she wanted me to have one.
"I might have," I mumbled.
I had no idea what a You Know was, but the word "might" usually got me out of sticky situations, just as it still does today.
"You haven't got one, have you?" she said, almost angrily.
"I'm just not sure where I put it," I whimpered feebly.
"Well, you'll have to be careful," she said sternly.
"Oh, I will, I will," I said, hopelessly confused.
We sort of staggered around for a few minutes and dislodged some stuff off the shelves.
"You don't know how to do it, do you?" she asked, with a trace of incredulity, derision, anger, frustration, impatience and desperation in her voice.
"Do you know how to do it?" I asked plaintively.
There was a bed by the back wall.
We tumbled on to it like two myopic drunks - well, one myopic drunk and one traffic policewoman.
We probably did it, sort of, very quickly, I think.
She went home.
I lay there with sunken eyes feeling like I would a few weeks later when I opened up my school cert maths paper.
She grew up and went overseas and repeatedly married men in uniforms.
I vowed to write about my first time one day to show that anyone who says it's great is a bare-faced liar. - Roy Colbert
