The Summer Rocco Lost His Virginity

Liam Scanlon

The summer that Rocco lost his virginity, the music pushed him into it and cheered him on. It was the soundtrack of flushed faces and jackrabbit heartbeats. Sizzling sun and lonely purple nights. The smooth indie sounds of a boy trying, desperately, to get free. 

Of course he lost his virginity because of music. After all, it was Arcade Fire that made Rocco fall for Blake, his initial, entirely internet-based lover. They met on Chatroulette, that short-lived cam site that was, for that one summer, the most chaotic corner of the internet, syncing up cameras in a Wild West that felt both thrillingly adult and reassuringly juvenile. Blake appeared there on Rocco's screen one night in early June of Grade Eleven. With his large head covered in a thin layer of peach fuzz and large grey-green eyes, Blake looked a bit like a boiled egg—but his Montreal loft, its brickwork and exposed ceilings, flashed onto the screen at the same time. Rocco liked him for his loft immediately. And when Blake heard that Arcade Fire was Rocco’s favorite band, he casually let it slip that, not only had he been at a party with them just last Saturday, but he’d listened to The Suburbs, their new album, a full two months before its official release. “There’s maybe only about four or five good songs on there,” Blake said on the screen with a proud shrug. 

Well that was it, baby, Rocco was done for. It didn’t matter that Blake was thirty-two, or was okay exchanging Skype info with a seventeen-year-old halfway across the country so they could jerk off on cam together. He knew Arcade Fire, and so Rocco would wait on the basement computer till eight, nine, ten PM, hoping Blake could come on so that, by masturbating together, Rocco could borrow glimpses of his life. But as he masturbated, he’d also pray, desperately, for Blake to be horribly wrong:

Please God, please, let The Suburbs be amazing. 

That last summer of his childhood, he was always plugged into his bulky iPod Classic. He made a very clear distinction between the music of the world outside—the speakers of the car radio while his mom drove, or his brother playing guitar—and the world inside, the coded sounds fed directly into his ear drums. People who preferred Outside Music seemed like Neanderthals, a divergent strand of evolution. Inside Music had no past and no genre, free of culture or income or political alignment as the Beatles melted into Kanye and into Britney. Hitting shuffle, he’d be amazed at how the iPod chose exactly the song that was supposed to come next. And an album was a story he never got bored of, a series of soundtracks rolling into one another. 

A vague anxiety would build every time he couldn’t listen. Past the protection of the headphones, his dad still wasn’t talking to him after Rocco couldn’t explain the porn on their search history. His mom spoke too much, prying and trying everything to get one word out of him. His brothers picked fights with him about anything. Grade Eleven was still recent enough to sting. He’d wonder when his life would start. Down by the banks of their cottage in the weak Canadian sun, his head bobbed to MGMT, murmuring, “We’ll choke on our vomit and that’ll be the end” like they were: a. the deepest lyrics ever written, and b. a prophecy of his own eventual demise. And the highs he’d feel while listening were always proof that he was destined for something bigger than this patch of middle Canada. 

He stumbled onto The Strokes, fortuitously, just as he and his family drove the sixteen hours to Chicago. For three days the city was his. Their sound was baby blue and sparkling yellow. Michigan Avenue gleamed in the sun like a gold bar slowly being unwrapped before his eyes while their guitars thrashed with the relentless intensity of revving engines as cars rolled down the avenue. Every song had an exhausted intensity as he skip-hopped, way ahead of his mom and brothers, between the shadows of the gothic and towers, where the upper floors thrilled with mystery. 

He only took his headphones out at The Art Institute, listening instead to the wet smacking of shoes against the polished wood flooring, the satisfied whispers of art patrons, and the slot machine trills of installations in distant rooms. A dark hush muffled the basement gallery showcasing intricate model houses. Rocco had to lean in to notice the stitching in the pin cushions and the iron fingers of the grandfather clock. 

“They look so real,” murmured the man beside him. 

The voice was gentle and eager, and by breaking the thick silence of the room, warmed the back of Rocco’s neck. Rocco looked up to a man a full foot taller than him, with curly surfer’s hair, silver stubble, and curved, questioning pink lips. He realized he was alone with him at the same time he realized the man wouldn’t stop staring. Waiting for Rocco’s answer.

“They—yeah, yeah they…” A nervous laugh swallowed the rest of his sentence. 

Well great, he totally fucked his first attempt at flirting, but it made the man smile. They moved to the next house, a Californian bungalow, a type seen in a David Hockney painting. 

“Wouldn’t you just love to live in a house like this,” the man said. “Somewhere in Malibu, not far from the beach?”

Rocco said, “California’s…always been a dream.”

“I’m guessing you’re visiting Chicago too?”

“Uh, yeah. Me and the whole family.”

“Fun. I’m in with a friend for a couple of days. From New York.”

New York: the New York. The Strokes started playing in his head as tension built in his chest. Excitement that felt like nausea. They moved from house to house, delicately dancing around small talk as they stared in at a New England Gothic, Post and Beam, Spanish Colonial, Texan Rancher—how the man liked Chicago, how it compared to other American cities, how much friendlier it was than New York. Rocco watched the man’s lips move in the reflection of each exhibit’s protective glass. The light never reached his eyes.

Rocco was talking about how Transformers 3 was being filmed right outside their hotel room. The man said, “I’ve always found Shia LaBeouf super cute.”

And there it was, the gay Rubicon. Rocco looked around the room to make sure no one was listening in before crossing it as well. “I’ve…always been more attracted to Josh Duhamel?” 

The man held out his hand. “Andrew.”

As Rocco grabbed and shook it, he was vaguely disappointed by the plainness of the name. He felt that the man’s name should’ve been more exotic, more strange, more able to capture the new feelings moving across his chest like a wave.

“Well, Rocco,” Andrew said. “As much as these houses are cute as hell, you’re cuter. Would you be interested in coming back to mine?”

The silence between them was warm and dangerous. His throat closed up. “What, now?”

“No time like the present.” 

He bumbled a series of excuses—the family, the trip, his mother waiting for him only a floor above. “I could…maybe take your email, maybe message you later?”

He didn’t even have a cell phone. Andrew smiled. “Afraid I leave first thing tomorrow. It’ll have to be now—only if you’re interested, of course.”

The feeling was like standing atop a diving board. He’d climbed this far, he ached for it, but now he stared past the edge and wondered if the drop would kill him. Andrew’s eyes were still covered in darkness. His lips gave a crooked smile. Come on, you know you want to. What you are.

“Okay. Let me, let me just tell my mom. I’ll meet you back down here.”

A part of him hoped his mom wouldn’t let him stay, but when he told her he wanted a few extra hours in there because there was so much to see, she only smiled. “Of course, honey, have fun!” 

Of course, honey: he was seventeen, only barely not barely legal. 

Whatever small talk Andrew continued on in the taxi back to his hotel room, Rocco didn’t hear it. He looked out on that turquoise lake, large enough to be the ocean, and felt like they were slowly sailing off, in a flying car, through to the distant clouds. They passed joggers and swimmers separated by a strip of sand, oak trees separated meter by meter. It would be as impossible to get out of the car now as it would be to jump out of an airplane midflight. 

And what music would he have played at that moment? He couldn’t think of a single song. For the first time, life was too big and too strange to be corralled by the chorus. 

A black lab came bounding off the hotel bed to meet them as Andrew opened the door—that should’ve been the first clue. 

“Come on Lulu! That’s it, that’s iiiit—”

The second: there was only the one bed. At this point, though, it could’ve been a hostel bunk under a laundromat for all he cared. This was something to break, to pass through, to one day brag about. Trying his hardest to ignore the dog, he stared out at the fake sea and wanted this horrible eagerness to finally end. He also wanted it to last forever. 

Andrew dropped his bag, sealed the dog off in the living area, and grabbed Rocco’s shoulders in one efficient motion. “Finally,” he murmured. He cupped the side of Rocco’s face with his large hand and, as the light of the afternoon finally shone on his eyes, Rocco saw a naked hunger in them. So this is what men looked like behind closed doors. He pressed in for a kiss. Rocco knew he was kissing all wrong—if it wasn’t wrong why didn’t it feel good?—but Andrew wouldn’t unlock their lips long enough to teach him. The silver stubble cut along his cheek like steel wool. He had no idea that kissing a man could hurt this much, it wasn’t what porn had taught him.

Porn hadn’t taught him a goddamn thing.

“Sorry man,” Andrew said. “Could you actually use a little less teeth? It’s kind of hurting my dick. Open up? Ahh? There we go, okay try again.”

Andrew came and Rocco dropped down beside him on the bed, exhausted. So that was it. He felt hollowed out—too hollowed out to even feel disappointed—but somewhere deep inside his belly, a spark had been lit. It was a relief. It was over, it had happened. He passed the test, and life would finally start. Andrew breathed heavily, almost regally, as he watched him.

“I think it’s probably good to be upfront with you,” he finally said. “I didn’t come here with a friend. I came with my husband. I’m thirty-four, we came together, things haven’t…been great recently, we…”

The more he talked, the more Rocco felt the pounding of the dog against the door, begging to be let in, like it was the pounding of the police, the priests, and the teachers all at once. He stared out at the lake and had to stop himself from smiling. Thirty-four. The man had been on this planet for twice as long as him. Somehow his age was worse than his marriage, even though, with the silver stubble, he should’ve guessed. It was incomprehensible to him to be alive that long—to be alive and still be naked with him. 

He had the come of a thirty-four-year-old on his chest.

“…and that’s what this trip was supposed to be about, we were supposed to be patching things up, but we’ve barely seen each other, can you believe it?”

“I should probably go.”

Andrew sighed. “That probably makes sense. But can I get your email, write to you later?”

Rocco wandered the cathedral-steepled glass lobby of his hotel for hours after his family had gone to sleep. He’d cup his hand to his face just the way Andrew had, feeling how inadequately small his was by comparison, and then raise it to his nose to inhale Andrew’s cologne. It wasn’t the piney, limey, earthy scents the men in his family sprayed themselves with; its purple aroma spoke of a foreign, maybe European sophistication. If he showered and the scent washed away, would it wash this feeling away with it? The more time that passed, the more the relieved thrill filled the space of the emptiness. He was a new person. He hadn’t died or dissolved in the transition. 

He saw the email come through on the hotel computer at 11:22 PM: 

Hey, sorry, Greg’s finally asleep. I can’t believe we did that, but I don’t regret it for a minute. You’re a really special guy, Rocco. 

He replied right away: I still smell you on my hands. I never want to wash it :) 

And only three minutes later: Then maybe we can find a way to do this again ;) 

As they left Chicago the next morning, Rocco, devastated, looked down the misty avenue of uniform towers and imagined them unrolling out to the sea. Does it get better than this? The Strokes answered, of course it does, there’s still New York, doofus. And for the first time he realized that loving a city and loving a man could be the same thing. 

Andrew recommended Madonna’s Ray of Light in one of his emails just in time. Madonna’s voice, deep and matronly with her channeled ashram wisdom, bent gender rules until he felt that what they’d done could be normal. And if not normal, at least okay. A world electronic. The frenetic, pounding rhythm dropped him inside a Manhattan rush hour and onto the moon at the same time. Vital, lonely music. One Monday a few weeks after Chicago they all left his cottage at dawn so his dad could make it back to the city on time for work. A rain had washed through and sprinkled the tips of the white pines with red stars from the rising sun. He pressed his nose against the window in the back of the van and felt like they’d landed on a distant planet. His mom asked him questions he didn’t feel he had to answer. 

The emails, he answered as soon as he saw them. He knew he shouldn’t—he’d read somewhere online that replying straight away seemed desperate—but his fingers typed out the words like little worms with brains of their own. 

Besides, he would sometimes go days without internet, down at the cottage where the loons sang their haunted lullaby and the single electrical wire brought enough electricity for a fifties radio and mom’s reading lamp. Besides (part two), if anyone came off desperate, it was Andrew. He lavished compliments on Rocco, wrote whole paragraphs about his “golden, amber” eyes, his butt, the dimples of his cheeks. Rocco would finish an email, heart pounding, and look at himself naked in the mirror. He couldn’t see anything attractive about the boy that stared back. Even to himself, even after Chicago, he looked way too innocent to be sexy. He had to close his eyes and imagine a leaner, more coquettish Rocco, a twink Rocco that bottomed in porn. 

In the same way, when Andrew spoke at length about his failing marriage, about Greg’s drinking, about Greg’s overwork, about all the silly things Greg prioritized over them, Rocco could only imagine them as characters in a soap opera making much more noise than they needed to. Who cares that they’re miserable—they’re miserable in New York. When Andrew wrote how he’d been imagining what their home together might look like, Rocco responded, is it the California bungalow? So when the email came that he was expecting and praying for, it still sent a spike of dread straight through his chest:

In two weeks, Greg is off for business. What do you say if I fly you out on my airmiles?  

For once, he was unable to reply. He and his family were back in their Prairie city for the week, and yet the internet, the TV and all his video games couldn’t distract him from that fatal email. As he paced through his house, he wondered if he’d made all these feelings up. A plane. Alone. And all the things they’d talked about, all the feverish feelings that made more sense while being written than actually spoken out loud…

Airmiles. All he had to do was get on the plane. 

He tried to remember Andrew’s eyes, but he couldn’t say their color. Blue? First they’d been covered in the warm dark of the model home room, and by the time they’d gone to the hotel room he’d been so nervous he didn’t dare look above Andrew’s nose. He only pictured those lips, curved into a question or exclamation mark. Blue eyes then: he’d always wanted a boyfriend with blue eyes. 

He listened to Ray of Light until he didn’t understand the English on it. When all he felt were colors flashing from the strobe inside his head. To go back now would be like admitting to himself that he was as ordinary as the rest of his family and that he deserved this middle Canadian city and all its mid-Canadian space. And wasn’t he destined for an extraordinary life? 

He got out of bed in the blue dawn, whispering past the cats still puzzled inside their bed, and crept down to the basement computer. He wrote an email whose terseness he hoped came off brave:

Sure. Friday? What time?

He told his parents he was going on a camping trip with a friend. They believed him: they thought he had friends. 

He got out of La Guardia and the smell of garbage was so overwhelming, he almost threw up. Andrew waved to him from across the terminal. At first, Rocco didn’t recognize him; he looked every month his thirty-four years. The silver stubble. The creases along the neck. And he had brown eyes, after all. His smile on those huge pink lips was stretched almost comically wide, but it twitched at the edges. Rocco had to swallow back the tears before forcing himself to walk across the dirty terminal hallway.

“You had a good flight?”

He’d been trembling the whole way there. 

“You can’t believe how excited I am, been thinking about this nonstop. I’ve got a great weekend of stuff planned, totally jam packed.”

And Rocco asked him for the itinerary so he didn’t need to answer anything more about himself. From then on, it was Andrew doing the talking. New York, the vertical puzzle, its pieces all jaggedly half-fitting into the red sky: too overwhelming for words. Rocco pressed his nose against the window of the taxi and watched the city sluggishly sink into the purple evening while Andrew’s voice dipped and wavered (had it always been this high? This pleading?) At a sleek Mexican restaurant in Harlem, a block from Andrew’s, Rocco shoveled down his enchilada and nodded uh-huhs to Andrew’s stories. He wondered with a mix of disappointment and relief if this was all it really took; if being a good boyfriend was just a series of well-timed uh-huhs. 

It was only when they were naked in his bed a few hours later that Andrew directed the full force of his attention on him. His legs were over Andrew’s shoulders. The streetlight, breaking through the waving cracks in the blinds, pooled in Andrew’s eyes: a bright, Jack-o-lantern emptiness. His breathing was warm and wet on Rocco’s neck. It was all the way this time. This was undiscussed, Andrew just reached, after an acceptable nine minutes of foreplay, into his bedroom drawer for the condoms. Andrew pushed in. The cool stretch of plastic pressing inside, like a surgeon’s hand in a physical, sent a hot slice of panic through him. He screamed out.

“You okay? It feels amazing.”

“A…lot. It hurts a lot.”

“It gets easier, you just have to breathe, like this?”

“Please stop.”

And while the man held him close in the night, like he was afraid he’d run away, Rocco stared at the purple shapes growing out from the corner of the bedroom and wondered why he felt nothing. Was he broken? Wasn’t this what he’d wanted? All he wanted now was his iPod, but it was in his pants at the far corner of the room, and Andrew’s grip was too tight. Lulu kept scratching and whining at the door in outrage over her banishment. 

It made Rocco feel all the more the intruder. He was living someone else’s life. He kept wondering when his was going to start.

Over the course of that Saturday, Andrew became more and more the man. The man at the edge of his vision, clutching clammily for his fingers underneath the table of the restaurant. The man at the end of Lulu’s leash, the shadow chasing after her as she chased after squirrels in Central Park. The man at the end of every paycheck, who’d say “you’re welcome” before Rocco had time to say thank you. The man with the voice that reached higher pitches the more frustrated he grew—and the more he talked about Greg, the more frustrated he grew. 

“It’s just like, why are you going to take your mom with us to Provincetown? Red flag. Tell me that’s not a red flag I should’ve seen a…” 

Central Park with bagels in the morning. A taxi down to the Brooklyn Bridge before Chinese food in Chinatown for lunch. Times Square just as the afternoon rush made walking in a straight line impossible. The Trip Advisor itinerary was so strategic and so jam-packed (the man kept suggesting a Statue of Liberty-passing boat ride like a threat), Rocco had no time to absorb or reflect. It was just the warm wind of a Greyhound bus roaring past them. The black windshields of the endless lines of taxis glowing as knife-bright as desert sand. The burning cement, the drying flowers and the fumes of restaurants and laundromats.

All he wanted, of course, was to put on the Strokes, or Velvet Underground, or Vampire Weekend as they strolled the shadows of the Midtown avenue. But he couldn’t ever concentrate long enough on that Seinfeld-style eighties deli or the dirty steps down to a subway station—it was always just another excuse for the man to compliment Rocco or to bring up Greg. 

This wasn’t at all like how New York was supposed to be. He wanted to be back in Chicago with its straightforward skyline that only shocked you from one side, its clean lake and its cool pavements. Then he wanted to be with his family. He realized the main reason he liked Chicago so much was because he saw it with them. He was desperate to fight with his brothers about what to see next, because at least it meant that, in fighting with them, he could be completely himself. An individual in opposition. Instead now he—

“You know what’s great about New York? You can go just about anywhere and still be a total nobody.”  

They were eating pasta in deep bowls, with enough ragu sauce to drown a baby.

“I go past this restaurant all the time, and you think anybody in here is going to notice me treating a handsome boy to dinner?”

Still, they were eating at a table in the back corner, protected from the greedy eyes of the warm evening street. And Rocco wondered if he was supposed to be playing the boyfriend role, if Andrew wanted a newer version of Greg to greet everything with fresh wonder—or if he wanted someone completely new. A quiet listener, or a chatty know-it-all. An antsy twink that was so carefree he verged on the psychotic. Either way, was he doing a good job? Andrew looked at him expectantly. He felt the sweat build on the back of his neck. The door twinkled extra slow as it opened a gust of sauna street air, kids laughing and sirens singing and a dog barking. Was he supposed to laugh? Insert his own anecdote? Oh God, was he expected to start paying for meals because he wasn’t a good fuck? With what money? He’d quit lifeguarding after two weeks at the start of the summer. 

“Come on,” Andrew said, throwing his napkin on his half-finished pasta. “You want to go dancing? I know a place that never checks IDs.” 

A basement den in Hell’s Kitchen, it looked almost exactly like the club he’d imagined in his head while listening to Ray of Light—the fog, the low ceiling riddled with pipes and stucco stalactites. But the smells were new. It was the sweaty stench of hundreds squeezed together and the burnt haze of the fog machines. The feeling of bodies pressing into him was also new. Touching him without feeling him, noticing and not noticing him. They all seemed ten feet tall, furry trees with their canopies full of red shadows. 

And the music. It was Outside Music that played, through the radiating subwoofers, inside of him. His boundaries melted away. No wonder so many people could squeeze together in this tiny box: they didn’t notice where they ended and the five men around them began.

Andrew gripped his hand and kept him close, but their romance was over. Maybe they both knew it. Andrew stood halfway up the line for drinks when “Ray of Light” started playing—and that was it. By the time the man came back clutching the vodka sodas, Rocco was in the middle of the tiny dancefloor, miles away, head-banging and gyrating in ecstasy and terror. It felt the way sex was supposed to feel. Song after song, he danced until he forgot his name. 

He met a boy with a face he can no longer place. The boy gripped his hand—in a friendly, sisterly way—and dragged him to other parties in other parts of town. Warehouses and lofts whose geographic positioning no longer make sense in the years since he’s moved to New York (Bushwick? had they taxied?). He doesn’t remember drinking any booze or taking anything else, and how he managed to talk at all with his thoughts moving so fast and his jaw clenched shut is now totally beyond him. He just remembers the way every pore shone with white light like a disco ball and how, every time he looked up, the stars were just a reflection of the explosive lights of the city. 

And he realized that’s the secret of losing your virginity: like the bride throwing her bouquet at the cheering crowd, you have to do it joyfully. 

The following Friday, Arcade Fire released The Suburbs, and it was everything he hoped it’d be. Deep and teeming, his musical sea had now turned a deep blood red, the waters teeming with hidden tentacles. Blake, Mr. Montreal, didn’t know what the hell he’d been talking about back in June—and Rocco was now old enough to form his own opinions.  

The Suburbs fit the new person he’d become since coming back, the way he was split between worlds. Around him life with his mom and his brothers at their cottage rolled on as the sun began its slow arc down, siphoning off more light by the day, and the leaves began to dry and turn golden. Inside, something different was happening, he didn’t have the words for what. He’d play the music while facing the sunset and feel himself expanding, that weekend in New York roaring in his chest like the great maw of a Midtown avenue. Chanting the lyrics, “now our lives are changing fast, hope that something pure can last,” he prayed for it to be true; that he could keep something of this endless August once things had finally changed forever. 

His mom didn’t question him when he told her that his sports bag of clothes had flown off the deck of his friend’s boat as they’d approached his cabin (he couldn’t, obviously, go back to Andrew’s after that, and thanked God he had his passport in his back pocket.) But for the rest of the summer, whenever she hugged him, she seemed to do it extra tight, like she was trying to figure out how to say goodbye. 

And he let her. Let her until he was covered in the scent of her Chanel No. 5.

Two years later, he spent the summer in Montreal to learn French. People partied on Art Nouveau balconies and marched in the streets for school reform. Though sometimes he still found the private moments to let an album soundtrack his life like before, he didn’t need to—there was music in the streets, in the house parties, in the clubs. Nineteen felt as far away from seventeen as seventeen had from twelve. He could drink now, talk now, had opinions on music and shows and had read enough philosophy to sound intelligent at parties. He had a boyfriend there, or something close to one, who bragged about Rocco to his friends on WhatsApp. 

One of those friends responded right away in shock, in awe.

“He says he knows you!”

He passed Rocco the phone. It was Blake. Mr. Chatroulette himself. In his WhatsApp profile pic, he had even less hair but the same watery green eyes. Staring into them, the summer he’d almost successfully forgotten came flashing back.

When Rocco stopped laughing, he managed to say to his sorta boyfriend, “Amazing. Hey, just tell him one thing: he was wrong, The Suburbs is totally their best album.”