Written by: Frankie Morrison

It is with great shame but also a healthy chuckle that I confess…Bret Michaels, of 80’s super band Poison took my virginity. He was not the literal poker; but the way his rippling abs and bleached blonde hair looked when he did those mic stand thrusts and scissor kicks made one thing impeccably clear to me. My virginity was not a gift. It was a pathetic leftover of childhood…a horrific barrier to the adolescent cool needed to attract the attention of a man as perfect as Bret Michaels. Bret didn’t want to hang out with nervous little virgin girls. He wanted a woman who knew what to do with that mic stand thrust. As I started my freshman year of high school, I was determined to make myself one of those women; and that meant someone was gonna have to get fucked.

Jason Brannon was sixteen and utterly average in all ways. He wasn’t particularly popular, smart, or funny. He also wasn’t tall. He didn’t have a hot body. He didn’t have long hair or even a cool mustache. He drove a beat-up sky blue Gremlin, which, although uncool, was at least memorable…but not quite as memorable as the rancid cat piss scent of the Hai Karate cologne he dabbed on every morning before school. Even with my desperate desire to dispose of my virginity, Jason would not have stood a chance if it weren’t for the actions of my frienemy Debbie.

Debbie and I were “friends” insomuch as we hung out with the same people during that first year of high school. However, Debbie never quite fit in with us. We were the metal chicks…”Barbie and the rockers” as some people termed. But Debbie always seemed to be faking her metal love. She was prudish and awkward and she preferred Bon Jovi to Motley Crue…and Warrant to Van Halen. Moreover, she was a member of spirit club and played trumpet in the concert band. Her participation in both of these activities was a clear indication of her lack of metal authenticity. After all, no self-respecting metal chick would spend time hanging school colored streamers on a football player’s locker when they could be thumbing through the latest issue of Metal Edge; and a true metal chick would never play trumpet in band when drums were a viable option. Debbie was a fake; and for this I quietly shunned her.

Debbie, Jason and I were in German class together. From day one, Jason and I flirted. While I had no real interest in him, I, like most 14-year old girls, couldn’t resist the ego boost his interest gave me; in the fashion of a classic teenaged tease, I encouraged his advances without any intention of ever giving in to them. After a month of daily flirting, Jason suggested we go to the Friday night football game together. I wanted to go, but since I was only teasing Jason, I didn’t want to be alone with him.  So, I asked Debbie to join us.

During the game, the three of us hung out, talked, ate popcorn, and engaged in typical teenage gossip. Afterwards, Jason dropped Debbie and me off at my house where she spent the night. All was fine until Monday morning when I heard through the grapevine that Debbie was bragging to our friends that Jason liked her more than he liked me. This aroused my deepest anger. I considered her braggadocio a challenge; and nobody is more ruthless than a 14-year old girl who feels challenged. There was no way fake, annoying Debbie, with her notebooks covered in Bon Jovi lyrics and Jani Lane pinups, was going to sweep Jason Brannon away from me! She had to be defeated!  

That Friday, I asked Jason for a ride home from school. Once seated in his car, I said, “Are your parents home?” When he replied “no,” I suggested we hang out at his house for a bit. Once there, he lead me to his room. A Harley Davidson poster hung on one wall and his bottle of Hai Karate stood proudly on his dresser. We took off our shirts and made out. Eventually, we shed the rest of our clothes and started having sex. Two minutes later, as I was zipping my jeans back on I thought, “that’ll show Debbie! She’ll never have the balls to do that!”

Once more, I piled into Jason’s snazzy ride for the trip to my friend Katy’s house. As I opened the door to step out of the car he said “Maybe we can do something sometime…I’ll call you.” I turned to look at him and smiled “please…just don’t.” With that, I stepped out, slammed the car door shut, marched into the house and announced “well, I got that whole virginity thing out of the way. Now I can fuck Bret Michaels!”

The next day, word got back to Debbie that I’d fucked Jason. Just to add insult to Debbie’s injury, I emphasized the fact that I was never really interested in Jason. “He wears Hai Karate!” I laughed. “But my virginity just needed to be gone and he was just …there, the right place at the right time” I said dismissively. This statement wasn’t entirely untrue. Jason most certainly was in the right place at the right time…and that was between two quietly competitive teenaged girls fighting for adolescent social supremacy.

Thankfully, I never got the chance to wow Bret Michaels with my new and improved, experienced teenaged self; and his ironic return to fame, as the object of desire on VH1’s Rock of Love (Bus), is delightfully absurd to me. He will always be responsible, in some small way, for my decision to toss the V-Card, a choice I never really regretted. Perhaps it might have been better to wait a couple years…maybe for an actual boyfriend…or at least a friend who happened to be a boy. But the fact is that I considered my virginity a burden. I wanted to be rid of it; and using it partly to prove a point to a girl I found inauthentic and passé seemed an added bonus. It was vengeful and mean…but we're all vengeful at fourteen.  I wanted to be a little dangerous…and the way I saw it at the time, virginity was in direct opposition to danger.   

Jason and I never went out again. In fact, we spoke very little after our late afternoon rendezvous.  But then, years later, when I was in college, he randomly called me. It was late at night and I was jarred out of REM sleep by the phone’s ring. He had no reason for his call. He may have been drunk. When he said his name, I didn’t even connect it. “Who?” I asked annoyed by the late night call. “Jason Brannon, from high school?” he responded. “Oh,” I said a little more annoyed. He then rambled for a minute about his pet ferret, before I said “dude, I gotta go.” We had nothing to talk about…no reason to catch up. He was nothing but the first and I’d long since moved on.