Free Bare Bones by Bobby Bones Page A

tear-offs (stick the shovel under the nails; use your foot to pry up the roof; tear off a piece; throw it down on the ground) and cleanups (cleaning up everything I’d thrown on the ground).
    Uncle Bub had a friend on the crew with two daughters, one of whom was my age. One night, the sisters and a couple of other kids invited me to hang out with them. There were six of us, and someone suggested we play Spin the Bottle. I was nervous because I had never kissed a girl. Let me remind you, I was a sophomore in high school. There were kids in my class who already had babies, and I still hadn’t made it to first base.
    No one in the group gathered around the bottle knew I hadn’t kissed a girl, but that didn’t make me feel any better. The bottle spun around and landed on the sister my age, a blond sixteen-year-old who was already very developed. Then it spun again . . . and landed on me.
    She was not a happy camper.
    How do I know this? Because she was very vocal about her displeasure. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” she said. “I hate this game.” As I write this, I just felt that disgusted feeling again. The same one I had when I wrote the T-Bone story just a few pages back. I am such a loser.
    But she did it. I had to give her credit, she held true to the rules of the game. That was my first kiss—with someone who wanted to have nothing to do with me. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it wasn’t until I got to college that I finally got a girlfriend.
    It took me the longest time to get the nerve up to ask out (fake name alert) Farah (with an h, always with an h, and if you didn’t put an h, you’d have to hear about why the h was so important to her. And that’s true. Just her name wasn’t Farah. But it did end with an h ). I could tell she was awesome as soon as I met her. The cousin of my roommate’s girlfriend, she was smart, pretty, and together. I didn’t think I had a chance with her.
    I was scared of girls, especially pretty ones like Farah, because they never liked me. It’s just like if a dog gets hit a bunch, he’ll flinch whenever someone raises his hand. I had been rejected so much I was scared of putting myself out there. But somehow I got the nerve to ask Farah out. I remember the smooth pickup line I used the first time I asked if she wanted to hang out: “Hey, ummm, can we eat sometime?” Feel free to use that whenever you need, and don’t say I never gave you anything.
    Farah was awesome. She was smart. She challenged me on my beliefs. She had parents who were still together and loved each other. I enjoyed everything about her. Well, almost everything. She and I dated for a long time before we had sex—like, a long time. Unlike the stereotypical scenario where the girl is the one who refuses to put out, in this case I was the one who wouldn’t do it. I was scared to death.
    I was always scared of sex. Different than my fear of rejection from women, this stemmed from my mom getting pregnant with me when she was fifteen. I never wanted to have a kid and certainly didn’t have the money to support one. Because of that early and indelible imprint on my personality, I have never been the type to go out and try to get lucky. I’ve only ever had sex with real girlfriends. And myself. Lots of that. I can’t get me pregnant!
    BEFORE I DID THE DEED WITH FARAH, I WANTED TO DO MY homework. Because I was already in my twenties and still completely inexperienced, I didn’t want to be, as my grandma would say, “like a cub bear playing with his peter.” In my quest to learn what made women feel good, I turned to the best source of sex education: the Internet. Now, I’m not talking about porn. I’m not a porn guy. Never have been. Not for any moralistic reason, I’m just not into it. No, I did some bona fide research on how to have sex and more specifically what women like