I have never had sex on the beach, and this is why: years ago, I was taking a quick vacation with some of my girlfriends in Mexico. Rosarita Beach. We did the things you do when you're on vacation—drank, flirted, laid out. We hadn't brought along any boyfriends with us, though we all had them. None of us seemed interested in meeting anyone, certainly not having sex with anyone. Then, the night before we were to leave, we were down on the beach, and we couldn't find one of my friends, so we split up and went looking for her. I had the misfortune of finding her having sex with this huge, hulking, completely stupid college tennis player from Ohio. We'd met him the day before and were all thoroughly underwhelmed and had never mentioned him again. So it was completely shocking to see him having sex with the “quiet” friend in the group. This was the sensible girl who always told us when something was not a good idea, and now she was doing it in the mud that stuck to her like baby poop. When I came upon them, I was horrified; in fact, at first, I thought he was beating her up. It was the first time I had seen two people having sex in person, and it was disgusting—so unromantic and animal it reminded me of something so base, like going to the bathroom. After that, it was hard to think about having sex, let alone sex on the beach.
I was dating a Christian guy. One day, we went down to San Diego to tour the campus of a Christian school, Point Loma Nazarene University. We toured the campus, then went down to the beach for a little stroll. We were alone. The mood struck. The school didn't even allow couples to hold hands, so we'd thought it would be fun to get a little freaky. We ducked behind a row of shrubs, took off our clothes and started doing it. The school had a security guard patrolling the cliff. He must have heard us. I didn't go out of my way to be quiet. All of a sudden, through the shrubs, I could see him approaching us. We got up and ran. It was fun, but not the finish I was looking for.
I had sex on the beach once—not because I wanted it or desired so greatly the person I had sex with (though she was lovely), but because it seemed like something you should do once, like taking those mules down the Grand Canyon, which I would never do because I don't think I would ever be able to unclench after that to go to the bathroom. Anyway, things came together for me one summer when I had a steady girlfriend and a friend of ours had a house on Sunset Beach. We said we were going for a walk, taking a blanket along, explaining we'd need it in case we wanted to “sit and listen to the waves.” And we are walking. And walking. Anyone who has been to Sunset Beach knows it is a long way from your friends' house to the actual shoreline. A huge plot of sand that at first comforted me because I believed sex was something to have in total, utter privacy as opposed to those degenerates who like to do it in front of Christian day schools. We finally reached the area near the breaking waves, and well, you know. It was completely quiet down there, including us, since we went about our business completely businesslike. It was cold and sandy and dark, and we both wanted to do it; actually, we both wanted it to be over because, somehow, we had both realized at the same time that it was exactly in this position that most young couples are stabbed repeatedly in the throat. At least in the movies. And what was to stop someone from coming along and killing this young couple that no one could see or hear? And I was really freaking out, looking up and down the beach, expecting someone to amble by and start murdering us, and now the distance between us and the house was freaking me out so much I yearned for there to be a gathering of Christian day schoolers nearby, all singing Kumbaya, holding floodlights and handguns. What I got was silence, so much silence you might not hear a naked man being stabbed repeatedly through the throat. Somehow, after a while, the whole thing ended, and that's all that's best said about that. We made the long walk back, quickly. That night, in the house, we had sex again. This time, it was wonderful as I gazed into the my girlfriend's eyes, sure of her love and that every door in the place had been locked. I had checked each one of them. Twice.
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When you're 17, there isn't much to do after 10 p.m., save for coffee shops and movies—and even those become boring by the second or third day of summer. So when your best friend says, “Hey, let's go to the beach” at 11:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, it sounds like a GREAT idea. That is, until she and her dude start going at it. Right. Next. To. You. And you know, there's really only so many sandcastles you can make in the moonlight before you want to grab the two of them—preferably where they're glued at their junk—and cast them out toward the oil islands. That is, until she suggests it again the following week. With a different dude. And you? More sandcastles, baby.
My college girlfriend and I had been together a few months when I accompanied her to my first—and last—gathering with her extended family in Sunset Beach. The only thing about the family I recall, other than the granny giving me dirty looks, was the way they all huddled around the TV to watch an LA newscast and point to my girlfriend's anchorwoman cousin. Aunties went on and on about what a success the woman was while you could see the not-measuring-up scowls on the faces of nephews and nieces.
“Let's go!” said my perturbed girlfriend, who wanted to bail long before I got the chance to whine about being stuck there. We took a walk along the beach that extended into hours. I think she wanted to make sure everyone in her family had left before returning. The grunion were running when night finally fell, and after scores of people had filled their pails and left the beach, we seemed to be the last two people on Earth.
We eventually snuggled up. Snuggling gave way to nuzzling, which gave way to fondling, which gave way to hot talk and the stripping away of strategic pieces of clothing. But it didn't stay hot for long when sea spray and the cool night air hit our exposed naughty bits. It was so pitch-black out that we got all fumbly trying to complete the act. Right at the moment it seemed we had finally found each other, our mood was spoiled by a voice that couldn't have been more than 20 feet away. Worse yet, after we'd seemingly disconnected, I wasn't sure if I had sex with my girlfriend or a piece of driftwood wrapped in kelp.
Wonder if that driftwood ever thinks of me?
* * *
When I was in high school, a co-worker of mine who was in college came in on Monday and said she and her boyfriend had been having sex on the beach when a bunch of gangbangers came up, pulled him off her and beat the shit out of him, and then gang raped her. I've never had sex on the beach.
I was 16 and had sneaked out of the house to go to the beach with my best friend Jane and my boyfriend, Jason—or as my mom called him, “Jason the Ax Murderer.” We went to the campground across PCH from Leo Carrillo, and then Jane and Jason started to have sex on a picnic table, so I went and sat at someone's campfire for a while until they started hinting that they were kind of sick of me, so I went and yelled at Jason and Jane that we had to go home. Now. Jason was having sex with my other best friend, Heather, too, but Jane and I didn't find that out for a while. Heather and Jane were both virgins till Jason. I was still a virgin afterward. I guess Jason wasn't actually my boyfriend like I thought.
Sex on the beach is, above all else, a collision of physics and romance, of reality and ideal, of sand and salt (on the one hand) and simple lubrication (on the other). Then there are the waves—on the night of our one-night stand on Waikiki, waves that rose and fell like God's hand slapping at the shore, angry, a rebuke—and, sure, paranoia: while my consort was absolutely switched on by the possibility of being caught in the act, I was terrified into something like impotence. My terror shaped every sound (distant car horns, a disembodied voice, the gentle soughing of the trade wind) into the specter of spies: we were clearly being watched, I believed, and it seemed as if the only force between me and the multitude of intruders was my focused certainty that I would not allow myself to become distracted by anything like passion; my anxiety was like a prism operating in reverse, transforming the colorful, ambient sounds of Waikiki into a single black horror that would manifest itself at the moment of orgasm. But mostly the sand and salt. We were there for a water-polo tournament at the University of Hawaii, and the most natural thing in the world, after slipping out of our clothes, was to race into the hip-deep water and swim until we could no longer touch bottom. Then, the physics lesson: we embraced—and sank. We squirmed a little closer to shore, gasping for air, the waves whipping up a froth of salt water and sand that covered our genitalia; every in and out was like a whip strike across labia and penis, and not in a good way, unless you're a Christian who believes that every act of pleasure must be accompanied by pain, and even then you'd likely admit that it hurt. And then a wave knocked us over, leaving us for a moment like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, until the next one hit us and sent us like a pair of dice cast on a craps table—a couple of dice fucking on a very sandy craps table. We never finished. We were too sore. And by then we were laughing and relaxed. A few minutes later, sitting in a bar, she put her on hand my thigh, and I recoiled as if from a flame.
