A Place I've Never Been

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Book: A Place I've Never Been Read Free
Author: David Leavitt
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drugs.
    I remembered the first time I ever played Deprivation, my sophomore year, I had been reading Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
. Everything in our lives seemed a question of innocence and experience back then, so this seemed appropriate. There was a tacit assumption among my friends that “experience”—by that term we meant, I think, almost exclusively sex and drugs—was something you strove to get as much of as you could, that innocence, for all the praise it received in literature, was a state so essentially tedious that those of us still stuck in it deserved the childishrecompense of shiny new pennies. (None of us, of course, imagining that five years from now the “experiences” we urged on one another might spread a murderous germ, that five years from now some of our friends, still in their youth, would be lost. Youth! You were supposed to sow your wild oats, weren’t you? Those of us who didn’t—we were the ones who failed, weren’t we?)
    One problem with Deprivation is that the older you get, the less interesting it becomes; every year, it seemed, my friends had fewer gaps in their lives to confess, and as our embarrassments began to stack up on the positive side, it was what we
had
done that was titillating. Indeed, Nick Walsh, who was to Lizzie what Nathan was to me, complained as the game began, “I can’t play this. There’s nothing I haven’t done.” But Lizzie, who has a naive faith in ritual, merely smiled and said, “Oh come on, Nick. No one’s done
everything
. For instance, you could say, ‘I’ve never been to Togo,’ or ‘I’ve never been made love to simultaneously by twelve Arab boys in a back alley on Mott Street.’ ”
    â€œWell, Lizzie,” Nick said, “it is true that I’ve never been to Togo.” His leering smile surveyed the circle, and of course, there
was
someone there—Gracie Wong, I think—who had, in fact, been to Togo.
    The next person in the circle was Nathan. He’s never liked this game, but he also plays it more cleverly than anyone. “Hmm,” he said, stroking his chin as if there were a beard there, “let’s see … Ah, I’ve got it. I’ve never had sex with anyone in this group.” He smiled boldly, and everyone laughed—everyone, that is, except for me and Bill Darlington, and Lizzie herself—all three of us now, for the wretched experiments of our early youth, obliged to throw Nathan a penny.
    Next was Dorrie Friedman’s turn, which I had been dreading. She sat on the floor, her legs crossed under her, her very fat fingers intertwined, and said, “Hmm … Something I’ve never done. Well—I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”
    An awful silence greeted this confession, and then a tinkling sound, like wind chimes, as the pennies flew. “Gee,” Dorrie Friedman said, “I won big that time.” I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely pleased.
    And as the game went on, we settled, all of us, into more or less parallel states of innocence and experience, except for Lizzie and Nick, whose piles had rapidly dwindled, and Dorrie Friedman, who, it seemed, by virtue of lifelong fatness, had done nearly nothing. She had never been to Europe; she had never swum; she had never played tennis; she had never skied; she had never been on a boat. Even someone else’s turn could be an awful moment for Dorrie, as when Nick said, “I’ve never had a vaginal orgasm.” But fortunately, there, she did throw in her penny. I was relieved; I don’t think I could have stood it if she hadn’t.
    After a while, in an effort not to look at Dorrie and her immense pile of pennies, we all started trying to trip up Lizzie and Nick, whose respective caches of sexual experience seemed limitless. “I’ve never had sex in my parents’ bed,” I offered. The pennies

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