How I Murdered My First Vibrator

On a cross-country run sophomore year of high school, my much more adventurous friend Mabel asked us if we’d ever had an orgasm. Despite the ranging sexual of experience of our group, the answer was a definitive ‘no’ all around. The next day the four of us drove thirty minutes away to a ridiculous sex shop next to a highway ramp, hidden in a patch of woods that was clearly for old men who are also forest trolls.

We each bought the first thing we saw. Or the second thing, seeing as the first thing I saw was a 50- year-old man ruminating over an enormous green dildo. Then we went to our respective homes, used the items we purchased, and met up in the parking lot of the ice cream stand to discuss it. It was, to this day, the most bizarrely organized sexual experience I have ever had.

Reviews were overwhelmingly positive, we were each now the happy — if not proud — owners of a vibrator. Things were going great until a few weeks later when my friend Kelly “lost” hers. I say, “lost” because she put it in a drawer one day and then it was just gone. We hypothesized that her mother had found it. Our theory was that her mom did not exactly want her to have a vibrator, but she also did exactly not want to discuss it. So she just disappeared it like a Mafia kingpin.

This new development set my already heightened paranoia and fear of discovery to a “McCarthy trials” level. Of course, I now realize my parents would not have cared, although they would have been pretty pissed that Mabel drove us to the sex store with only a junior license. However, I was likely much more paranoid than everybody else about being caught with a vibrator, because when I used it I was thinking about girls, not guys.

Every day I would come home and re-hide my vibrator somewhere new. I might as well have laminated tiny fake passports and come up with different phony occupations because my vibrator was basically in the witness protection program. I reached a breaking point when I walked in on my mom putting away my clothing IN MY DRAWERS. Thank God, I had moved the vibrator from my dresser to my old Kaboodle that morning.

I was like a sweaty criminal in the last third of a noir film. Fate was closing in on me. I had to get rid of it, but how? I didn’t want to take it with me anywhere for fear of being somehow caught with it — I would have rather been caught with heroin. At least most people would have believed the heroin wasn’t mine.

However, I couldn’t just throw the thing in the kitchen trashcan. I imagined our garbage man knocking on the door to report his lascivious discovery to my horrified parents. There was only one option left. I took the vibrator on a scenic ride to an old country road and then I drove over it with my parents’ Toyota.

I did not destroy it on the first try. We should probably put whoever is making cheap vibrators on a national defense contract because this thing was nearly indestructible. I actually had to roll back and forth over it several times before it finally smashed into pieces. Unfortunately, on the fifth time over I did not hit the brake fast enough and the car went into a culvert.

I had to walk through the vibratoral remains to check out the car damage. It was all pretty gruesome. Luckily the car just had a scratch or two. Poignantly, a few days after I murdered my vibrator, I would learn that Kelly found hers, which had fallen behind a drawer.

I told my parents the scratches were from rolling up too far into a parking space, which I had also actually done so it wasn’t a complete lie. They made me take the car to be repaired at the dealership garage, which was thirty minutes away, next to a highway ramp, and across from a patch of woods. As I pulled into the dealership parking lot and looked across the street at the sex shop, I remembered what my mom had said as I left: “Punishment fits the crime.” She was right.