Satan Speaks, Ducking Punches, and How I Lost My Virginity

/By Tony Nappo / Jul 2, 2019

SHARE

Nappoholics Anonymous is a weekly column featuring twelve random thoughts by actor Tony Nappo. Some are funny, some are poignant, some bother him, and some make him weep from sadness while others make him weep for joy. Here are his thoughts: unfiltered, uncensored, and only occasionally unsafe for work.

1. Working with Milo Manheim, whose father I play in Disney’s Zombies 2 and telling him about my daughter, Ella. Saying that she is 14 now and really exerting her own will and seeming not to feel bad at all when her parents express any disappointment in her choices.

Milo: You should have raised her Jewish. You never get that with Jewish kids.

2. Fuck Yeah!!! of the Week: Ronnie Burkett and Andy Jones are inducted into The Order.

3. Top 5 Doug Ford/Ontario PC Party Movies of the Last Decade

5. Crazy Rich Caucasians

4. The Hate You Vote For

3. A Tzar Is Born

2. Fliphash

1. There Will Be Beer

4. Guest Post of the Week

5. Fan Letter of the Week

I just saw this feedback on the Nappoholics column recently. I don’t understand why someone would bother reading what sounds like such a piece of shit column or how someone with such a clear and strong opinion doesn’t believe in that opinion enough or have enough self confidence, in general, to sign their name to it. I too, am baffled.

6. This One Gets Truer With Each Passing Day

7. When I was younger, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw the first punch. I figured I would land as many punches and do as much damage as I could as quickly as possible. Now, I know to avoid that first punch if at all possible and to make sure that the first punch I do throw, should I have to, has a really, really good fucking shot at being the last.

This is NOT a metaphor. #agingbull

8. I have had the pleasure of working with this man who most of you will know from The Wire. I wouldn’t be as bold as to say we are friends but we follow each other’s day to day on the Gram they call Insta. I love the quote he has on his page. It’s a truly brilliant perspective. Enjoy your fucking life. Don’t worry about what you do or don’t achieve so much as the pursuit of it and the process, challenge and struggle. When it’s all said and done, we’re all gonna end up in the same place. It’s got to be the going not the getting there that’s good.

9. The Opening Lines to the Final Chapter of the Novel I’m Never Going to Write

If I’m honest about it, I guess it was an even trade in the end. I gave her everything I had to offer, which, in retrospect, wasn’t very much at all. In return, she offered only her lady parts and a laundry list of lies—both of which had been used rather extensively and were noticeably worse for wear.

10. In a semi-related story, Satan distanced himself from both of these guys’ agenda, at a recent press conference, stating, “ Nuh-uh. I ain’t working together with those motherfuckers on ANYTHING. The two of them are just TOO mean and heartless for my tastes.”

11. Conundrum of the Week

12. A True Story

I never lost my virginity. I know exactly where I left it. It’s in a hotel room somewhere in Kingston, Ontario.

I was fifteen years old and at a hockey tournament with my dad. When I went downstairs for breakfast that morning on that fateful day, I saw a room key lying on the ground. I picked it up and put it in my pocket with the thought of returning it to the front desk and then forgot all about it, more or less.

It was early afternoon, and I remember the guys were all running around the hotel getting into whatever teenage shit they could find. The parents were likely all drinking in someone’s room together as parents of teen boys tend to do while away at tournaments. While I was loitering around the lobby doing some dumb thing or other, an older sister of some kid on some other team, I assume, grabbed me and told me that she liked my hair. I had taken to spiking it up Billy Idol style with toothpaste because I had heard that that was how Billy Idol did it which, in retrospect, seems unlikely to be true, but then, it was the eighties. There were very few rules. Especially when it came to hair products and styles.

I’ll skip forward in the story a bit and say that somehow or other, this older sister had pulled me into a stairwell. I assumed it would just be some kissing, but she seemed to be pretty well versed in how to do a lot of other stuff that I knew very little about and had never experienced firsthand. Frankly, it made me a little nervous what with being right out in the open where anyone—INCLUDING MY FATHER— could have walked by and seen us. I didn’t want her to stop whatever it was she was starting, but I also didn’t want to get caught in the act (whatever the act was going to be) by my dad or her dad or her brother or her brother’s entire team or a hotel manager or… anyone.

“I have a key,” I remember saying quite feebly.

“Let’s go,” she said enthusiastically.

I didn’t tell her the key wasn’t to my room and that I had no idea whose room it was or if anyone was in the room presently but up we went, regardless. I turned the key in the lock quietly and pushed the door open.

The room looked like any occupied hockey tournament hotel room I have ever seen. Open suitcases and clothes strewn about. Some half empty liquor bottles. Hockey bags open and equipment being aired out. Remnants of half-eaten fast food and their containers and wrappers. But none of the room’s rightful occupants were there, so she proceeded to lead me to the bed.

I will never forget how quickly my clothes seemed to come off because it was the first time I was completely exposed in front of a female, which made her next words burn forever in my brain all the more so than they might have otherwise.

“It isn’t very big, is it?” She asked.

“I don’t know,” I responded, “How big is it supposed to be?”

Now, as it turns out, the next female who ever laid eyes on my down belows said, immediately upon their unveiling, “You’ve been blessed.” Since then, many post-hockey showers and the invention of the internet have taught me that the truth lies somewhere between the two witness’ statements, and that this particular sister must have come from some town like Pickering, where a local power plant or tainted water supply had caused all of the inhabitants to have ridiculously overgrown mutant reproductive organs.

I’ll skip all the dirty bits, except to say that things didn’t take very long and that neither she nor I could get out of that room soon enough knowing, at that point, that its rightful inhabitants could return any minute. I don’t remember saying goodbye or even what her name was. I’m not even sure that we ever exchanged names.

I found my way back to my dad, who asked where I’d been and what I had been doing. I gave him the prototypical teenage boy answer: “nothin’’” and then went on with the rest of the day as if none of it had happened. I don’t think I told anyone on the hockey team that day what happened but I may have. For years I felt semi-guilty about hijacking that room/bed and messing up the sheets of some unsuspecting occupant. The room hadn’t been disturbed at all, other than the DNA evidence, and had been as respected as could be expected under the circumstances. But still.

I often wonder who that girl was and what her life is like now and if she has any recollection or idea in her mind at all of what was a humungusly significant event in my life that she had been instrumental in creating and executing. It was all kind of like getting hit by a car but in the very, very, very, very, very, very best way.

Somewhere in a storage bin, among old play programs and high school yearbooks, a few choice hockey cards, my six-million-dollar man doll and other souvenirs from my youth still sits that Holiday Inn room key. I’ve forgotten the room number on it, but I won’t ever forget the reason that I saved it–as awkward and clumsy and embarrassing as it all ultimately was.

WRITTEN BY

Tony Nappo

Tony is Italian, he’s from Scarborough, he’s an actor, he’s a father, he’s a really good house painter, and he doesn’t believe that most things matter, ultimately, at all.

LEARN MORE

Satan Speaks, Ducking Punches, and How I Lost My Virginity

Comments

Leave a Comment Cancel reply