The first time I saw Rocco Siffredi was at a friend of a friend’s house after school. Two guys brought the porn on VHS, both freshmen at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional like the rest of us. They wanted to show all the girls what they were missing out on, to tell the girls that they could get it from them, anytime. Say the word and we’ll go upstairs and I’ll show you just how good it feels. That was the line. None of the girls took these guys up on their offer.

So there was Rocco Siffredi in this adult film. I had no idea who he was before then. I had spent the majority of my pubescence studying Penthouse or whatever super-graphic-close-up magazines I stole from my uncle’s house, curled up tight and slipped inside the waistband of my acid wash jeans. I suppose I could have seen Rocco’s cock in one of them but who knows. If I had, I’d never seen it moving, captured only in a money-shot moment.

This was the mid-1980s, so the woman in the scene with Rocco had big hair on her head and her crotch. They were in a bedroom where there was a crucifix on the wall. She was on her knees in front of Rocco, and he was saying, Si, si, squeezing her tits like soapy wet sponges. She popped Rocco’s cock out from his pants and gasped at the size of him, and almost all the girls in the room where I sat did too. That was the first time any of the girls in our friend’s living room made any noise. Before that, it had been church quiet as we all watched this scene unfold. The other boys, the ones who brought the porn, were pacing in the hallway smiling at each other and occasionally snuck in peeks at the television screen. They were stuffing their fists into their front pockets to hide their hard-ons. “That ain’t nothing,” one of them said. “I got more than him.”

Rocco was long and thick and had big balls. Another friend said they had to be fake, Rocco’s cock and balls, that no one was really that size. I remember feeling disappointed by that information. It didn’t occur to me that maybe a 15-year-old girl couldn’t possibly know all there is to know about cock. Then one of the other boys said, “Fake cocks don’t bust like his. Just keeping watching,” and I felt hope again.

We watched Rocco fuck the woman’s mouth like she wasn’t there, just a hot wet spot with eager tongue. He moaned as she did her best to satisfy the particular requirements of this scene, to hold his cock and suck him hard enough so that he wouldn’t slip out and end up bashing her in the nose or front teeth. You could see on her face her obvious concentration. You could see on his face how good it felt. That was what I liked watching the most—seeing a guy get pleasure that way from a girl, all his different vocal pitches, all the pain/pleasure expressions. With Rocco on that TV screen, I felt like I could feel her too.

But then what happened next became my favorite thing. The woman was suddenly on her back on a bed. Her eyes looked glassy, just out of focus. Rocco lined his cock up with her hole and with one thrust pushed himself inside her. He closed his eyes, threw his head back, and grunted like he had conquered the world. The woman’s noises were louder than his because I think she was horny but was panicking. Like she thought she could take all of Rocco’s cock if she just got a little higher—smoked a little more, snorted a little more—but now that she was taking it she just wanted it to be over. Or maybe all that moaning meant she wanted it to never stop. It was really hard to tell, and I liked that.

Rocco started thrusting his hips again. He didn’t look at the woman. He looked down at his cock fucking a hole. Only at his cock, that’s what it looked like. Rocco went deep. His balls swung as he fucked her and they smacked the woman’s ass. He sucked her toes through gaudy red fishnet stockings. There was a voiceover in mumbled Italian, lots of fica and culo. He started moving his big probing cock faster with his arms wrapped around one of her legs to hold her still and close to his body. It looked like she couldn’t move as he jack-hammered himself inside her.

I didn’t know that was rough sex, the way Rocco was fucking her then. I thought it looked right but what did I know? A boy with no cock thinking, “I want to do that.” It looked right to me, like that would be something I’d want to do some day with a woman who would one day become my wife. It was just that I had really simple Catholic values.

Then Rocco put a hand on the woman’s throat. One of the girls in the room, the same naysayer as before, the one who tried to convince us all that Rocco’s body wasn’t real, said, “Okay, but does this actually happen, though?”

One of the boys said, “Come here and find out.”

The other boy said, “Dude!” in a way that meant he thought that was the coolest thing to say ever.

In response, there were nervous giggles from all the girls, except from the one asking.

She spoke again. “I don’t think any of this really happens. I think this is misogynistic.”

Another friend said, “I don’t even know what that means. You’re ruining this.”

“It means he hates women and that’s why he’s choking her,” said the boner killer.

“He’s cute, though. Look at his muscles,” was the response, and that made the boner killer huff and cross her arms, sitting back against the sofa pillow behind her. She hated that her feminist critique failed to launch.

Another friend said, “Well, we have babies so a dick that big is probably just whatever.”

A friend of a friend said, “Did I tell you that I caught my brother choking himself with a rosary while he masturbated?”

Another friend said, “Mmm, he’s speaking Italian. I think I found my husband.”

In that moment Rocco embodied all I ever wanted to be: dangerous, desirable, a husband.

I ended up walking the boner killer home because she was actually my closest friend at the party. It wasn’t a gentlemanly gesture. My family lived only four houses down from hers. She told me that even though porn is misogynistic, the one we watched that night made her really horny and wet, so wet that she needed to change her underpants as soon as she got home. She laughed and smiled. “I’m going to come so hard tonight thinking of that guy’s cock and how brutal he was with it.” She turned and looked right at me. “Don’t tell anybody, but I want to meet a guy like that someday.”

I felt something then, like searing heat threatening to destroy my soft wax body shaped all wrong. I said, “I wonder where you’d meet a guy like him.”

When I got home I went to the bathroom and saw that my underpants had a dark damp spot on the crotch. Shame lit up my body again, first my face, then my throat, then my scalp. I brought my knees together so I couldn’t see the spot anymore.

Jake Tavares lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Say hi on Instagram: @jakextav