I thought I lost my virginity to a girl I met at Finley Hall, but afterwards I was never truly sure. I suppose it was a matter of definitions. It wasn’t really about the event itself, but rather the woman I was with.
Finley Hall was the Student Center at the City College of New York by the 1970s. It was a huge, sprawling structure and I don’t remember now exactly what was contained in the whole place. It wasn’t being used for its original purpose; in fact, it hadn’t even been built by the city. It had been acquired in the 1950s from a Catholic women’s school called the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart.
I guessed that Finley may have been once used for the school’s administration and surely for classrooms as well. Perhaps the nuns who had once taught there had their quarters in the building too. It was certainly big enough for all that.
It had been built in 1888 on the foundation of an earlier structure that had been destroyed by fire. Finley had an impressive exterior made of some kind of brownstone, but the interior had turned into a government-issued mediocrity during the two decades of municipal control. There was an air of shabbiness about everything, and it was made more visible by the harsh fluorescents that lit almost every room and hallway. Anything appealing or charming about the inside of the building was long gone.
I was in there one night in May, 1974 because I had joined a student newspaper called The Salient. It was one of five papers in a sort of “Newspaper Row” on the third floor. One evening I was in the office by myself past 11:00 PM typing a story.
At five minutes past eleven, I was getting ready to leave when I heard a knock on the door. It was closed but not locked. I doubted it was another staff member; I assumed it was one of the security guards making his rounds. They were ineffectual rent-a-cops from some agency, but usually, they were friendly enough.
I went over there and asked who it was. A female voice said, “May I come in and talk to you?” A lady? Yeah, I’ll open it for her.
A young woman was standing in the hallway. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Amelia Thurber, but most people call me Millie.”
“Well hi, I’m Paul D’Amato.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to come in as I mentioned.” I’m sure that if it had been was some guy I would have found a pretext to deny him entrance and get rid of him. But it wasn’t a guy; it was a girl about my age. It seemed that she gave me a few moments to look her over.
Her clothes struck me first. They didn’t appear to be contemporary, but I was hard put to say why. She had a white blouse and a very long dark blue skirt; I could just barely see her black shoes. Her hat was the most notable item. It was a dark, brimmed hat with some red ribbons placed on one side that I supposed were there to evoke roses.
I didn’t know much about women’s clothing, but it didn’t look like an outfit that was made out of various bits to approximate a certain look. Instead, there was something authentic about it. Her garments were not elaborate, but I thought, she’s dressed as if it was before the First World War. She would fit right in with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1953 Titanic or Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis.
Then I checked out the girl herself. She wasn’t head-turning gorgeous, but she looked pretty good to me. Her face was a bit wide, and she had reddish-brown hair pinned up at the back of her head. She was a substantial girl, about an inch shorter than I was, which would make her about five-seven. Her body wasn’t slender; there was, to me at least, a pleasing solidity about her.
The girl next door, 1912 version. When she smiled, she clinched it for me. “Sure, come in. I guess we can sit back there.” There was a shabby red couch over in the corner by one of the windows. The sofa was about the only semi-comfortable place to go.
I was insecure enough to ask, “You did say that you wanted to talk about something?”
“Yes, I’d like that very much.”
And I was very willing to talk myself. I was finishing my freshman year and I was still a virgin. I thought I would surely get something going in the last eight months, but I had made no progress and I hadn’t had a single date yet. I was craving female attention, and I was going to get some now. That overrode any doubts I had about the lateness of the hour, her somewhat unconventional appearance, and the fact that she somehow had found me in the first place.
I closed the door and we went over to sit down. I said, “I wish I could offer you a drink, but we have nothing here.” Not even a soda; the office lacked a refrigerator. When we wanted something, we’d go to the snack bar on the second floor, but that had been closed for hours.
“That’s not a problem; I understand.”
“So, ah, Millie, I assume you go to school here.” What else could she be doing here?
“That’s true, in a way.”
I almost missed her odd phrasing, but she got right into whatever was bothering her. “I’d like to talk to you about something personal.”
I couldn’t help but reply, “So why ask me?”
“Because you’re here.”
I tried a joke, “So that makes me Mister Right?”
“Excuse me?” She didn’t seem to get that. This chick is a little on the serious side. I was wondering again how she found me. My name was on the masthead of the newspaper, but what made her come there at that time, so late in the evening?
She put her left hand on my arm. For an eighteen-year-old virgin (well, I’d be nineteen in two weeks), that touch alone was heady stuff. Then she got right into her subject. What she said was pretty heady too.
“This is a little hard to talk about. You see Paul, there’s been a lot of, call it repression of my femininity. There’s been so much pressure on me to remain chaste.”
I heard that, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. “Are we talking about your . . .” I had just met her, and I didn’t want to risk behind impolite by being too blunt about it. “I mean about your femaleness as you called it, and the feelings that come from that?”
She was rather blunt herself, “Those feelings should really be called desires. There is a strong physical side to them. I admit that is what I meant. Am I being too forward with you?”
I joshed, “Well, it’s the seventies now. Anything goes.”
“I think it’s better this way; there’s more openness now. There had been so much hypocrisy, I’d call it.”
Now I was wondering, who exactly repressed your so-called femininity? I almost asked her, but then another thought hit me. Was this girl a little crazy, I meant literally with a disorder of some kind? I felt a bit of anxiety about being alone with her, and not just in that room. I knew the entire building had to be virtually empty by now, except perhaps for one of those unreliable security guards.
My doubts were erased when she put her arms around me and started kissing me. I had never been kissed before and now I knew why it had always been such a big deal in movies. I thought, well some girls fuck on the first date, this one has a make-out session. It indeed was a very abrupt and strange date, but at that moment I didn’t care.
I kissed her all over her face, not just her lips. On some impulse, I also put my tongue into one of her ears. She seemed to enjoy everything I was doing. After a couple of minutes of this, she backed off a bit but she still had her hands on me. She spoke in a low voice.
“Paul, I have to admit something else to you.” She seemed to be getting her courage up to say it. “I do, sometimes, fondle myself at night when I’m in bed. The feelings are too strong; I can’t help myself.”
She’s talking about masturbation now? “Well, it’s not a big deal. Doesn’t everybody do it?”
“But I’ve been caught at times, and I’ve been punished for it. They’ve whipped me with birch rods for that.”
“What are birch rods?”
“Just some thin branches from a tree or maybe a bush. Usually, the leaves are removed, then they are tied into a bundle. ” She stopped for a moment to think. “The problem is that, although it hurts to be beaten like that, it also increased my desires, and I touched myself even more. You see, the whipping had to be across my bare behind.”
I got that she was talking about BDSM activities. That was interesting to me, but I knew very little about it. In those days before the Internet, one couldn’t just go online and see a video about almost anything imaginable.
She went on, “I’ve also been caught in activities with other girls too, and I’ve been disciplined for that as well.”
So she’s now bringing up lesbianism. Where had all this been happening and who had done these things to or with her? Some paranoia came to me, and I speculated that this was all some kind of set-up. I imagined that there would be another knock on the door, and when I went to open it, there would be a group of guys there. Surprise! We really had you going with that one.
Yet that didn’t make sense. It was a commuter school, and there were only two small fraternity houses about ten blocks north of there. And I had never heard of a frat boy prank like this. I would be much too elaborate to arrange and the payoff would be too low.
Millie started kissing me again, and my suspicious thoughts vanished. In a short while, she whispered into my ear. “Paul, I want you to deflower me.”
Yeah, baby, I’d like somebody to deflower me too. All I could think to say was, “And when and where is that supposed to happen?”
“Well, right here, right now. I know, they’d say that I was sullying my virtue, but I don’t care.”
If our cherries needed to be busted, I guess we can do that together.
I was trying to process this when she unbuckled my pants and lowered them. She took out my cock – it was already erect from the make-out session – and she started to stroke me. My horny male biology took over and I lived in the moment.
She said, “I do know what a man’s stiff member looks like. There are lewd photographs if one knows where to get them.”
Did she mean magazines? I was beyond caring. “Oh, Millie, that feels so good.”
She giggled, “I’m sure it does.”
My next thought was, dummy, if she’s touching me like this, then I have the go-ahead to touch her in any way I want. Her blouse had buttons offset to the left, and I undid them. Millie didn’t resist. Her undergarment was something I had never seen before, a sort of brassiere that had cloth going down to her waist. Don’t they call that a chemise?
It seemed to be too much trouble to remove it, so I lifted her skirt and got another surprise. Instead of panties, she had what I would call bloomers that went down to her knees. Below that, there were knee-high black stockings and high-topped shoes. Again I was at a loss as to what to do.
Meanwhile, she was still working on my cock, which was very distracting indeed. I thought I was going to reach an orgasm rather soon with the vigorous way she was doing it. She seemed coy as she said, “I see you’re having some trouble with my underthings. Do you like them anyway?”
“Yeah, they’re really cool.”
“Oh, you mean like when the weather is warm?” I supposed that was some kind of joke,
This was all getting quite complicated for an inexperienced guy like me. I managed to say, “Millie, hold off on what you’re doing and I’ll rub you down there through the cloth. How does that sound?”
“That seems splendid.”
She helped me by putting her left leg up on the sofa. She splayed herself out, and I put my hand down to rub her crotch. Her bloomers were cotton, and she started moaning almost immediately. “That is so nice; please keep doing it.” Man, this chick is really, really fast. I wondered what she saw in me that the other 4,000 girls at the school hadn’t.
She had her arms out and she was holding my shoulders. We were saying little endearments to each other as I touched her. Suddenly, I could feel dampness in the crotch of her bloomers. In fact, it could actually be called wetness. By now she was moaning steadily, something like, “Oh, oh, oh!” Wow, this girl doesn’t require much to get going; she’s a really hot number.
Soon she leaned into me and softly said, “Paul, listen to me. I know young men can be somewhat, call it overeager when having relations with a woman.” If she was a virgin, how would she know that? Whatever, she had it all worked out. “I’d like you to have the stamina with your second time to truly please me when you couple with me. Therefore – I’m going to get up on all fours on the sofa. You’ll get behind me and I’ll rub my bare buttocks against your front. I believe that’s called frottage. I’m sure that will work quite well to bring you to a climax.”
It worked quite well indeed. This girl seemed to know more about sex than I had expected. Instead of waiting for assent from me, she got up and started to get into position. I got up to give her some room. Her skirt was still up and she reached back to undo the buttons on the back of her bloomers. Then she pulled the two halves apart, although they were still connected by a narrow strip across the top.
I had never seen a female ass in person before, and I was very impressed. It was bigger than most behinds in girlie magazines, but that didn’t matter to me. It was pale and lusciously round.
She looked up at me and said, “Do you like my bottom?”
I was too young and inexperienced to avoid overpraising women. “Oh, Millie, it’s beautiful. And I like your underpants too.”
“They do offer good access, don’t they?” I was still standing next to the sofa. “Well, go back there and push against me.”
For a moment, I thought I was going to wake up in my bed. Occasionally, I had dreams that ended just at a critical point like this. But I seemed to remember everything I had done in the last fourteen hours. It didn’t feel like a dream, but then it was rare to know that one was actually in one.
There was only one way to find out. I knelt behind her and lowered my pants further. My cock had been completely erect since she had first touched me with her hand. I moved forward and our bodies collided.
She was very enthusiastic in the way she was grinding against me. In turn, I was eagerly pushing myself against her. My upright cock moved against the smooth flesh of her backside. It felt so good that I couldn’t speak; I was whimpering something. I heard her giggling. At least she liked it too.
I was so charged up that it only took me a brief time before I came. I managed to say, “Millie, you’re just so sweet!” and then I ejaculated all over her. Some of it got on her lower back, and a bit onto the underside of her flipped-up skirt.
She said, “My, it feels so hot.” Yes, 98.6 degrees, I imagine. After a moment, I fell back onto the sofa. She looked back at me, and said, “May I borrow your handkerchief, please?” So polite. I got it out and she dabbed herself as best she could.
Then she moved over and cuddled against me, this time to my left. I put my arm around her shoulders. It didn’t seem necessary to speak, so we didn’t. I was very pleased and yet I didn’t have any specific thoughts.
After a few minutes there she said, “Do you think you could get the wind back into your sails?”
Nice phrasing. My male pride got to me, and I responded in the affirmative. She leaned forward and almost whispered to me. I’ve noticed since then that women will sometimes talk very quietly when making a sexual proposition, even when there is no one around to overhear them.
“What I think we should do is: I’ll get on top and straddle you.”
“You mean a cowgirl?”
“A cowgirl?” All right, she has a very dry sense of humor.
“I mean, you’ll be facing me.
“Yes, of course. But first, we should touch each other some more. I’ll take my drawers off for that.” Yeah, Millie, take off those cute bloomers you have.
She stood up. She simply left her underwear on the floor after removing it, and she held up her skirt so that I could see her thick pubic bush. My eyes went from her dark stockings and shoes up to her hat, which was still on. I’ll fuck a girl wearing her hat; it’s kind of interesting in a way.
Mille knelt next to me so we could have better access to each other. After a moment, she said, “Let me get this out of the way.” She moved her long skirt and draped it over the back of the couch. Now she was wearing only her blouse, stockings, and shoes. And the hat; I couldn’t forget that.
I felt a need to compliment her, “You look very fetching this way.” Somehow fetching seemed to fit her better than cute.
“I’m happy I’m so pleasing to you.” She looked at me, and I realized that I had finally met the girl who would give me my first time. When one is still eighteen, it had seemed like a long time to wait.
When I touched her down there, I was struck by how wet she was. It seemed that I was very pleasing to her too. Then she swung over me and I guided myself into her.
For two virgins, we certainly banged away vigorously at each other. When I could still have lucid thoughts at the beginning, it struck me how clever she was in getting me to come that first time. I had plenty of staying power for her, and she loved it. Also, getting on top of me gave her more control over how the act went. It was very different from the awkward fumbling around I had once worried about for my first time.
After that, we lost ourselves in our pleasure. I held her ample hips and she held me by my shoulders. For a moment, I wished I had access to her breasts, but I had never gotten that chemise off. Well, there was always next time.
We said various things to each other that I don’t remember now. In any case, they were probably the usual endearments that lovers say to each other in the heat of the moment. She came quicker than I might have expected. Her movements speeded up, then she leaned back and made very loud noises. Her hands moved all over my chest and shoulders as if she didn’t know where to put them. I said, “Millie, don’t stop, not now.” She didn’t reply, but she kept moving up and down on me. With the downward stroke, she did some delightful grinding against me.
When I came shortly after that, I lifted my hips to get as deeply into her as I could. As I was spurting, I heard her say, “Paul, that’s it, I can feel your seed going inside of me.”
After that, she leaned forward, and I pressed my face against her chest; she held me around my neck. That seemed like it went on for a while. Then she got off and sat there stretched out next to me.
I put my arm around her shoulders, but I didn’t know what to say to her. This had all been so abrupt that the usual questions – What is your major? Where do you live? – seemed to be beside the point. I thought she might pick up the conversational slack, but she didn’t. She was a bit on the quiet side, perhaps.
Then I became aware again of where I was. The room was brightly lit, and the chairs, desks, and filing cabinets in it were battered by hard use. It was an ugly, very unromantic place in which to lose one’s virginity. Well, we’ll find a better place next time. Except, I still lived at home and I had no idea of what her living situation was. Perhaps for the time being our affair would take place in there.
Millie was just sitting there looking forward. I got the feeling there was something blank about her now as if she had done what she had intended and didn’t know what came next. I asked her something that seemed a bit impertinent, but I figured with what we had just done, I had the right to know. “Millie, you seemed – I don’t know how to put this – you seemed to know what you were doing, I mean with me.”
“I admit, I secretly have a copy of a marriage manual that has a lot of information in it. Of course, it’s supposed to be for married couples. As I said, young girls like me are supposed to be chaste.”
I tried to josh with her, “You’ve actually been very naughty.”
She smiled, “Yes, maybe you should use those birch rods on me.”
Wow, that was blunt. But she sat back again and she didn’t seem to have a follow-up.
Suddenly, she sat up and lightly kissed me on the mouth, “Paul, you’ve been very sweet but it’s time for me to go now.” She got up and started to out her drawers back on.
“Where exactly are you going?”
“I just have to go.” If had been three hours earlier, I would have invited her downtown for drinks and maybe dinner. I was suddenly feeling frantic. “Millie, I’ll take you out to dinner. I’m free tomorrow evening.”
Instead of answering, she reached back to get her skirt. I was still talking, “All right, what day would be good for you? I mean, they’re all good for me, as far as I’m concerned.” It wasn’t supposed to be a one-night stand, or at least that’s the way I saw it.
She seemed very fast at getting dressed. The last thing she said was, “Paul, I do appreciate what you have done.” Then she turned and headed for the door. Like an idiot, I was still sitting there with my pants down. I tried to get them up and walk at the same time. As she opened the door, I called out, “I’ll take you over to Amsterdam and we can catch a cab.”
I lost a couple of seconds fooling around with my trousers. I entered the hallway and I didn’t see her. The entrance to the main stairs was just across the way. I went in there and I could see the whole staircase winding down to the first floor, but there was no Millie in sight. Back in the hallway, I decided to check its two legs that went off to form a U-shape that matched the shape of the wing I was in. She wasn’t in either of those.
Think this through. If you look out the windows, it might not be too late to see her leaving. But did she go out the front or the back? I assumed the 135th Street gate beyond the rear entrance was closed, so I dashed into the office again which had a view of the front. She wasn’t out there, but the driveway curved around and I couldn’t see all the way to Convent Avenue.
It seemed imperative that I find her, and I ran out of the building and went all the way down to the Convent Avenue gate. There was a guard in a booth there, but he ignored me. I stepped out and looked along 133rd Street and up and down Convent, but there was nobody in any direction.
Now it would take at least ten minutes to get back to the office. Once there, I sat down and had an intense feeling of disappointment. That girl had been bizarre. It’s possible she was a nymphomaniac. (Now the term is hypersexual disorder.) It was great to finally get laid. However, I wasn’t looking for casual sex. I wanted a girlfriend, someone I could take to a bar or restaurant and then a movie. And Millie had seemed like she’d be plausible girlfriend material.
And I was feeling lust, too. That beautiful ass of hers inside those drop-seat drawers, or whatever they were called. How could I let that just slip away?
I figured she’d come back to Finley – maybe tomorrow – to look for me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to look for her, assuming she really was a student as she had said. There were about 10,000 of them at my school, and finding a certain person would be a matter of chance at best
I looked at my watch and saw that it was 12:30 AM. Shit, I’ve never been here so late. It wasn’t that safe to walk to any of the three subway stations, all of which were several blocks away. I figured I’d get a livery car on Amsterdam Avenue and go to 145th Street. The D train wasn’t safe either, but I could ride with the conductor and I’d probably be all right.
*****
Millie didn’t show up the next day, even though I tried to maximize the time I spent at the office. I didn’t tell anyone about my experience. On the second day, I spoke to a fellow staff member, Jeff Kimmel, whom I had met back in high school. I was in the newspaper office again, and I tried to be as off-hand about it as I could.
“When I was here Tuesday night, this girl came up here to talk to me. It was really late, after eleven o’clock.”
His reply surprised me, “Did she make some moves on you?”
“Yeah, quite a few moves, in fact.”
He hesitated for a moment. “Was her name Amelia Thurber?”
“It sure was. How did you know about that?”
“Because she’s been around here before, doing the same thing.”
I said, “Okay, it did seem like she was a bit unstable.” Should I tell him more? “Maybe she was even a nymphomaniac.”
“She’s more than that, or she’s different I’d say.” He hesitated again. “There was a student here during Manhattanville College days named Amelia Thurber. In 1912, she committed suicide by taking poison. It was in one of the dorms here I think, probably in this building.”
The implications of that didn’t hit me immediately. “And who told you that?”
“People have looked into it. There have been reports about her going back to the 1960s. Maybe even to 1956, when the city took over the building.”
I couldn’t respond to that. He went on, “She’s usually here, late at night, in one of the five newspaper offices on the third floor. If there is some young guy alone in one of the rooms, it’s likely that she’ll come in and introduce herself.”
All I could say was, “That’s so strange.”
“Bobbie met her here last year.” Bobbie Metsky was our resident pornographer. He was a quiet and somewhat morose senior. Back in those days, we got away with publishing the “Weird” section, which had explicit stories and drawings. Bobbie had created it and he edited it. The students kept funding us with their activity fees; some even claimed it was our best feature.
Jeff seemed to be amused and he went on about Bobbie. “You know what that crazy guy did? He came back here four more times, and she arrived here every time.”
“Did she remember him?”
“No she didn’t, she just came in and went through the same routine each time. I guess every time he wants to get a piece of tail, he drops in here late at night.”
“He’s kind of exploiting her, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know if you can exploit somebody who is actually dead.”
“They should get a paranormal investigator in here.”
“There was a guy here in ’71. What he did was spend a night in each of the five offices. When she didn’t show up, he started the cycle again, but he gave up after eight nights.”
“How did she know he was here to investigate her?”
“Like I would know that.”
“Jeff, she wasn’t like a specter. She was so solid, I’d say.”
“I know. You implied that you actually banged her, didn’t you?”
I admitted, “Yeah, I did. I wonder if it counts with a ghost?”
“If you came in her, I guess it counts. Hey, if you want to, come back like Bobbie did and have her again. She’s not dangerous in any way.”
I threw it back at him, “If you think it’s such a great idea, why don’t you do it here some night?”
“Oh no, not me; I don’t need it that badly.”
“I don’t think I need it either. It’s just too creepy.” And yet, somewhere in my mind, I was tempted.
I ultimately decided that living girls were preferable to dead ones, and I never went back. I wasn’t going to do what Bobbie had done, which was to go through the same thing each time and then have her disappear.
Plus, as I said to Jeff, the whole thing was indeed creepy. In fact, I always made sure to be out of Finley before night came. I got the willies imagining her knocking on the door again. Whatever walked there, walked alone.
Yet, during the last weeks of the term, I sometimes hoped to see Amelia going around the campus in her dark brimmed hat. I knew that would never happen because she was only around at night and besides, she was tied indefinitely to the third floor of Finley.
Finley Hall was demolished in 1985, long after I had graduated. I went up there soon afterwards, and there was only a field of bricks where the building had stood.
In the last decade, the Advanced Research Science Center was built on the South Campus. It seems that the northern end of the building overlaps with the footprint of the former Finley Hall. Whether or not Amelia Thurber appears there is something I do not know.
#####
Author’s note: Finley Hall did exist as described here, and the five newspapers were on the third floor. However, when I was at City College, I didn’t see or hear anything about ghosts. However, I did a little research recently, and for the last one-hundred years that have been reports of specters that appear to be former students and professors. One of them is supposedly of a student who died in 1918. I don’t know if these occurred at the original 1907 City College (the North Campus) or at the former Manhattanville College site (the South Campus), which was first developed as a school in the 1840s.
My own opinion is that most ghost sightings (or often just hearings) are the results of poor perceptions and overactive imaginations. I did hear from a reliable source about one in a Massachusetts house. That was pretty vivid and seemed hard to explain. A psychologist I knew at the time said that it could have been I result of hypnagogia, the state of mind between wakefulness and sleep. But I’ll never be sure.
