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Malina Saval

Malina Saval is the author of "The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw, Emotional World of Male Teens" (Basic Books, 2009). Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, LA Weekly, the Jerusalem Post, Flaunt, Forward, Moment, Heeb and Variety, for whom she currently pens Celebrity profiles. She scribed screenplays for Touchstone Pictures and has appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show and NPR's "Talk of the Nation." Personal website: www.MalinaSaval.com

Israel is for Lovers

When I was eighteen years old I flew all the way from Boston to Los Angeles to lose my virginity to a boy that hadn't returned my phone calls or letters in over a year, not since we met on a USY pilgrimage trip to Israel the summer prior. I went with the alleged mission of scoping out USC film school, to where I'd been accepted.  It was either there or Cornell. Cornell had snow and gorges and a top-rated English department; USC had Benjamin, a child actor who'd starred in an episode of Saved by the Bell and went down on me for the first time on a narrow bunkbed with scratchy bedding in a Conservative kibbutz in the Galil. 

It wasn’t long before that I was ten years old and at my first Kadima dance at our local synagogue. My hair was cut really short with a little tail in the back and I had these big white buck teeth and my breath smelled like a retainer. I looked like Ralph Macchio in the “Karate Kid” as I sat on the edge of the bima listening to a Journey song and hoping beyond hope that somebody of the male gender would ask me to dance. Somebody did actually—a girl. Who thought that I was a hot boy who looked just like Ralph Macchio. So you can imagine my excitement when I met Benjamin that a boy finally liked me enough to ignore me.

Benjamin had eyes the color of the Mediterranean and was taller than any of the Jewish boys I knew at home. I recognized him immediately from a non-speaking bit part he’d played on The Wonder Years as Student #2 during the episode where Kevin Arnold stages a walkout from school in protest of the Vietnam War.

Benjamin dated me, he said, because I was “the second hottest girl” on the trip. The first hottest girl, Amanda, had a hot Irish-Catholic football player boyfriend back home. And Benjamin’s best friend on the trip, Josh, was doing it in the banana fields late at night with Amélie, this slutty French Jewish girl from western Massachusetts.

The first time Benjamin and I kissed was on an army base in the north of Israel under a shooting star, which would be corny if it weren’t true. But he also had a hard time relating to anyone who didn’t want to talk about his upcoming role as Student #4 in an episode of “Family Matters” during which Urkel celebrates Black History Month. He kept practicing his one line— “ I didn’t know there were black actors!” — all throughout our tour of the Western Wall. During our hike through the Banyas, a lush forested area with postcard-perfect waterfalls, he snapped pictures of himself in front of every palm tree. At the Dead Sea where I wore a new black bikini, he complained of jet lag and slept back at the youth hostel. He did superhero imitations on our sunrise climb up Masada, as I panted and puffed struggling to keep up with him, dropping my asthma inhaler somewhere between the remains of Herod’s bathhouse and the Roman Ramp. During an Israeli music class, I tried desperately to impress him with my newly acquired shofar blowing abilities.

On our visit to Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum, he cried inside the Children’s Memorial which I thought was so totally hot, but when I went to stand next to him and show him that I was crying too, he just started walking off toward the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations.

I pursued him like this after our trip ended, for an entire year, determined to lose my virginity to him. I went to USY International Convention in Orlando because he was going, only to find out that he’d just lost his virginity to a girl from the Farwest region. Still, I kept writing and calling. And then I got my acceptance letter to USC. And my parents agreed that I could go look at the school. 

So my mom and I flew out to Los Angeles. We checked into the Biltmore Hotel downtown and because we were from Boston and didn’t know anything about LA decided not to rent a car, figuring we’d just take the bus everywhere.  Which is how I wound up ditching my mom and taking a $60-dollar cab ride to see Benjamin at his parents’ home in Van Nuys, porn capital of the world and the romantic spot of my soon-to-be ceremonial deflowering.

Because Benjamin was a self-important child actor, he was flattered that I’d chosen him as my first and flown all the way cross-country just for him, especially when he’d only recently been rebuffed by Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. Foreplay included us watching a videotaped performance of his dramatic turn as a chorus member in his Hebrew school production of Fiddler on the Roof. He was also a really sloppy kisser, which I guess I’d somehow blocked out in my dogged pursuit to have sex with him—or maybe it’s that Zionist teen tours to Israel make everyone seem like a good kisser. He finger-fucked me with the tenderness of a plumber.

And that’s how I lost my virginity: in a bedroom with Star Wars wallpaper and my socks still on and “More than Words” by Extreme playing on the stereo and Benjamin balling up the bloody sheets and tossing them in the washing machine before his parents got home.

That September, filled with sharp regret, I went to Cornell. And Benjamin wound up at a Big Ten school where he failed to get any traction in its drama department. Years later, he apologized for being a jerk and we’re still in touch. Sometimes when I look at the USY group photo of us on Facebook, I feel a dull pang of nostalgia. When it comes to your virginity, you always sort of miss it.