beautiful, funny, sad & true

The first part of this entry is kind of gross; I’m not gonna lie about that.  The good news is that it’s also really funny, and it’s about a joke I played on my brother when I was about fifteen years old.

We shared a big bedroom at Dad’s house.  One day, Brother was lying on his bed doing homework, and I was lying on my own bed reading a book.  He got up to take a break, or watch TV or something, and at the same time I got the urge to pass gas.  Being the older brother, it was my natural impulse to walk over and pass gas into his pillow.   I repeated that action as the need arose, and I thought it would be even funnier if I was able to really stink up his pillow as much as possible, so I took my shoes off and rubbed my smelly socks all over it, inside and out.

A few minutes later, Brother walked back into the room, and I was reading on my bed, as if nothing had changed.  He reclined on his bed, with one elbow on the offending pillow, and returned to his studies.  After a few minutes, he sniffed the air and said, “Do you smell something?  It smells weird over here.”

“Hunh,” I said, as casually as possible.  “I don’t notice anything.  Smells fine here.”  My bed was ten feet away from his.

He turned back to his books for a while, but then curiosity got the better of him again.  “No, really,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?  It’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.  “I don’t smell anything weird at all.”

He turned back, determined to find the source of the odor.  He sniffed up and down, then got a really strange look on his face as he looked toward his pillow.  That was the moment I’d been waiting for.  As he brought his nose closer and closer, the realization hit him, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Gross! What the heck did you do?” he asked, as he pulled off the pillowcase, smelled the pillow itself, and grimaced.

I was still laughing, but I finally pulled myself together enough to give him an answer.  “I might have farted on it a few times.  And I also might have slipped and accidentally rubbed my socks all over it too.  Yeah. . .I might’ve done that.”  I started laughing again.  He did too, as I recall.

A few years ago, I told a girl I was dating about The Pillow Incident, and she was slightly repulsed by it.  She saw the humor, but she also never quite believed that I wouldn’t do that sort of thing again.   I assured her that I wouldn’t, since I was thirty four years old, and she of all people had nothing to worry about.

Why am I telling that story now?  I’m not sure, exactly, but it came up in conversation with a friend the other day, so it had been bopping around in my brain lately, and I figured that I should tell it here too, under the heading of Childhood Stories.  I did learn that I shouldn’t tell that one when I’m on a date.  Not a very sexy story, as it turns out.  Ha ha.

One other funny childhood story (this one’s not gross, don’t worry) that took place in that bedroom was when my brother and I were wrestling one day, and it kept escalating and escalating, like it does sometimes between brothers.  We were joking around, pulling clothes and stuff out of each others’ dressers, and pretty soon we started pulling the blankets off of each others’ beds too.  It was all in fun, as if to say, “So, you wanna start something?  Okay, well, how about THIS?”  We kept one-upping each other, until all of our clothes, blankets, sheets, and mattress pads were strewn around the floor of the big bedroom.  We were laughing like hyenas, and my brother reached for my actual mattress and started to pull it from my bed frame.

That’s when Dad walked in.  He heard the commotion and came over to see what was going on.  His jaw dropped.  “What the hell are you guys doing?” he yelled.  “Clean this crap up now!”  His tone of voice broke the spell of our laughter, and we looked up, somewhat mortified, to see that we had completely destroyed the room.  Our beds were in a gigantic heap in the middle of the floor, and it looked as if a tornado had touched down in our room, but had spared the rest of the house.  He stood and watched us incredulously as we put everything back together.

That house was really great.  It was owned by family friends who went to our church.  Their aging mother lived in the house for decades, and our friends lived in the house up the hill.  She was in her eighties, and was starting to be unable to live alone anymore.  They wanted someone to live in her house, but they wanted it to be someone they knew.  It was a perfect situation.  They kept the rent low for us, and we happily moved in.

The house is over a hundred years old now, and it used to be the only house on the street.  It’s situated on the old Evergreen Highway in Vancouver, which runs right along the Columbia river.  We used to be able to walk down to the waterfront and play down there.  These days, all of the roads are private, and gated, and so far I’ve been unable to find a way down past the railroad tracks to the river.   Our old house is now surrounded by a group of newly built houses, and the wild, wooded hillside is now a sleepy cul-de-sac like a million others.

Such is the way in America, I suppose.  Open spaces don’t last long, particularly in Portland, where the Urban Growth Boundary is strictly enforced, and space is at a premium.  Vancouver doesn’t have a law like that, so urban sprawl is the order of the day, but this house is in a long-developed residential neighborhood, and we felt lucky to have had the opportunity to live there.

It’s probably worth mentioning that our bedroom at the time of these stories was in the bedroom on the back of the house, on the far left side of the picture.  The layout of the house changed sometimes, too, because at another point, we lived in the upstairs room and could look out over the river and the airport.  We even bought an airport radio and would sit up there for hours with binoculars and a notepad, writing down the names and flight numbers of the planes as they landed and took off.

If you’d told me when I started this entry that it would morph from a disgusting tale of pillow desecration into a nostalgic musing, I might not have believed you.  Yet here we are, and I stand by my choices.  For the record, I solemnly swear not to soil any more pillows, and I won’t tell that story on any more dates.  In fact, if I’m on a date, and you hear me start to launch into it, I hereby give you permission to step in and save me from myself.

My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me.  My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time.  School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment.  My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day.  While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff.  My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young.  Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards.  I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.

Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure.  My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe.  By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed.  I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written.  I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.

There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years.  The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played.  The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week.  My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day.  I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.

I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day.  I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.

I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus.  From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss.  You’re welcome.

All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed.  She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.

Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so.  He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed.  One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.”  Or DID it?

The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers.  He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air.  It made for hilarious and riveting radio.   When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician’s name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.”  Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands.  Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”

Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later?  Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs?  The mind boggles.  All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson.  We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.

At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too.  That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.

It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music.  One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough.  She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall.  The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered.  “Take it down.”

“What?” my brother asked.  “No way!”

“Yes,” she said firmly.  “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

“So?  You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”

“Well. . .maybe.”

“Oh yeah, right.  Why do I have to take this down?  Come here.”  He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck.  “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face.  “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”

At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”

I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too.  He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.   Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit.  The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.

“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.

“No.  Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?  These pictures have been up here for two years.”

“Well, take them down now.”

“No.  I like them.”

My brother and I won that particular argument.  I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough.  Or maybe she just gave in.  Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.

In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more.  When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.   One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.”  Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out.  That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it.  As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough.  People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.

The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.   Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills.  If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.

By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers.  I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.

Synchronicity is a term that was coined by Carl Jung to describe an ‘acausal connecting principle’, which is the short way of explaining a situation in which two unrelated events have an almost preternatural link, in a way that was unknown at the time of the first event.  That sounds confusing, but it’s really a beautiful idea, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience it a handful of times, and here’s my favorite example.

When I was a kid, I used to have a green Huffy bike that was really heavy and cumbersome.  Some of the other kids had BMX bikes, and they could race around, pop wheelies, and catch air off of ‘sweet jumps’ with ease.  (That’s a Napoleon Dynamite reference, by the way.)

My tank of a bike made such stunts laughably difficult, although they did happen occasionally, albeit with a little help from my friends.  One kid named Sean who lived across the street claimed to have bionic powers.  This was in the late 1970’s, after all, and the Bionic Man TV show was in full swing.  Sean was notorious for claiming the powers whenever he would throw a football for a slightly longer distance than normal, or run extra fast, but his favorite thing was to stand in the middle of his yard and gesture at the two large trees in it.  “I can pick up this tree in this hand,” he would say, “and that tree over there in my other hand.”

“Well, let’s see you do that,” my brother and I said.

He would hold his arms out and flex his fingers before he poked at his wrist and said, “Hunh.  My bionics don’t seem to be working today.”

“Oh, man, that’s a shame,” we said.  “We wanted to see you lift up the trees.  Maybe next time.”

That being said, one day all of us were riding our bikes in circles, jumping off curbs and trying to pop wheelies, and after numerous tries, I finally was able to get the front wheel of my Huffy off the ground at the precise moment it needed to be lifted, and the front wheel sailed into the air.  I kept it aloft for quite some time, and I was elated.  When the wheel found its way back to the ground, I pushed backwards on my pedals, stopped my bike, and shouted with glee.  “Hey, everybody, did you see that?  Oh, man, that was super high!”  Most people cheered and said that yes, they’d seen it, but Sean was having none of it.

“Did you see me go like THIS right before you pulled up on the handlebars?” he asked, making a sort of throwing motion with his arm.

The rest of us kinda looked at each other, and I said, “Uh, no, I didn’t see that.”

“Oh, well, I transferred my bionics to you, and that’s what gave you the strength to do that.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to laugh.  “Thanks!”

After much cajoling of my parents, I finally got a new bike when I was about nine years old.  I’d been looking at it for months in a catalog I’d gotten from the Schwinn store.  It was a Tornado, and it was love at first sight.

I don’t remember exactly when I got it, whether it was for my birthday or For No Reason, but I loved it, and I rode it everywhere.  It was quite an improvement over the clunky Huffy.  Suddenly jumps and wheelies were no problem, and I could skid around the slippery sidewalks at CatholicSchool like a pro.  A handful of us clipped playing cards into the spokes of our wheels with clothespins, in order to make our bikes sound like hot rods.  Incidentally, I think it may be time to clip a card or two into the wheels of my new bike and race around the neighborhood, just to see what kind of a reaction I get.

In true BFS&T fashion, I told you that story so that I can tell you this one, and this is where the synchronicity factors in.

One day, my brother and I were playing football in the front yard, like we did often.  On this particular day, we were in full uniform, with pants, jerseys (he wore a Seattle Seahawks jersey, while I was partial to the Pittsburgh Steelers), knee pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, and helmets.  We were quite well decked out, I have to say.  So we’d been playing for a while that afternoon, when I got the sudden urge to ride my bike.  Normally I would have gone inside to change out of my football uniform first, but this time I chose to climb on my Tornado and zoom away in full regalia.  I thought I should just leave my helmet and everything on; I’m not sure why.

I had been riding for fifteen or twenty minutes, when the thought occurred to me, Why didn’t I take all this stuff off?  I must look like a complete idiot.  I’m going home right now and changing. About one second after I had finished that thought and turned toward home, my handlebars slipped ninety degrees sideways, and my bike fell to the ground.  I flew through the air for a couple of seconds, flipped over onto my back, and my head slammed down onto the cement sidewalk much harder than it had any right to.

I lay there dazed, looking up at the sky, completely unhurt.  I suddenly realized how glad I was that I’d chosen not to change out of my football helmet, and I rode home with newfound vigor.  I don’t think I told my mom what happened, because I didn’t want her to worry.  Nothing had happened to me, after all, so why bother her with a non-issue?  But I never forgot, and I got a bike helmet pretty soon after that incident.

By way of a summary for this entry, here’s a video of the Police, tearing it up in 1984 (I’m guessing it’s 1984 by what they’re wearing), when they were at the absolute top of their game.  This, naturally, is the song, “Synchronicity I.”

Here’s another story from the TMI Files, and it’s quite possibly the most. . .um. . .risque of the bunch of stories.  If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading, or if you’re at work, I encourage you to skip over the next few paragraphs and start reading again at the fifteenth paragraph, which is a good bit and takes place on Halloween.

Like I’ve said in the last couple of these stories, there’s a certain age during which young kids are curious about nudity and romantic feelings, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before puberty happens and changes everything.  The last of these of ‘innocent’ experiences for me was when I was ten years old, and it naturally involved GirlUpTheStreet, who will henceforth be known as WonderWoman.

At the end of our street in Yakima was (and still is) a fairly good-sized Catholic school and church.  Next to that is a fairly good-sized lawn and baseball field, and next to THAT is a fairly good-sized football stadium, with fairly good-sized bleachers.  All of us kids spent countless hours around the school, though none of us went there.  They had a large log toy on the playground, and the school’s sidewalks were paved with smooth and slippery cement, which made for some excellent bike riding and skidding around all of the corners.  Another of our favorite endeavors was to sneak underneath the chain-link fence and into the stadium, day or night.  Sometimes we would play football, sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek, sometimes we’d just roam around.  This isn’t the interesting part of the story yet, and it’s also not the location of my final innocent tryst with WonderWoman.

I told you about the school and the stadium because A) it’s such a huge part of the setting for our neighborhood stories, and B) there was a network of fruit warehouses to the south and to the east of the stadium.  The one to the south (which has since been divided up and developed into Glenwood Square) is where my brother and dad and I witnessed a Volkswagen Bug stall on the train tracks and nearly get crushed, but the one to the east is the one in which FinalInnocentTryst occurred.

During the day, the warehouse was a hive of activity, and none of us was brave enough to speak to any of the ragged, scruffy men who worked there.  After hours, the place was full of great places for kids to play.  There were countless fences to climb under, and boxes of fruit to throw at each other, and large wooden pallot boxes to hide in.  The boxes became our favorite places, because not only could we hide, we could also see through the cracks of the boxes to see if anyone was coming.

Late one afternoon, WonderWoman and I decided we wanted to go to the warehouse and check it out, since it was a weekend and there was nothing going on over there.  We climbed under the fence and walked through the warehouse.  We’d been there many times with the whole group of kids, and each of us had gone separately a million times, but this was our first time going there together.  We’d been holding hands palm-to-palm the way ten-year-old kids do, without the fingers interlaced.  Suddenly we heard a noise and a door opened at the far end of the warehouse, letting a sliver of daylight into the dark warehouse.  This can’t be happening, we thought. There’s never anyone around on weekends.

Two men came through the door, and our hearts leapt into our throats.  We ran toward the door at our end of the warehouse, pushed the door out and sprinted toward freedom.  The men heard our footfalls and yelled, “Hey, you kids get outta here!”  They turned and started to chase us out.

The gate was too far away, and we knew we’d never be able to squirm under it before the men caught us, so we ran to one of the pallot boxes and jumped inside.  Breathing heavily from our sprint, we peered through the cracks in the box and saw the men come out the door and half-heartedly search for us.  They were about thirty feet from us, and they had no idea we were there.  We didn’t want our loud breathing to give away our hiding place, so we kissed.  A lot.  Even after the men went away.  We decided that we quite enjoyed being trapped in there.

“Here, let’s do something else,” she said in her let’s-pretend-we’re-married voice.  She slid her pants down to her knees and motioned for me to do the same.  Having done that, we sat down next to each other, close enough that our posteriors were touching, and kissed some more.  This was a whole new level for both of us, since we hadn’t ever really kissed before, and certainly not like that.  She rose up to her knees and said, “Let’s touch.”

“Okay,” I said, and rose up to my knees in front of her.  We were kneeling a baby’s arm-length from each other with our pants down.  We kissed again, quickly, just once, and she reached out to touch the tip of my penis with her first two fingers.  She kept them there, ever so gently, and was fascinated to watch tumescence in action.  She moved her index finger from the tip to the base, and back to the tip.  Now it was my turn.  There was a line on the skin of her lower abdomen from the elastic at the top of her underwear.  I touched that line, and slid my finger slowly down.  I didn’t put it inside her, because that wasn’t something that we would have done at that time.  I just touched her gently from top to bottom to top, in the same way that she had done to me.

By this time, it was starting to get dark outside, and we thought we should get back home.  We gave each other one last long kiss and, still kneeling, embraced and pulled our bodies together.  Neither of us had experienced anything that magical before, and we held each other there for a very long moment.  Afterwards, we stood, pulled our pants back up and found our way to a new place where the gate was unlocked, so we just walked right through and out to the street toward home.

We had our pants pulled up, but unzipped slightly, so that they’d stay up, but we still had the feeling of intimacy that it created.  We were holding hands in that non-interlocked way again, until she found a discarded piece of garden hose in someone’s yard, picked it up, and started blowing into it like a trumpet.  Suddenly we we saw a couple of the neighborhood kids at the end of our street.  They saw us, too, and started running in our direction.   I quickly zipped my pants up.  “Your pants,” I said, “Get your pants!”  She laughed, dropped the hose and reached for the zipper on her pants.  She had a bit of difficulty, but got them zipped just as the kids arrived.

“What’re you guys doing?” they asked.

“Nothing,” we said, giving each other Significant Looks.  All of us walked home together, and I don’t think any of the other kids was the wiser.

WonderWoman moved from my neighborhood not long after that, and she went to a different school, so I didn’t see her again until Halloween of the following year, by which time I was eleven and she was ten.  She and her older brother came by our neighborhood to trick-or-treat and say hi to everybody.  They arrived a bit late, maybe ten o’clock at night, and my brother and I were already practically asleep in our bunk beds.  My mom let them in and got us up to say hello, cause she knew we’d be disappointed if we missed them.

My brother got up first and went in to say hi.  I straightened up my Oakland Raiders pajamas and walked out a minute later.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries and good-to-see-yous, but after a while it got a bit awkward.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was just because we all hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, or maybe it was so late at night that we were all a little groggy, but we gave them some candy and said thanks-for-coming-by-and-stuff, and they went on their way again.

I turned back to walk into the bedroom, and that’s when I noticed that the fly on my pajamas was open, and that the tip of my little penis was poking out, and it had been out the entire time.  It was as if it, too, was saying hello to the girl it missed.  I smiled to myself, tucked it back into my fly, and crawled into bed.

That’s the last time I saw her.

Sometimes, I wonder what became of her.  I’m sure she’s old and fat and married with kids now, like so many other people our age are, but I’ll never forget her as she was back then, and I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared.  They’re still imprinted in my brain, and that stuff happened over three decades ago.

Love, it would seem, conquers all; even such seemingly insurmountable forces as time and an otherwise rapidly fading memory.