beautiful, funny, sad & true

So.  Back to the TMI childhood stories.

Like I said at the end of the last one, my little brother wasn’t immune to Cupid’s prurient influence either, despite his tender age of five years.  To be fair to him, I’m sure that he was more interested than he would have been if he didn’t have an older brother who was at just the right age for that kind of exploration.  Older brothers also tend to influence musical and cinematic preferences, and my brother probably wouldn’t have been interested in heavy metal or British comedy if left to his own devices, but that’s neither here nor there.  Suffice it to say that we both had a short period of time, well before puberty sexualized everything, during which we were very interested in nudity.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is probably not the sort of thing you’ll want to read if you’re at work; although there’s no bad language, the subject matter may be inappropriate and you may get an eyebrow or two raised in your direction.  If not, or if you’re prepared to fly under the radar, then gawd bless ya and off we go.

My brother and I liked to run around the house naked (especially after a bath; we’d wrap up in blankets and watch TV), we would swim naked, we would even dare our friends to run back and forth across our front yard naked.  Sometimes they’d do it, and sometimes they’d chicken out and just take their shirts off or pull their pants down or something.  Our yard was full of smallish trees, which were problematic for front-yard sporting events, but great for hiding behind if a neighbor’s car happened to drive by.  Incidentally, the people who bought our house from us will never know the nudity-covering power those trees possessed, because they summarily removed every single one of them, and the white picket fences as well.  They even ripped out the three trees on the opposite side of the yard so that they could pave a double driveway.  Never mind that they could have easily kept all those trees and parked one of their behemoth cars on the street, or they could have bought two small cars, like we did, and parked them both in the driveway.  But that, as they say, is a digression.

Speaking of digressions, here’s another one about that house.  We had something like a quarter of a million cats when we lived there.  Every time we’d adopt a new one, she’d have a littler of kittens before we could get her spayed.  This happened a few times in a row, which meant that at any given time we had at least five cats, sometimes ten, and sometimes we even had as many as fifteen, in a small three-bedroom suburban house.  At some point one of them started spraying, and once one starts the others follow suit, so before long the entire house reeked of cat spray.  The garage bore the worst brunt of it, after the offending felines were banished from the inside of the house.  There was the telltale foot-high ring of dripping spray marks around the entire perimeter of the garage.  We did what we could by scrubbing and power-washing, but nothing seemed to work, and the smell was overpowering, particularly in the heat of summertime.

I told you that story to tell you this one.   Six or seven years after we moved out of that house, I was working at a video store, which was the largest in town.  I worked there for long enough that I made some really good friends during my tenure there, and I got to know many of the regulars personally.  One day someone came in who I didn’t recognize, so I asked to see her ID so that I could set up an account for her.  I instantly noticed that her address was MY old address, and I said, “No way, you live at my old house.”  She gave me a very strange look and took about one second before blurting out, “Do you know anything about cat pee?!”  You could tell she’d been living with that disaster for years, and praying to every god she knew that one of us would inadvertently walk into the path of her car one day.  With a herculean effort, I restrained a smile and said, “Uhhh. . .I was just a kid when we moved.  I don’t remember anything about pee.”   I could see that she didn’t quite believe me, but she couldn’t really do anything about it, and I certainly wasn’t going to go into any more detail with her.  Sometimes the best thing to do is play dumb.

See what I mean?  Also a digression.

My two favorite nudity stories about my brother involve two different girls.  My second-favorite involves GirlUpTheStreet, otherwise known as WonderWoman (cause remember, I was her Superman).  To get back to the subject of trees, we had two crab-apple trees in our yard, and both of them had branches that were just the right height for kids to climb.  The one next to the sidewalk had one particular branch that was strong, flat and smooth, and about five feet from the ground.  This made it perfect for doing chinups, or for hanging upside down, or climbing up higher into the tree.  One day, GirlUpTheStreet was down at our place hanging out.  She and I were ‘married’ by this time, and she was hanging upside down from that branch with her pants unzipped a little and her shirt sort of slid up, thanks to gravity.  I was climbing on a nearby branch, when my brother came out of the house and saw her.  Before he even knew what he was doing, he ran over to the tree and made a grab for her pants, trying to unzip them the rest of the way and pull them down.  She half-screamed and half-laughed and tried to twirl away from him but it was to no avail.  She fell on the ground, laughing, while he tried to unzip her pants.  My dad saw what was happening, and came outside to put an instant stop to what he was doing.  “[BROTHER]!  Come in the house right now!!”  My brother sheepishly walked in and got the speech about how We Don’t Do That To Girls and about how When You Pull Your Pants Down With Someone, It Means You Love Them.  I wasn’t in on the first discussion, but I seem to remember being in on the second.  Perhaps my chronology of these stories is amiss somehow, and I’m jumbling part of one with part of another.  In my defense, it has been over thirty years since these events transpired, so I suppose the occasional memory lapse is inevitable.  Either way, these stories are all true, and let’s hope they make for some compelling reading.

All that being said, here’s my favorite ‘romantic’ childhood story about my brother.  Every once in a while, he liked to sleep naked.  I don’t remember doing that very often myself (and for the record, I still don’t do it very often), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  I just remember that was one of the things he liked to do, and he would do it pretty regularly.  One day, a group of us from the neighborhood was playing outside in the yard, and Brother suddenly decided he wanted to go inside and take a nap.  As I also mentioned in the previous entry, there was a Mormon family who lived next door, and their four-year old daughter was a year younger than my little brother (and still is, presumably!), so she found him completely fascinating.  A couple minutes after he went inside, she went in to look for him.  He had whipped his clothes off and jumped into bed, when all of a sudden, YoungestNeighbor appeared at his door.

“Hi, [Brother].  Whatcha doin’?”

“Taking a naked nap.”

“Oh.  Can I take a naked nap with ya?”

“Okay.”

She pulled her clothes off, climbed up into his little bed (which at that time would’ve been the lower of our two bunk beds) and snuggled up next to him.  “Ooooooh, you’re warm!” she cooed.

I seem to recall that my mom found them and very gently explained to YoungestNeighbor that she should come back to play some other time, when Brother wasn’t resting.  I don’t think she blasted her out of the water the way she had done with my conspiratorial friend who wrote BELLYBUTTON and BAGINA on our patio in crayon.

That’s my favorite story of my brother, at least in this context.  My absolute favorite will be entitled “One in a Million”, and will need to be told before too long here on BFS&T.  But it won’t be today, because A) that story involves a cassette tape that I need to find first, and B) it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.  As I’m sure you’re very much aware, I’m nothing if not fastidious when it comes to remaining on-topic.

Speaking of topics (Do you like how I seamlessly worked that in?), there is more to come on this one very soon.  To be continued.

P.S. – I don’t know why it never occurred to me until just now, when I abbreviated the name of this blog  – BFS&T – it reminded me of turn-of-the-last-century railroads, which made me laugh a little bit.  Not uproariously, or even out loud, just a tiny little bit, and just to myself.  Anyway.

To be continued.

P.P.S. – The title of this entry comes from an excellent song by The Hollies.

I knew this was going to happen.

At eleven-thirty, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I decided I should give in and go to bed. I picked up and started reading a book of short stories called The Best American Non-Required Reading from a few years ago, and I got completely engrossed in it.  At one-thirty in the morning I found myself completely awake, and practically buzzing with stories.  I didn’t want to get up and turn my computer back on, because I knew that if I did, I’d start telling another of my huge childhood stories, and before long it would be four o’clock and my shoulders would be sore from hunching over in my chair, typing.  Well, that seems to be what this night has in store, so since I’m here now and so are you, it’s time for another one of those stories. I’ll give you a fair warning before I go any further.  I don’t think I’ll need to use any R-rated language, but the subject matter of this entry may make it unsafe to read at work, or it may make you uncomfortable, if reading about nudity is something that makes you uncomfortable.

There’s a certain age that kids reach, years before puberty, when curiosity gets the better of them and they want to see what the opposite sex’s naughty bits are like.  For me, that age was about nine.  The list of likely candidates was surprisingly long, since our neighborhood was full of kids the same age as my little brother and me.  A girl who lived two houses down used to come over to our place to color with crayons on the front porch.  Not on paper, mind you, but directly onto the porch.  One day she scrawled out the words BELLYBUTTON and BAGINA onto the cement.  When I asked her what a ‘bagina’ was, she pointed between her legs and said, ‘This,” and we smiled conspiratorially at each other.  My mom came outside to check on us, and noticed that we’d been drawing all over the porch.  She got mad and sent the girl home, and I had to scrub the porch clean with steel wool.  That’s when she saw what the girl had written.  She decided there and then that the girl was Trouble, and I wasn’t allowed to play with her anymore.  The girl and her family moved away not long after, actually, and I never saw her again.

The Mormon family next door had three kids.  Their son was a year older than me, and he fancied himself a comedian.  He used to say things like, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, in THAT order,” and we found him hilariously clever.  He also had what was by far the coolest bike in the neighborhood; a purple chopper with stickers of flickering flames along the bottom.  All of us were dead jealous, and we used to beg him to let us ride it.  He had two younger sisters, one of whom was two years younger than me, and the other a year or two younger than my brother.  We would all hang out together often, and if the parents of one set of kids ever wondered where their kids were, it was a pretty safe bet that they were at the other house.

I found out very recently that not long before they moved from the neighborhood, their mom had suffered a severe bout of depression and considered committing suicide.  She confided in my dad, who was then and is now an Episcopal priest, and he counseled her for a short time, which may very well have saved her life.  They moved across the country to New England, but they still keep in occasional contact with my dad, who occasionally gets a note or a Christmas card from them.  Interestingly, after my parents split up, they told my dad they had a feeling that my mom would end up marrying the guy who lived across the street.  Never mind that he was already married, and that my mom was doing a bit of dating herself.  This is actually a very funny subject and will probably merit some entries of its own at some point, but suffice it to say that six or eight years later, my mom DID end up marrying the guy across the street, and twenty-some years on, they’re still married.  I’ll never know just what it was that our former neighbors noticed, or how they could have predicted that marriage.

So.  Anyway.  Back to the subject at hand.  There was a family up the street with two daughters, the older of whom was my age, and the younger a year or two behind her.  They were not the cutest girls in the neighborhood, I wouldn’t say, or the friendliest, but they were cool enough, and we did hang out with them sometimes because that’s what kids do.  I seem to remember them trying cigarettes really early, but I’m not sure why I have that particular memory.

Next to the two sisters lived a cute dark-haired girl who was a year younger than I (presumably our age gap has not changed) and had an enormous crush on me.  She would ride her bike past our house and if I was outside, she would yell things like, “I love you!” or “I’m Wonder Woman and you’re my Superman!”  She was the obvious choice when the aforementioned Curiosity hit, and she was happy to oblige one day in her bedroom.

She made it easy, actually, by asking me if I wanted to see her.  I said yes.  She lifted up her tank top slowly, left it around her shoulders for a moment, and then decided to take it off altogether.  Then she unzipped her shorts, which slid to the floor.  She shimmied her underwear down to her knees, and stood that way for a while to let me look, then smiled and said, “Now you.”  I started to take off my T-shirt, and she reached over to help me take it off.  We were in love, after all, so that little gesture was surprisingly natural and sweet, especially considering that I think we were eight and nine years old.  I sat down on her bed and took my jeans off, which left me sitting in my tighty-whities and feeling really awkward.  She was still standing in front of me, shirtless, with her shorts on the floor and her underwear at her knees, so I mustered my courage, stood up in front of her, and slid my underwear down.  We stood there for a while, a foot apart, just looking at each others’ bodies.  It never occurred to us at that point to do anything more.

We started doing that pretty regularly.  Sometimes we would take our clothes off and cuddle up in a blanket somewhere in her house.  We used to pretend we were married.  We’d be outside playing and one of us would do a big fake stretch and yawn and say, “Unnnnnnnh. . .I’m really tired.  Is it time to go to bed?”  “I think so,” the other would say, and we’d wander off into the house together, holding hands.  We got familiar enough with each other that I could probably have identified her in a lineup of naked girls with their faces hidden.  She was my first love, and her first name was the same as Angelina Jolie’s last.

The Mormon girl next door was a different story, and not a romantic one.  She showed my brother and me (and we her) in our garage.  I don’t quite remember the circumstances of how it happened, but we were outside playing baseball or something, and it was all very matter-of-fact.  We just kind of went in the garage at the same time.  I remember telling her, with my plethora of nine-year-old tactfulness, “Whoa.  Yours is pink.  [GirlUpTheStreet]’s is red.”  My brother and I pulled our shorts down at the same time and let her inspect us in the same way.  I seem to recall that my brother was still uncircumcised at the time, which, if true, meant that we gave her quite a bit of information that day.  Having accomplished our mission, the three of us pulled up the garage door and went back outside to resume whatever it was we’d been doing before that.

My brother wasn’t immune to Cupid’s charms, either, despite his tender age, but this entry is long enough that I think I’d better stop now and leave some stories for next time.  There are a few more that involve GirlUpTheStreet, too, so we all have those to look forward to.   As I predicted, it’s four o’clock in the morning now, and my eyes and brain are having difficulty focusing.

To be continued.

Childhood can be a tricky subject to write about.  There are some stories that are great, but they may not necessarily be the kind of thing you’d want everyone to know about.  Either that or they involve people who you may still be friends with, who may not be too thrilled about having those stories told.

Maybe there are ‘secret’ stories that nobody else ever knew about, like the first time you pulled your pants down with someone, or the first time someone touched you in an intimate way, but you were still young enough that it never occurred to you to go any further.  These are the kind of things my friend and I were talking about in a phone conversation today, and we were laughing like hyenas the entire time.  Since then, I started compiling a list of stories, so that I can be thinking about how to tell them in a way that isn’t just gratuitously prurient. . .or TMI.

Here’s one that should be a good sort of segue.  If you’re reading at work, or if R-rated subject matter isn’t something that interests you for whatever reason, I invite you to stop reading now, because this entry is about to take a distinct turn for the worse.

My dad used to collect porno magazines, and he had a few books as well.  He made no secret about it, and he kept them all catalogued in boxes in the bedroom.  My parents also owned the book The Joy of Sex, and as a matter of fact, I don’t remember them making a big deal about it if my little brother or I snuck a peek at that kind of stuff occasionally.  I guess their feeling was that the more we learned on our own, the less they’d have to actually teach us themselves.

My dad mostly gravitated toward soft-core stuff like Playboy, but he had a few issues of Hustler floating around, as well as a couple of harder things like High Society, all of which was not a big deal to my brother and me.  He had one that we both distinctly remember, though, which was called Shuttlecock.  The idea behind this one was that a man and a woman would be in their yard playing badminton, and before long their clothes would start coming off, by which time they’d start getting it on.  My brother and I wouldn’t have thought twice about this magazine either, ordinarily, were it not for the hilarious captions that were on a few of the full-page pictures.  They were sayings such as, ‘They would fuck for a while, then she would suck his enormous cock.’ That kind of stuff completely cracked us up.  I remember asking, as we were looking at the magazine, “Is this supposed to be sexy?”  I’ve tried to find pictures of that for a while now, because I thought it would be funny to send to my brother, but so far I’ve come up empty-handed.

My dad also had a book in his night stand [Edit:  I just now remembered the name of it:  Pissing in the Snow] that was full of antiquated naughty stories and songs.  For example, there was one about a guy who would ride around town in his horse-drawn carriage and pick up women he saw on the street.  They were just bizarre, and we couldn’t figure out A) why our dad was into them, and B) why anybody would find them arousing.  I also remember a golf-related book that was called Dead Solid Perfect [I can’t believe I remember these names!], that involved a lot of swearing and sex.   It also prominently featured these brothers who would dress like nuns, unzip their habits and pee in whichever conspicuous location they found themselves.  They’d also stop people on the street and say, “Can you point me in the direction of the nearest bar?  I’m just aching to get a hold of a nice warm dick.”  So. . .um. . .yeah.

The worst and funniest occurrence happened when I was about fourteen, long after my parents had split up, and my dad had remarried.  LittleBrother and I were visiting for the summer, and we had a friend over.  We wanted to show the antiquated naughty book to our friend, so we walked into the bedroom and said, “You have to see this.  It’s right in his night stand.  Wait. . .what’s this?  Oh, pictures.  Pictures of Dad. . .and that’s our. . .stepmom. . .AAAAAUGH!”   We had inadvertently stumbled onto their stash of polaroids, and the images burned themselves into our impressionable little brains in a way that the magazines never could.  I wish there was a way to excise them, because seeing explicit pictures of your parents having sex is too much to process.

To this day, neither of us is into porn.  I can’t speak for my brother, but I know that I can’t help but think of dumb stuff like Shuttlecock every time I think of porn, and it just makes me laugh.

The moral of all this, I suppose, is that if you have kids and you have porn, you have to either get rid of one or the other.  I’m assuming that unless you have a serious problem, you’ll choose to get rid of the porn.  If you have it around, the kids will find it, no matter where you think you’ve hidden it.  Also, it’s probably not the greatest idea to take pictures of yourselves and leave copies of them in an easily accessible place.

Hopefully this was a good read, and hopefully it falls within the parameters that I set for this little endeavor.  I’ll keep thinking of more stories that I feel I can share.  In the meantime, for God’s sake, keep the porno away from the kids.