R/T/M (5 page)

     But you can write that down in your little notepad.

     “Lived in housing project.”

     I’ll wait.

     There.

     I used to spend whole days outside just roaming around the woods on the outskirts of town.

     I loved the way that there was an infinite variety of difference in the natural environment compared to the artificial sameness of the city.

     For some reason, single pages of pornography littered the woods.

     I didn’t think about why when I was a kid, it was just something you grew up with so you accepted it without question.

     You’d see a bit of glossy pink paper and
you’d pick it up since it caught your eye and there it was.

     A naked woman with a big hairy bush grimacing with pleasure or a naked man standing with his fists on his hips with his thick veiny cock sticking out in front of him, defying gravity.

     Now that I look back, it was probably homosexuals rendezvousing in the woods on the edge of town after dark to avoid the judgeful eyes of the city.

     Maybe child molesters taking their prey out to the isolation of the woods to make their move.

     “Hey.  Kid.   You ever see a naked lady?   See?   Does that make you hot?   No?   Well is makes me hot.   Maybe if you let me touch you.   No?   What if I gave you a dollar?”

     Speaking of child-molesters, no, I wasn’t molested as a child.

     Although my grand-father was a child-molester who diddled all his kids.

     Most of them buried it deep down inside of them and turned out alright.

     On
e of my uncles ended up being a pervert and there were a lot of rumors about him being a child molester.

     He
volunteered as the first aid guy for the local little league.

     Let’s just say there were rumors.

     Thankfully he didn’t try anything funny on me.

     One day my mother looked at me really strangely and talked slower than she usually did when addressing me, like one talks toward a child or a moron.

     She asked, “When you stay at you uncle’s… does he ever… do things to you?”

     I didn’t answer right away because I was trying to figure out what she was talking about.

     I knew some of what was said in hushed tones when people talked about my uncle, but it didn’t mean anything to me.

     “What do you mean ‘things’?”, I asked.

     She looked at me like she was trying to read my mind.

     Like she was trying to look inside of me.

     She was trying to decide if I was lying.

     Because she knew that if my uncle had
ever done the “things” she was asking about, then I would know exactly what kind of things she was asking about.

     So she looked at me really intensely for a minute or two and then her expression changed and she said, “Nothing.   Don’t worry about it.”

     She was so close.

     S
o close to that moment where she had to decide whether or not to explain the kind of things she was asking about.

      Whether or not to ask if my uncle ever asked to take a bath or shower with me, or played “sexy games” with me, or did anything unusual to my “bathing suit area”.

     Then she decided that the awkwardness of having to explain was more intense than her suspicion that her brother was molesting her son and she let it go.

      Thankfully he had not.

     Not that where I lived I was invulnerable to dangerous sexual adventure.

     One time I was playing in the woods behind my house.   I don’t know what I was playing.  
Maybe some make-believe Indiana Jones adventure thing.   There was dense vegetation with a narrow path through it.   It was like Lord of the Flies.   I was trundling through the path and there were two people up ahead.   Two girls.   I recognized them.   Everyone knows everyone else in the housing projects.   One of them was a retarded girl that lived up the hill.   She wasn’t Down Syndrome retarded.   More like fetal alcohol retarded.   She had a bowl cut hairdo like Johnny Ramone and a scrunched-up distorted man face.   She was with a dark-skinned black girl who looked like Buckwheat’s older sister.   I only knew her by her nickname, Pooh.   I can’t make this shit up.   Truth is stranger than fiction.

     The path was narrow so we met.

     I don’t remember the entire episode, but the girls had a hunk of dogshit on a stick and the deal was, they wanted me to show them my dick or eat dogshit.

     I remember somehow knowing that there was something inherently wrong with the situation.

     Maybe I should have just gone along with the game.

     Maybe I would have gotten a couple of blow jobs.   Or maybe I could have had sex with the both of them.   But I was, like, six, so it probably wasn’t physically possible.

     But maybe they’d flip the script and try to put the dogshit on a stick up my ass.

     I never found out.

     I bolted out the way that I came in and I never mentioned it to anyone.

     Until now.

     Around the same time I had a friend named Neil.

     Neil was one of those kids who always looked dirty.

     Like a real-life Pigpen.

     He always had gummy brown dirt on his hands and around his mouth.

     Neil would drink his own pee if you asked him to.

     I don’t know how I first discovered this inclination, but all you had to do was ask him to and he’d undo his fly, pee a little into his cupped hand, and drink it.   I didn’t think of asking if he’d drink my pee too.   I’m not sure if that’s a missed opportunity or not.   How many people can say that someone else drank their pee?   Probably a lot more than the average person would ever want to know.

     Neil told me that his dad had a stack of Playboys in a clos
et in the house and I told him to go get a couple so we could check them out.   I waited outside while he went in.   About twenty minutes later his mom came to the door and said that Neil couldn’t come out to play.

     His dad caught him and he caught a beating.   I felt bad, but at least it wasn’t me.

     Speaking of urine, w
hen I was around seven, I got busted at the babysitter’s talking her daughter into letting me watch her pee so I could see why girls sat down when they peed.   It was kind of hot.   The little girl had those batgirl underoos.   I spent the rest of the day catching accusatory looks from the babysitter while not knowing why what I did had been so awful.

     My mom came to pick me up and she and the babysitter talked in hushed tones and looked over in my direction every now and then.   They never talked to me about it, but I was also never trusted out of eye’s distance with her daughter again.

     That’s how people are.

     I was still a sexually curious child and this interest sometimes worked itself into play.

     I remember I was playing in the woods with a kid named Shane and a little girl whose name I’ve long since forgotten.

    I think we were playing some kind of imaginary G. I. Joe adventure whatever.

    I had a switch that I had plucked all of the branches off of.

    I remember thinking I was imagining myself as, like, a Baroness kind of character, and commanding the other two kids to strip while waving the switch around.

     I don’t know what I was thinking.

     I guess I was just curious about what the other kids looked like naked.

     Maybe I wanted to have them get together like they were having sex and see what happened.

    The other kids weren’t having it, thankfully, because I would have hated to have inadvertently permanently scarred two kids that early on in life.

     Not that all of the trouble I got into as a kid was sexually oriented.

     My first day of kindergarten my mother watched me from the other side of the fence.

     They let the parents hang out the first day to ease separation anxiety.

     They penned all of the kids in and let them run around and meet each other.

     My mother said I went up to each kid and said, “Hi!   Do you want to be my friend?”

     I was precocious.

     About a month later, during recess, I was playing an imaginary let’s pretend Star Wars game with a couple other kids.   One was a little boy and one was a little girl.   I had the kids standing about five feet away from me and about five feet apart.

     I
was imagining I was Obi-Wan Kenobi and the pebble sized piece of asphalt I had in my hand I was going to try to throw between the two kids, which, in my imagination would go into the cavernous depths of the Death Star and somehow do something awesome.

   
I swung my arm around and around and let the pebble fly with all of my little kid strength.  

    
Unfortunately I was a kid and wasn’t very coordinated so I accidentally hit the little girl right in the fucking eye.   I forget which one.

     Of course she freaked out and I got in trouble.

     She had to wear an eye patch for the rest of the year and I spent the rest of the year kneeling in a corner of the playground where two brick walls met.   I wasn’t allowed to play with the other kids and I got yelled at if I watched the other kids playing, so all I saw was brick wall.   I remember that kneeling on asphalt every recess really fucking hurt.

     Welcome to school kid.   There are twelve more years where that came from.

     In first grade, my reputation preceded me and I spent the whole year in the back of the class with my desk in a cardboard refrigerator box.

     The teacher would hand in school work and I would pass it out when I was finished.

     The only time I got to leave the box was for lunch, to use the bathroom, and for recess.

     Kind of like working as an adult, except at least I got to go outside for recess.

     I still wasn’t allowed to play with the other kids.

     I had to sit on an asphalt curb on the side of the playground.

     The asphalt curb was hard and my ass hurt, but it was a lot better than kneeling in a corner and I didn’t get yelled at for watching the other kids play.

     In fourth grade I almost got into a lot of trouble.

     I was obsessed with secret codes and I was obsessed with this one girl.

     She must have been pretty, because my two friends also liked her.

     We concocted this scheme to send her a letter.   To her house.   Through the mail.

     So we all wrote out a paragraph or so and transcribed all three onto a sheet of white-lined paper in code.

     It was a simple replacement code.

     We figured she’d crack it in an afternoon and she’d know about the communal crush we had.

     I don’t remember what my section was.   “Blah blah pretty.    Blah blah beautiful.   I’d love to fuck you.”   The last one I remember pretty well.   I didn’t know what it meant.   It was just something that guys said to girls they were interested in.   At least they did in my neighborhood.

     We didn’t hear anything about the letter, but I guess her parents caught wind of it, and her parents called my best friend Steve’s parents because they knew each other.

     One day Steve’s mom is supposed to be giving Steve and I a ride someplace when his mom turns into the school parking lot and puts the car in park and turns the car off.   We weren’t heading to the school, and there’s an odd tension in the car, so I knew something was up.

     Steve’s mom turns around and looks at me and asks, “Did you write that letter with Steven?”

     Even at that young age I could recognize a rhetorical question.

     “Yeah?”, I replied.

     She stared at me for about a minute, then just turned around and started the car up again.

     There wasn’t a lot said.   She just droppe
d me off at the unit I lived in at the housing project and Steve wasn’t allowed to hang out with me anymore.

     In fifth grade I still had a desk at the back of the room and I wasn’t doing my work.

     The teacher was a divorcee named “Ms. Gilchrist” and she made us pronounce the “Ms.” Which we all pronounced as “Mizz”.

     I hated her so I didn’t do my work, so they kept me back a year.

     Fifth grade was one of the times that they subjected all the kids to standardized testing.   My results came back and I was above the ninety-fifth percentile in all of the categories.