Does Jesus Squirt Too?

Behind my mother's apartment on Shoal Creek in Austin, back when I am only allowed to spend summers with her, I play around with a young Christian on an old mattress we drag to the middle of a large vacant lot covered with tall weeds that hide us completely. We are both ten. It is one of my summer stays with Mom. The Christian kid is totally freaked out by what we're doing, though he never once stops once we start, and he's always blathering on about how Jesus won't like it. I go along, engaging in earnest discussions about how we will quit doing it tomorrow, next week, next month, while wondering who is this Jesus person and why does he give a damn?

I don't mean that I'm entirely unfamiliar with the idea of Christ and Christianity, I just have no practical knowledge of him as an actual being in his followers' lives - spiritually, ghostly, judgmentally, or otherwise - or as someone who might take an interest in my sex life, which I don't think of yet as a sex life, more like after-school play. Other boys like to play sports. I like playing something else.

I'm pretty sure this is the summer my brother Gary gets into serious trouble with his own sex play - something I don't know about at first. An older, apparently predatory, boy - he is probably about seventeen - had been having sex with Gary, as well as with others in the neighborhood. I call the older boy predatory now, way after the fact. My sense of it then is just that it's the kind of messing around I do all the time. Someone, I don't know who, finds out about it and rats on Gary, who bursts into tears when he has to confess. I am asked a couple of questions. Do I ever spend time with that boy? I can honestly answer no. Then I am put firmly on the periphery and have to eavesdrop from the hall.

I can't fathom why Gary is crying. What on earth is he making such a fuss about? Then I feel jealous. Why hasn't that older boy asked me? Am I ugly? Can't he like me too?

As sexually adventurous as I am, I'm also bizarrely uninformed about the biology of any of it, so my first actual climax, at eleven, is alternately terrifying and the happiest sensation on the planet. I am alone, so I am able to allay my worried incomprehension of what has just happened by reading up in a sex manual which explains everything. I don't read all of it, so I don't get to the part about anything squirting out. That hasn't happened yet. I don't know if this is true for all boys, but for me there is a period of about six or eight months when I have the feeling of climax without any viscosity. Seeing semen for the first time appalls me. At least it doesn't spurt out of me, but out of someone else, my first grown-up. That's really the beginning of my pre-teen sex addict double life. I want more. A lot more.