I am a Fourteen Year-Old Murderer

Asleep at the Wheel or Suicide?
In the months before my brother Gary dies, our father and step-mother return from South Africa with their other two kids. Gary doesn't spend much time with them. None of us do. The only thing that ever makes me want to visit at all is my relationship with my little sister, Betsy. We have a strong bond that will be tested by distance and fatherly fiat.

Gary and I spend the Friday and Saturday of my ill-gotten holiday from "Pooh" rehearslas nominally visiting our grandparents, Budie and Zadie, but mainly farting around on our own, eating too much, drinking a little, and talking a lot while we drive around. He is always encouraging in a funny, sideways fashion, telling me I should do what I want, what makes me happy, even if it's stupid.

Sunday morning he leaves for Corpus Christi to shoot a wedding. He is a photographer, and even though he is only eighteen, he is good enough to start getting a bit of work here and there. I remember waving good-bye to him in the parking lot outside our grandparents' condo.

He dies on the way back to San Antonio. I will breathlessly tell my friends in the years that follow how I am the last one in the family to see him alive. I don't remember how my other brother Aaron gets to San Antonio that Sunday, and he is no help now since he has blocked just about every single memory that he can of his childhood.

Somehow Aaron and I both wind up at our dad and step-mom, Adam and Laura's temporary apartment, where Adam tells us Gary is dead. I don't react at all. Aaron immediately bursts into tears. Adam keeps getting on the phone to tell people the news. Aaron is still crying. I just sit there. Across the bedroom Adam barks at me, "For Christ's sake, would you hug your brother?!" Hug him I do, begrudging them both every second of it. Who is my father to tell me what to do, how to feel, how to treat Aaron, the brother I instantly begin to resent since if one of them has to die, why can't it be him?

Aaron later admits to having the same thoughts about me, which goes a long way toward alleviating my guilt over being so hateful. I am fourteen. I am guilty.

Our father accuses his parents, our grandparents, Buddie and Zadie, of causing Gary's death by buying him a compact AMC Gremlin. Gary crashes the Gremlin head-on into a Cadillac, the passengers of which survive the accident.

As I understand things, it happens like this: Tired from shooting photographs at the wedding in Corpus Christi, Gary falls asleep at the wheel and crosses the yellow line, placing himself in the Cadillac's oncoming path. There are further accusations from Adam. It's all murky, but I'm given to believe that our father may believe my brother committed suicide. I think. Possibly, so Adam imagines, because in the year before his death, Buddie fills Gary's head with horror stories about how Gary's juvenile diabetes will bring nothing but pain and early death.

But in the two years he lives with diabetes Gary is healthy. The disease is manageable. And my grandmother's frequent mentions of diabetes aren't to Gary, but to Adam and Laura. Buddie is furious about the fact that before Gary is finally taken to a doctor and diagnosed at sixteen, he goes untreated for months while Adam and Laura, who know something is very wrong, believe vitamins and natural food will cure whatever it is that Gary has.

No one ever mentions the fact that on the night he dies, Gary is on his way to get me in San Antonio, to drive me back to Austin the next morning. With a terrible flutter in my stomach I think that maybe if he didn't have to pick me up, he would have stayed the night in Corpus. In a way it is my fault he is dead. This is not something that occurs to me until just now, right at this moment, as I write this paragraph.

More of a Death in Paris

With a guest non-appearance by Diana Ross as the Unseen Neighbor.
The funeral activities for my brother, Gary, are almost immediate since Jews are supposed to be buried within days after death. I am worried this might make it perfectly clear to the director of the show I'm rehearsing, "Winnie the Pooh," in which I am The Pooh, that I have not, in fact, been in Paris - which is the lie I tell to get the weekend off. I tell everyone at the show that when we get the news of his death while in Paris we fly back on the red eye - a story no one has any reason to dispute and so did not. I learn several years later that because of the way the Earth spins on its axis and the whole east to west thing, there is, in fact, no such thing as a red eye from Paris.

I am in San Antonio with Gary the day before he dies.

It is an escape from working so hard on the play and on my various jobs. Gary encourages the idea. He is gorgeous. Everyone wants to sleep with him. Eighteen, blonde, tanned, muscular like a swimmer, and a natural leader. At fourteen I don't know how much I love him or will miss him once he is gone, but I am always drawn to him, especially since we don't live together very often. My move to Mom and David's is followed by a confusing series of relocations by my two brothers.

Aaron originally comes with me but later goes back to the Naked Dad, Adam, and step-mother, Laura. Then he comes back to Mom and David, and then goes back to Adam and Laura. Meanwhile, Gary's self-proclaimed mission is to somehow reach inside our father and change him. He believes there is good in him and that he will be the one to find it and help it grow. You know, just like a battered wife. I don't know if this is evidence of some deep empathy on Gary's part or just the normal sort of teenage narcissism that makes you believe you have superpowers.

For much of my two years in junior high Gary and Aaron live with Adam and Laura in Beverly Hills, in a house I'm told they rent from Paul Mazursky, on Alpine Drive, reputedly next door to Diana Ross, though they never see her. That is when my father is trying to break into movies with a man named Jay Weston whose credits include, coincidentally enough, "Lady Sings the Blues," starring their next door neighbor. Adam's quest proves largely unsuccessful from what I know, and he never makes a completed film.

When Adam and crew leave for South Africa to try to make the movie that reminds me of "Imitation of Life," middle brother Aaron comes back to Texas to live with Mom and David again. Gary decides to go with Adam and make his last stand or whatever at trying to help him. Whatever happens there between them doesn't go well, and before long Gary is back in Texas, and all three of us brothers are under the same roof again. Gary swears he will never go back to our father. Never. Then he dies.

Death and Winnie the Pooh

Is it actually funny how a bear likes honey? Not so much.
I never have acne, my voice changes without incident, and body hair appears at normal intervals in a not-unattractive way. But at fourteen I still have braces, which I think look incredibly stupid when I am dressed and made-up to be a singing bear.

The version I'm starring in of "Winnie the Pooh" is one of the worst shows I will ever do. The costume is uncomfortable and the director makes me wear a dance belt after I go on one night with a visible erection caused by a member of the backstage crew groping me as I wait in the dark to go on. I supposed it is my fault for encouraging it.

A few weeks before we open I want to get out of a few rehearsals. I tell the director my father, Adam, is flying us to Paris for the weekend and has insisted I go. This is not true. He does actually fly a group of friends to have dinner at Maxim's in Paris at some point, but I am not among the guests, as he and I are enemies at this point. By the time I am Winnie I barely see the Naked Dad at all. The year or two before my singing bear act my father is in South Africa trying to shoot a movie that is never completed called "Point of Departure." I vaguely remember it having something to do with a person of color pretending to be white - you know, like the slutty daughter of Lana Turner's maid in "Imitation of Life," a character played by the Oscar-nominated Susan Kohner, who will go on to give birth to Chris and Paul Weitz, the brothers who will hit it big with "American Pie" before broadening out to making really groovy movies for grown-ups. This is a chain of facts I find fascinating for no apparent reason.

The idea of saying Adam is flying us to Paris comes to me because I do occasionally admire my father's style, and I often use stories about my colorful upbringing to give the false impression of wealth to new acquaintances. I am in Austin living an extremely middle-class life with Mom and my step-father, David, waiting tables at Swenson's after school, and working at The Gap, where I have perfected a means of pocketing money when customers pay for their purchases in cash. Between that and my tip money I do okay. I have to pay for gas and cigarettes somehow. As David later confirms, I never appear to others to be troubled or rebellious. My grades are terrific, I am the king of the extracurricular activity, I work, and faithfully do my chores - in fact, I am far more fastidious about the state of our house than Mom or David ever is.

Listen children and gather round: Succeed spectacularly at the things that impress adults and you can get away with murder. Drugs, sex, shoplifting, "Rocky Horror," or whatever. I never get caught, not once, not even during the several years when I shoplift with the determination of Winona Ryder, successfully making off with suits, shoes, music, small appliances, and so much cheap jewelry I don't know where to keep it all. I bring this same sense of determination to every aspect of my life, and will never be the sort of person who shirks responsibility. If I say I will do something, I do it. Always; whether a school assignment, a favor for someone, or an unpleasant sexual act. It probably has something to do with wanting to be in control and right all the time. There can be no obstacles to my accomplishment. I must never be unable to perform or forget an obligation.

So getting out of "Winnie the Pooh" rehearsals by means of a pretended Paris weekend is a very unusual thing for me to do, and the jig is potentially up when the same weekend I am supposedly in Paris, my brother Gary dies in a head-on collision.

A Flacid Forty Year Old or a Boy Gentleman

Sleeping around is easy. Dating? Impossible.
When I am sixteen I think I am in love for a couple of weeks with my speech teacher's husband, who has trouble keeping his erection, and who likes to languidly drape himself on the sofa, smoking, laughing at the bitter ironies of life, and mispronouncing "ennui."

I don't look on my sleeping with him as anything wrong, since his wife, my teacher, seems to know about it, and rumor has it she is sleeping with one of her students anyway. The overwrought dramatics of it all, the seediness, the emotional masochism is very "Valley of the Dolls," and an essential piece of the self-portrait I am creating.

Blinded by ambition he doesn't slow down long enough for love. Will scandal and disaster strike? Will early burn-out and death follow?

Alan Hunt is the boy I really have a crush on. He is kind of gawky but has the kindest eyes and a slight lisp that is boyish rather than effeminate. We are rivals at L.B.J. High School since my year there is supposed to be his year to shine. I arrive, all pushy ambition, with no thought to his plans at all. The drama club there has a habit of giving out awards at the end of the year, and Alan and I are in a run-off for Best Actor. I lose. But I find out that after a huge struggle with himself Alan has actually voted for me. The fact that I still remember losing that award is testament to my own insanity, but I'm still touched by his gesture. I am infatuated with him well before knowing of his vote for me. I am out to most of the people I hang out with, but few others are, and I have no idea whether or not Alan is gay. I know the language of sex but haven't a clue as to the language of courtship. I don't have the foggiest notion about how to approach him.

I think it's very funny when I learn several years later that all during our time in school together Alan is messing around with another guy in our class - someone who later visits me in New York and we sleep together. Small world.

I'm still in touch with Alan, and for some stupid reason I feel weirdly responsible or guilty or something that while for years I sleep around and sleep around with no ill health consequences, Alan gets H.I.V. from his very first proper boyfriend.

Go ahead: Light a cigarette. Laugh hollowly at the bitter ironies of life.

A Fluffer with Frontal Nudity

The Perk of Having People Falsely Believing Your Dad is a Child Molester

My brother Gary and I share a room my first year of high school when he is eighteen, and I masturbate myself to sleep into a gym sock, some nights fantasizing about him. He makes a funny comment once about knowing I jerk off a lot, but I don't think he quite understands it is sometimes about him. Maybe he does. He is pretty comfortable with being desired by the hoi and the polloi, and at the time is having an affair with a much older woman. She is twenty-three.

I remember everything in my childhood, everything of importance, and as much as all the facts seem like they should point to some sort of sexual abuse in the home going on behind closed doors it never happens. Okay, there is the man I've written about before who my father is friends with when we live in Cairo and I spend one night with him and his family. I am scared and want to sleep with the man. Once we are alone in his bed I ask if I can hold his penis. He looks a little mystified but nods. When I am looking at it, he explains about circumcision. Then I start to cry and he has to call my father to come get me.

My first movie turns out to include a fairly accurate depiction of my vivid childhood fantasy that starts when I am about six, of wanting to get back at my father; the razor-naked-chair thing I have also written about before, where he is naked, tied to a chair, and I slice him up with a razor blade, refusing to kill him, so he can be awake to feel the pain.

In the movie I want to depict the violence of my upbringing, and I want to explore early sexual stuff, but I don't want to make a gay movie since I figure there will be such a limited market for it. I compromise by telling the story of a girl whose father returns after being in prison and wants to take up his sexual relationship with her. She kills him in the end after also accidentally shooting her sister and probably implicating her best friend as well. I wish I could say it is a musical.

On the film festival circuit a lot of the press coverage surrounds my own experiences as a self-proclaimed abused child. As carefully as I explain that my father never sexually abuses me, lots of reviews and articles take to referring to me as a survivor of incest, which I start finding fairly funny. After all, though I know my father has never done anything of the kind, it's a kind of perk if people come away from the movie thinking he is a child molester. That's what I gleefully tell people anyway. It isn't really how I feel. I have no way of knowing since everything in my life becomes a story, a dinner-party anecdote, a way of sparkling in a room. I can't be sure this blog isn't more of the same. It feels honest. What is honesty? I say all this stuff about how there is nothing ever directly sexual with my father, and yet he is always the Naked Dad to me, and while shooting the movie I am hugely attracted to the actor playing his doppelganger, who has a scene with frontal nudity, and likes to tease me by asking me to be his fluffer.

The Curse and Sixth Grade

Can a Single Tampon Change the Course of Your Life?
I have some sexual play with a girl in sixth grade whose boyfriend, Ben, appeals to me. We almost get to penetrative sex but she is having her period. I try to pull that white little string out of her, not knowing what it is, but she stops me with a giggle. Maybe my life goes a different way in the version of these events where she doesn't have her period, where we have sex all day long, where she gets pregnant and we are married at thirteen. But I doubt it. I am with her because at this age I feel sexual about everything and everyone, but mainly because I have something to prove, since sixth grade is the one school year in my life of out and out torture.

Everyone teases me and calls me faggot. I wear short-shorts and a lot of jewelry that I successfully shoplift. My main tormentor is a rich boy named Christy, and the worst part of it for me is that I found him incredibly attractive. It is no small pleasure to learn while in high school that he becomes known as the Queen of Austin High.

But I have a wonderful teacher for home room my sixth grade year named Kathy Street. One day she takes me out into the hall because my mother has been called to talk about the teasing situation with her and with the principal, and also because I have been caught reading a Jackie Collins book at school, material some teacher or other (not Miss Street) considers to be pornography.

Mom eagerly defends my right to read and to be whatever I want. Two faces. She angrily tells me I should get a sex change if I want to be a girl when she catches me in her stuff, but she soulfully defends same-sex love and cultural differences most of the time, often telling the story of how she sees a movie called "The Fox" which has a lesbian theme, and when the audience starts laughing during a love scene, standing up in the theater, angrily telling everyone to stop laughing, that the love scene is beautiful, and they are all bigots and idiots.

On the way back to the classroom from the principal's office Miss Street says to me that she wants me to know that there is nothing wrong with people being gay. I assure her that I agree, even though I am not gay myself. I don't know why I lie to her. Luckily the school system Austin has at that time houses us all in massive sixth grade centers before packing us off to seventh grade in various junior highs all over town. So junior high is a new start for me, I transform into someone else, someone more aggressive if still a bit girly, and everything is all right after that. I get a bit of teasing here and there, but everyone except the most macho jocks do, especially the speech and drama people, and once I become a high achiever I find that achievement is respected in Texas above all else. If you are good at underwater basket weaving there is an organized system of district, region, area, and state competition. Football may rule the roost but all trophies are prized beyond reason by administrators and teachers, an attitude that seems to trickle down to even the most delinquent of juveniles.

By high school I no longer spend any time with students who aren't high achievers at something or other. Some of them may be into drugs and sex, but to a person they are intelligent and motivated. Like me. So all of us can get away with absolutely anything.

Lucy and Ethel's Vagina Monologue

Wanting a vagina isn't the same as wanting to be a woman.
I tie a string around our German Shepherd's testicles when I am only about three. It doesn't seem to bother him but when I accidentally step on the string, yanking his balls, he gets a little upset. I don't know why I do it. They are just so interesting looking, lying there like that, and he can lick them himself, which fascinates me. I am not as interested in looking at what I call his "lipstick," a sight that always grosses me out. I get in trouble for the string incident. My father has seen me do it and punishes me accordingly. I think he sends me to my room where I sit eating animal crackers and planning my wardrobe for the day I become a fairy princess.

I am staying one summer with my mother. She has a cat who is supposed to go into heat once before getting spayed. When it happens it is horrifying. She moans, ovulates, and bleeds all over everything, and every time she starts to stop, it all starts up again. Later the vet says she is having some weird heat cycle, where it doesn't seem to want to stop on its own. So she gets her tubes tied without ever going out of heat. But while she is still in the grips of the madness no one knows what to do. Someone tells my mother to get a pencil. I don't immediately understand the intent, which is to penetrate the cat's vagina with a lubed pencil. But the cat keeps biting and running away, horribly affronted at every whisper of a touch of that pencil against her little flower.

As much as I like sex as a boy, even after the pedophile, (especially after the pedophile?) I kind of want a vagina. Not at the expense of having a penis. I just like the idea of being penetrated "properly," with the mechanics getting easier, more "natural." I don't want breasts or anything. Actually, the sexual appeal of breasts to straight guys always eludes me a bit, not the aesthetic appeal mind you; they look lovely in a strapless gown. And the sensitivity of my own nipples makes their sensual importance to their owners perfectly clear, but what's in it for the man, or in the case of lesbians, the other girl, the one touching them and squeezing them and putting them in his or her mouth? Actually I think I can answer my own question since I just realized something I do with my own mouth that isn't necessarily connected to my own... oh, just never mind...

Dicks are so different from vaginas. At school in junior high gym class jocks wander around naked, some of them aggressively so, like one guy at my West Hollywood gym now who plops his genitals on the counter while he shaves at the sink. Talk about a need for antibacterial soap.

Jocks are muscled and fit. Impenetrable. Except for their penises, where one kick can bring the hardest guy to his knees. Vaginas are so much more self-contained and economical. You don't have to put them anywhere, worry about their size, or think about what they look like in a bathing suit. A recent spate of magazine articles about the surgical "rejuvenation" of middle-aged vaginas, though, may mean that vaginal self-consciousness will one day equal penis paranoia, but we'll have to wait and see. See, I'm still fascinated by vaginas. I think Neiman Marcus should offer them in their Christmas catalogue along with all that David Orgell jewelry.

I like to imagine television stars from the '50s in commercials for modern feminine hygiene products. "I'm Lucille Ball, and when my vagina itches I use Monostat 7. It's the greatest!"

Or I look at sitcom plots. "Hey Ethel, remember that time we pretended to be having a lesbian affair to make Fred and Ricky jealous? We thought it would make them so mad, but then the boys just asked if they could watch!"

Then Ricky gets his soundless 8 millimeter home movie camera out from under his twin bed and finally lets Lucy be in the show.

I Am My Own Sex Object

Is a sex-obsessed kid entitled to be the victim when he makes the first move?
It's during a run of "To Kill a Mockingbird" at a community theatre in Austin when I meet the crossover guy; my first actual adult. I'm acting in a string of shows playing a child, since at eleven, that is what I appear to be. In "Mockingbird" I must boyishly throw a football as if I am an actual boy.

During rehearsals I scope out the crossover guy and I make the first move. It is most emphatically not the other way around. I am absolutely the aggressor. Surrounded by adults, I am very anxious to appear as grown up as possible. I take up smoking with zeal, and learn to laugh hollowly at the bitter ironies of life; just like I do when my grandmother complains about her sex life with my grandfather.

That I have far more ironies to laugh about than most of the grown-ups I am appearing in these shows with is not immediately apparent to them or to me. The desperate seriousness of the artiste destined to be famous has its hooks in me - which I still think of as a kind of virus, far more hazardous to my long-term emotional well-being than a little childhood sex play.

The crossover guy isn't very attractive, but he is kind of funny, and once I make my move he starts doing all the things pedophiles are supposed to do, like buying me liquor, trying lamely to boost my confidence, things like that - all for no reason whatsoever since I am completely certain I'm going to fuck him before I even walk over, and he can save time and money by skipping the cheesy gestures and just getting us to a motel room.

It's with him in a motel when I learned about actual ejaculation, which catches me off guard. I don't ever like revealing that I don't know something and I am afraid my alarmed reaction to the sticky white mess pumping itself out of his penis will reveal my lack of knowledge.

He looks up at me then and says, "I like little boys."

This totally blows my mind. Whatever I look like on the outside, I totally believe he's with me because he sees through my eleven year-old physical self and recognizes the incredibly mature adult inside.

What he says makes it obvious that I am like this thing to him, this child. I don't like children, and I am horrified that he should think me one of them.

It doesn't put me off sex though. I start riding the bus, going to the University of Texas, cruising public bathrooms. I am still eleven. The thrill of discovering glory holes helps me forget how much of a pain in the ass sixth grade is turning out to be. Other people remember the torments of high school, but for me, sixth grade is the nadir of my existence. It is my first year of attending any school anywhere for a whole year without moving. But now I am with my mother. Now we no longer move on.

That there is a probable if totally indirect correlation between my finally being allowed to live with my mother and my sex play with adults doesn't occur to me until about five minutes ago.

Having sex is easier than confronting the differences between the fantasy of wanting her and the reality of getting her. I have new people to fantasize about, grown men, college students, occasionally even people my own age.

What I spend my childhood thinking will be my defining moment, being allowed to be with my mom, comes and goes without my actually being there.

But a stranger might love me completely. Rescue me. Take me to New York. Make me famous. I still crave rescue even as I am supposedly already rescued. My self-awareness only extends to what I want and how to get it. I never think to question what I am doing or who I am.

My mom's boyfriend, soon to be my step-father, David, and I are close still. When I am a child he is playful, loving, and a little more sexy than he imagines I might notice or think about. This is before he becomes so fatherly, back when he is still just Mom's hunky boyfriend, tearing around in an MG, smoking pot while he drives, bounding around the house naked. He is much bigger than my father, Adam. Simple justice.

Years later when I am an adult I finally tell him about all that pre-teen sex with grown-ups. He starts crying, ashamed that he and my mother never knew how needy I was, how troubled and lonely. He says I must have been lonely if I went out looking for that. I don't know. I hid myself from them and from myself. "But you were so good," he keeps saying, "Never any trouble, always good grades, we never thought you had any problems."

Having sex with adults in public restrooms takes no courage at all. Admitting loneliness is next to impossible.

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.

Tongue Tied

Is it just me, or is every kid having sex?

Every single place I live as a pre-preadolescent comes well stocked with children my age who want to have sex. Never penetrative. Always secret. The lack of emotional mortification we all feel is confusing to me now in an age where all such behavior is regarded as evidence of something sexually evil going on in the home. As bizarre as my childhood is, no one diddles me without me initiating it. Deep down I think it might be less harmful than everyone on "Oprah" wants us to believe.

I know I seriously undermine that statement in my last blog by pointing to the six year-old girl's vaginal ointment as evidence of something not right in her household.

For a while for me as a kid it is pretty evenly divided between girls and boys, but somewhere around the age of about eight or nine my sex play begins to get more exclusively male. And insertive. In Hawaii where we live when I am briefly in the third grade, two slightly older boys meet up with me every afternoon after school. There is usually some pretense of talk about how we are doing this only because there were no girls around who are similarly inclined, which I go along with, preserving their fantasy of normality, even though it seems perfectly silly to me even then.

One of them asks if I want to kiss, and I don't yet know how to do it properly. His saliva is a little acrid. I don't see the point of having his tongue in my mouth when it could be put to such better use elsewhere. A friend of my father's from Blanco, Texas, visits us, bringing his wife and his son, who enthusiastically make our sex play into a foursome - the son, not the father or his wife. One night in the bedroom he is sharing with me, the son wants to play and I am tired. He grins and says if I don't do what he wants he could tell my father what we are up to. It isn't coercive and he really is kidding, but this is the first time it strikes me that some people might consider what we are doing wrong. Maybe that's a little disingenuous. I must have an instinct that it won't be looked upon favorably, otherwise why keep it a secret? But mainly I don't see it as any big deal.

As I mention 2,899,431 times in earlier blogs, there is nothing coy about sex in our family. A plumber points to my step-mother's pregnant bump when she is carrying the kid that is born after my sister, Betsy. The plumber asks Betsy, then about four, whether she knows that her mommy has a baby in her stomach. Betsy snorts as derisively as a four year-old knows how to do. "That's dumb. It isn't in her stomach, it's in her uterus. She didn't eat the baby!"

Sex and the Single Five Year-Old

When I am five there's this little girl, an older woman, she's six, across the street from where we live in Albuquerque, New Mexico (the place where my father is almost shot and killed - see January 27, 2006 "Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess"). The little girl and I don't play doctor. We don't need a pretend excuse for sexual gratification.

She asks me point blank whether or not I want her to lick me down there, making me promise to reciprocate if she does.

I like the cool, wet sensation of her tongue, and I don't know orgasms exist yet, being incapable of producing one at the age of five, so there is no lack of a happy ending even though the experience can't technically have one. When it's my turn though, it's tough going, not because I have any problem with reciprocating, as such, but because she has some kind of strange ointment smeared all over her, and I don't like how it smells or tastes. I renege on my end of the bargain.

Only recently do I get past what I consider to be the funny thing of getting but not wanting to give oral pleasure at such a young age (how like a little man-to-be) long enough for it to dawn on me that for a girl of five to have ointment on her vagina and to be initiating sex play with a playmate isn't a good sign. Someone is probably raping her. But she is the aggressor with me and I don't say no. It would never occur to me to say no. I grow up in such sexually free households that the idea of something sexual being ill-advised doesn't register. My parents and step-parents are always running around naked. I know people who never see their mothers without eyeliner. After my mom takes a shower or when she is changing I sometimes see her vagina, or more accurately her pubic hair. Eyeliner doesn't really factor into the equation.

I have no idea that childhood sex play is a taboo of some kind. I also grow up with an absence of media since my father and step-mother don't allow television. Societal concepts of shame are unknown. We are amoral.