Me and my brothers really didn't have much ideas about sex, growing up in our strict Catholic household during the 70s. We certainly had no clue how we were made, nor did my parents ever enlighten us about it, with the exception of one strange hallway conversation between me and my mom in my teens and long after Health Ed classes had already clued me in, along with my own experiences. She asked me if I had any clinical questions, because she likes to pretend that she's a doctor, which is strange enough to deter any child from inquiring.
Children were also seen as a nuisance. Over and over, the adults around us quoted the same trite sayings, like "Children should SEEN, and not heard", and if we counteracted with superior logic, they ganged up on us, sometimes physically. They often kicked us out of the house, whether we liked it or not, and locked us out of the house for hours. I suppose it was to "build character", or they needed a vacation from child rearing, because most of our parents shrugged their shoulders and said "It was the thing to do" noncommittally, when we asked them why they got married and had kids. Oh. Great answer.
They were horrible to us and often really bad company, so after awhile, we learned to stealthily avoid them whenever we could, mostly to avoid their choking cigarette smoke and nasty drunk behavior. Fine! We don't wanna be around you anyhow! And we really didn't. We could disappear for hours, without any adult interferences at all. It was freeing and also wildly dangerous, given the amount of horrors out there in the world, but I guess they figured that the country gentrification of Rockland and our close proximity to the family farm on the two surrounding lots would be enough to quell most dangers, and they were right. Heck, our street wasn't paved by the county for snow, and we had a joint mailbox at the head of the lane for the houses. We were effectively off the radar. We could walk for miles and still be nowhere.
But, there were still plenty of ways for kids to get in trouble, because we tried most of them. We tiptoed around this one rundown cottage on the block that we called "The Shack", a place perpetually darkened by the shade of some towering pine trees, and haunted by a murder of crows. We rarely saw the people who lived there, nor did we want to. Our parents told us in hushed tones that they were this thing called "renters", because they were po' white trash who moved around all the time."That's why you see their kids outside all the time, running around with bare dirty feet and their faces streaked with mud," my mom said to us in a regional accent so profoundly colloquial, people outside of her small environ in the Bronx have trouble with it.
"See?" she pointed at them one time, as we drove past slowly to the end of the land to dump some leaves, or turn around. "They're no good. That's why their mutha feeds them McDonald's all the time." The kids did indeed look down and out, morosely unwrapping their cheeseburgers on the front steps of the small house. This, from a woman who would conscript me into the workforce by signing me away to the same corporation when I was 15. But, our parents did that all the time: blatantly judgmental hypocrisy that was extremely obvious. Still, they weren't totally off base.
We never knew who they were in school (did they even go to school?), and they never played with us, which was a really bad sign. Even the inbred farm kid who couldn't speak well from retardation rang our doorbell to play outside. They were weird. They were two dirty blond hair kids, with an unfortunate hair color that matched soiled dishwater, a boy and girl of about the same age. The girl looked glumly at us in our car, with one white skinny shoulder exposed from the slipping of her worn baggy shirt. I never even knew their names.
Which is, of course, why we found torn pages from an old Playboy magazine around their house. My grandmother was over, visiting with my mom in the kitchen, and in a rare sign of adult solidarity (she actually liked kids), she pushed us to play outside so they could talk alone. It was intriguing to us for its' rarity, which kept us in close orbit. We did a cursory circuit of the woods at the end of the lane, and snuck around the gravel driveway of "The Shack", which was devoid of rundown redneck cars during the day, for once. And there it was: water-damaged from the rain and torn into pieces, but we immediately knew what it was. It was part of a "Playboy"! No way! My dad sometimes had a magazine or two rolled up and stuffed into an old paint can in the garage, but as we got older, he got savvier and changed his hiding spots.
Anyway, we had no idea what it was, but "nudies" were coveted kid-material. We got stupid over the giddiness of violating the shanty borderlines, and did a blatantly un-kidlike thing to do with our haul: we sat out the front steps of our house, trying in vain to piece together the grainy flesh-colored pieces. It was like a bad jigsaw puzzle. What the heck is this piece? Wait! No, that goes there. What is that? I think it's a ladie's private parts, I don't know. In the midst of our find, we had let our discretion go out the window, right under the noses of two very clever and highly experienced New York City women. We were doomed. After a few minutes of shrieks, muffled giggles, and stage whispers, the totally unexpected event that made complete sense happened: my grandmother had crept down the creaky, carpeted wood stairs to surprise us with the whoosh of a front door opening. AGGGGH....
We were stone-cold busted, and we knew it, but this was grandma; the lady with the incredible meatballs and warm talcum powder hugs. We had to try, so we did. We pleaded with her not to tell mom. We gave her sad, puppy eyes, and we begged for mercy...to no avail. Each and every one of us had to stand in front of my mutha in the kitchen, while she called our friend's parents to deliver the bad news: we were caught with a porno mag, and we all got punished. Uh oh. This was bad: no allowance, no dessert after dinner, no t.v., and we're were all grounded. Fuck.
But, it wasn't all bad. To this day, I relish the touch of a human man over some photo, any day of the week. Pictures are great and all, but they ain't nuthin' like the real thing. A photo don't talk back to you when you need it, or hold you close on a cold winter's night. Only yo man does that for you, girl. Get me on this one? You can have your Photoshopped mistresses, boys. This girl's aiming for the real thing: an actual man who loves her back. Happy hunting. It's a jungle out there. Rowwwrrr!
