Val had also just replaced his bedroom posters of soccer superstar Pelé with hundreds of photos of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, effectively turning what was once a shrine to the New York Cosmos into a full-fledged, NFL-endorsed masturbatorium. On the other hand, I was doomed to feel insecure being around or even pondering the opposite sex until a good ten years after you are currently reading this story.Ībout the same time, my best friend Val had started watching Star Wars over and over again in the theater with the scholarly intensity usually reserved for the Zapruder film for any sign of Princess Leia’s breasts jiggling as I stared sad-eyed up at the screen certain I would never possess the masculine self-confidence of C-3PO. Even my five-year-old brother Marcello-who still occasionally spoke in a Jodie-Foster-as-Nell patois of his own devising in which plants were “kmms,” and pajamas “tash”-knew the word “vagina” and would use it in a sentence as often as possible. And though they didn’t quite have the sexual parlance down yet (“I would so do her mouth”) the boys were at least making an attempt to learn the language. They had agendas as they approached girls, hoping to come across as attractive, funny or at least capable of blowing up a party balloon without gasping for air halfway through and bursting into tears (a remarkably low bar that I had thoughtfully set for my classmates earlier in the year). Boys now saw themselves as “preteens,” with the emphasis on the second syllable, and comported themselves as such. Not only had the word “play” apparently been redefined in my absence from “hanging out with friends” to “playing baseball, soccer, football or any team sport that did not involve Kenner’s Death Star Playset” but also girls had somehow gone from just “guys with barrettes” to “people of great interest.” Perhaps it happened the week I was out with the first known case of “hysterical flu”-or the day I passed out from fear in the middle of reading my book report and woke up in the nurse’s office with a bump on my head and a withering critique of Mouse on a Motorcycle still clutched in my hand-but when I returned the very social fabric of fifth grade had been irrevocably altered. But it began like any other crime caper-with a lone hero looking for that one last big score that would set him up for life.īy the age of eleven I realized I was already a good 20 years behind my classmates sexually. That’s how it ended, not with a bang but a lot of mortified whimpering. There was just a fat, four-eyed kid stammering an inaudible, almost incomprehensible apology to a naked 19-year-old as she lay spread-eagle on the glass dining room table on which my family still eats Christmas dinner to this day. There wasn’t a last-minute double-cross, a final moment of ironic justice or a closing iconic farewell. Unlike typical crime capers there was no climactic shootout, no final explosion and no conclusive battle of wits.
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