beautiful, funny, sad & true

Here’s another story from the TMI Files, and it’s quite possibly the most. . .um. . .risque of the bunch of stories.  If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading, or if you’re at work, I encourage you to skip over the next few paragraphs and start reading again at the fifteenth paragraph, which is a good bit and takes place on Halloween.

Like I’ve said in the last couple of these stories, there’s a certain age during which young kids are curious about nudity and romantic feelings, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before puberty happens and changes everything.  The last of these of ‘innocent’ experiences for me was when I was ten years old, and it naturally involved GirlUpTheStreet, who will henceforth be known as WonderWoman.

At the end of our street in Yakima was (and still is) a fairly good-sized Catholic school and church.  Next to that is a fairly good-sized lawn and baseball field, and next to THAT is a fairly good-sized football stadium, with fairly good-sized bleachers.  All of us kids spent countless hours around the school, though none of us went there.  They had a large log toy on the playground, and the school’s sidewalks were paved with smooth and slippery cement, which made for some excellent bike riding and skidding around all of the corners.  Another of our favorite endeavors was to sneak underneath the chain-link fence and into the stadium, day or night.  Sometimes we would play football, sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek, sometimes we’d just roam around.  This isn’t the interesting part of the story yet, and it’s also not the location of my final innocent tryst with WonderWoman.

I told you about the school and the stadium because A) it’s such a huge part of the setting for our neighborhood stories, and B) there was a network of fruit warehouses to the south and to the east of the stadium.  The one to the south (which has since been divided up and developed into Glenwood Square) is where my brother and dad and I witnessed a Volkswagen Bug stall on the train tracks and nearly get crushed, but the one to the east is the one in which FinalInnocentTryst occurred.

During the day, the warehouse was a hive of activity, and none of us was brave enough to speak to any of the ragged, scruffy men who worked there.  After hours, the place was full of great places for kids to play.  There were countless fences to climb under, and boxes of fruit to throw at each other, and large wooden pallot boxes to hide in.  The boxes became our favorite places, because not only could we hide, we could also see through the cracks of the boxes to see if anyone was coming.

Late one afternoon, WonderWoman and I decided we wanted to go to the warehouse and check it out, since it was a weekend and there was nothing going on over there.  We climbed under the fence and walked through the warehouse.  We’d been there many times with the whole group of kids, and each of us had gone separately a million times, but this was our first time going there together.  We’d been holding hands palm-to-palm the way ten-year-old kids do, without the fingers interlaced.  Suddenly we heard a noise and a door opened at the far end of the warehouse, letting a sliver of daylight into the dark warehouse.  This can’t be happening, we thought. There’s never anyone around on weekends.

Two men came through the door, and our hearts leapt into our throats.  We ran toward the door at our end of the warehouse, pushed the door out and sprinted toward freedom.  The men heard our footfalls and yelled, “Hey, you kids get outta here!”  They turned and started to chase us out.

The gate was too far away, and we knew we’d never be able to squirm under it before the men caught us, so we ran to one of the pallot boxes and jumped inside.  Breathing heavily from our sprint, we peered through the cracks in the box and saw the men come out the door and half-heartedly search for us.  They were about thirty feet from us, and they had no idea we were there.  We didn’t want our loud breathing to give away our hiding place, so we kissed.  A lot.  Even after the men went away.  We decided that we quite enjoyed being trapped in there.

“Here, let’s do something else,” she said in her let’s-pretend-we’re-married voice.  She slid her pants down to her knees and motioned for me to do the same.  Having done that, we sat down next to each other, close enough that our posteriors were touching, and kissed some more.  This was a whole new level for both of us, since we hadn’t ever really kissed before, and certainly not like that.  She rose up to her knees and said, “Let’s touch.”

“Okay,” I said, and rose up to my knees in front of her.  We were kneeling a baby’s arm-length from each other with our pants down.  We kissed again, quickly, just once, and she reached out to touch the tip of my penis with her first two fingers.  She kept them there, ever so gently, and was fascinated to watch tumescence in action.  She moved her index finger from the tip to the base, and back to the tip.  Now it was my turn.  There was a line on the skin of her lower abdomen from the elastic at the top of her underwear.  I touched that line, and slid my finger slowly down.  I didn’t put it inside her, because that wasn’t something that we would have done at that time.  I just touched her gently from top to bottom to top, in the same way that she had done to me.

By this time, it was starting to get dark outside, and we thought we should get back home.  We gave each other one last long kiss and, still kneeling, embraced and pulled our bodies together.  Neither of us had experienced anything that magical before, and we held each other there for a very long moment.  Afterwards, we stood, pulled our pants back up and found our way to a new place where the gate was unlocked, so we just walked right through and out to the street toward home.

We had our pants pulled up, but unzipped slightly, so that they’d stay up, but we still had the feeling of intimacy that it created.  We were holding hands in that non-interlocked way again, until she found a discarded piece of garden hose in someone’s yard, picked it up, and started blowing into it like a trumpet.  Suddenly we we saw a couple of the neighborhood kids at the end of our street.  They saw us, too, and started running in our direction.   I quickly zipped my pants up.  “Your pants,” I said, “Get your pants!”  She laughed, dropped the hose and reached for the zipper on her pants.  She had a bit of difficulty, but got them zipped just as the kids arrived.

“What’re you guys doing?” they asked.

“Nothing,” we said, giving each other Significant Looks.  All of us walked home together, and I don’t think any of the other kids was the wiser.

WonderWoman moved from my neighborhood not long after that, and she went to a different school, so I didn’t see her again until Halloween of the following year, by which time I was eleven and she was ten.  She and her older brother came by our neighborhood to trick-or-treat and say hi to everybody.  They arrived a bit late, maybe ten o’clock at night, and my brother and I were already practically asleep in our bunk beds.  My mom let them in and got us up to say hello, cause she knew we’d be disappointed if we missed them.

My brother got up first and went in to say hi.  I straightened up my Oakland Raiders pajamas and walked out a minute later.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries and good-to-see-yous, but after a while it got a bit awkward.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was just because we all hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, or maybe it was so late at night that we were all a little groggy, but we gave them some candy and said thanks-for-coming-by-and-stuff, and they went on their way again.

I turned back to walk into the bedroom, and that’s when I noticed that the fly on my pajamas was open, and that the tip of my little penis was poking out, and it had been out the entire time.  It was as if it, too, was saying hello to the girl it missed.  I smiled to myself, tucked it back into my fly, and crawled into bed.

That’s the last time I saw her.

Sometimes, I wonder what became of her.  I’m sure she’s old and fat and married with kids now, like so many other people our age are, but I’ll never forget her as she was back then, and I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared.  They’re still imprinted in my brain, and that stuff happened over three decades ago.

Love, it would seem, conquers all; even such seemingly insurmountable forces as time and an otherwise rapidly fading memory.

So.  Back to the TMI childhood stories.

Like I said at the end of the last one, my little brother wasn’t immune to Cupid’s prurient influence either, despite his tender age of five years.  To be fair to him, I’m sure that he was more interested than he would have been if he didn’t have an older brother who was at just the right age for that kind of exploration.  Older brothers also tend to influence musical and cinematic preferences, and my brother probably wouldn’t have been interested in heavy metal or British comedy if left to his own devices, but that’s neither here nor there.  Suffice it to say that we both had a short period of time, well before puberty sexualized everything, during which we were very interested in nudity.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is probably not the sort of thing you’ll want to read if you’re at work; although there’s no bad language, the subject matter may be inappropriate and you may get an eyebrow or two raised in your direction.  If not, or if you’re prepared to fly under the radar, then gawd bless ya and off we go.

My brother and I liked to run around the house naked (especially after a bath; we’d wrap up in blankets and watch TV), we would swim naked, we would even dare our friends to run back and forth across our front yard naked.  Sometimes they’d do it, and sometimes they’d chicken out and just take their shirts off or pull their pants down or something.  Our yard was full of smallish trees, which were problematic for front-yard sporting events, but great for hiding behind if a neighbor’s car happened to drive by.  Incidentally, the people who bought our house from us will never know the nudity-covering power those trees possessed, because they summarily removed every single one of them, and the white picket fences as well.  They even ripped out the three trees on the opposite side of the yard so that they could pave a double driveway.  Never mind that they could have easily kept all those trees and parked one of their behemoth cars on the street, or they could have bought two small cars, like we did, and parked them both in the driveway.  But that, as they say, is a digression.

Speaking of digressions, here’s another one about that house.  We had something like a quarter of a million cats when we lived there.  Every time we’d adopt a new one, she’d have a littler of kittens before we could get her spayed.  This happened a few times in a row, which meant that at any given time we had at least five cats, sometimes ten, and sometimes we even had as many as fifteen, in a small three-bedroom suburban house.  At some point one of them started spraying, and once one starts the others follow suit, so before long the entire house reeked of cat spray.  The garage bore the worst brunt of it, after the offending felines were banished from the inside of the house.  There was the telltale foot-high ring of dripping spray marks around the entire perimeter of the garage.  We did what we could by scrubbing and power-washing, but nothing seemed to work, and the smell was overpowering, particularly in the heat of summertime.

I told you that story to tell you this one.   Six or seven years after we moved out of that house, I was working at a video store, which was the largest in town.  I worked there for long enough that I made some really good friends during my tenure there, and I got to know many of the regulars personally.  One day someone came in who I didn’t recognize, so I asked to see her ID so that I could set up an account for her.  I instantly noticed that her address was MY old address, and I said, “No way, you live at my old house.”  She gave me a very strange look and took about one second before blurting out, “Do you know anything about cat pee?!”  You could tell she’d been living with that disaster for years, and praying to every god she knew that one of us would inadvertently walk into the path of her car one day.  With a herculean effort, I restrained a smile and said, “Uhhh. . .I was just a kid when we moved.  I don’t remember anything about pee.”   I could see that she didn’t quite believe me, but she couldn’t really do anything about it, and I certainly wasn’t going to go into any more detail with her.  Sometimes the best thing to do is play dumb.

See what I mean?  Also a digression.

My two favorite nudity stories about my brother involve two different girls.  My second-favorite involves GirlUpTheStreet, otherwise known as WonderWoman (cause remember, I was her Superman).  To get back to the subject of trees, we had two crab-apple trees in our yard, and both of them had branches that were just the right height for kids to climb.  The one next to the sidewalk had one particular branch that was strong, flat and smooth, and about five feet from the ground.  This made it perfect for doing chinups, or for hanging upside down, or climbing up higher into the tree.  One day, GirlUpTheStreet was down at our place hanging out.  She and I were ‘married’ by this time, and she was hanging upside down from that branch with her pants unzipped a little and her shirt sort of slid up, thanks to gravity.  I was climbing on a nearby branch, when my brother came out of the house and saw her.  Before he even knew what he was doing, he ran over to the tree and made a grab for her pants, trying to unzip them the rest of the way and pull them down.  She half-screamed and half-laughed and tried to twirl away from him but it was to no avail.  She fell on the ground, laughing, while he tried to unzip her pants.  My dad saw what was happening, and came outside to put an instant stop to what he was doing.  “[BROTHER]!  Come in the house right now!!”  My brother sheepishly walked in and got the speech about how We Don’t Do That To Girls and about how When You Pull Your Pants Down With Someone, It Means You Love Them.  I wasn’t in on the first discussion, but I seem to remember being in on the second.  Perhaps my chronology of these stories is amiss somehow, and I’m jumbling part of one with part of another.  In my defense, it has been over thirty years since these events transpired, so I suppose the occasional memory lapse is inevitable.  Either way, these stories are all true, and let’s hope they make for some compelling reading.

All that being said, here’s my favorite ‘romantic’ childhood story about my brother.  Every once in a while, he liked to sleep naked.  I don’t remember doing that very often myself (and for the record, I still don’t do it very often), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  I just remember that was one of the things he liked to do, and he would do it pretty regularly.  One day, a group of us from the neighborhood was playing outside in the yard, and Brother suddenly decided he wanted to go inside and take a nap.  As I also mentioned in the previous entry, there was a Mormon family who lived next door, and their four-year old daughter was a year younger than my little brother (and still is, presumably!), so she found him completely fascinating.  A couple minutes after he went inside, she went in to look for him.  He had whipped his clothes off and jumped into bed, when all of a sudden, YoungestNeighbor appeared at his door.

“Hi, [Brother].  Whatcha doin’?”

“Taking a naked nap.”

“Oh.  Can I take a naked nap with ya?”

“Okay.”

She pulled her clothes off, climbed up into his little bed (which at that time would’ve been the lower of our two bunk beds) and snuggled up next to him.  “Ooooooh, you’re warm!” she cooed.

I seem to recall that my mom found them and very gently explained to YoungestNeighbor that she should come back to play some other time, when Brother wasn’t resting.  I don’t think she blasted her out of the water the way she had done with my conspiratorial friend who wrote BELLYBUTTON and BAGINA on our patio in crayon.

That’s my favorite story of my brother, at least in this context.  My absolute favorite will be entitled “One in a Million”, and will need to be told before too long here on BFS&T.  But it won’t be today, because A) that story involves a cassette tape that I need to find first, and B) it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.  As I’m sure you’re very much aware, I’m nothing if not fastidious when it comes to remaining on-topic.

Speaking of topics (Do you like how I seamlessly worked that in?), there is more to come on this one very soon.  To be continued.

P.S. – I don’t know why it never occurred to me until just now, when I abbreviated the name of this blog  – BFS&T – it reminded me of turn-of-the-last-century railroads, which made me laugh a little bit.  Not uproariously, or even out loud, just a tiny little bit, and just to myself.  Anyway.

To be continued.

P.P.S. – The title of this entry comes from an excellent song by The Hollies.

Childhood can be a tricky subject to write about.  There are some stories that are great, but they may not necessarily be the kind of thing you’d want everyone to know about.  Either that or they involve people who you may still be friends with, who may not be too thrilled about having those stories told.

Maybe there are ‘secret’ stories that nobody else ever knew about, like the first time you pulled your pants down with someone, or the first time someone touched you in an intimate way, but you were still young enough that it never occurred to you to go any further.  These are the kind of things my friend and I were talking about in a phone conversation today, and we were laughing like hyenas the entire time.  Since then, I started compiling a list of stories, so that I can be thinking about how to tell them in a way that isn’t just gratuitously prurient. . .or TMI.

Here’s one that should be a good sort of segue.  If you’re reading at work, or if R-rated subject matter isn’t something that interests you for whatever reason, I invite you to stop reading now, because this entry is about to take a distinct turn for the worse.

My dad used to collect porno magazines, and he had a few books as well.  He made no secret about it, and he kept them all catalogued in boxes in the bedroom.  My parents also owned the book The Joy of Sex, and as a matter of fact, I don’t remember them making a big deal about it if my little brother or I snuck a peek at that kind of stuff occasionally.  I guess their feeling was that the more we learned on our own, the less they’d have to actually teach us themselves.

My dad mostly gravitated toward soft-core stuff like Playboy, but he had a few issues of Hustler floating around, as well as a couple of harder things like High Society, all of which was not a big deal to my brother and me.  He had one that we both distinctly remember, though, which was called Shuttlecock.  The idea behind this one was that a man and a woman would be in their yard playing badminton, and before long their clothes would start coming off, by which time they’d start getting it on.  My brother and I wouldn’t have thought twice about this magazine either, ordinarily, were it not for the hilarious captions that were on a few of the full-page pictures.  They were sayings such as, ‘They would fuck for a while, then she would suck his enormous cock.’ That kind of stuff completely cracked us up.  I remember asking, as we were looking at the magazine, “Is this supposed to be sexy?”  I’ve tried to find pictures of that for a while now, because I thought it would be funny to send to my brother, but so far I’ve come up empty-handed.

My dad also had a book in his night stand [Edit:  I just now remembered the name of it:  Pissing in the Snow] that was full of antiquated naughty stories and songs.  For example, there was one about a guy who would ride around town in his horse-drawn carriage and pick up women he saw on the street.  They were just bizarre, and we couldn’t figure out A) why our dad was into them, and B) why anybody would find them arousing.  I also remember a golf-related book that was called Dead Solid Perfect [I can’t believe I remember these names!], that involved a lot of swearing and sex.   It also prominently featured these brothers who would dress like nuns, unzip their habits and pee in whichever conspicuous location they found themselves.  They’d also stop people on the street and say, “Can you point me in the direction of the nearest bar?  I’m just aching to get a hold of a nice warm dick.”  So. . .um. . .yeah.

The worst and funniest occurrence happened when I was about fourteen, long after my parents had split up, and my dad had remarried.  LittleBrother and I were visiting for the summer, and we had a friend over.  We wanted to show the antiquated naughty book to our friend, so we walked into the bedroom and said, “You have to see this.  It’s right in his night stand.  Wait. . .what’s this?  Oh, pictures.  Pictures of Dad. . .and that’s our. . .stepmom. . .AAAAAUGH!”   We had inadvertently stumbled onto their stash of polaroids, and the images burned themselves into our impressionable little brains in a way that the magazines never could.  I wish there was a way to excise them, because seeing explicit pictures of your parents having sex is too much to process.

To this day, neither of us is into porn.  I can’t speak for my brother, but I know that I can’t help but think of dumb stuff like Shuttlecock every time I think of porn, and it just makes me laugh.

The moral of all this, I suppose, is that if you have kids and you have porn, you have to either get rid of one or the other.  I’m assuming that unless you have a serious problem, you’ll choose to get rid of the porn.  If you have it around, the kids will find it, no matter where you think you’ve hidden it.  Also, it’s probably not the greatest idea to take pictures of yourselves and leave copies of them in an easily accessible place.

Hopefully this was a good read, and hopefully it falls within the parameters that I set for this little endeavor.  I’ll keep thinking of more stories that I feel I can share.  In the meantime, for God’s sake, keep the porno away from the kids.

A number of years ago, I had a cushy and surprisingly well-paid data entry job during which, once we reached a certain level of so-called proficiency, we were allowed to listen to headphones while we typed away.  Many of us listened to NPR and audio books, and many of us also became hooked on the radio show LoveLine.

A handful of us were undeniable super fans, and we would go home and record the show for posterity.  I taped it for years, as a matter of fact, and I still have a box of cassettes floating around that one day may find its way to one of the many online archivers.  One of my fellow super fans (we’re still close friends) and I recently sent off a bunch of tapes to the proprietors of one such site, so we did our part to give back to the LoveLine community that had done so much for us.

If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically a relationship and medical advice show, with a comedy format.  Dr. Drew Pinsky is a board-certified physician and an addiction medicine specialist (and probably has acquired more titles since then), and Adam Carolla is a comedian and television writer with many years of psychotherapy under his belt.  LoveLine was where Adam got his start, actually, and in the early years of his tenure on the show, he was very hungry and eager to become a presence in the entertainment world.  These were some of my (and many other peoples’ as well) favorite years of LoveLine.  There have been other hosts before and since Adam, but his perfect blend of comedy, street smarts, and actual therapeutic experience brought a level of depth to the show that I’ve found lacking in the other hosts the show has had, who are comedians but who lack psychological knowledge, so they have to make their wisecracks and then metaphorically hand the microphone back over to Dr. Drew, who will dole out the ‘serious’ advice.  To be fair to the show’s current incarnation and co-host, I haven’t listened with any regularity for a while now, so it’s entirely possible that the show is back on a stellar track again and I’m just unaware of it.

The great thing about Adam and Drew’s dynamic was the fact that they came from completely opposite backgrounds; Dr. Drew from a life of privilege and prep school to an Ivy League education and a residency program at USC, and Adam from an unhappy home life and a string of construction jobs while attempting to break into the stand-up comedy arena.  Adam had even listened to Loveline as a younger adult, because Drew had co-hosted the show with other people since 1984 or something, so Adam was already very familiar with it by the time he joined the show in 1995, when it went national.

The format of LoveLine is that in addition to advice, they will invite celebrities to be on the show to promote their current endeavors, as well as to join in and give (hopefully) good advice.   It was always especially good when the guests were either insightful and genuine, funny and quick-witted, or just plain outrageous.  Some of my favorite guests include the masterful David Alan Grier, the talented and hilarious Zappa brothers, the punk band Pennywise (one of the members got drunk and projectile-vomited all around the studio), and I seem to remember a band called Orbit (where are they now?) who were particularly good on the show, and the band Better Than Ezra were even repeat guests.

This is all well and good, I can feel you thinking, but what does it have to do with the Holocaust?

Well, funny you should ask.

Actor and comedian Tom Arnold was a regular guest on the show, and during one of his visits a girl called in who was a phone-sex operator.  The problem she was having is that her callers were ‘getting off’ too quickly, thereby ending the call, and she wasn’t making as much money as she would if the calls were longer, so she was looking for advice on how to steer the calls to stretch them out.  Adam suggested that during her conversations, she should attempt to work in references to war atrocities, or terminal diseases, and that should do the trick.  He led her through a role-playing scenario in which she played herself and he played the caller.  After a rocky start, they decided how the the conversation should flow, and it went something like this:

“Hi, I’m Sugar.”

“Hey there, Sugar, this is Ace.”

“Hey, Ace!”

“What are you wearing?”

She delivered the coup de grace in her sultriest voice.  “Oh, I’m wearing a nice black lace bra and panties.  Oooohhh.  I’m just sitting here thinking about the Holocaust right now.”

Everyone in the studio fell over laughing, and Adam continued to riff on the joke, purring in his own ‘sexy’ voice, “Oh yeaaaah.  Burn those Jews. . .gas ’em in the showers, baby, yeah.”

It was such a brilliant and funny call, and has gone down as one of the all-time classics of the LoveLine lexicon.  The laughter that follows it, which is so out of control that they decide to halt the show and take a commercial break while they regain their composure, is really infectious too.  The phrase “I’m just sitting here thinking about the Holocaust” has become a staple answer between myself and a handful of friends who are in the know, whenever one of us will ask what the other is up to.

If you’re interested, I actually found an mp3 of the call in question and you can listen to it here.   There is also a huge and well-organized online LoveLine archive which you can find and enjoy here.  Another great one is located here.

Mahalo.

The other day, I did something I would never normally do; I used my little video camera during a recording session.  I was working with two guys who have been long-time friends and collaborators, a bassist/singer and a guitarist.  The bassist was up here visiting from the Beast (my personal favorite nickname for the East Bay of California), so they wanted to collaborate on a couple of song ideas together.  I owed the guitarist a recording favor, so that’s how I got involved.

The guys were both so intense and animated (the singer, especially) that my arm reached for my camera before I even knew what it was doing.  I took a few other videos before this one, actually (by this time I had their approval), but this is definitely my favorite.  I promise you that he was not doing this for the camera, or for the open windows, or for my benefit; it was absolutely his megalomania personality and energy shining through.

Enjoy this while you can.  If I end up feeling even more like an unprofessional a-hole later, I may decide to take it down, but for now I just felt I should let you behind one scene of the recording process.