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.

I knew this was going to happen.

At eleven-thirty, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I decided I should give in and go to bed. I picked up and started reading a book of short stories called The Best American Non-Required Reading from a few years ago, and I got completely engrossed in it.  At one-thirty in the morning I found myself completely awake, and practically buzzing with stories.  I didn’t want to get up and turn my computer back on, because I knew that if I did, I’d start telling another of my huge childhood stories, and before long it would be four o’clock and my shoulders would be sore from hunching over in my chair, typing.  Well, that seems to be what this night has in store, so since I’m here now and so are you, it’s time for another one of those stories. I’ll give you a fair warning before I go any further.  I don’t think I’ll need to use any R-rated language, but the subject matter of this entry may make it unsafe to read at work, or it may make you uncomfortable, if reading about nudity is something that makes you uncomfortable.

There’s a certain age that kids reach, years before puberty, when curiosity gets the better of them and they want to see what the opposite sex’s naughty bits are like.  For me, that age was about nine.  The list of likely candidates was surprisingly long, since our neighborhood was full of kids the same age as my little brother and me.  A girl who lived two houses down used to come over to our place to color with crayons on the front porch.  Not on paper, mind you, but directly onto the porch.  One day she scrawled out the words BELLYBUTTON and BAGINA onto the cement.  When I asked her what a ‘bagina’ was, she pointed between her legs and said, ‘This,” and we smiled conspiratorially at each other.  My mom came outside to check on us, and noticed that we’d been drawing all over the porch.  She got mad and sent the girl home, and I had to scrub the porch clean with steel wool.  That’s when she saw what the girl had written.  She decided there and then that the girl was Trouble, and I wasn’t allowed to play with her anymore.  The girl and her family moved away not long after, actually, and I never saw her again.

The Mormon family next door had three kids.  Their son was a year older than me, and he fancied himself a comedian.  He used to say things like, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, in THAT order,” and we found him hilariously clever.  He also had what was by far the coolest bike in the neighborhood; a purple chopper with stickers of flickering flames along the bottom.  All of us were dead jealous, and we used to beg him to let us ride it.  He had two younger sisters, one of whom was two years younger than me, and the other a year or two younger than my brother.  We would all hang out together often, and if the parents of one set of kids ever wondered where their kids were, it was a pretty safe bet that they were at the other house.

I found out very recently that not long before they moved from the neighborhood, their mom had suffered a severe bout of depression and considered committing suicide.  She confided in my dad, who was then and is now an Episcopal priest, and he counseled her for a short time, which may very well have saved her life.  They moved across the country to New England, but they still keep in occasional contact with my dad, who occasionally gets a note or a Christmas card from them.  Interestingly, after my parents split up, they told my dad they had a feeling that my mom would end up marrying the guy who lived across the street.  Never mind that he was already married, and that my mom was doing a bit of dating herself.  This is actually a very funny subject and will probably merit some entries of its own at some point, but suffice it to say that six or eight years later, my mom DID end up marrying the guy across the street, and twenty-some years on, they’re still married.  I’ll never know just what it was that our former neighbors noticed, or how they could have predicted that marriage.

So.  Anyway.  Back to the subject at hand.  There was a family up the street with two daughters, the older of whom was my age, and the younger a year or two behind her.  They were not the cutest girls in the neighborhood, I wouldn’t say, or the friendliest, but they were cool enough, and we did hang out with them sometimes because that’s what kids do.  I seem to remember them trying cigarettes really early, but I’m not sure why I have that particular memory.

Next to the two sisters lived a cute dark-haired girl who was a year younger than I (presumably our age gap has not changed) and had an enormous crush on me.  She would ride her bike past our house and if I was outside, she would yell things like, “I love you!” or “I’m Wonder Woman and you’re my Superman!”  She was the obvious choice when the aforementioned Curiosity hit, and she was happy to oblige one day in her bedroom.

She made it easy, actually, by asking me if I wanted to see her.  I said yes.  She lifted up her tank top slowly, left it around her shoulders for a moment, and then decided to take it off altogether.  Then she unzipped her shorts, which slid to the floor.  She shimmied her underwear down to her knees, and stood that way for a while to let me look, then smiled and said, “Now you.”  I started to take off my T-shirt, and she reached over to help me take it off.  We were in love, after all, so that little gesture was surprisingly natural and sweet, especially considering that I think we were eight and nine years old.  I sat down on her bed and took my jeans off, which left me sitting in my tighty-whities and feeling really awkward.  She was still standing in front of me, shirtless, with her shorts on the floor and her underwear at her knees, so I mustered my courage, stood up in front of her, and slid my underwear down.  We stood there for a while, a foot apart, just looking at each others’ bodies.  It never occurred to us at that point to do anything more.

We started doing that pretty regularly.  Sometimes we would take our clothes off and cuddle up in a blanket somewhere in her house.  We used to pretend we were married.  We’d be outside playing and one of us would do a big fake stretch and yawn and say, “Unnnnnnnh. . .I’m really tired.  Is it time to go to bed?”  “I think so,” the other would say, and we’d wander off into the house together, holding hands.  We got familiar enough with each other that I could probably have identified her in a lineup of naked girls with their faces hidden.  She was my first love, and her first name was the same as Angelina Jolie’s last.

The Mormon girl next door was a different story, and not a romantic one.  She showed my brother and me (and we her) in our garage.  I don’t quite remember the circumstances of how it happened, but we were outside playing baseball or something, and it was all very matter-of-fact.  We just kind of went in the garage at the same time.  I remember telling her, with my plethora of nine-year-old tactfulness, “Whoa.  Yours is pink.  [GirlUpTheStreet]’s is red.”  My brother and I pulled our shorts down at the same time and let her inspect us in the same way.  I seem to recall that my brother was still uncircumcised at the time, which, if true, meant that we gave her quite a bit of information that day.  Having accomplished our mission, the three of us pulled up the garage door and went back outside to resume whatever it was we’d been doing before that.

My brother wasn’t immune to Cupid’s charms, either, despite his tender age, but this entry is long enough that I think I’d better stop now and leave some stories for next time.  There are a few more that involve GirlUpTheStreet, too, so we all have those to look forward to.   As I predicted, it’s four o’clock in the morning now, and my eyes and brain are having difficulty focusing.

To be continued.

Friday, after spending the day playing and recording drum tracks for my own version of one of Breanna’s songs from her previous band, I walked to the store to get ingredients for dinner.  Walking back up my street, arms full of groceries, I found that the police had all of the streets blocked off, and there were people standing on the sidewalk watching, all the way up the street.  I asked someone what was going on, and she said that it was drug-related, and that they were trying to get into the house of a person who was both selling and using drugs.  I continued walking on MyStreet, and a cop stopped me and told me that I wouldn’t be able to get through on MyStreet for a while.  I asked which way he’d recommend I go to get home, and he said I could walk up NextStreet and be out of harm’s way.  I thanked him and took the opportunity to quickly survey MyStreet in the process.  There were officers with rifles, and a SWAT team with an armored vehicle of some sort parked a block from my building, on the other side of the street.  I walked home quickly and grabbed my camera.

The neighbor lady across the street saw me and called laughingly to her husband, “Hey, he’s taking photographs!”  Someone walked over and asked the plainclothes policeman what was up, and according to NeighborSusan, “Apparently it was actually shooting-related. They located, or at least thought they’d located, a suspect for a shooting that occurred elsewhere at some previous time.”  The cop was telling people to stay inside for about half an hour.  I did, and listened with my window open.  I heard no gun shots, and the multitude of cars drove away half an hour later, so I’m assuming that means the incident ended well enough.

I guess you could say the jury’s still out on what really happened, (I’m gonna go with the shooting scenario rather than the drug scenario; drug busts don’t usually involve that many big guns and vehicles, unless it was a huge operation) but that was certainly not something you see every day in this neighborhood.

This Christmas season has been stressful, disappointing, exhausting, and marked by a conspicuous lack of financial means, all of which has left me feeling less than inspired to write much lately.  I’m still around, just completely broke (again. . .for the fifth consecutive month!), incredibly busy and stressed out.  Trying like crazy to feel like my usual happy-go-lucky self, with varying degrees of success.

The weather here in Portland is warming, and it’s been raining steadily for the last couple of days, so much of the snow is melting and disappearing.  We now have flood warnings in effect for parts of town and the state.  I took the chains off my car, one of which had broken and was hanging on by a mere thread inside the wheel.  I didn’t even realize it was still attached (I thought it fell off on the freeway the other day, and I haven’t driven since then) until I went out today to take off the remaining right one and saw the left one barely poking out from underneath the car.   I ruined my yellow rain jacket in the process, by getting grease all over both arms.  Niiiiice.   Well, it’s true that I wanted a new rain jacket anyway.

I found out yesterday that my grandma died on Christmas Day, at the age of 96.  For the record, I should mention that my brother and I didn’t know her very well.  I feel more disconnected and strange about it than anything else.  My family isn’t particularly close, on either side, either geographically or emotionally, and that’s what makes me saddest of all.  We hadn’t seen her for ten years, and it had been at least that long before that.  I’d been intending to reach out to her again lately, actually, and a couple of months ago, I got her address from my dad so that I could write to her and send some pictures.  He told me that I’d better do it soon, because she was ‘starting to lose it’, and that she’d been taking a turn for the worse these last few months.  I really regret that I didn’t write like I intended to, and that the time got away from me.  I wish that I’d had the chance to reconnect with her in some way.

I thought she’d be particularly happy to know that I play the cello now, because my grandpa (who died when I was about nine, but who I hadn’t seen since I was six) used to play the cello also.  I didn’t even know that until one day when I was about twenty-six or something, and I happened to mention to my dad, “I think it would be really great to learn how to play the cello.”

He gave me a strange, thunderstruck look and said, “I wish you would have said something earlier.”  He told me about my grandpa, and how he had an orchestra-quality instrument that was at my grandma’s house, but that she had recently GIVEN AWAY.  My dad continued.  “In fact, he put himself through college on a cello scholarship, I believe, and he played semi-professionally back in the 1920’s and 30’s.  After he died, his cello was in her attic, untouched and unused, for decades.  She kept it this whole time, hoping that maybe one of you guys would show some interest in it, but you never said anything, so she gave it to a student at her church.  She would have gladly given you his cello for nothing.”   My jaw literally dropped.

I didn’t get a cello and start playing until about four and a half years ago, when I saw an ad for one online, and offered to trade one of my electric guitars for it.  The person accepted, and I’ve been a happy cellist ever since.  Mine turned out to be an excellent quality instrument, an Ernst Heinrich Roth from the early 1960’s.  It needed quite a few repairs and modifications, since it had had a difficult life in a public school district.  I got done the repairs done as I was able to, and now it’s a perfectly good semi-professional level instrument.   I loveitloveitloveitloveitloveit.  It has a full, warm sound that newer instruments just can’t replicate.

And yes, sometimes when I’m playing, I wonder what they would think.  My grandpa, who knew the instrument so well, and my grandma, who kept it faithfully in the hopes that one of her children or grandchildren would play one day, to keep a connection with them and give them a gift they would very likely treasure for their entire lives.

Here are some pictures for you, grandma.  Wish you could have seen them, and also heard what was happening in my life when they were being taken.

After yesterday’s post, I walked out and about in my neighborhood and took a few pictures.  This neighborhood is beautiful anyway, but with this much snow it’s even more beautiful.  And the Christmas lights and everything. . .it’s just an amazing treat.

Here are the ones from last night. . .

. . .before I went home to my sort of warm apartment.   I woke up this morning to go to work, and found that it had snowed a couple more inches overnight.  I had to take a picture of my forlorn little car.

Luckily, my friend was warming up his truck to take his girlfriend to work, and they offered to drive me also, since her work is right near mine.  That really made my morning.  There were only a handful of us who actually made it in to work today, and it was so cold inside the building that most of us bailed out after a few hours.  I left at noon, and I’d worn my jacket and scarf the entire time, and even my hood occasionally.  Three people left around ten-thirty, but I stayed until my fingers couldn’t really type anymore.  There were a couple of diehards who stayed on after I left, but they didn’t think they’d be there for long.

I certainly wasn’t the only one who was home from work today, either.  The streets were filled with families and couples who were out enjoying the snow.  And they were friendly, too!  I couldn’t believe it.  Everybody greeted me, or waved, or smiled, or even flirted, in a way that (I’m here to tell you) they rarely do.  I kept thinking, ‘Where was all this friendliness in all those times when I was feeling lonely and sad, and felt like something must be wrong with me because no one would so much as glance at me when I was walking on the street?’  But that’s neither here nor there.  It was nice, and I appreciated it.  It was so nice, in fact, that I kinda wanted to stay out longer, and keep crossing paths with people, on purpose.

I stopped in at Aztec Willie’s for a yummy burrito, which gave me enough energy to shovel my sidewalk, which I found still sucks after all these years.  You’d think that with technology being the way it is, there’d be some sort of process that could make the act of shoveling obsolete.  C’mon, science, can we get on that, please?  The polar bears need all the ice they can get.  Isn’t there some way to get this up (or down) to them?  I mean, JEEZ.

So then it was time to deal with my car.  I got all the snow off it, but the windows and sides are encased in ice that’s about a quarter of an inch thick.  Clearly I’m going nowhere today, unless it’s by foot.

This couple had the right idea; forego the driving and the walking, and go straight on to skiing.

I also have a smallish secret that I’d like to let you in on.  Every time I see her walking on the other side of the street, to the grocery store or something, I want to say, ‘want to go to breakfast?’ or ‘your eyes are beautiful; what color are they?’ or ‘ditch the zero and get with the hero’. . .you know, something really romantic like that to completely sweep her off her feet.

Anyway, don’t tell her I said all that.  She and her guy seem really genuine and nice, and I don’t want to mess that up for them.  Really I don’t.

So to change the subject back to the actual one we’re SUPPOSED to be talking about, I’ll leave you with this nice picture of my snowy, wonderful neighborhood.