Chapter 5

I had many friends in my neighborhood. There was Jake, whose older brother hated me and wanted me to beat me up and would call me a “faggot” before I even knew what that was.

It seemed like everybody’s older brother back in those days was a sadistic prick.

I don’t even remember his name, Jake’s brother, but do remember his horse face and buckteeth and that he was a raging asshole.

It could be that he hated me because of the egg battle me and Jake had.

After school one day, when our parents were gone at work, I’m not sure who started it, but we raided our respective fridges and pelted each other and each other’s houses with eggs.

Neither of our parents were thrilled to return home after a long day at work and see the house covered in slimy egg yolk, cracked shells lining the streets.

It was one of those times, as a kid, that I felt guilt, when my mother told me how eggs cost money, they weren’t free, and that she’d gone to work, worked all day so we had these to eat. Even as a kid, usually lacking empathy, I felt like a dirtbag for that, and we never had an egg battle again.

Jake and I both loved baseball. I recall him having the coolest Washington Senators jacket. His family had originally been from Washington DC.

We’d trade baseball cards. We’d talk of the Senators, Walter Johnson, famous baseball players from the past like Shoeless Joe, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. There was something cooler about the old baseball players than the current ones, their big baggy pants, and the grainy black and white photos of them, the tall tales of their exploits.

Jake, like me, was into girls at a young age. He was a fellow lifelong admirer of the females, and it was with him that I saw my first Playboy magazine. It’d been stashed by his dad somewhere. In a locked bathroom, we perused the pages, as if archeologists discovering an oracle, and jaws agape, we gasped and wondered, in awe at the mature female form.

They were so shapely, the models, so curvaceous. They looked like girls but were so different than the girls at my school whose bald little snatches I gaped at and clumsily, cautiously touched.

I didn’t know exactly what it was or why, but I liked them, I liked their nudity, their geometry.

I began masturbating young, not long after that, touching myself, fucking my pillow and poking holes in stuffed animals and pieces of fruit, but I didn’t really have orgasms until later. Still, I enjoyed the act of fucking something, even a pillow, and loved fantasizing of engaging in sexual activities with naked women, and those pictures I saw at Jake’s house, those images, those virgin glances at naked, developed female bodies remain etched into my memory forever.

Another friend I remember was Tim. He was a Black kid, from a less financially fortunate family.

Not that I was rich, but my mother being a shrink, she did okay, and my father, while around, did well too, well enough to provide a comfortable middle-class life.

Whereas I’m guessing Tim came from a lower economic stratum.

I know this because he was flabbergasted when he came over, saw my basement, which had many toys in it. He’d obviously never seen so many toys, likely because his parents didn’t make enough money to provide them, or maybe didn’t want to. I don’t know.

We had a couple sleepovers at my house. I remember him vomiting one morning, on the stairs to the second floor. Nothing precipitated it. He simply looked at me with this confused glaze, slapped his hands to his stomach, hunched forward and upchucked.

I didn’t see him for a while, other than at school, until one night, him and his mother came by my house.

His mother, her face rigid, eyes narrowed, angrily declared, “Tim has something to tell you,” and she yanked him by his arm, thrust him from behind her, to face me.

A guilty looking Tim struggled to maintain eye contact and handed me a toy, a GI Joe figure, and whimpered, voice shaky, “I’m sorry I stole your toy.”

I received it, wasn’t sure how to respond. They left. I never hung out with him again.

Once at school, afterwards, he joked about it, saying how “remember the time I stole your toy,” and we laughed about it, but his laugh was forced. It’d be ironic if he grew up to become a professional thief, bank robber, banker, or politician. But whatever became of him, I wish him well.

Another friend of mine was an older guy, who lived with his parents, I’m guessing he was in his 20s or so. A lean, tall, wiry Black man named Anthony. I remember his family lived around the corner from us. I think they were Haitian.

They had a gray dog, a runty, scruffy fleabag sack of shit called Ralph, which looked almost like an overgrown rat. And that dog would be out in their backyard, day and night, snapping, growling and barking incessantly. I recall really hating the animal, as it was so loud and annoying and had an ugly, mangy, and menacing appearance. Not to mention it stunk like shit, aside from always barking. Why is that the smallest dogs always seem to bark the loudest and most frequently?

Anthony, me, other kids, young guys would play basketball and baseball in the park nearby. When the Jehovah’s Witness lady who’d been babysitting me left, or I think got fired for getting too pushy and freaky with the Jesus, my parents asked Anthony to look after me when they were off at work and I wasn’t in school.