Let’s talk about sex, baby

OK, so if you've followed my annoying little rants at all, you will know that I was raised by fundamentalist Christian parents who were more fucked-up than The Manson Family, but with slightly better intentions. And hey, I love my folks -- because, well, they're my folks. If I had the opportunity to choose them in advance, I don't know that I would have picked them out of the catalog, but I'm sure they're not even close to the worst I could have ended up with. A cursory rapid-fire remote-control click through all the various daytime talk/freak shows assures me of this. besides, I'm all grown up now, or so I like to believe. So in retrospect it's all pretty fucking funny.

Case in point:

When I was a kid, we moved around a lot. I'm not sure why; I think my parents were descended from nomadic tribespeople or something. I attended so many different schools, it's amazing I ever completed an assignment or passed a test. They'd pick me up in the middle of class and throw me in the car, where I would notice all our shit packed carefully in boxes. I think I remember once asking if the buffalo-hunting grounds had changed again or something, and I think I remember getting smacked for it, so I never questioned again. I just accepted the constant change after awhile, and it became an adventure of sorts. The weird thing is that we never moved very far -- like around the corner, or 3 blocks down. Always just barely inside the zone of a different school. Weird. One time we moved from out in the boonies (Simi Valley when it was still a big cow pasture) to The Valley, which was quite a distance. That one I understood; my dad was sick of his commute. Otherwise, the rest of it was a mystery to me, and I've even asked about it as an adult and gotten no coherent response. It was probably economic, or else some really complex, HUGE case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some people have to have their desk arranged a certain way or they freak out. We just had to keep moving. Somebody once told me that perpetual motion had yet to be invented; I begged to differ.

We also went to church or some church-related function almost every night of the week in addition to the usual Sunday stuff. Because we moved around, we always ended up trying out different churches that were close to home. Even if we'd only moved a block. I guess laziness is next to godliness. Anyway, It was at one particular church that I met my good friend (and fellow blogger) Jim, whom I've now known for just about a lifetime. I was already becoming a bit of a Bad Seed at that point, while he was still a good little PK (preacher's kid, for those of you fortunate enough to have been raised outside of the church world). I can still remember that annoying little fucking halo around his blonde head. Anyway, I was what parents, Christian or otherwise, like to call a "bad influence" on him.

OK, so we were both teenage boys, right? So despite all the fire-and-brimstone crap we were getting on a daily basis, we still had wild fantasies about every girl that walked by and many more who didn't. And, of course, they taught us that not only was sex outside of marriage a sin, but even THINKING about it was a sin. So I knew that if there was really a Hell, they had a red-leather barstool there with my name engraved on it. Because I thought about girls 24 hours a day. I woke up with sticky sheets every damn morning, and my mom wondered why I was so conscientious about doing my own laundry. I think she thought I had a bedwetting problem or something, and didn't want to embarrass me by asking.

Anyway, things were different back then. This was the seventies, and there wasn't every conceivable kind of porn available at the push of a button. I don't know how kids today handle the sensory overload of the Web, but back then it was a huge ordeal for a young boy to get access to proper whacking material. Hell, I remember excitedly thumbing through the underwear section of my mom's Montgomery Wards catalog. Yeah, it was that bad. But I was a smart kid. I devised a plan.

Our latest dwelling was this nondescript pink-stuccoed ranch-style house in Granada Hills, which is just another boring suburb in the middle of the suburban Hell called The San Fernando Valley. I've mentioned that place before. It's beautiful, if you're a sewer rat or you just got back from Beijing. But anyway we were constantly getting mail for the previous occupant, some guy named Robert Something-Or-Other, and my folks would just mark it "doesn't live here anymore" and stick it back in the mailbox for the mailman to deal with. So I saved up twelve bucks from my paltry allowance and a few illegitimate teenage activities that I've mentioned in previous posts, and I sent off a subscription card for Playboy magazine. Using the name of the former resident Robert guy so that, just in case my parents ever intercepted the mailbox before I did, they'd think it was supposed to go to him.

All worked pretty well for awhile; a month or so after sending in my card, the magazines started coming, wrapped in a plain brown sleeve. They arrived pretty predictably each month, so I was able to get to them before my folks did, and soon I amassed quite a collection. At last, a virtually limitless supply of naked girl pictures which, to a horny teenage boy in a devout Christian household, was like finding El Dorado. I would go through each one slowly, savoring every luscious photo and stretching out the experience until the next month's arrival. I can remember forcing myself not to look at the centerfold until weeks later, just so I could keep the experience fresh until the next issue without any gaps in the newness of it all. Ah, to be fourteen again...

But then it all came crashing down.

See, naked pics of girls are fun, but it's even more fun to share them with your best friend. And Jim, as saintly as he might have appeared, was the same age as me, and surely he had the same equipment, though it too probably had a halo around it before he met me. Because I was Bad Boy. Black Sheep Christian. And so I shared. Now I know what you're thinking, and you should be ashamed of yourself. It wasn't like that 'Nico and Dani' movie (which is a pretty good film, by the way). Nope, we didn't have any circle-jerks or anything; we just looked at the pictures together. I didn't know what he went and did after looking at them, though I probably would have felt better knowing he was as 'perverted' as me, because I felt pretty alone surrounded by all those supposedly asexual Church People. But I knew what I did. And I thought I was the only one. Not much in the way of Sex Ed back in those days. And it wasn't even Kansas.

Anyway, I'd found something in common with my friend that we couldn't really talk about with anyone else, because, well, Christians aren't supposed to think about naked girls. Or about doing whatever it was we thought we wanted to do to them. I'm not sure we even really knew, now that I think about it. But whatever it was, we wanted it bad. So one day, after several of these 'viewing' sessions, my loyal and trustworthy friend asked if he could have one of the pictures to take home with him, since I had so many. "Sure," I said, carefully ripping out the page that had so enamored him. After all, what are friends for?

Except that the bonehead had folded up the picture, put it in his pocket and forgotten about it. So when his mom went through his pockets before washing his jeans, a typical 'mom' thing to do, she found the offending Graven Image Of Disgust and nearly had a heart attack right there in the laundry room. As far as she was concerned, it was as if she'd found a severed head in his backpack. How could such a hideous, horrible thing have been in her precious son's pocket? Who could have hypnotized him into looking at such filth? Why, it must surely be that Bad Influence Brian kid, the one she just KNEW was bound for the flames of eternal punishment; she could see it in his eyes! Why, oh why, had she let her son be his friend? How could something like this have happened?

For the record, Playboy in 1977 was about as pornographic as a Victoria's Secret catalog is today. Maybe less so. There wasn't the slightest hint of pink anywhere in the publication. But I digress.

The details of what happened next are a bit fuzzy, but I believe that his family held some sort of Crisis Meeting and gently but firmly coerced him to admit that it was indeed I, the Bad Seed, who had given him the picture -- forced him to take it against his will, I might add. Of course, at this point, chaos ensued.

Parents were called. The prayer chain was alerted. I came home from school to find my room ransacked, every vestige of teenage maleness removed, including my oh-so-well-hidden (or so I thought) magazine collection AND the few non-Christian rock records I had formerly been allowed to have (like The Doors and The Beatles, two bands known for their open cavorting with Satanic Messages when played backwards at 45 RPMs). Even my perfectly G-Rated Charlie's Angel's poster had been ripped -- RIPPED -- from the wall, as well as my beloved Raquel Welch poster (from One Million Years' BC -- oh gawd that strategically-torn suede bikini was the main reason I hadn't yet killed myself). That one had been thumbtacked to the ceiling above my bed. But not anymore; now there was just a big white rectangle in the otherwise yellowish acoustical textured crap with the little sparkly things in it. Strange people came over to my house to 'lay hands' on me. All I could think of were two things: 1) the bastard COULD have just lied; he could have said he found the picture in the street someplace, goddammit; and 2) one of the people 'laying hands' on me was a really cute 20-something girl, and though her complexion could use some work and she wore glasses and a 'Jesus Saves' t-shirt, I wanted her hands off my back and on my front.

I had a third passing thought, which was "why aren't they just glad I'm not a goddamned homo?" But I let that one go, because, again, just thinking about shit is, in the Christian tradition, the same as doing it.

OK, so is that the end of the story? No, it actually gets weirder. Are you still reading? Because this is the best part.

My parents never mentioned the incident. Never said ANYTHING. Just tore up my room like it was a crackhouse on 'COPS', had me prayed over like I was Linda Blair, and seemingly dropped the subject. No birds-and-the-bees lecture; no sitting me down and reading Song of Solomon together; NOTHING.

And then, about 2 weeks later, my folks announced they were going on some weekend retreat, and that my bro and sister would be staying with relatives. I, on the other hand, would be going to hang with some really old folks from church who lived way out in the middle of no-fucking-where. Why? I didn't know. This was new. Since at this point I was beginning to consider my childhood as an anthropological and sociopolitical study that must surely have meaning someday though it seemed meaningless in the present, I didn't argue. I just threw up my hands and said every teenager's default word, "whatever."

So they drove me out to Lancaster. If you don't live anywhere near L.A., that name will be meaningless to you. But if you do, you will realize that, at least back then, that was essentially the open desert outside of the sprawl. Just past Lancaster, it was believed, the Earth ended and you could hear, in the distance, the gradually dissipating doppler effect of people screaming " O..H.....S..H...I....T " as their cars tumbled off the sudden drop and into the abyss. I think there may have been a sign with an icon of a car falling off the end of the world, but if YOU saw that sign, do you think you'd stop in time? No, I don't think you would.

As my folks drove away, waving, the sound of rubber tires on gravel ringing in my ears, this very nice couple with very white hair welcomed me into their lovely (ranch-style! what a surprise!) home, even carrying my small suitcase for me. I knew them, at least at the level of attention a teenager pays to really old people who aren't related to them, and I knew they were nice folks. The kind who called you 'son' even though you're not their offspring, and if you were, you'd likely have grandchildren of your own. Yeah, they were THAT old. And what's really weird is, I think they're still alive. Which means that they've gotta be pushing a hundred and thirty or so, both of 'em. All I know is, their house smelled like a combination of freshly-baked bread and a methane refinery.

They set me up in their guest room, which had a desk, a bed, a nightstand, and a vase with flowers in it that were identical to the flowers growing right by their front door. There was a window facing the front gravel driveway, which was right off the main highway so you could hear cars rumbling by, when they came by, which didn't seem that often. And there were books everywhere in the room -- a wall of bookshelves and several books strewn about on the nightstand next to a lamp that was a cowboy boot with a lampshade on it. If I were seven, I think I would have gotten a kick out of that lamp. But I was almost fifteen, and all I got a kick out of was naked girls and science fiction stuff. Neither of these things were in evidence in this house where I was trapped for the weekend.

So I was unpacking my stuff (luckily I brought whatever Sci-Fi book I was reading at the time), and the old guy came in, asked me if I wanted a soda. I said "Yeah. Root beer." And then he said something really weird; something that I was going to hear a LOT as the weekend wore on. He said, "Now if you have any questions, feel free to ask us and we'll talk about it." I couldn't imagine what questions I might ask, other than "Why the fuck am I here?" so I just said, "OK. Thanks."

He took awhile with the root beer; I think it was in the garage and he had to search for it, because when he brought it, it was warm but served in a glass over ice like a cocktail. So while he was gone, I began to look around the room a bit. Everything was clean and prepared for my visit, as if I were the guest of honor or something. In a way, I thought that was kinda nice. Maybe my parents just wanted to help these old people out by having me stay with them; maybe they were lonely and their grandkids never came over or something. I started to feel kinda proud, like maybe my folks thought so highly of me that they figured I was just the kid to make these people's lives fuller, richer. Like a pet. For a minute I wondered if they were ever coming back -- but I quickly dismissed that thought as just my Dark Side coming through. It did that sometimes. Usually got me in trouble. Now it's there all the time, and usually keeps me OUT of trouble. Or maybe I need some antidepressants.

OK, so just when I was starting to feel like this wasn't so bad, Methuselah came back with my kiddie-cocktail and he again said the same creepy thing: "If you have any questions, feel free to ask us." Then he said, "Make yourself at home" and he left the room, closing the door behind him. It was then that I noticed that the door locked from the outside. In a moment of surreal paranoia that one gets as a wisecracking fourteen-year-old Sci-Fi fanatic, I ran over to the door and turned the knob to see if he'd locked me in. It opened. I was relieved. I snickered to myself uneasily. And then I looked more closely at the books on the nightstand, and I almost peed my pants.

Running around the room, I looked at ALL the books that were placed within my reach. The shelves were filled with books, every one of them about something Christian-related, like speaking in tongues or The Second Coming or whatever. Some were more mundane -- like Bible Concordances, biographies of famous Christian figures like St Augustine, daily meditations by Billy Graham, shit like that. But all the ones that were so carefully placed around the room at kid-level, flat on the desk and the nightstand, were about SOMETHING ELSE.

They were about SEX. Or, more appropriately, Young Christian Boys' Guides to Suppressing Sexual Urges. None of them were actually titled that way; they all had prissy little titles that skirted the issue, and they were all from the forties or fifties. Probably seemed recent to these people, who had likely known St Augustine personally. But there were several of them, and they all looked like someone had gone to great lengths to strike a balance between making them visibly available and yet somehow just haphazardly sitting there at random.

So all of a sudden it all made sense. "Oh my fucking god," I distinctly remember thinking. "You've got to be kidding me." The bible was right, after all. I had thought about girls, dwelled on the topic in fact, and now I was in Hell.

Yes, rather than sitting me down for 'the talk' as some parents might, they sent me away, to the house of these ancient people, who had probably last had sex in the back of a horse-drawn buggy, so I could learn the proper way for a Christian Boy To Handle His Urges.

It all dawned on me at once, so horrifying and absurdly funny at the same time, that I started laughing out loud. Whereupon there was a knock on the (as yet) unlocked door and, without a pause for a response to the knock, the old woman came in. And just what do you think she said? "Hi sweetie. If you have any questions about anything -- anything at all -- feel free to ask us, OK?"

"Um, OK. Thanks." I stammered out, not knowing what else to say. I wanted to hurl myself through the window and run screaming down the highway for someone -- anyone -- to stop and pick me up, the shards of glass poking out of my bleeding teenage face perhaps creating the sense of urgency needed for someone to actually pull over and help. She left the room, closing the door behind her, and I thumbed through one of the books just for the hell of it. It was ridiculous. There were even drawings in there, but not detailed drawings, lest they defeat their intended purpose of SUPPRESSING one's urges. Basically, masturbation is bad, and thinking about sex is bad, and the thing to do is think about something else (yes, they actually suggested baseball) and perhaps immersing oneself in cold water. Picturing Jesus on the cross, suffering for your sins, is also presumably an effective way of changing the subject in your mind -- or, from a gay friend of mine's perspective, an effective way of getting yourself a crucifix fetish. Right now there are doubtlessly thousands of gay men who re-enact 'The Passion' as part of their foreplay. It might not be a coincidence that 'stimulus' and 'stigmata' have the same latin root. After all, I don't think I need to belabor the point that the whole Priest/altar boy thing is seeming more and more the rule than the exception. I heard a rumor that they're going to kill 12 young boys and bury them with the Pope, all wearing nothing but swaddling clothes for the afterlife...

Anyway, after contemplating jacking off into every one of the books to make the pages stick together for the next poor sucker who gets sent here, I finally just decided to lie down on the bed and read the sci-fi book I brought with me. I don't remember which one it was. At some point there was another knock, and Moses asked me if I was ready for dinner. "Yeah," I said, both hungry and relieved that he wasn't coming in to ask me if I had 'any questions' again.

So I sat down with the two of them and ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans. Actually it was pretty good. Grandma could cook, as you would expect. And there weren't any little surprises in the food, like anti-masturbation bible verses printed on the plate under the potatoes. Everyone was real quiet while we ate, except when the Old Guy said grace before we started in -- and they didn't make me hold their hands, which I appreciated. I've always hated that shit; if somebody wants to pray, give thanks for the meal that was handed to them by God after they went to the store and bought all the ingredients with their Social Security money, that's fine. To each their own. But ninety-nine percent of the time, they wanna grab your hand while they're doing it. I don't even really like shaking someone's hand; I don't know where it's been, but I certainly know all the disgusting places my OWN has been and I can extrapolate.

So dinner was overall pretty quiet. lots of crunching and slurping and the occasional "How is everything? Would you like some more?" To which I always replied "Yes" because I was a fairly small but rapidly growing boy, and because as often as I masturbated, I needed the fuel. It's amazing how many calories you burn doing that. Fat guys should quit buying crap they'll never use like the 'Ab Lounge' on TV and instead buy a couple of 'Girls Gone Wild' videos. That'll burn those extra pounds in no time, as long as they use both hands and don't use one to snack on popcorn while they're doing it. Sorta defeats the purpose AND decreases the chance they're ever gonna meet a REAL girl to 'go wild' with.

After dinner, things were a little weird. We were all stuffed, and The Boys retired to the 'living room' while the oh-so-traditional white-haired granny did the dishes. I wondered if we were gonna light up some cigars with Bible verses on them or something, but then it dawned on me that, unlike MY house, which disgustingly smelled like stale cigarettes because my parents were fucking chain-smokers, this place didn't smell like that at all. No wonder my asthma wasn't bothering me for a change. Go figure.

But I could see the wheels turning, and I knew that Old Spice was gonna ask me the question again. You know, the one that asks if I have any questions. I actually DID have some questions, but these were kindly old people, and I really did like them, and I knew their intentions were good even though the whole thing was freekin weird, so I abstained. Because my questions wouldn't have been appropriate. I would have asked things like, "Can you still get it up after all this time?" or "Does Granny like it better from the front or behind?" or "When you guys are going at it, which is really hard for me to picture, do you speak in tongues and shout out 'praise Jesus' and shit like that?" But instead, of course, I was just quiet, except for the occasional "Man, that sure was good chicken, eh?" Then I noticed they had a jar of black licorice whips, which I love, so I asked for some, and they were happy to hand me a couple of whips. All I can say is, never eat candy that old people keep around. The licorice was so hard, I couldn't bite it. It would snap in half easily, but the pieces weren't chewable. These were antique licorice whips. Probably worth some money on that Antiques Roadshow thingy. "Yeah, carbon-14 dating reveals these to be the actual prototype for all other licorice whips. These were the first. Hold onto these a few more years and you can retire."

I've already mentioned this was 1977, and 'Star Wars' had just come out. The marketing was pretty esoteric on purpose, but those of us who were big into sci-fi already had some of the scoop. And we were all excited about it, because it was supposed to have the greatest special effects ever. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but before that, we had crap like 'Logan's Run' which looks like it was shot in a toy store with a WebCam.

Anyhow, so Father Time asks me if there's anything I'd like to do that night; anything I'd like to talk about. And I could tell he didn't wanna pressure me, and we had all of Sunday ahead of us (which I dreaded) the next day. So I said, "Well, I'd like to see 'Star Wars'-- that would be fun." And he said, "Star Wars? What's that?" And Grandma shouted from the other room, "That's that movie that all the kids are talking about -- the one with Alec Guinness in it." And he said, "Oh, I like him. He's a great actor." So they took me to see 'Star Wars' at the closest theater that was playing it, which was about fifty miles away.

And they both fell asleep halfway through it, so we stayed in the theater and I saw it twice. The rest of the series has been a bunch of happy meal commercials as far as I'm concerned; George Lucas is the luckiest and least-talented bastard ever to create an accidental moneymaking scheme. But the first one will always be a classic, because I was almost fifteen and it was Science Fiction, sorta, and because it saved me from a night of sex-talk with old people.

The next morning we went to church, which was all the way back in The Valley. And my parents were there, and I had never been so happy to see them before. Nobody said anything; I assume that my folks spoke to the old folks and they all figured I'd read the books and hopefully learned about the Facts Of Life from a 1940s Christian perspective, and didn't have any questions. So the topic never came up again. But my Playboys stopped coming in the mail, and I knew I was going to have to go back to using my imagination.

But now I had Princess Leia to think about...

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