There aren’t many things I know for sure, but I feel pretty confident about this one: You should never tag along on someone else’s honeymoon. And if you do, you definitely shouldn’t bring your kids. I know this because my dad and stepmom crashed their best friends’ honeymoon with me and one of my pale and unenthusiastic friends in tow. I mean, who does that?
We were scheduled to go to the Maritimes on one of our patented type-A camping trips, but our painstakingly prepared vacation dossier was still a work in progress. My parents’ friends—let’s call them Bob and Donna—must have mentioned in passing that they would be honeymooning there and we should all meet up. An invitation, I’m sure, that was both halfhearted and insincere. The same way you might say, “We should all go out for Chinese food sometime,” or “Thank you for the show!” which is really just a polite way of saying “That show was terrible and you were terrible in it, but thank you for going to the trouble of performing it!” I’m also quite positive that at no time was it presented as an invitation to join in for the entire length of their honeymoon.
No matter to my father! It was as if Jeebus H. Christ Himself had emerged from a burning bush and deposited into his hands a solid gold tablet engraved with a diamond-studded invitation. Why the hell wouldn’t we go? And for that matter, why not make it a sixsome? We were camping, they were staying in a motel . . . what a terrific opportunity for all of us to grab a nice hot shower and maybe catch a football game on the boob tube! Maybe up to three! One right after the other!
Even at the tender age of nine, I felt awkward as my dad and stepmom enthusiastically dragged us to every event on the itinerary of their best friends’ postnuptial Maritimes extravaganza. I mean, it’s not like anyone would plan a trip out east without stopping at the Anne of Green Gables house to learn about old-timey bread baking, so why not carpool? We did everything with the newlyweds—lobster boils, clambakes, whale watching, fish-themed photo ops—all of it taking place with one giant elephant looming in the room at all times; namely, that the moment we were out of sight, Bob and Donna would be up in each other’s genitals within about five seconds flat.
Never before or since have I felt so acutely unwanted.
My friend, of course, was oblivious to the impropriety of the whole endeavor, as she sprawled across their pathetically underused marital bed and pored over every last detail of the emergency Josie and the Pussycats collection we had brought along for rainy days. (And it rained almost every day.) There is nothing on Earth less conducive to lovemaking than the sight of two greasy-haired nine-year-old children quietly fighting over the last piece of fudge in matching VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS satin jackets. Whenever the two of us got together, we had that weird kid smell that is reminiscent of Bubblicious but in the end is just the odor of unwashed clothes and sour prepubescent armpits. Innocent, but also gross.
I remember that vacation like it was yesterday . . . Bob’s eyes boring a hole in my skull as I got up to pour myself the last of his Cokes, leaving a trail of Bugles crumbs behind me large enough to have nourished a stranded Argentinean soccer team through some tough times. And Donna shuddering as we stoically refused her offer of Kleenex to blow our snotty noses, preferring to reinhale our rattling boogers at annoyingly irregular intervals.
It was the death of sex. No one could do it. And no one could really do the things that would have made it okay not to be doing it, like smoking pot and telling racist jokes, seventies-style.
When we weren’t numbing our tender skin in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean or pillaging the all-you-can-eat cold lobster tables at the church picnic we crashed, we watched a lot of television in their motel room. At the time, women’s tennis was a big deal. Lots of drama and high stakes. Even for non—tennis-playing Canadians who were busy tagging along on their soon-to-be-ex-friends’ honeymoon.
And so there we were, inside on yet another Maritimes gray day watching the Wimbledon ladies’ singles quarterfinals, a hard-fought battle between the Lady Titans of Tennis, Chris Evert and a certain Miss Billie Jean King, when it happened . . The Slip Up.
In the heat of sexual frustration, his tongue loosened by liberal consumption of Canadian Club and warm Tab, Bob uttered the words that shattered our vacation bliss. He called Billie Jean King a “carpet muncher.”
The sudden intake of breath in the room was audible, all oxygen sharply inhaled by my father and my stepmother. They were certain that this was the first time my girlfriend or I had ever heard smutty language in our short lives. We were only nine. We were barely toilet trained, right?
The tone of the evening went from pleasantly drunk to stone-cold sober. The TV was turned off. Multiple cigarettes were extinguished. The axis of the Earth shifted incrementally under our feet. Code Red. Situation Not Normal. Crisis-Stage-Extreme-Danger. Threat Assessment DEFCON One, Involving Imminent Sex Talk With A Minor.
My stepmother’s eyes, instantly rimmed with red, looked like a pair of saucers spinning in her head. She wordlessly commanded my father to: Fix. This. Situation. Donna exchanged a look with her husband that said, I was planning to have sex with you, but now I’m just mad. And Bob shot us a look that said, Get the fuck out of my room. I’d like to have angry sex with my wife now.
But instead, my father sat us down for an explanation of lesbianism . . .
“You know how ‘work Jackie’ always wears really sensible shoes—”
My stepmother interrupted him, her voice breathless and about three octaves higher than it would normally have been, and her eyes glittering with promise. There was a thought bubble above her head that seemed to say, “I’m doing it. I’m really doing it! We’re having The Talk!”
“Sometimes . . . when a woman . . . loves another woman . . . who isn’t her husband . . . No, cancel that. A lady sometimes doesn’t want to marry a man. She wants to marry a lady. And then one of them is the lady lady, and one of them is the man lady. Tennis players are different . . . sometimes. Also, lady field-hockey players sometimes don’t like boys. I mean, they like boys, but they don’t like like boys. Oh, gosh . . . Remember the time we went for brunch and we saw that lady who sort of had a beard . . . ?”
I was mortified, and looked over at my girlfriend to see if this was all registering with her, but she was too busy daydreaming to notice the runaway train that was thundering through the motel room. She hadn’t spoken a single word to any of the adults so far on the trip, and even when she occasionally spoke to me, it was in such an eerily quiet tone that only a nine-year-old girl or a dog could hear it. I’m pretty sure that Bob and Donna thought she was a deaf-mute, albeit one who could miraculously sense the vacuum seal breaking on a can of Pringles from a mile away.
I was eager to let the whole thing go, when my friend asked casually “But what’s munching the carpet got to do with anything?” All the clocks in the room simultaneously stopped ticking. Of all the times to pipe up, why had she chosen this as her first foray into conversation territory? Why now? There had been plenty of excellent opportunities up to that point. Where had she been when my parents were debating a diversion to the world’s longest covered bridge, in lieu of an extensive tour of the region’s plentiful french fry-based snack trucks? Thanks to her indifference, I had had to watch my dream of a fried potato smorgasbord vanish into thin air, while we ate soggy egg sandwiches by the side of the road and stared at a bridge all day. I would remember this. After a long sigh, my father’s shoulders visibly sagged under the heavy burden he was about to lift.
Desperate not to scar us for life or encourage us to pursue alternative lifestyle choices, my parents knew they were in the shit. This was it. The heart of darkness. They were about to explain the fundamentals of lesbian sex to two impressionable nine-year-olds, and they had to do it in such a way that minimal information would be supplied but no further questions would arise. There was no going back until the job was done. But first, as a prelude, they would have to explain the regular facts of life to put everything in the proper context.
My father was as red in the face as if he had just swallowed a scorpion and it was stinging him from inside his throat. It was partially from having to explain sensitive material to us but mostly from having to do so with the knowledge that he was missing precious television time. My stepmother appeared to have inhaled the contents of a helium balloon, her voice so thin and so high that like my girlfriend’s, it was barely audible to human ears: “When a man . . . and a woman . . . want to make a baby, they make love . . . which is to say, that the man’s penis goes into the lady’s vagina and he basically, um, LAYS AN EGG INSIDE OF HER that becomes a baby eventually.” My father chimed in, helpfully: “But when two ladies want to make love . . . it’s like TWO DOUGHNUTS BUMPING UP AGAINST EACH OTHER, and then they munch each other’s rugs.”
My friend was disgusted by this, and turned away, done. I sat, paralyzed with fear that this conversation would continue even one nanosecond further.
“Clear?”
I nodded vigorously.
I didn’t want to tell them, because I didn’t want them to feel bad about having missed the opportunity to teach me something, but I was already quite acquainted with the regular facts of life, and perhaps even more so with some of the irregular facts of life. My mother was fixated on the notion that it’s unhealthy to prolong childhood innocence past the age of, say, seven. Trying to toughen me up, she routinely mocked me for my devotion to disco music and my childhood ambition of becoming Kate Jackson. Whenever I was at her place, she was happy to let me do the grocery shopping and cook dinner on my own for both of us while she was out. I took the subway to school by myself, got myself to bed at a time I thought an adult would approve of, and shopped for all my own clothing. Naturally, this meant that I had free rein to choose my own outfits for school, which produced many near heart attacks on the part of my grandmother, who also happened to be the secretary at the Catholic school I attended. White short-short suede hot pants, black nylons (with reinforced toes), and a pair of open-toed high-heeled clogs, for example, on the first day of first grade.
My self-directed ensembles were usually some confused attempt to combine the uniforms of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders with the somber aspect of a Portuguese widow. Whenever my mother prepared lunch for me, which was sporadic, it usually meant slapping last night’s leftovers onto canapé crackers and throwing them into a Baggie to be sorted out later, presumably by me. Imagine my surprise when I opened my lunch box one day to find that the extremely rare roast beef my mom had prepared the night before had exuded so much blood into the plastic wrap that my sandwich looked like an IV bag I was planning to administer for lunch. Well, at least it drew people’s eyes away from my outfits for a while. My report card read “Cries easily.”
One evening, as I carefully prepared my dollies for bed with their silky pajamas and pin curls, my mom literally threw a little red book at me from across the room with a “Here. Read this. Let me know if you have any questions.” It took me about half a day to get through, and afterward, oh, did I have questions. The book contained the most explicit descriptions of every sexual proclivity in existence—I had a lot of questions:
“Is it the man that pees on the woman or the woman that pees on the man?”
“What if you forget your safe word?”
“Do we have any shlurp bars in Toronto?”
“What’s your safe word?”
“What if you go to shrimp someone and they haven’t washed their feet?”
“What should my safe word be? Is alphabet soup too obvious?”
Soon, not only was I familiar with the basics of male-female sexual intercourse, I could explain in great detail what bukkake was. I could give you the rundown on a Cincinnati Bowtie, or perhaps even take you through the intricacies of a German Scheisse video. So a year later, a simple carpet munch between two robust female athletes held little mystery for a savvy youngster like me.
Also, my mother had several gay male friends who were unbelievably daring and promiscuous, it being the late seventies and all. They would come over for dinner and regale us with tales of their sexual conquests, which were many and varied, and seemed to have all the impact on their lives of an itchy mosquito bite or a really satisfying sneeze. Carl was into nipple clamps and cock rings, while Keith was more of a fisting kind of guy. But they seemed willing to do it any which way with just about anyone who entered their eye line and gave them a lingering look. I’ll never forget the day we sat around the kitchen table eating spaghetti and meatballs, which I had made, as Carl described to me the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation. As I cradled my gerbil, Pierrepont, tightly in my hand, I felt my childhood officially end.
The peripheral benefit of all this knowledge was a sharp uptick in playground popularity. Star Wars role-play was the game of choice in our neighborhood, but it was frustrating for me to be the only one who had actually seen the movie. I had spent many a recess trying to explain the fine points of the plot to my slack-jawed third-grade cohorts, only to hear infuriating cries of “Fetch me the Siberian Emerald!” from the fat kid playing Uncle Owen. I tried to reason with them, but in the end, they played the game they wanted and certainly never let me play the coveted role of Princess Leia. When everyone was sick of hearing me bitch about how poorly they were doing things, I was usually relegated to playing R2D2 and speaking in bleep-blop-bloops in my quest for vérité.
But armed as I was with knowledge of water sports and necrophilia, Star Wars role-play took on a whole new meaning.
Suddenly Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker were a whole lot more knowledgeable about each other’s bodies. If only we’d known then that they were actually brother and sister! That would have gotten them talking back on Tatooine! Who knew that Dark [sic] Vader was such a freak for B&D! Although, to be fair, his gimp mask was something of a dead giveaway. And Chewbacca. I mean, I was pretty sure there was something off about his relationship with Han Solo, but once I realized they were both into Furries, it all started to make sense.
The children on the playground began to rely on my breadth of perverted knowledge to spice up our below-average games. Soon I had graduated from my nonspeaking role as the unattractive midget robot and been promoted to the position of “rarely speaking robot who executive produces the playground.” No matter. Whatever tertiary character I had been assigned would end up with the most spectacular kink of all. Remember that scene in the movie when C3PO mounts all the dead Jawas? Of course you don’t.
Sadly, even with all of these ideas coursing through my head, the thing that really disgusted me more than anything was plain old French kissing. I mean, it’s one thing to run around dumping chocolate pudding down the back of your lover’s diaper as foreplay, but to look him straight in the eye and stick your tongue in his mouth? That’s unhygienic and just plain ridiculous. And because of that, I flat-out refused to expose my Barbies to it.
I did, however, subject them to a range of sexual situations that would have turned anyone’s parents’ hair white if they had stood and listened outside the door for more than three consecutive seconds.
There were six main players in my coterie of dolls: G.I. Joe (macho, good-looking), Wonder Woman (hot carpet-munching neighbor, not interested in G.I. Joe, busy with athletics), Marie Osmond (career gal, smart, brunette), Ken (gay, obviously), regular Barbie (slutty, dumb, eternally single), and an old-timey Barbie from the sixties with a bouffant hairdo (smoker’s cough, swinger).
Naturally, everybody in town was divorced and self-employed, with loads of spare time for their standing appointment with afternoon delight. At any one time, you might find my doll collection in multiple ménage à trois in the Barbie Dream House. Obviously, G.I. Joe possessed the only feasible penis in town, but you could always count on Ken to be looking on and jerking off in the corner. Nobody was too hot for bouffant Barbie either, but she was keen to participate and would always do nice things, like make sure everybody had enough snacks to keep their energy up and plenty of lemonade for hydration.
Everyone was nude most of the time, and when they weren’t, they were largely festooned with what appeared to be bedsheets fashioned into easy-access togas. It was basically like Caligula in there. Mostly they spent their time hopping in and out of one another’s beds, getting caught cheating, having long, laborious conversations about honesty, switching partners, and getting caught cheating again. Also, they adored the music of Fleetwood Mac and would routinely hold naked dance parties out on the Barbie sundeck.
Everyone in my family thought my love of my Barbies was fanciful and adorable. “Oh! You’re talking to your Barbies again! What are they saying to you?” I repeatedly tried to explain that I was not talking to them, I was talking for them, and they were saying some very sexually adventurous things, to say the least. Regular Barbie was upstairs in the den right now tasting the forbidden fruit of Wonder Woman, while old-timey Barbie fetched some clean towels to cover the cream-colored sofa. It wasn’t called the Barbie Dream House for nothing!
Soon after giving me the little red sex book to read, my mother decided that it would be okay to bring all of her pornographic material out of exile and pop it back on the bookshelf where it belonged, beside the Boz Scaggs records and dog-eared copy of Silent Spring. Movies, toys, magazines—all of them in plain sight—and we took it all in as casually as one might read the Sunday paper. When I discovered a cache of pseudo-Victorian erotica, my dolls started to reference their body parts as “cunnys” and “quivering quims.” I thought it was hilarious and figured that my wealth of perverse knowledge would continue to make me a very desirable playmate.
After a while, none of my friends wanted to play dolls with me anymore. I can’t really blame them. My expertise had begun to wear on them. It was too much information for them to handle, and too boring for me to have to explain everything over and over again. All of my girlfriends were too preoccupied with Barbie’s ever-changing hairstyles to worry that she wasn’t getting enough in child support payments, or that she had a fender bender with a handsome new neighbor that she was going to invite over later for a snort.
At the time, their indifference barely registered with me. I was very caught up in these dirty games and didn’t have time to waste on my friends’ dolls’ babyish backstories. My dolls had rich social lives and theirs were bona fide squares—teachers, doctors, vets. Talk to me when your Barbie can work a double shift at the casino, hitchhike home because her car’s in the shop, throw together a quick tray of hot Vienna sausages for her friends, and have lesbian sex while her hair sets in rollers for the impromptu block party she’s hosting in the back room of the hair salon that night. Then maybe we can play.
My mother and her boyfriend would host dinner parties, and at the end of the meal, everyone would just retire to the living room to watch a classic porno instead of a regular movie. There would be popcorn and Rice Krispies squares and lots of convivial conversation. No one was sitting there staring at the television like a pervert in a raincoat at the XXX theater. It was just a bunch of hip adults having a laugh and watching people bang each other. If I happened to come home in the middle of a movie, I would just join the gang and watch along with everyone else. Sometimes things required a little explaining. Most times not.
But my father and my stepmother held staunchly to their belief that children needed to be children; the less information, the better. Their knuckles were white from clinging to the idea of fostering an idyllic childhood. I’m not really sure where it came from, since neither one of them had enjoyed the kind of picture-perfect upbringing that needed to be cryogenically frozen and cloned for the enjoyment of all.
But it was sweet. Leaving packages from Santa until I was well into my twenties. Refusing to swear in front of me until I was almost forty. It still makes my father sputter like a rusty lawn sprinkler when I drop an F-bomb on him.
So when my dad and stepmother tried to have The Talk with me during Bob and Donna’s ill-fated honeymoon, I wanted to tell them that I was already familiar with plain old boring lesbianism. I really did. But I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to take away their big moment. Even at that early age, I understood that part of forging a healthy relationship with people you don’t see all the time sometimes involves asking questions that you don’t really need the answers to and letting someone think they are helping you when you don’t really need their help at all.
I also wanted to tell Donna and Bob that I got it. We were interlopers. I wanted to apologize for not getting our own hotel room to defile with our wet socks and morose expressions and joyless Deney Terrio Dance Fever routines. I was sorry we were getting in the way of their conjugal privileges, too.
But after so many rainy days of observation, I was starting to doubt that they were up to the task as a couple anyway. Having watched so much pornography at an impressionable young age, I had naturally begun to equate sexual prowess with having a great tan, and Bob was pretty pale. Donna was no vixen either; she barely ever wore white high-heeled shoes around the motel room, and she wasn’t much of a hostess either. I mean, what was up with all the sour faces? And she hardly ever bought enough Hawaiian Punch or squeeze cheese to satisfy the gnawing hunger in our growing bellies.
In my play world, the drinks were fresh and free-flowing, the rumaki were hot, and the swingers were all passably attractive. I was beginning to suspect that things weren’t necessarily the same in real life. But why expose a nine-year-old to that kind of a downer? Let children be children, for God’s sake. There’s no need to be cruel about it.