Chapter 19

The Babysitter’s Boobs

Rachel with the red hair, red hair scares me

Rachel with the red hair, devil in her eye

Rachel with the red hair, red hair heartbreak

Rachel with the red hair, love her till I die

“Rachel With the Red Hair”

By the time I moved to Starmount Drive, I had already been married and divorced for three years. Her name was Rachel, and she was a redheaded mountaineer who lived across the street from me in Morgantown, West Virginia. True to the color of her hair, she was a firebrand who challenged my own redheaded sensibilities from the outset. She and I were all of three feet tall and completely full of ourselves. She was well aware that the sun shone down exclusively upon her, and, well, I was convinced that I was the sun.

Rachel was my first lesson, though certainly not my last, in the complicated attraction between the sexes. The confounding nature of girls was not something I could communicate at the time, but it was definitely something I experienced. I suppose Rachel could have said the same about little boys.

Our wedding was obviously not a shotgun wedding, but it was hastily arranged in my driveway, and everyone was there, including friends, parents, and neighbors who thought it was cute. We held hands and consummated the arrangement with alternating pecks on the cheek. Our vows were short and one-sided. Rachel found her voice much earlier in life than I did.

“You’re going to marry me,” Rachel said.

“Okay,” I replied.

“You’re my husband now, and I’m your wife.”

To which I replied, “I’m hungry, and I have to pee. I think I’m gonna go home now.”

Our brief marriage lasted all of two days, but it included a honeymoon and several vacations down the block and back on our bright-red tricycles. It also included a few fights about who should take the lead while tricycling and what was real about our imaginary world. We were five, going on six, and it would be another twenty years before I found myself in a similar predicament.

As far as romantic love goes, there is a natural cooling-off period for boys around age ten. At that point, they have surpassed the initial curiosity about the opposite sex and have survived the innocent “Aren’t they cute together?” parental push. By nine or ten, boys operate within the philosophy of, “If girls aren’t full-on gross, they’re at least certainly less fun to play with.” This built-in break is short-lived, but essential to developing the social, communication, and self-defense skills necessary for the uncontrollable hormonal onslaught to come. Adolescent dating can be a bit of a blood sport.

There were very few girls our age on Starmount, which meant that the competition between us remained uncomplicated. Showing off, at least for the next few years, was reserved for the glory of adventure. That is not to say that the subject of girls and the relationships we would have with them in the years to come were altogether absent from our conversations. But our limited knowledge made our discussions about the opposite sex relatively short and without much insight. After all, most of our information about love and sex came from the movies and TV shows we watched. Sometimes we were able to pick up bits and pieces of sexual insight from the arrogant ramblings of the neighborhood teenagers. But their words of advice mainly flew over our heads.

My first TV crush was unmistakably Kristy McNichol, from the popular show Family. This, of course, was the era before Beta and VHS recorders, much less TiVo, so I often Scotch-taped a note to the TV screen to remind me to watch the weekly drama.

Kristy McNichol was the perfect crush for a boy. She was beautiful, had the quintessential 1970s feathered hair, and a great tan to boot. Best of all, her character on the show, Buddy, was a tomboy. She was a girl with no aversion to racing her bike, playing outside, and getting dirty. Buddy was about as perfect a catch as a ten-year-old boy could hope for. Ironically, years later, the actress came out of the closet.

I heard the term “lesbian” only in passing, occasionally uttered in adult conversations or in confusing jokes bantered about by the teenagers. None of us knew what the hell it meant or had any hope of using it correctly. As a sign of the times, as well as of our awkward list toward adolescence, our ignorance found its way into the joke du jour on the school bus.

“You’re a Homo sapien.”

“No, I’m not; you are.” Everyone would laugh, none the wiser of our stupidity.

Still, if I had understood the term “lesbian” at the time and knew that it described the object of my TV crush, I’m sure it would not have changed the intensity of my devotion. When you are ten years old, you love stuff without question. You love your parents, your dog, candy bars, mud wars, fishing, your friends, and the girl on TV. You love them all, no questions asked.

My first brush with all things worldly and womanly came courtesy of one particular babysitter, who, in retrospect, I’m sure was high as a kite. For her, babysitting consisted of talking on the phone with her boyfriend, watching TV, and occasionally yelling at me and whatever friend I had over at the time, in some weak attempt at exerting her authority.

One night though, things got a little weird. It may have been the weed on her part or some prepubescent dare on ours. Maybe it was just part of her continued lame attempts to show us that she was the boss. But for whatever reason, she decided it would be a good idea to flash her boobs at a couple of ten-year-olds. The spectacle stopped me dead in my tracks. I remember my eyes bugging out of my head, and my mind blowing like a small amp circuit hit by a bolt of lightning.

With our retinas now permanently etched with the image of real live naked breasts let loose in my living room, Jim and I looked at each other, smiled the smile of the fortunate, and did what you might expect any self-respecting ten-year-old boy to do: we ran away. We ran as fast as we could, giggling, scared, and enlightened. We made tracks for The Fort in Jim’s backyard. It was much easier to revel in our newfound knowledge of women at a safe distance. We talked about how gross and how beautiful boobs looked. And laughed of course. We debated what they were there for and recounted what the teen boys in the neighborhood said they did with them. And laughed again. The babysitter’s lapse in judgment was our first, though certainly not our last, teachable moment on Starmount about girls and sex.

Before the end of the summer, we quite literally stumbled upon what seemed like the mother lode of all things taboo. One Saturday afternoon, the whole gang was rambling through the dark woods in the opposite direction of our favorite destination, Death Valley.

There was an old homeless man we called Crazy Jeb who lived in the less traveled part of the woods, beyond Hidden Pond, where we built fires and speared small bream. Jeb never bothered with us, but he was old, gray, and scary-looking. Our imaginations ran wild with the threats he could pose. Whenever we drifted too far into that part of the woods, we’d often see him at a distance and then run like hell.

We had been hiking in single file, no doubt barking Army orders at one another, when Matthew, walking point, came to an abrupt halt. I ran right into his back, almost knocking him to the ground. The rest of my friends followed suit behind me until we had all crashed into one another and were occupying the same square foot of ground.

“Look out, man.”

“Watch where you’re going.”

“What are you, blind?”

Each boy reacted with the same irritation, except for Matthew. He was standing there like a fence post, staring straight ahead.

“Guys, look,” Matthew whispered. “There he is.” Matthew pointed toward a bend in the creek, where a fallen pine tree took up most of the far bank. Crazy Jeb was sitting on that tree about a hundred yards from us. We stared at him, and he stared back.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tommy whispered.

“No, man; he’s not gonna do anything. He never does. Let’s just keep going,” Jim shot back.

It was not standard practice for us to avoid things, and I think our fear of Crazy Jeb finally gave way to our need to investigate our more distant curiosities. We walked in a large half-circle, curving away from Crazy Jeb. We kept one eye on him and one on the unfamiliar trail until it finally opened up into a larger fire road, which eventually delivered us to a clearing near the back parking lot of the Tallahassee Mall.

As we walked into that clearing, we could tell that we weren’t the only ones to have found it, which always annoyed us. We relished being first. Being first helped our credibility as explorers.

The clearing looked like a well-used backwoods camp. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was a prime teenage party spot for keggers and getting laid. On Friday nights, the older kids parked their cars in the large, anonymous mall parking lot and headed back into the woods with their girlfriends, their beer, their pot, and all of their adolescent angst. Fallen trees surrounded the clearing, with a fire pit defining the middle. Leftover Schlitz and Vienna-sausage cans littered the ground, and the butts of Pall Mall cigarettes pierced the old gray ash.

We talked about what this well-worn encampment represented. A secret Army outpost, the hidden lair of witches and devil worshipers, and a thousand other outlandish possibilities ran through our minds. Imagination always seemed to take us one step beyond where our feet could. We scoured the area for proof of our theories and any bounty worth hauling back to The Fort. Once we had shuffled through the dirt around the fire pit and cataloged its riches, we carefully made our way back to the camp’s perimeter, where the weeds grew tall and fallen tree limbs littered the forest floor.

Suddenly, Jim’s voice pierced the quiet camp. “Holy shit! Guys, you’re never going to believe this.”

High-pitched exclamations were standard fare for us. We had run across many things worth screeching about, like poisonous snakes, the occasional half-empty pouch of Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco, and a few rusted-out BB guns. So it was no surprise that Jim’s declaration instantly interrupted the intensity of our foraging. We turned to look at him; he stood dead still on the far side of a large fallen log, staring straight down. Maybe it was the startled look on his face or the hurried sound of his voice, but we all immediately dropped whatever treasure we were excavating and ran up to and over the log.

Standing next to Jim and looking down at his feet, we came face-to-face with what had stopped him in his tracks: the body of a naked woman.

“Oh my God,” I said as Larry Flynt’s girl lay spread-eagle across the open pages of that storied magazine like imagination-filled stars spread out across the universe. We stared at the picture, then at each other, and back again in an endless loop, trying to figure out exactly what to do with it. I mean, it’s not like you find a naked girl lying at your feet every day.

This magazine was no Playboy or risqué deck of playing cards. It was the famed Hustler magazine. We had seen ripped-up, soggy editions of both Hustler and Playboy during that trashy torrent down the ditch, but their rain-soaked condition, coupled with the fact that we were in my front yard and dangerously close to our parents, lessened the images’ power. This time, things were different. There was a naked girl lying there, smiling at no one else but us.

After the initial shock and adrenaline rush had begun to wane, we laughed. The laughter was life-saving; we needed to force ourselves to take at least one solid breath of air into our gasping lungs. After gathering our composure, or what was left of it anyway, we nervously turned the pages with varying degrees of dropped jaws and a few unrecognizable grunts. Our first utterances were predictable.

“Wow, man! Wow!”

“Yeah, that’s my girlfriend.”

“You wish.”

Then came the more honest and innocent questions.

“Hey, what exactly is…that?”

We pointed toward, but did not touch, the most spellbinding parts of the pictures. From a distance, we probably looked like a mini synchronized swimming team, with our heads tilting and our eyes widening in near-perfect unison.

We all shared the feeling that we were gazing upon a forbidden talisman. As captivating as it was, we knew we were risking bad luck and negative karma by fixating on it too long, so we buried our outlawed treasure under that fallen log, with earnest plans to return soon.

As we left the camp and headed back toward Starmount, you’d think that we had learned all there was to know about a woman’s body. We volleyed carnal knowledge back and forth all the way home and talked of manly conquest. But we walked away with more questions than answers and with an uneasy feeling of having crossed a one-way divide.

The 1970s lay squarely in the middle of what society dubbed the sexual revolution, but thankfully, in our particular orbit and at our innocent age, we were none the wiser of the liberation at hand. Still, I suppose the idea of sex and love having a decade of renaissance was freeing, even to us. We didn’t have to participate in it to benefit from it.

In our lives, the sexual revolution just meant that no one seemed to get too hung up on the concept of sex. These innocent incidents served to amuse and superficially titillate our senses, at least temporarily. Those moments, eye popping as they were, failed to overshadow our attraction to fishing, riding bikes, and throwing dirt clods. I can’t help but believe that if the same event happened to ten-year-olds now, it would result in a puritanical parental meltdown of epic proportions.

These days, it’s hard to imagine parents not completely losing their minds at the notion of sex toys washing down the street in broad daylight or their youngster running across a nudie magazine in the woods. And the mere thought of a babysitter flashing her boobs at her young charges would no doubt bring social services rappelling down the chimney like a jackbooted Santa Claus. I’m sure that in some cases, that reaction might be appropriate, but our parents did us a favor by never overreacting. Maybe they were never even aware of most of it. Still, the ground beneath us never seismically shifted because of our exposure to sex, and even if it had, our attention spans were short enough to keep us safely scattered and mostly unmoved.

That year, we were granted a sneak peek at the world we were hurtling toward, but without the guilt and darkness that often surrounds the subject of sex. With some of us barely into a double-digit age, the idea of and exposure to adult notions of sex was thankfully fairly innocent, leaving us without any emotional scars. All too soon, we would have to grapple with far more serious challenges like girls, actual sex, bad situations, and even worse decisions. But for the moment, that world was inoffensively exciting and harmlessly alluring.