I proved my incompetence early. At eleven years old, I was already a liability. Tried to warm up my little brother on a mattress with a goddamn hair dryer, left it unattended. An inevitable watch. I broke every rule in the babysitter’s handbook. Hell, I was only eleven myself, for Christ’s sake.
So when my mom, the disco queen, wanted to go out and shake her ass at the Star-Buc or the ‘ol watering hole, she had to find someone to watch the animals. The job fell to the people who watched us after school anyway: Joyce and her daughter, Meredith. Joyce was the mom. Meredith, a sixteen-year-old chubby girl, was the one my mom picked to watch over us on this particular night.
Our house was a dirty little place, but Meredith was used to it. It was white trash on white trash, two different slices from the same moldy loaf. Things seemed normal enough at first. Small talk, bored conversation. “Let me show you my room, show you this, show you that.”
Then, my brother was off in his bed watching TV, and Meredith somehow got herself onto my mom’s bed and called for me to come join her.
You’re too young to really know what’s happening, but you can smell it. That hormonal skunk on a person. You can see their mind working, cooking up new ideas. She started to expose herself. “Have you ever seen this before?” she’d ask, touching, guiding. “Put your lips on this.” She’d instruct me on what to do, and I’d do it. She’d respond with these uncomfortable giggles, but her body was moving in a way that was new to me. I couldn’t figure it all out, but I was okay with it. This went on until the pants were off.
What I saw down there… nobody should see at that age. It was disgusting. Not for a man my age now, maybe, but for that kid? It didn’t look edible, wasn’t candy. It was just… different, and strange. But somehow, with all the stimulation and stroking, my own manpower and juices got rolling. And what I’d been discovering by myself was now happening in front of another person. I was standing tall.
She guided me between her legs, her thighs squeezing my hips, maneuvering me, showing me what needed to be done. The ins and outs. A little fast, a little slow. I was like Pinocchio with strings on me; she pulled me this way, my body went that way. This lasted maybe ten minutes, which, hell, is probably more than the average grown man can produce. I was already ahead of the goddamn league.
But it all came to a screeching halt when my little brother, who I guess had been peeking, came running in. Butt-naked, screaming, he jumped right across my mom’s bed where we were tangled up, and ran out the other door.
We were officially caught. I’m sure she was more worried than I was that my little brother was going to report what had just transpired in our mom’s bedroom. She got dressed quick, already starting to reconstruct the story, to manage the narrative of what my brother had seen.
That was it. Eleven years old. That’s when I lost my virginity. I called it “The Nutcracker.” Of course, that first time, no nuts were cracked. My damn brother ruined that.
The second time was with the very next babysitter. And this time, I was the aggressor. I was still eleven. She was sixteen. I asked her some dumb question about how many Girl Scout cookies she’d sold. She looked at me all snotty, “I’m in high school,” she said. I couldn’t stay away from her. And with all her snobbiness, I broke through. I used the same lines Meredith had used on me, just flipped the script. “What are these? Let me touch those. Let’s see what happens when I put my lips on those. How’s it feel when I suck?” With all that mojo, I got my second notch. This time, the Nutcracker worked. Mission completed. They always said I had an old spirit inside me. At eleven years old, I was already two for two with my babysitters. I felt pretty damn proud of myself.
Shortly after, it was my twelfth birthday. My mom had this hot friend who I used to babysit for. I was always well-behaved for her. She came by the house. “You okay with this?” she asked my mom. My mom just grinned. “Go ahead, girl, make his day.” She calls me over, “Jimmy, come here.” Not even to the car. She grabs the back of my neck, shoves her tongue down my throat, and goes right at it. My first French kiss. She had to be in her thirties. It was my birthday gift.
I used to go down to the 7-Eleven, play video games with money I’d stolen from the guys who would come and go after spending the night with my mom. When the cashier’s back was turned, I’d grab a Penthouse magazine. My God, they were special. Penthouse, Playboy, these beautiful women. Then one day, I got a Hustler. It was absolutely disgusting. I remember sharing it with my friends in the neighborhood, and we were all equally repulsed, not knowing what the hell that was all about down there. I eventually got caught stealing. Humiliating. But they didn’t call the cops, just banned me from the 7-Eleven for life.
Then my mom bought us these long, bolster-style pillows. The tag used to hang off the end, so I ripped it off. In doing that, the threads came undone and left a perfect little hole. The pillow was about the same length as my torso. It didn’t take long before my natural instincts started putting that pillow to good use. Over and over again. That would be considered my first real girlfriend. I even named her: Suezie.
My mom’s friends would all come over to our house to get dressed up before they went out to the disco. And as women do, they were very comfortable with each other, walking around in their naked form. I’d seen my mom plenty of times, but there was something unique about watching these other women, flapping around like I was just some gay piano player they’d hired for the evening. Accepted in their crowd. “Oh, never mind him,” they’d say. “He’s just one of us.”
Little did they know, I had a pillow named Suezie upstairs I had to get back to.
High school? My first one, Cal High in Whittier, California, was a different world. I was the only goddamn white boy there, a nobody floating through halls that didn’t belong to me. And let’s get something straight about all those stories you hear: nobody saw my scrawny, big-eared, string-bean body as attractive. I was invisible. I had one old friend from first grade, and maybe some girl on the corner who looked interesting, but the air was thick with a low-grade gang bullshit that made you keep your head down. It was an intimidating, lonely place to be a kid.
Then my father decided to move me. He dressed me up like I was some forty-year-old engineer going to a job interview, drove me over to Artesia High School, and just… dropped me off at the curb. Like leaving a bag of laundry. I swear, looking back, that whole family had some kind of Asperger’s, some fundamental disconnect with how human beings are supposed to operate. He just drove away. I was left standing there, supposed to walk through the gates into a world I’d never seen, with no idea what the hell to expect, except that I should probably find the office.
I walked through those gates, and it was like stepping into a different goddamn country. Suddenly, everyone looked like me. White kids. Suburban kids. All of them.
I wasn’t twenty yards past the gate when this hot blonde practically jumped on me. Her name was Jodie. “Are you new here?” she asked, already taking my arm. “Come on, I’ll take you to the office.” She took me to the office. She took me to my classes. I was completely love-struck, a little dumb animal. I’d never seen so many beautiful blonde women in my life. In my old neighborhood, a girl like this was a myth. Here, they were everywhere.
Jodie was aggressive. Three days later, I’d added another notch to my belt. My third notch, at the ripe old age of thirteen. But I learned fast. I found out she was what they called a “village bicycle.” Everybody got a ride. That wasn’t a game I wanted to play long-term, not even as a freshman. So I cut it off.
Just like that, I was on a new path, a so-called “normal” path for a young man. Thirteen years old, a freshman in high school, on my own. And so began the goddamn journey into the world of female bliss. Or whatever the hell you want to call it.
Author’s Note:
You look back at a stretch of life like that, from eleven to thirteen, and you realize you didn’t have a childhood. You had an internship. A crash course in the ugly mechanics of the human animal.
The first lesson isn’t about love; it’s about power. One babysitter, Meredith, a lonely, chubby kid herself, teaches you the script. She shows you how the strings on the puppet work. She instructs, you perform. It’s awkward, it’s clinical, it’s disgusting. But it’s a lesson. And what do you do? You learn it so well that by the time the next babysitter comes along, you’re the one holding the goddamn script. You become the aggressor. You learn, real fast, that it’s better to be the player than the one getting played.
Then there’s the solo study, the lonely education. The stolen magazines. You learn there’s a difference between the airbrushed fantasy of Playboy and the raw, gynecological horror of Hustler. You learn what they’re trying to sell you versus what the thing actually is. You learn that the naked women getting ready for the disco, your own mother included, they don’t see you as a person. You’re a piece of furniture. A ghost. You learn that most of life happens without you, and that your only real, faithful companion is a goddamn pillow you named Suezie.
Then they drop you into a new jungle. Artesia High. And you get your next lesson: the marketplace.
You go from being invisible at Cal High, the lone white rat in a cage of toughs, to being… a commodity. The new thing. Suddenly the girls look at you. And you learn the most important lesson of all: your value isn’t fixed. It all depends on how rare you are in any given market.
That girl, Jodie, she wasn’t falling in love. She was closing a deal. You were new, you were there, you were a notch she wanted on her belt. And you, having learned your lessons from the babysitters and the magazines, you treated it the same way. A quick transaction. You assessed her value—a “village bicycle”—and you decided the long-term investment wasn’t worth it.
So what do you get from an education like that? You don’t get a well-adjusted kid ready for the prom. You get a survivor. You get a thirteen-year-old who already knows that sex is a currency, that vulnerability is a liability, and that “love” is just a word people use when they want something from you.
You get a kid who is perfectly, tragically prepared for the ugly, transactional world that’s waiting for him.
You get me.
