1946: I turn seven
A Man Who Never Went to War
The goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to dictates of conscience and society, must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.
-Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years
On the radio, Winston Churchill warned of an “Iron Curtain,” Bernard Baruch coined “Cold War,” and President Harry Truman urged “containment” at all costs.
In my first grade classroom, there was a short blonde girl with whom I’d been in love since the first week of school. When my family found out, they called it puppy love. I knew differently. At night, every night after saying my prayers, I imagined myself with her while giving myself a burst of pleasure uncontained, greater than any other.
Noontime at school one day, waiting our turn at kickball, a second grader — nice kid, but a Catholic — came up to me and my cousin, Henry, and whispered that he had seen his mother’s “bird.” This was something we’d never heard. I asked him if she had it in a cage. He laughed. He spit. No, he said he had seen it when he peeked in at her taking a bath. Said it was black and hairy.
That afternoon Henry and I decided it was a good time to stop at the grocery store and steal some apples. We had them in our pockets when one of the butchers behind the meat counter came toward us. After we’d returned the apples, the butcher told us to follow him. Soon we were in a huge freezing cold room looking at cows and pigs that had been sawed in half, hanging on huge hooks attached to the ceiling. If we ever stole again, we’d be put in this room, he said.
We never stole again.
On the way home, Henry said he had a joke that his father had told him. “There were these twin boys still inside their mother, and one day one twin asked the other what he wanted to be when he grew up. The other twin said he wanted to become a fighter pilot, then asked his brother what he wanted to be. The baby said, ‘I want to become a boxer, so I can punch that big red thing that comes in here every night.’”
Once walking home Henry and I debated where we came from — that is, from what part of our mother’s body. Our theories were two. Out the back or out the front. We knew what else came out the back, and wanted nothing to do with it, so we settled on the front, what bad boys called the “cunt.”
In April, I turn 7. The sun warms a field of tall grass next to our house, where I lay with my beagle, Gypsy, holding her and running my hand over the sweet nipples of her fat tummy — in turn she looks to my face and licks my chin.
Read more of A Man Who Never Went to War: 1948: I turn eight
