Twenty years ago this month, my first published short story appeared, in a well-regarded, now-defunct fiction journal out of Chicago called Other Voices. I'd originally written the story for an application to a three-week summer fiction intensive at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, taught by the late, great storyteller Frank Conroy, then the director of the program and one of the country's more notable writing teachers. I was just beginning to experiment with fiction, drafted the story in a rush after seeing the notice in Poets & Writers magazine, and to my shock and delight, was admitted.


I spent a month at the University of Iowa, living in a grad-student dorm, spending three hours twice a week in workshop, and coffeeshop-writing and bookstore-hopping and pub-crawling the rest of the time with the other storytellers and poets present, tasting the literary life. When my story came up for critique, and the other students were finished giving their opinions, Conroy peered at me over his glasses and rumbled, "You're a journalist, aren't you?" I nodded; he nodded back. "I can usually pick them out." He said he could tell by the realistic dialogue and plain description. He was at turns unsparing and flattering in his read, then took me aside after class to say, "Polish this up and publish it." Other Voices was in the story's first round of submissions, and when I got the voicemail from the editor saying it would appear, I fumbled the receiver in disbelief.


Sadly, Other Voices was struggling to make ends meet, as literary journals do, especially when not being funded by some larger entity like a university. A year later it disappeared, reconfigured briefly as a producer of books, an imprint of the indie press Dzanc Books, which is joyfully still around and winning awards.


Other Voices had a rudimentary online presence, and my story existed only in print, alongside work by wonderful writers like Janet Desaulniers and Jeffery Renard Allen. On this 20th anniversary, I'm reviving the story and reproducing it below, in hopes readers might still enjoy reading it, as I enjoyed writing it and still cherish it today. Anyone who knew my one-of-a-kind mother might especially appreciate her cameo.


Scary things happened in Teejay’s basement. That’s why we were always down there.


Back then the rage in our Milwaukee lakeshore suburb was to finish your basement into a rec room. You’d put in a wet bar, ping-pong or billiards, indoor-outdoor carpeting, rough-cedar paneling, dimmable light fixtures – as if you’d want to sit underground and then dim the lights – an old refrigerator for beer and pop, and a television wired to an enormous outdoor antenna so you could pull in the Packers from Madison back when home games were blacked out on TV. Then you’d do all your entertaining downstairs instead of up in the actual house with the overstuffed leather furniture and the deep-pile carpeting and the picture windows framing the willows and maples and little landscape pond.


The main attraction of Teejay’s house was that it did not – repeat, did not – have a finished basement. It had a basement like a basement was meant to be: webs in the ceiling joists, visible utility boxes, torn furniture, discarded toys, overflowing crates of junk all over the place – sort of an indoor supplement to the garage. This was our kind of place, Teejay and me and our reprobate pals. In one corner was Mr. Greenwalt's L-shaped work bench. We’d put a golf ball in the vise and hack it open with a handsaw, rubber windings flying everywhere, the liquid center oozing out. (Teejay tasted it once. I thought he’d die, but he just looked at me and said, “Salty.”) We’d build sprawling forts out of garden trellises and scrap wood and dirty blankets. We’d dump iron filings on the floor and make wild patterns with bipole magnets, then sweep the whole shebang down the sewer drain. We’d take big ball bearings and whip them as hard as we could against the foundation wall, just to see how they’d carom. One time a ball bearing bounced into the pilot light of the water heater and roasted white-hot before we could budge it out of there with a steel rod and douse it with a cup of water. Thank god the floor was concrete – if they’d had carpet down there we’d have burned the house down.


Our hijinks rarely brought Teejay’s parents to the basement. For one thing, they were overweight and reluctant to descend stairs. For another thing, Teejay’s older brother Jamie was what we then called “mental” and generally required to remain above ground. Not kid-slang mental – somebody-call-a-doctor mental. The Greenwalts must’ve assumed that any trouble we could make downstairs paled next to what Jamie might perpetrate upstairs if not kept under constant surveillance.


They were wrong.


“Check it out, Matt!” Teejay would say, ushering me into a tiny toilet enclosure in a remote corner of the basement. “Check out the bone!”


Teejay could carry me aloft with one arm, so protesting wasn’t of much use. He’d unbutton his brown jeans and yank them down along with his underwear, emitting a puff of relief as “Rudolph” sprang free. It was a sight to behold, especially if you’d never seen a mature erection before – it seemed to be craning its neck, sniffing the air, like a nocturnal rodent roused from its burrow. Spiraling black hairs were already erupting by the hundreds from Teejay’s paper-white pelvic skin, far more impressively than on top of his head, where his mother would inflict a jagged, serial-killer haircut once a month. I don’t know what bothered me more: the prospect of soon having a Rudy of my own, or the reality of not having one yet.


“My god, Teejay,” I’d say, leaning away from Rudolph.


“This happens every time I think about Annemarie Stelzenberg,” he’d say. Annemarie was the prettiest girl in sixth grade by open consensus, and I had sort of a crush on her myself, but it never affected me or my little bald nubbin quite like that.


I’d go home, lock myself in my bedroom, and attempt to follow Teejay’s improbable but detailed instructions on spending profitable time alone with one’s penis. I’d fantasize clumsily about Annemarie in various poses and situations I thought might be provocative. As a visual aid I might extract my collection of permanently creased Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds from their hiding places, little boxes which formerly housed playing cards, tucked away in a bottom desk drawer. My classmates had won these erotic treasures at considerable risk, stealing them out of older brothers’ rooms or off carelessly attended convenience store shelves. I wasn’t brave enough to filch them myself, but I was popular enough to receive them as gifts when other boys got tired of them.


The pictures were of no value to me. No number or combination of them would inspire my timid organ, and neither would the contemplation of Annemarie or any of her cadre of almost-as-pretty girlfriends. Discouraged, I’d put the sex aids away and flick on a baseball game. Then I’d get a boner. That’s the way it was. I’d get a hard erection doing homework or making toast, but never when I had any use for it. It was an arrow pointing nowhere – except back toward Teejay’s basement to start the confusion all over again.


Nighttime was the best time of all in the basement. The Greenwalts had smoked windows in the window wells, so if you jammed towels under the crack of the doorway at the top of the stairs and turned out the lights, it would be pitch-dark in the basement. You could be standing close enough to feel someone’s breath and not know who they were. This made for all sorts of games and adventures. Our favorite was blind tag. The person who was “it” would have to find someone who was hiding somewhere in the nothingness, figure out who it was, and scream out his name. That person would become “it,” and the rest of us would scramble around for another hiding place, bumping into each other and giggling and swearing.


We must’ve played hundreds of rounds of blind tag back in fifth and sixth grade. The most memorable by far was the last one. It occurred on the night after Thanksgiving, November twenty-fourth, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Two.


We thought we’d have no fun at all because it was Jamie’s birthday and he was being allowed to play with us against our will. Though Jamie was turning fifteen and was head-and-shoulders taller than any of us, he was Teejay’s little brother for practical purposes because of what the senior Greenwalts referred to as his “condition.” Teejay said Jamie was insane, but I was never sure if that was literally true or if it was just a brotherly exaggeration. Jamie looked normal. He had alert Hawaiian-blue eyes and fine whitish-blond hair, and unlike the rest of his family he was tall, solid, sinewy – “too hyper to be fat,” as Teejay put it. But he didn’t act normal. He was prone to fits of mania and aggression more typical of a toddler; I’d seen him cry and wail and dance around like he had to go to the bathroom when denied his way. He could talk OK – in fact, he had a striking vocabulary – but it was manifested in an odd, little-brotherish manner: chattering, ceremonious, a child’s parody of an adult.


Counting Jamie there were six of us in for blind tag the night after Thanksgiving. Still sluggish from holiday dinner and the subsequent leftovers, I decided to hide for a round or two by lying like a corpse on an old, scratchy sofa pushed up against a wall. Just after I lay down, another boy had the same idea, sneaking over and diving face-first right on top of me. It was obviously Jamie: He covered me like a quilt. He knocked the wind half out of me, and a gasp escaped from him, but we dared not make another sound, because Teejay was out there somewhere, roaming the basement like a ghoul, trying to find someone to tag.


Jamie began patting my face, trying to recognize me. It didn’t take long. “Aw, Matt,” he whispered, in a dead-on impression of his younger brother. “We are screwed.”


I found his ear and breathed into it: “Get out of my hiding place, you big brat.”


We started to giggle. It got worse and worse, until we were squeaking the sofa springs trying to hold it in. I snuggled under Jamie, fearful that Teejay would hear our commotion and start heading our way. Jamie tried to wrestle me out from under him so that his brother would tag me first. I buried my face in Jamie’s neck, wanting to hide my recognizable parts.


Jamie fell still for a moment. Then he dug his chin into my shoulder and began to shift from side to side atop me, like a soldier crawling serpentine across the battleground. At first I thought he was itchy, that he was trying to scratch himself against me or his own clothes. “Mmmm,” he said. “Mmm-mmm.”


I felt an erection forming. Not mine.


I’d never heard of being humped by a boy. Homosexual, faggot, queer – we weren’t using those words yet. “Fem” was what we called a boy who behaved like a girl, but that was mostly about gender, not sex. What Jamie was doing to me on that sofa seemed anything but femmy. It felt male, startlingly male, male enough to make a boy my age and size seem girlish by comparison.


I had a momentary urge to cry out for Teejay, overcome by a more powerful desire not to be discovered in this position. Though Jamie had my shoulders pinned securely, my hands were more or less free; I tried to push him up and away. If anything, it seemed to encourage him. Then I tried clamping my arms around his ribs and stifling him. That didn’t work, either – it was like clinging to a bobbing raft.


I felt Teejay’s knees bump into the arm of the sofa, at our feet. Then he grabbed hold of my ankle. “Aha!” he said.


He felt his way up our legs, starting and restarting, muttering quizzically to himself, slow to catch on that he’d stumbled upon two people at once, as opposed to a four-legged person he hadn’t remembered inviting. Jamie’s churning slowed, became circumspect.


Teejay brushed my ear with his hand. Then he stuck a finger in my eye. I yelped and convulsed, dumping Jamie onto the floor, where he landed in spasms of squealing laughter. Then I jumped up and clocked my head against a heat duct that ran across the ceiling and into the wall above the discarded sofa. I was outgrowing the basement.


“Ow!” I said, doing a jig from the pain. “God damn it!”


“What happened?” said Teejay.


“I bumped my goddamned head! God damn it!”


“Did I poke you in the eye, Matt?” Teejay asked.


“Yes, god damn you!”


“Then you’re it!”


And off we all went, running like imbeciles around the black, grimy basement. I spent the rest of the game giving the sofa a wide berth, determined to tag anyone but Jamie.


Just before I left that night, Teejay caught me by the arm and took me aside, into the Greenwalts’ heavily stocked kitchen pantry. “What was my brother doing to you down there?”


You tell me, I thought. “We picked the same hiding place at the same time.”


He took hold of the front of my shirt to pull me within whispering distance. “Listen. You gotta watch out for my brother. He’s, like, a sex maniac.”


A sex maniac! Placed in those stark, adult terms the thought of it almost made me laugh, regardless of the evidence in Teejay’s favor. “How?” I said. “He’s got the brain of an eight-year-old. You told me yourself.”


“I’m not kiddin’, Matt. Stay out of his way. There’s reasons he never gets to play with us.”


“Geez, Teejay. You’re the one who’s always showing me your penis.”


“Yeah, well, at least I don’t try to use it on you.”


Before he could expound on that, Mrs. Greenwalt called us out. She didn’t like Teejay being in her pantry; he had a tendency to open new packages of things.


The next day our phone rang late in the afternoon. Mom spoke for a minute or so, then turned the phone over to me. The voice on the other end was adult and female, and there was some sort of commotion in the background.


“Hello, Matthew? This is Mrs. Greenwalt – hold on.” She muffled the mouth of the receiver. “Jamie! Would you please? I have him on the phone, all right?” The background interference ceased. “I’m sorry, Matt. Say, I’m calling to ask you a favor. Now you don’t have to do this. You just tell me if you feel funny.”


“OK.” Something about the call was making me queasy; grownups didn’t talk like this to kids.


“I was wondering if you’d like to walk over Monday and be our guest for dinner, and maybe spend a little time with Jamie afterward. I think Teejay’s told you” – she lowered her voice – “that his brother has some, you know, problems. He has a hard time making friends at school.” Volume back up. “He’s taken a real shine to you, Matt. He’s been asking if you can come over.” Volume down again. “You’re probably going to be bored, I know, but if you could just humor him for a little while, it might pick up his spirits. It might do him some good.”


I stammered. A shine to me? Was that what that was?


“Just a little while, Matthew. I’d sure appreciate it. He doesn’t have much to do at home, except play with his brother, and, well, you know how brothers can be...could you walk over Monday? Around 5:30?”


I said yes, but I anticipated my mother would save me – that she would prohibit me from spending time with Teejay’s brother if I posed it to her in a way that sounded even mildly foreboding. She was from Italy and she was raising me the way Italian mothers raise sons, as art pieces, primarily for the display and edification of the holder. No way could I tell her what had actually happened on the basement sofa – Jamie’s life would be in danger – but I didn’t think I’d need to.


“Mama, Mrs. Greenwalt wants me to go over Monday and play with Jamie. Teejay’s brother.”


She turned from the stove and its gurgling pots, wiping a damp, dangling curl from her forehead with the back of her hand. “The retarded boy,” she said.


“He’s fifteen. He had his birthday yesterday.” This would certainly be enough. A boy that old might drop and break me.


Mama contemplated this in a Caesaresque pose, tipping back her head slightly and jutting out her chin. This was a classic position from which to forbid.


“Of course they want you to play with him. The smartest boy in school. Yet gentle. What better companion?”


“I can’t go, can I?”


She smiled. “Oh, carino. How can we say no?”


.....................


I hadn’t even kicked the fresh snow off my waffle-stompers when Jamie came running into the foyer of the Greenwalts’ unfancy ranch house. He ran like a second-grader, carelessly, with shoes clomping and heels flailing – considering his size it was a wonder everything in the house wasn’t broken. He was still in his school clothes, a starchy white dress shirt and austere black pants, stark and contrasting as squares on a chessboard.


“Let’s go!” he said, pulling me past his mother by the elbow.


“Where?”


“Let’s play tag in the dark!” We were headed into the kitchen, toward the downstairs door.


“Blind tag?” I said, clawing the walls as Jamie dragged me along. “Just me and you? There won’t be anyone to find us!”


“Good,” he said. “I hate that part.”


“Hey, hey, hey!” Mrs. Greenwalt was chasing us – despite her planetary size she could move faster than you’d imagine when she wanted to. “Hold it right there!”


Jamie had the stairway door open and was diminishing my resistance with amazing teenage strength. Mrs. Greenwalt managed to capture my free arm and wrench me away from her son. “There’ll be plenty of time to play later,” she said, ominously.


Teejay cruised in. “Oh, good,” he said. “The babysitter’s here.”


“You’re the baby!” Jamie shouted.


Mrs. Greenwalt stomped her foot, and when she stomped her foot, you knew it – it felt like someone had dropped a safe on the floor. Teejay scampered right out of the room. Jamie jumped between me and the swinging door to the dining area to stop me from following. “Don’t pay any attention to my little brother,” he said. “He’s only twelve.”


“I’m only twelve,” I said.


“Yes, but...” He stopped. “Yes, but...” Then he turned to his mother. “But what?”


“But you’re a big kid,” she told Jamie, easing past with a steaming plate of something from the oven. “And since Matthew is your guest today, he gets to be a big kid, too.”


Jamie turned to me, wide-eyed. “Did you hear that?”


At the dinner table Mrs. Greenwalt directed me to the chair across from Jamie, next to my brooding contemporary. The parents sat at either end. Pork chops were the evening’s entree, and as his wife began to dole out, Mr. Greenwalt shoved his chair forward so that he was flush against the edge of the table, causing a brief tremor. He was built like a newel post and was about as graceful, not to mention as quiet. He had a stubbly flat-top haircut (out of style even back then) and a neck wider than his head, which was so wide itself that he had to bend the earpieces of his aviator glasses outward to get them around it.


I’d dined with the Greenwalts a few times before. Eating was a serious business with them. As was their custom, we ate mostly in silence, by which I mean, without words; in fact, it was a busy and noisy table, with lips smacking and utensils clanging and serving plates in constant orbit, occasionally colliding. It was a trick to get enough food down without holding up the proceedings for everyone else.


Jamie was a sight with food in front of him. He consumed at an almost unsafe speed, yet his deportment was impeccable – elbows clear of the surface, always cutting and eating with the right hand, setting the knife down and switching the fork over. It was like a fight to the death between his appetite and his manners. His eyes were focused mainly on me. I wondered for a moment at how he was able to cut his food without looking at his plate. Then I noticed that his chops had been cut up for him. He’d been outfitted with a second fork instead of a knife.


When his plate was clean, he set his forks down, hoisted a napkin, and patted his mouth primly. Then he checked me – caught me peeking – and sent me a smile: a wide, unconditional smile, a smile so big and un-self-conscious that I felt it materialize on my face at the very same time, as if I were his reflection.


Could I possibly have been so scared of this? I thought.


“So, Jamie,” I ventured, “Teejay says you’re in high school now.”


“Special classes,” Teejay whispered. “They don’t let him near the regular kids.”


“I’m a Foreston Charger,” Jamie said, revving up, as if I’d thrown the switch on a battery toy. “I wrestle on the freshman team for now. But if I continue to train hard, and my growth curve remains steady, I have a good chance of making the varsity next year.” His inflection was distractingly grown-up, borrowed. “I’m working on takedowns right now. The key is to attack high in one direction and low in the other. I have a tendency to attack too low.” He stood up. “I attack here” – he placed a forearm across his lower abdomen – “which allows the man to bend and escape.” He bowed deeply and took a step backward, demonstrating. “That’s poor technique. What I need to do is brace the man low” – he turned to his dinner chair, placing his knee behind it – “then attack high.” He swung a forearm around and took the chair down backward with a thwack against the carpet.


Mrs. Greenwalt pounded the table. “Jamie Greenwalt! You respect the furniture!”


Teejay’s head was bowed and his eyes were shut tight. Nothing short of an exhausted supply was going to stop Mrs. Greenwalt from food intake, but she forked it in now with her eyes planted preemptively on her elder son. Mr. Greenwalt didn’t seem to notice any of us were there.


The plate-and-fork symphony entered its second movement, an andante, halting, self-assuring, proper. Jamie was wearing a look of pregnant disappointment, hopeful in the eyes but frowning in the mouth.


“How’s the food, Matt?” he offered, too loudly. He had wacky sound control.


Mrs. Greenwalt pointed at him. “We keep our voice down at the table.”


That brought a frown from Jamie – not a bitter frown, like the pout of a child, but resigned, directed toward his knees, toward himself.


I made sure everyone’s else’s attentions had returned at least momentarily to their plates. Then I shot Jamie a furtive grin and lifted a finger to my lips, mockingly shushing him. It cheered him. His eyebrows shot up; he managed not to giggle aloud.


Mr. Greenwalt let out a demure belch, which seemed to signal the bell lap for the plates.


“Hey, Mumma,” Jamie said.


“Yes, honey?”


“I like Matthew.”


“There’s trouble,” piped up Mr. Greenwalt.


“Can I give Matthew a hug?” Jamie asked.


“Holy Jesus,” Teejay said.


“No you may not,” said Mrs. Greenwalt.


“Come on,” Jamie whined. “Pleeeease?”


“No. Eat your food.” Jamie’s mother directed his attention back to his plate with a snap of her fingers.


“I want to hug Matthew Schofield!” Jamie cried.


Mr. Greenwalt looked up from his plate and shot me a wink. “Better get your huggin’ muscles ready.”


Mrs. Greenwalt made fists next to her ears, raising her eyes in a plea for divine assistance. “Aaugh! Matt, I’m sorry. Would you mind? I don’t want to have a scene.”


Before I could answer, Jamie galloped over and yanked me up by a wrist, sending my fork to the floor. He threw his arms around me, pinning my elbows to my sides and jamming the back of his head into the crook of my neck.


“That’s nice, Jamie,” Mrs. Greenwalt said. “Now let’s finish our meal.”


Jamie took a half-step back, sized me up. Then he leaned forward, clasped both hands around the back of my neck, drew me in and kissed me bang on the lips, movie-style. Though it was our mouths that were locked, I felt it mostly in my chest, a startling swelling, as if some blockage there was being released and blood was rushing in to a place that had been cut off before – a heart attack in reverse. He held it for a long, wondrous couple of seconds before Mr. Greenwalt made it to his feet and dragged him away by the shoulders, as if he were breaking up a fight.


“Whoa-ho-ho!” Teejay said, shielding his eyes. “Grotesque!”


Mrs. Greenwalt leaped up and scurried to my side, apologizing breathlessly and asking if I was all right. I waved her off, bent down to retrieve my fork, and bludgeoned my forehead stunningly against the edge of the table.


“God damn it,” Jamie said, as Mr. Greenwalt pinned him back in his seat.


“Young man!” gasped Mrs. Greenwalt. “That is on your list of words not to say!”


I stood there teetering, having straightened up a bit too quickly. Mrs. G. put her hands on my shoulders and tried to steady me from behind.


“Matt bumped his goddamned head,” Jamie said, pointing. “God damn it!”


Teejay cupped his hands over his mouth. “We’re here on Brookwood Drive,” he intoned, “where the Foreston Pervert has struck again – ”


Mr. Greenwalt stood up. “All right, all right. I think it’s time to clear the table. Matt, you had enough dinner?”


“Plenty. Thanks.”


“Teejay, take your brother back to his room and keep him company for a little while. Mother, you and I ought to have a little talk with our guest.”


Mr. and Mrs. Greenwalt led me away and sat me in the living room. I expected them finally to say exactly what was wrong with Jamie, but they didn’t seem to know much more than I did. At first the doctors thought he’d suffered some sort of brain injury, Mrs. Greenwalt said, but now they were starting to think it was in his genes, inherited. The Greenwalts didn’t believe it. No one else in their family had turned out like that, not for as long as anyone could remember. “We’ll probably never know what’s wrong with him or why,” Mrs. Greenwalt said. “We just have to deal with it.” She said these “inappropriate displays of affection” were just a part of Jamie’s condition, that he didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t mean anything by it.


The Greenwalts all but begged me to forgive their oldest son for what he had done, never mind that I hadn’t said I was the least bit offended. They apologized until I wanted to cover my ears from hearing it. The sorrier they got, the sadder I must’ve looked. Mrs. Greenwalt finally said the whole idea of having me over was probably a mistake, that it would probably be best if I made my way back home. As they were ushering me to the door, I caught sight of Jamie behind them, spying out at us from the bedroom corridor, the trail of a tear glinting on his cheek.


“Is he going to die?” I asked.


“No, son,” Mr. Greenwalt said, extracting my rainbow-colored ski jacket from the front closet. “But he isn’t going to get better either, I’m afraid.”


................................


My mother knocked softly at the door to my room as I was settling into bed that night. I hadn’t breathed a word about what had happened. Unfortunately, she’d had a call from Mrs. Greenwalt, with a fresh round of explaining and apologizing. Mom sat on the edge of my bed and rubbed my knees through the covers. I could tell she’d just gotten done emptying the dinner dishes out of the dishwasher – she smelled lemony fresh, like the detergent.


“You be careful of this retarded boy,” she said. “I no want you alone with this boy.”


“He’s not retarded, Mom. He’s just strange.”


“You are OK, yes? Are you not OK?”


“Why does everybody keep asking me that? He didn’t slug me.”


She reached out and pushed my hair up away from my eyes, smoothed it out. “It is all right to be upset, carino. No one is blaming you if you are upset.”


“I’m not upset! Can everyone stop babying me now? So what if some weird kid gives me a kiss? Maybe he just likes me, did anyone ever think of that?”


Mom bit her lower lip, squeezed my leg. “You tell me if you are upset. That’s all.” She walked to the door and shut off the light.


“Mom. Wait.”


She turned in the doorway, making a matronly silhouette against the bright corridor. “What you want to ask me?”


I swallowed. “Just because a boy wants to kiss another boy, does that mean he’s got a disease? Does that mean he’s mental?”


She left the light off, but walked back in and stood at the foot of the bed, massaging her hips, casting an angel-shaped shadow across my blanket. She thought about it a few moments, then said, “Is a complicated question, my little sweet thing.”


“Give me a complicated answer. Maybe I’ll figure it out.”


“OK.” She thought about it. “Is not normal for a boy to kiss another boy.” More thinking. “In Italy, we say this is a sickness. In America, not so sure. But is not normal.”


“Even when you’re just a kid? Like, twelve or thirteen? Not normal?”


“Is not normal,” she said, with emphasis bordering on alarm. “I hope you no – encourage this boy, Matty – ”


“Of course not! How would I do that?”


“You very young still, you probably a little shy, you know, with the girls, this is all – ”


“I’m not talking about me!”


“Then who?”


“Jamie! Who else?”


“He is not your age, my son.”


“I know, but, he’s like my age.”


Mom walked over and settled onto the side of the bed, chuckling to herself. “Oh, carino. You no worry, OK? You are regular boy. This boy, Jamie, is not OK. Not OK in lots of ways. He start this, not you. You forget about everything now. All this crazy stuff is nothing to do with you.” She leaned over, kissed me on the forehead, and left.


Poor Mom. She had a habit of scaring the hell out of me with her reassurances. The only thing worse than being frightened, I think, is not being frightened when you’re supposed to be.


I put my hands behind my head and projected the whole evening against the ceiling of my unlit room. I ran the loop again and again, my own little Zapruder film, freezing the critical moment, enlarging it, going frame-by-frame, trying to piece it all together.


There was a tingle, a stirring. I threw down the covers. The stupid thing had poked itself right through the loose fly of my peejays. It trembled there, like a flower in a gentle breeze, straining toward the moonlight. At your service, it seemed to be saying, winking its vertical eye. Ready when you are.