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The Autobiography of Alex Mead How To Care About Humans Chapter 3: Breast Quest
"Only one thing in the world could've dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window." -Ralphie Parker
The beginning of the Dori story (Jan.25.2003) After the holiday break, 1st period, full classroom. (See, I didn't rewrite that sentence either) Every time I would get up to sharpen my pencil, Dori would get up and sharpen hers so she could talk to me. She timed other things like putting back the drawing boards on the drawing board stack at the same time too. I was confused. I seemed sure that she was telling me that she liked me. I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world if she did. She was a Sophomore, a year older than me, nice to be around, pretty. I very much wanted her to be interested in me. But why would she be interested in me if she already had a boyfriend. That made no sense at all. As the days went on we started to notice that Vince was less and less concerned about talking in the class anymore. As long as people were getting work done talking was now okay. Dori and I started talking to each other and we also both started talking to Fred. A lot. Fred was a senior. But not just any senior. He was the captain and quarterback of our high school football team. I had gone to grade school with his younger brother so I think that's how I started talking to him. Fred was just a totally nice person. He didn't look at people as freshmen or weirdoes and all that. He was happy to talk to whoever felt like talking to him. Dori and I both started calling him dad. That came about because we were always going to him for advice. He'd seen how the school worked for 4 years and he was happy to tell the underclassmen how to watch out for certain things and to make sure to do other things that would benefit you. Then one day Dori and I were both over talking to Fred and he looked at me and he looked at Dori and he said "You two like each other don't you?" I was caught off guard and didn't know what to say. Then I was caught even further off guard when Dori admitted she liked me. Well of course I confessed that I liked her to, but what did that mean? She was already spoken for. Why was Fred playing with my hopes and dreams like this? But Fred already had the situation well at hand, far more than I did. The next thing he asked us was why we were not together if we liked each other. Dori divulged once more that she sort of had a boyfriend. Next Fred asked her whether she liked her sort of boyfriend more or me more. She said me. So. Fred suggested that she should drop her sort of boyfriend and start going out with me instead. Later in the class she handed me a note. I wouldn't have time to read it until second period but I was very anxious to see what it said. It said that she wanted to go out with me. For the rest of the school day I had an actual real girlfriend. Not pretend. REAL! Finally I had met a nice girl and after high school we could get married and maybe she would even be nice enough to let me see her naked. It was all just too good to be true. Too good to be true. Too good to be true. Yes. Well I was so looking forward to after school so I could find Dori and get face to face confirmation. Reading it in a letter is one thing, but I wanted to make sure it was true. And that meant me finding her and asking her if she was going out with me and having her say yes. I tracked her down. I started walking her home. I asked her face to face if she would go out with me. If she was willing to be mine and have me be hers. She said no. She said she was very sorry but she had to change her mind. There again, the story of my love life. Thermonuclear Emotional Weapons (Jan.29.2003) I went home. Sad. Miserable. I felt cheated and dejected. It was like the whole world just wanted to make me think I could be happy just so that it could squish my happiness under its boot. I told my mother about how I had almost had a girlfriend and she hugged me and gave me some sympathy and made me a nice dinner and made me feel better. My mom used to always tell me that I was good looking and such a nice guy that by the time I was 18 or 19 I would have to fight the girls off with a stick. I so looked forward to that time. Not that I wanted to beat anyone with a stick. I just wanted girls to like me. And for one of them to let me see them naked. In school the next day I didn't want to talk to Dori. I didn't want to look at her. I wanted her to leave me totally alone. I was done with her forever and ever and ever. I was so mad at her that I was able to make forever and ever last about 3 minutes before I gave in and started talking back. And when I started talking back I just ignored the fact that I was mad and just started talking to her like nothing had ever happened. She apologized. She started telling me about how she still liked me. She started building my hopes back up. She started telling me that she really wanted to go out with me but something had changed and she just couldn't. For the time being that was enough. I figured as long as I was the one she wanted, I could find it in my heart to still talk to her. Dori was hard not to talk to. She was tall, shapely and she moved like a female. She wore white dress shirts to school all the time, like businessmen's shirts. It was a kind of 80s thing for a girl to do. When it was a thin dress shirt you could SEE HER BRA! She had sandy blonde hair that was kinda short and spikey. Did I mention that sometimes you could see her bra? How is a young male who has just turned 15 supposed to hold out against that? So more days went by and then I finally learned what the big "I can't" was all about. Dori thought she might be pregnant by her "sort of" boyfriend Sean and she needed to stay with him. I was one mad little 15 year old boy. That seemed such an unfair thing to me. For her to be pregnant. Damn! I mean at least pick something that I know how to deal with! This was way out of my depth. Every cell in my body was screaming out to be with her and she had to go and be pregnant. I mean, okay, maybe she had gone and gotten pregnant before I had ever even bopped her on the nose with the masking tape, but hadn't she ever stopped to consider that she MIGHT meet me, and how a possible pregnancy would make ME feel??? How self-centered could she BE? Then she started with the questions. Why do you like me? What do you like abut me? I had enough sense to know that thin white dress shirts and being able to see her bra was not the right answer. In fact I had some instinctive romantic sense of exactly what were the right things to say. Only they weren't the right things to say. This girl had been severely emotionally traumatized her whole young life. She had started the whole cycle of sex and physical and sexual abuse at age 13. She was needing certain assurances of stability from somewhere and I automatically started giving them to her. I had a mother that always told me that she loved me and so I knew how to say I love you. I knew how to be affectionate and care about people. I knew what it was like to be different and a loner and so I knew not only how to sympathize, but I also had these deep brooding romantic notions and knew how to speak the language of love and romance very well. Far too well. I had in my possession powerful emotional warheads and I had no idea that I needed to be careful with them. I just started lobbing them around. I would have said anything to get to see her naked. She would ask me serious big life questions like "You wouldn't want to become a teenage father at age 15 would you? Especially if the child wasn't even yours." And I would respond by telling her how much I really wanted to be with her and that I would do my best to raise her child as my own. It wasn't even that I was lying at all either; it was just that I had no idea what I was saying and what it really meant. To me it was like no big deal. As long as I was going to get to see a naked girl at some point what's the big deal about raising a baby? Hell, in fact, it even sounded like fun. Now I had entered into a competition that I was unaware of. The race was on between me and Sean and I was running in total darkness. When she said things like her parents were forbidding anyone to walk her home today I just naively went home and watched tv. I had no idea that meant she wanted Sean to walk her home. When she wrote me letters about Sean that made me jealous I had no idea that that was the point. They were tests. She was trying to find out which guy was more likely to stay and least likely to hurt her. She turned out not to be pregnant at all. That was my first encounter with the "false alarm". It certainly would not be the last. When she turned out not to be pregnant the race seemed to shift. It seemed more like I was winning. She had started coming over to my house a couple times and my mom made her feel welcome. We held hands and touched each other gently. I kept waiting for the day to come when she would finally be my girlfriend. That day finally came January 15th of 1986. TLA&4E (Jan.29.2003) TLA&4E. That's how the love notes we passed back and forth ended. It meant True Love Always and Forever. That was us. We were going to be in love forever. I had found true eternal love on my very first try. Man I was good at this. January 14th my mom and I were in a department store. I didn't even ask for one thing for myself. I wanted to get a little stuffed teddy bear for Dori. Dori had been letting me walk her home more and more. In fact she made a big production out of it by saying "Oh I don't care what my parents think, I want to spend more time with you." I started walking her to the corner of her block. We said many long goodbyes on the corner of Grant and Gardner Streets. Buffalo's West Side has two main North to South oriented streets that I have lived near the whole time I've been here. I lived on St. James which was right near Elmwood. Elmwood is filled with quaint little ritzy shops and expensive homes. And Dori lived on the other main North-South Street, Grant. Grant has liquor stores and Off-Track betting and rent-to-own type stores and dilapidated houses. Her neighborhood was sort of like a Dodge Street for white people. As the days went by I grew bolder and started walking her closer and closer to her house. Then I got bold enough to walk her all the way to her back door. Then we got so bold as to start going inside her back hall and talk for a while. She told me her father hated me. I had never even met the man so I thought that was mighty unfair. That also meant that Sean got to come inside her house sometimes and I never did. From how angry he sounded when he would call down the stairs for Dori to get her ass upstairs I had no trouble believing that he hated me. It seemed a safe bet that he hated a lot of things. On January 15th though, we got to sit on her back stairs undisturbed for quite a while. It may have even been more than 15 minutes. I gave her the teddy bear. She looked happy. I had watched enough movies to know that it was time to kiss her. I kissed her. She let me! It felt SO great. Then I asked her to go out with me. She said yes. And forever began. Forever lasted for about a week. She had agreed to go out with me. She was my girlfriend. She had not found a way to break up with Sean. She said she was trying, but it wasn't like I had any idea when she and Sean got together. I now knew who he was. He was a freshman like me. He was about my height and a little fatter. He smiled all the time, and why shouldn't he? Most of the rare occasions when I caught a glimpse of him, he had his arm around my girlfriend. After about a week I think she decided that I was the easier person to break up with so she broke up with me instead. I wouldn't accept that as an answer. I put in overtime trying to get her to see that we were meant to be. So she took me back. I had to pretend to believe that she was going to break up with Sean when she got around to it, and then everything could stay wonderful and I could still kiss her after school. Only now it was escalating. She was promising to do things to me. Sex things. We usually couldn't because my mom was home from work and I wasn't allowed at her house. But there was a day coming up on the calendar. A day where my mother had to work but we had no school. She was telling me she was going to come over to my house and do sex things to me and I KNEW that now I was going to get to see a girl naked. Seeing a girl naked (Jan.30.2003) There was no school. I was watching some tv. Time was ticking by sooooo slowly. I had on my blue jeans and my blue muscle t-shirt to show off my muscles. I was ready. Ready to see a girl naked. I was so nervous you could have touched me and I'd have jumped up and run straight into the wall. Then finally the doorbell rang. I ran down the stairs to get it. It was HER. The girl that was going to be naked. She stamped off her boots from the snow and I invited her upstairs. We kissed and then I invited her into my room. I was so smooth that I already had my LL Cool J tape ready to go. We listened to it for a while. She stared at me expectantly. I smiled back at her in total ignorance. I rapped all the words to the LL Cool J tape. She continued to look at me expectantly. I made small talk and talked about everything under the sun and showed her my drawings. She continued to look at me expectantly. Hours went by with me talking and talking. She continued to look at me expectantly. Finally she just came over to the place i was sitting on the bed and started kissing. "Finally!" I thought. We laid down on the bed. I pulled the covers over us. I'm sure I was very grateful they did not smell like pee. Then I put my hand on her breast. She let me. I put my hand under her shirt. She let me. I put my hand under her bra. She let me. I was touching it. Touching it! A naked breast! A breast was in my room and I was touching it with my own hands. I got very, very hard. Now I wanted to see it. I pulled up her shirt and bra. She let me. I could see it. Oh man it was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen ever. The most beautiful thing there could ever be. It was so soft and rounded and tender and perfect. A naked breast for me to look at. I was so happy. I kissed it. And licked it. I had seen a guy do that in a movie and the girl really liked it. And when I did it to Dori she seemed to like it too. Then I kissed her. And then the breast again. And then her again. And then the breast again. I went on like that for a very long time. Then, satisfied, I just held her in my arms and snuggled her. We fell asleep for a while but I had cleverly set my alarm clock to wake us before my mom got home from work. The alarm went off and I rushed her to get dressed and we went out in the living room like nothing had ever even happened. My mom would never have to know that I had touched a naked breast in my bedroom. It would be my naughty little secret. When Dori had to go that night I smiled at her slyly. I was so grateful to her for coming over and doing sex stuff. She appeared pretty happy, but thinking back on it now she might not have been all that impressed really. Seeing Pictures of a Girl Naked (Jan.30.2003) It wasn't so much seeing what a girl looked like naked that had me so enthused. That was really old hat by the time I met Dori. Even seeing how a naked breast moved in 3 dimensions was kind of old hat because we had HBO and Showtime on our tv. It was more the opportunity to finally know what one felt like. How hard or soft one really was. These were the things I needed to know. I was the first kid on my block to see a picture of a girl naked. First by a wide margin. There was no real challenge to it. My mother just up and gave it to me. I was about 4 or 5 years old and my mother gave me this big black and white picture book called Show Me. It had lots of pictures and few words. But what words it did have told about where babies come from. I was about the only kid that knew. My mother cautioned me not to tell the other kids or to show any of my friends the book. She told me that every kid's parents should be the one to tell them and that most kids wouldn't get told until they were older. So I had to just sit on this information. I spent YEARS listening to ignorant kids in my classes and their stupid guesses about where babies came from or how people had sex. I had seen pictures of it, I had read about it, I knew that they had it all wrong but I was sworn to secrecy. Finally when I was about 6 or 7 I couldn't take it any more and I showed my best friend and my second best friend on Dodge Street the Show Me book. They laughed and laughed and laughed at the pictures. I was trying to show them something serious. I was trying to help these people. And all they could do was laugh at what a naked old man looks like or a pregnant belly. Last time I ever share secret information with these imbeciles. In addition to giving the book to me, my mom was willing to talk to me about anything. She explained a lot of stuff about sex to me. She told me lots of things about women and romance and I started to realize there were a lot of things she said that I just didn't believe. I didn't think she was lying to me. She seemed to always tell me the truth if she knew it. I just didn't figure she knew a lot about dating and romance anymore. Like all of her information was out of date since she never had a boyfriend or husband or anything. Like for one thing she was always telling me that I was handsome and that girls were going to start liking me after puberty (whenever that was). But she had no idea how totally disinterested in me all the girls were at school. I had never told her about the prettiest girl in second grade, but I knew what she would say. She would say that the prettiest girl in second grade was wrong and that I wasn't ugly. But she just didn't realize her own bias. She was always telling me everything I was doing was so great and that everything I was was so great. She had no ability to look at me and realize that I was not good looking. When we moved further down the street on St. James place the kids there had cable. Naturally I wanted it too. I wanted to see music videos and movies and cartoons all the time like they did. So I begged for cable and we got it. And with cable came a second influx of naked women to look at. This time they were in movies so in addition to what sex looked like I got to figure out what sex sounded like. We used to get a cable guide to our house. I would sneak it into my bedroom and dissect it looking for movies with the R-nudity warning on them. Many a night I would sneak back into the living room and watch a movie at 1 or 3 am while my mother was sleeping. The movies would be repeated from time to time and I didn't want to get caught so there was a whole list of movies where I knew how long into the movie one needed to wait for the sex scene. Then I would just get up and watch the sex part real quick and then go back to my bedroom to erm... be by myself for a while. I developed a few strange ideas about sex since the majority of my information was now coming from R-Rated movies, but learning is learning, and I was learning something. Then one fateful day I learned more than just the sights and sounds of sex. I found a deep well of actual information. It was hidden in my mom's bedroom under her nightstand. It was her collection of pornographic magazines. It wasn't like Playboy or Hustler magazines it was the black and white newsprint type magazines where people write stories and submit them and they're mostly all wildly distorted lies and messed up fantasies, but I was very young and I didn't know the difference. I was learning the names for sex things. The real names that adults were always careful not to let you hear. And I was learning fantastical seemingly impossible things like people having sex using their mouth. Insane stuff like that. So what if I was also learning that men and women always climax at the same time and that women always have 100 orgasms every time they have sex, learning is learning. Enough about sex, lets talk about my mother's bedroom (Jan.30.2003) My mother's bedroom at our house further down the block on St. James Place was a wondrous place. There was an extra room that went all the way to the back of the house. You could look out the back window and see the garage and the tiny backyard. That extra room also housed our record player so I had to go in there if I ever wanted to listen to records. The first 45 I ever bought (with my own money) was "Hurt So Good" by John Couger. There was no such person as John Mellencamp. I had no idea why anyone would write a song about Hurting So Good but the kids at school liked it so I bought the record so I could know the words and be cool. Or at least as cool as I was capable of. The stash of porn magazines was a great place to go also. I remember sneaking into the stash on many occasions and stealing a magazine from near the bottom and hiding it under my mattress. I would remember the exact location it came from and the orientation of the magazine (cover facing up or down and any angle it might have been tilted at). Sometimes I would see the picture of a naked woman on the cover of a magazine at the top and I didn't dare remove the magazine from her room so I'd read it in there and then return to my room to be alone for a while. Then there was my mom's closet. My mom's closet was the object of fascination toward the end of every year. My birthday is pretty close to Christmas and so toward the end of the year her closet would become a treasure trove to hunt through. Sure all of the presents would be wrapped but I could shake boxes and tell by the size of the boxes whether I was about to get all of the toys that were vital to my continued survival. As time went on my mother realized that I was sleuthing out what all my presents were ahead of time and so she started hiding the presents in a crawlspace above the closet. Once I had to start climbing up in there I found out what a cool place it was. It was almost like a barn loft being up there looking out over the rest of the bedroom. There were old blankets and stuff stashed in there so it was soft and warm and pleasant to be in there. I used to bring little Rachel up there and we would play there or take a nap there and just enjoy the ambiance of the place. Oh wait. You don't know who little Rachel is. Okay. You have to know about the Rachels and stuff. Rachels (Jan.30.2003) Okay. There are two Rachels. If there are more Rachels than that then they don't really matter or at least don't matter within the text of my autobiography. Telling you all about little Rachel will take a lot longer so I'll tell you about big Rachel first. Rachel is one of the Soffins. The Soffins are about the only relatives I have left in Buffalo. BUT, they aren't related to me. Through my whole life it's just been the case that most of my relatives aren't blood relatives at all and most of the people related to me by blood aren't really my relatives. The way the Soffins are really related to me is that Rose (the matriarch of the Soffin clan) was my mom's coworker and dear friend for more than a decade and probably almost two decades. So my mom and Rose were super close and me and the Soffin kids were pretty close too. I'm helping Rachel move tomorrow and I wouldn't dream of asking her for money, and I'm totally broke and I have very little time. To me... that's pretty close. That doesn't mean we see each other often at all, but if one of the Soffins needs a favor... I'm there. Rachel's the oldest of the Soffins. Deborah is next and then Jonathan and Daniel. They are all really quality people. They are all seemingly doing well and achieving great things too. They are all younger than me and Rachel is the only one that's really close to me in age. And me and Rachel and Deborah went to take certification courses for kids together. Deborah was technically too young but she's really smart so they bent the rules a little. We all became certified babysitters and lifeguards at a young age. Oh, and all of the Soffins are very good looking folks. That's one of the first things you'd notice about them all if you saw them. Oh, and they're biracial like me so we all have that in common too. Their mom, Rose, is black and their dad, Barry, is white. They have the best attributes of both. Like I said, they're good lookin.
Yeah, so she's pretty strong-willed and self-assured and has lots of what one would call attitude. I'd like to say that the reason I never dated her was because I don't like people who have lots and lots of attitude, but that would only be half the truth. The more important half of the truth is that I was always scared of her. Frightened. Even at the prom and the whole prom night I just mostly did whatever she told me to do as not to incur her wrath. Okay, good, so now I've told you a bit about the Soffins. That's good. Keep them in mind because they're important in my life. But now... time for you to find out who little Rachel is and that whole thing. Little Rachel (Jan.30.2003) Okay. I lived at two different places on St. James Place. I lived right at the end of the block for a few years and then we moved to the middle of the block. It's a long block. Anyway... so I had known since I was a little boy, sort of, how babies were made. But then we moved half way down the block and I got to see one being made. Well, not that I actually saw my landlady Kathy while she was copulating or anything like that, but I mean I got to see her baby growing in her stomach. And actually I probably got to hear her while they were making little Rachel too. Little Rachel's father liked to come over to the house and chase Kathy all around the house. You could hear them running and laughing and I mean literally running like little kids. Then he'd finally catch her I guess and then there'd be some sex noises and then soon after that Kathy's belly started growin. This was a fascinating thing to watch on a daily basis. Kathy's belly would get bigger and bigger and that was because there was a baby inside of it. INCREDIBLE! I was like 9 or 10 years old and Kathy was always telling me when the baby was kicking and letting me feel it. Kathy was our landlady but she was also very much like a friend to me. She wasn't very old and she was very, very nice and she spent a lot of time watching me whenever my mom had to stay late at work or do something else. Actually, as a matter of fact I went downstairs to Kathy's house a lot even if my mom was home. She was a fun person to talk to and in case I've forgotten to mention it, she had a BABY IN HER BELLY!
Oh. Check this out. I just remembered that the first time I saw a naked breast in person wasn't Dori. It was Kathy. She breast-fed little Rachel for quite a while and adult people never even tried to stop me. It was crazy. Another reason to love babies. I guess this will happen from time to time in this autobiography thing. I will tell you one thing and then remember something different and then tell you that the first thing was wrong. Yeah, I like that idea a lot better than going back and finding the part that I told wrong and rewriting it. So um, yeah... I got to see one or the other of Kathy's breasts on a regular basis. The adults would pretend that it was natural and nothing out of the ordinary, and it was my duty to pretend not to be too excited, but hell, I was 10 and it was breasts. So sue me. But then after the breast feeding, Rachel went to solid foods and all that. I fed her all the time and got to wear a lot of food in my hair and clothes. I loved Rachel. Still do. She's another relative that's not a blood relative. She grew up calling me 'cousin Alex' but I thought of her more like my little sister. Actually I often felt more like I was her 3rd mother. See, because I grew up around a TON of women and not a whole lot of men really so I have what you might call a well-developed female empathy. There was no question that Kathy was Rachel's mom, and a super mom she was, but little Rachel also spent so much time up at our house that she often called my mom mom. I never called my mom mom, I called her by her first name, Sue, but Rachel called her mom sometimes and my mom was very much like a 2nd mom. And I was like a 3rd mom. I had a very maternal sense about Rachel. Like if anything had ever tried to harm her I'd have reacted like a mother lion. When I got linoleum from my mom to breakdance on in my living room, I was teaching little Rachel to breakdance right along with me. And you best believe she had some fresh little 3 year old moves too.
Little Rachel is a mom herself now and doing pretty well from what I hear. I was glad that my mother got to see one of Rachel's children before she passed on. Rachel wasn't technically her daughter so it's not really the same as if my mom had gotten to see a grandchild, but well it was sort of like that. Bringing the little one over really made my mom happy so I was glad for it. Okay, now where was I in the Dori Story? (Jan.30.2003) Good question. Where was I in the Dori story? Oh yes. I had just seen her naked breast and spent a hot and scandalous afternoon fully involved in some very tawdry breast fondling. Well not long after that we moved away from St. James Place over into the edge of the lower West Side. I'll tell you more about that place later but the important detail about the move is that now the house was a lot smaller and more cheaply made and the walls were thin and anything that went on in any room in the house could easily be heard in any other room in the house. That was the bad news. The good news was that Dori was coming over a lot more often. And some of those times my mom wouldn't be home because she'd have to go out grocery shopping or to a meeting or whatever. I was very eager to see the breasts again and one night when we were home alone she did me one better and got fully naked. That was super! I got to gaze at her in her full nakedness for as long as I wanted. She was looking at me like she was expecting something, but I didn't really notice because I wasn't really looking at her face. I would walk her home at night and tell her how much fun I was having and she must have been really starting to wonder what was going on. So you know what happened next? At school she asked me if I was a VIRGIN? WHAT? A virgin??? Hell NO! I had sex lots of times before. Lots. Um... yeah. Think Alex. Uh... The only thing I could think of was to bring back my mom's Scrabble friend's daughter. So now not only was she my unwitting girlfriend, but she had now become my ex-lover. Because I was not going to be a 15 year old virgin!!! Hell no! Better to be a liar than be that. I had talked to a lot of freshmen and none of them were virgins. No way! So neither was I. Absolutely not. I was just... er... just... um, I was just willing to take things slow. Yeah. That was it. I was a gentleman. A NOT virgin and a gentleman.
Dori was starting to get more explicit in the notes she passed to me in school. She said she wanted to see ME naked. Oh no! I thought I had some muscles going on at that time so I had taken my shirt off in front of her a lot of times but... well, I mean she was talking about wanting to see my thing!!! No way! Okay. So then we were in my room. My mom was home but we were in my room with the door closed and we had learned to whisper quietly at all times. She said it was time for me to get naked. I boldly took my shirt off and even took my pants off and stood there in my underwear hoping that she could get her thrills that way. But no, she wanted the full monty. I got completely naked and she seemed very, very unimpressed. She even commented that it was kinda small. But I wasn't really worried. In fact I was completely unworried. I had seen lots of pictures and read a lot about penises and I knew that how big a penis was when it was soft had nothing to do with how big one was when it was hard. I told her to bring the naked breasts back out and we'd see what she had to say then. So she stripped naked and my penis came to life and she did in fact change her mind. Now she was very impressed. She wanted to touch it and do things to it. Hell no! Was she crazy??? My mom was home. I told her that we'd better get dressed before my mom started getting suspicious. And sure enough not even 10 minutes later my mom popped her head in my room to suggest that maybe it was time to walk Dori home. See! Who knows what would have happened if Dori had been able to talk me into whatever crazy plan was on her mind. My 1st girlfriend's boyfriend (Jan.30.2003) So Dori was still feeling the jealousy of all these other girls in my life. Trying to find ways to ask me without actually coming out and asking me why it was that I had had sex with this other girl but wouldn't have sex with her. And she kept telling me that she was just waiting for the time to be right and that she was going to leave Sean. And then sometimes she would tell me that she had left Sean and already told him that she wasn't interested in him BUT that her parents still made Sean come over to her house. And then she would tell me what a big penis I had. And what a nice penis I had. And how my penis was so great. And I was 15 years old and there was no way I could possibly disbelieve her about Sean. I mean he might be the guy that was allowed to come over to her house, sure, but I was the guy with the big and nice penis. So obviously I won. Who cares if Sean occasionally got to spend the night over her house, she told me nothing happened between them and I believed her. Why would anything happen just because he spent the night? After all, I was the guy with the most wonderful penis. Not him. Hell no dawg. Me. I was the penis guy. Now I guess it wasn't enough that this menace had to continuously take advantage of the fact that Dori's parents made her spend time with him, but NOW this being of ultimate evil was actually starting to corrupt my friends. I had high school buddies of mine trying to tell me that he wasn't really such a bad guy or even going so far as to say he was a nice person. Those people just didn't see the evil. But I saw it. My girlfriend wanted me and only me and yet he had to keep manipulating the situation and putting himself in the way. And a couple times he even tried to talk to me but I was having none of that. Dori had warned me that he might try to talk to me one day and she had cautioned me about the lies that he might tell so I wasn't even going to give him a chance to start lying. I was going to say as little as possible and wait until me and Dori were old enough to live on our own and we could buy a house where her parents wouldn't make her have to hang around with Sean anymore. And she would probably even let me look at her breasts every single day. Yes sir. I had it ALL figured out. I Hit a Girl Before (Jan.30.2003) I'm a pacifist. A very non-violent person. I've never really been in a fist-fight. I'm glad I can say that. It is something I hope to be able to proudly tell my kids someday. That I managed to make it through life without ever having to resort to violence to resolve something. And I'd also like to say that I've never hit a woman before. But that isn't really true. And the whole thing about never being in a fist-fight is true but with an asterisk after it. I hit a girl. It was Dori. I hit her right in the face. It was an accident, but I felt so bad that I just wanted to curl up into a ball and die. It was so stupid. Me and Dori had this thing that we did. Whenever we were mad at each other. I would punch my fist into my hand right next to her face, and that would let her know that I was really mad at her. When she was mad she would slap her hand right next to my face and that let me know she was really mad. Somehow it honestly never did occur to me that that was a stupid thing to do. I had punched right near her face hundreds of times and so it was no big deal. It was just a thing we did. It was fun. Or funny. Or something. But it wasn't funny when I accidentally hit her. Hard. And she started crying. And looking at me with that look of betrayal. And I wished that I could just die. No. That wasn't funny at all. I must have apologized a hundred times and after she stopped crying she said it was alright and that she understood that it was an accident but that didn't make me feel any better. That punching the fist thing was over with right then and there. She was so wonderful that she accepted that it was an accident and I would never hurt her again and that would be the end of it. That wasn't the end of it. The next day in school Sean let it be known that he was going to beat me up after school. In fact he was saying crazy things about how he was willing to be tolerant about me always hanging around "his" girlfriend but now I had punched a girl in the face and that was totally not cool under any circumstances and he was now going to beat me up after school to teach me my lesson. That was fine with me. I welcomed it. I had put up with his evil ways for far too long and even though I had never been in a fight before I knew fully well that I was going to beat the living dog snot out of him. I knew this because I hated him far more than he could ever have possibly hated me. And no matter how much he misunderstood what had happened to Dori and how mad it might have made him, it was NOTHING compared to how mad I was. I was furious with myself for being so stupid as to have hurt my beloved Dori. Even accidentally. But since I couldn't pummel myself into the ground I was willing to use Sean as a proxy for myself. I was mad at Dori because no matter what she said it just seemed like maybe she could have tried harder to find some way to get her parents to stop making her spend time with Sean. And I had already hit her and could never do so again, so I was willing to take that out on Sean too. And then there was the anger I genuinely did have for Sean. Who was HE to be telling ME about what goes on in my bedroom with my own girlfriend. And I knew that somehow he had done some secret thing to make Dori's parents hate me and like him. Man I was ready to beat him senseless over that. I wasn't going to say a word I was just going to start his beating the moment I saw him and not stop until the ambulance came. We were scheduled to meet up for the fight directly after school at Colonial Circle. The moment school ended I marched straight down there to wait for him. And I waited. For a long time. Finally after I realized that he wasn't going to show up I went home. But if he had showed his face I doubt I'd be able to say that I've lived my life without being in a fistfight. So I'm very grateful now that he didn't show. I learned the next day that he couldn't make it to the fight because he had swim practice or something like that. I guess teaching me a lesson for hitting a girl wasn't as important as swim practice. I think I even remember him making some argument that I knew he had swim practice or something like that and that he had meant that I was supposed to wait until after swim practice for us to fight. I'm not sure if I'm remembering that right or not but I think i remember it resolving itself somehow with both of us claiming that the other had chickened out. Almost and Sort Of Fistfights (Feb.04.2003) Today I was helping big Rachel move into her new apartment. We had just arrived at her floor in her old apartment and the elevator doors opened and a guy stepped on to the elevator as we were exiting. He said something to Rachel but I don't think he recognized me. Half way down the hall to her apartment I asked her if she knew whether or not that guy's name was Daryl. She said that it was and asked how I knew him. I almost got in a fight with that guy I replied. It is a small world after all because there are VERY few people I've ever almost gotten into a fight with. My almost fight against Dori's other boyfriend Sean was by far the closest I ever came to committing acts of serious violence. My almost fight against Daryl was by far the dumbest fight I ever almost got into. In the 7th grade a group of boys was starting trouble by asking the weaker looking and nerdiest kids who they thought they could beat up. They were trying to start a fight among some of the kids who were least likely to fight. They had asked Daryl who they thought he could beat up and he listed me as one of the few people he figured it was safe to say he could beat up. It was a well known fact that I was a pacifist and I went around telling people that fighting was against my religion as I had been instructed to do by my mother. Daryl felt that I was a safe choice and an impressive choice since I was a fairly big guy for my age. The boys that had been starting this whole thing approached me with this information that Daryl thought he could beat me. I replied that I doubted that was true. That was just my objective opinion based on our sizes weight. So they then went back to Daryl and whipped him into a fervor telling him that I thought I could beat him and questioning his manhood. Daryl announced that he and I were gonna fight and that I had better run home after school because he was going to find me and beat me up. As the school day went on there was more and more interest in this arranged fight. Everyone seemed interested in what was going to happen except me. When the bell rang and the school day had ended, my friend Dave and I got our coats and were walking slowly around the block to St. James Place. We were about 50 yards down the block when we heard a commotion. We turned back and saw a huge mass of kids turn the block behind us with Daryl out in front. Dave suggested to me that maybe I had better run. I still thought the whole thing was totally dumb. The mob walked quickly to catch up to us and Daryl got in front of me. He seemed very mad and he was yelling very loud. Demanding that I tell him to his face that I thought I could beat him. I tried to calmly defuse the situation by just asking him what difference did it make who could beat who? The crowd of people started egging him on and he seemed to get more determined to fight. Okay, now here was my problem. I liked Daryl. I had always thought we were sort of friends and I couldn't imagine myself hurting him. Yet with the frame of mind he was in, he seemed like he would have been happy to hurt me a whole lot. So that seemed like a very stupid fight for me to enter into. So I just told him that I wasn't going to fight him and that if he wanted to think he could beat me up that was fine with me. He was still mad and trying to save face. He clarified one more time that if I did not fight him then that meant I was chicken and that he won the fight. I let him know I was perfectly happy with that arrangement and that he totally won the fight and so then he and the big mass of kids left. Almost Fight with a different Sean (Feb.04.2003) One of the strangest fights I was ever in was a fight with my very good friend Sean who lived near me on St. James Place. When I moved to the middle of the block I eventually made two very close friends. There was Matt who was my best friend and Sean who was my second best friend. I think I was also Matt's best friend and Sean was his second best friend. Most of the time this arrangement didn't make much difference since we were all great friends and had great fun playing together. Under the surface though Sean sometimes got a little aggravated by the way it all worked. You see, I had all kinds of toys. G. I. Joe and Star Wars and He Man figures and all that which were in steady supply from my mom. Matt's family was always the first on the block to have computers and VCRs and all of the cool new devices that were a wonder to behold for kids. Sean was just a fun guy to hang out with but he didn't have anything either of us needed so there was no pressure to make him our best friend or be nice to him if we were in a bad mood. I in particular used to really treat him like a red-headed step child sometimes even though all three of us had been through a lot together and almost always got along really well. One day Sean had just had enough. I don't know if I pushed him or told him to go home or made him feel second class in some way but he just really came after me. We were sort of in a fight because he really wanted to hurt me bad. He was telling me that he was sick of me and he was swinging at me and really trying hard to connect. Both Matt and Sean were a couple years younger than me and Sean was really kind of skinny so I can't say that I was really scared or anything. I just didn't have any good idea for what to do about the fact that one of my best friends was trying to pummel me. So, since nothing really came to mind, I grabbed one of his swinging arms and put him in an arm bar and just held him like that. Had no idea what to do next. He was trying to kick backward at me and he was demanding that I let him go. I asked him if he was going to stop attacking me and instead of answering he continued to try to attack me with his legs. Okay so at this point I was just going to wait for an adult to come by so that I could ask the adult to escort Sean home or something like that. A long time went by like that with me holding him in a wrestling hold and him trying to kick me and no one around on the whole street. Finally someone did come around but he was no help. It was a kid who lived down the block. A kid a few years older than myself who was sort of a bully or a troublemaker or something. He was riding by on his bike and he stopped and asked us if we were really fighting. Sean angrily announced that we were fighting and that he was going to kill me. I said that I wasn't really fighting I was just waiting for my mother to get home. So the kid on the bike just sat there and watched. Sean still tried to kick me. I think he tried to find a way to bite me. He was really mad. And on and on like that it went. Finally the kid on the bike got bored and went home and I tried to get Sean to calm down. He never got even a little bit more calm. He was able to sustain a rage like that for over an hour. Finally my mom did get home from work and she told Sean to go home. It was a good thing she did too because my arms were getting tired. The next day Sean, Matt and I were best friends again like nothing had ever happened. Strange. Almost Fights with Dunk People and Stuff (Feb.04.2003) One time I was walking Dori home and this one kid Louis was drinking on the corner on Grant Street with a few of his friends. He asked us to stop and have a drink. I told him that I didn't drink. He got mad about that for some reason and started yelling at me. Then he seemed to calm down and he asked me to shake his hand. I went to shake his hand and he punched me in the nose. I staggered back and shook it off. I had always wondered what it felt like to get punched in the nose. I can't really say I cared for it much. Louis' friends quickly swung into action and held him back and tried to get him back across the street to his house. I grabbed Dori and we ran back to her house. I took a different route home but I was still very mad about being punched in the nose. I went home and told my mom that I had been punched in the nose. I was mad about it and wanted her to explain to me again why when someone punches me in the nose I'm not supposed to punch them right back. She just explained that it wasn't the Quaker way and that we were pacifists and blah, blah, blah and that if I was really all that mad about it then I should go fill out a police report. The Police precinct house was only a block and a half away so I walked over and I filled out a police report. Years later my mom and I talked about the incident and she informed me that she only told me that because she thought I wouldn't do it. Even after I left the house she said she thought I would get to the Police Station and reconsider. I didn't. I was mad. I filed assault charges and then I had a court date and everything. My mother was mad because she had to take off from work to take me to court. Louis never showed up and all that happened was they issued some kind of leagal thingamajig that said he had to stay at least 50 feet away from me at all times. That was kind of cool. I had the power to make him have to stay away from places just by showing up there. As a kid I thought it was kind of funny. I had developed a sense of entitlement from living on Saint James Place and he had developed a a criminal record from living on Grant Street and when I think back on it, the part that he was really angry about was because I thought I was better than him. I faintly recall how annoyingly arrogant I was at that age and I might have been tempted to punch me too. Then one time when I was in my late teens there were two sisters, Jo and Tracy. Tracy was the second girlfriend I ever had. Our relationship lasted for almost 24 hours but not quite. But I was interested in JoJo before I was interested in Tracy. Mostly because I met her first. I had gone with the Soffin girls at a young age to get certified as a lifeguard. Lifeguard jobs were hard to get for someone my age but pool attendant jobs were easy. So when I moved from St. James to Winter Street I used to work as a pool attendant in the summer. I met Josaphene --yeah, that's why she had everyone call her Jo-- at the pool one day And I got to know Jo fairly well. I thought she was cute. My friend Jerry had been organizing trips to the movies in his van. It was mostly a collection of nerdish guys and my friend J.T.'s girlfriend usually, but occasionally one of us guys would convince a woman to come along in Jerry's death trap of a van. Well I asked Jo if she wanted to come along to the movies and she said yes. I thought that was awesome. She was really pretty and would impress all of my friends. And that's what was important. And impress them she did. We went to see Princess Bride but I never really saw much of the ending of the movie because Jo and I were too busy tongue-fencing. And I could hear my friends further down in the row whispering about us so I knew that they were thinking I was pretty hot shit and figuring that Jo was gonna be my girlfriend. We all figured that was how it worked. If a girl's gonna put her tongue down your mouth you figure there's a pretty good chance she's gonna be your girlfriend. On the drive home back to her house to drop her off Jo and I sat separately in the back of the van. She let me put my arm around her and we were close together whispering. I figured she must already be my girlfriend by now with all the kissing we'd done but I figured I'd make it official by letting her know how much I liked her and asking her if we were going out. She said that under no circumstances was I to think of myself as her boyfriend. She let me know that she already had a boyfriend and that she and I were not anything to each other or ever going to be. Here again I was rather deflated. At least Dori had had the common decency to let me know she had a boyfriend BEFORE she kissed me. Jo and I had been kissing and petting an hour before in a darkened theater and now she drops this on me? WTF? She kept on talking to me as though everything was cool but I think I just started to space out. I have no idea what my facial expression must have looked like but it couldn't have been too good. Then she started telling me that I should be glad that I'm such a nice guy and how I'm funny and blah, blah, blah. That did little to cheer me up. So then she said if I really wanted a girlfriend I should talk to her sister because her sister Tracy thought I was cute. Well, I thought Tracy was cute to, except for the fact that she was only 14 years old. I had recently turned 17 I think and Jo was almost 18 and I told Jo that I wasn't going to date a 14 year old. She shrugged and just started looking out the window waiting for us to get her home so she could leave. I guess my consternation was making her uncomfortable. I started to think about it more. Okay, yeah she was only 14 but she wouldn't be 14 forever. Maybe I would really like her if I got to know her more. She was certainly very pretty. I thought about it for a little while and came to the realization that I was desperate enough to date anybody. Why was I even kidding myself and pretending like I had standards such as 14 being too young? That was my mom talking. Not how I really felt. And my mom would get over it if I needed her to. My 2nd Girlfriend Ever (Feb.08.2003) Okay. I realize that I was right in the middle of telling you about almost fights with drunks and junkies, and I was right in the middle of the Dori story before that, and now I've skipped ahead in time, but oh well. You'll survive. It ties in with my almost fights with drunk people so that's how we got off on this tangent in case you were wondering. Tracy was the youngest of three kids. All three were very slim. They didn't have a lot of money. I had known them for a while but I hadn't seen them very frequently. First I had just seen Jo and Tracy once in a while at the swimming pool where I worked. Then there was one night when I had first gotten my drivers license and I was taking the station wagon out and having a really good ol time and my mother was a nervous wreck. She was certain that something terrible had happened to me and I had died in a terrible 80 car pile up somewhere. That's sort of why I was always a little skeptical when my mom used to tell me she had "mothers' intuition" and could feel when I was in trouble. She also used to tell me she could sense when I was about to get home. Well, that particular night she seemed to have no idea that I wasn't coming home until it got dark because my license said I could drive until dark. She also seemed to have no idea that I was perfectly fine and the car was all in one piece. Well when I got home my mom had Tracy, Jo and their mom up on our front porch talking to her. They didn't even know each other before then so the only way I can think that they would have even started talking was if my mom was asking every single person that passed by on the street if they'd seen a yellow station wagon. Then probably she described me and Jo and Tracy probably said they knew me. Then my mom probably made them come up on the porch and talk to her to distract her from her worry or something like that. I'm just guessing. Anyway later that night my mom was trying to convince me that I should go on a date with Jo. I was still dating Dori, I was not interested in dating anyone that was not Dori and I was kind of tired of my mom trying to get me to. I think at that point my mom was just looking for anything at all that would turn my attention away from Dori even a little bit but I'll get back to that later. Anyway, at some point after Dori and I went our separate ways I did think more about dating Jo and then Jo did agree to go out on a date with me but that ended up being that whole mess about her tongue kissing me and then having a boyfriend. Now, I was about to turn my attention to Tracy which my mom probably wouldn't appreciate since she was 14 but I was so desperate I was willing to fight with my mom over it. Yes or No Question (Feb.10.2003) Jo had shoulder length dark hair that I really liked. Tracy had brownish-blond really long hair that I liked even more. They had a brother who was a few years older than Jo who had bright blonde hair. In addition to their thinness they were all a little pale and not exactly healthy looking. Tracy had budding breasts that weren't fully developed but I still very much wanted to see them and be with her over a long period of time to watch them grow to full magnificence. Tracy was sort of shy and sort of not. She would sometimes do very bold things and she seemed to have no regard for the law at all. Very rebellious. But there were also a lot of things she'd never had the opportunity to do and she was very scared in some of those areas. One thing it seemed to me she might never have done before was have a boyfriend. She seemed really scared of the whole idea. She liked to spend time with me and we laughed a lot and had fun but any time I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend she either didn't answer me or she just said I don't know or something like that. Looking back at it now I think she might have been scared about what my expectations would be if we were to become official. I mean, knowing me, I probably would have been content to ogle her breasts, but she might have had a much different mental picture of what I was after and what I was capable of. Back then though, I had absolutely no clue what her problem was. I was treating her good and we had fun together and I so totally NEEDED a girlfriend so what was she waiting for? Why couldn't she just say yes and then I could finally be happy. maddening. Tracy also had a lot of responsibilities for her age. She had babysitting to do and she didn't even get to keep the money she made because her family needed it. Plus the kids she had to watch were a total handful and she was still a kid herself and not always a very responsible one. Not that I can say I was mr. responsibility either. One time I let her drive the car in downtown Buffalo and she couldn't even keep the car on the right side of the yellow line. We both were immature enough to just think it was funny. I started showing up to her babysitting job and she and I would talk on the front porch of the babysitting house and she'd sort of keep one eye on the kids. One day on that porch I told her that I was tired of her not giving me an answer. I told her that I was going to ask her one more time to be my girlfriend and she was going to have to either tell me yes or tell me no but I wasn't going to ask her anymore. And I told her she could think about it but that she had better give me an answer before I left. So she said she'd think about it. And we'd talk. Every once in a while I'd ask her if she was still thinking about it and she'd say she was still thinkin. We talked more and finally it was getting close to the time when the lady she babysat for would be getting home from work. So I told her I was about to leave and waited for her answer. She just stood there quietly. So then I walked down the steps, she still didn't say anything. Got in the car rolled down the window she was still standing there on the porch. Finally I started to drive away and she screamed out "YES" as I pulled away. That was pretty cool. Tracy was cool like that. I had given up hope of her giving me any answer at all and then she said yes at the very last moment. Finally she was my girlfriend. That was such a great night. I was so happy I could hardly go to sleep. I had finally figured out how to penetrate her defenses with the trusty old ultimatum trick. I was going to just take everything nice and slow and be understanding about how nervous she was. I would leave everything up to her and just be satisfied with the fact that she was my girlfriend. The next day she didn't have babysitting so I went to her house. I rang the doorbell and waited hoping to see her lovely face and was instead greeted by her brother. Her brother was high. He was always high. Not just a little high but way high. He sniffed coke. I'm guessing on a daily basis. His eyes were all red and he looked out of it but also really angry. He angrily asked if I was there to see his sister and I nervously responded that I was. He told me to keep away from his sister. He said that his sister had a boyfriend and that her boyfriend was over six foot tall and that this boyfriend was inside the house and wanted to come outside and stomp me into the ground with his big black combat boots. I started to wonder how many times was this going to happen to me. I seemed to have a talent for only picking women who already had boyfriends. But then somewhere in his rantings about how big and strong this guy was that was waiting behind the door to pummel me he mentioned that it was Jo's boyfriend. I explained that I wasn't there to see Jo, that I was there to see Tracy. Then he stopped talking for a minute. He thought about it. Then he told me I couldn't see Tracy either because she was only 14 years old. My second relationship pretty much ended just like that. Less than 24 hours and of that I hadn't even gotten to spend any of the time we were a couple actually face to face with her. I saw her later and asked her what was up and she figured it was best if we just let the matter drop and not risk angering her brother because she had to live in the same house with him and he was somewhat of a lunatic. I was really afraid he was going to start hitting me that day on the porch. He was so wildly irrational and angry. He was almost twenty years old or something like that and I was very afraid of coked out people that are much older than me. It was odd. Her brother had seen me hanging out with Tracy more and more. He had even begged me for rides to various places and I would give him a ride. At first I would give him a ride because I wasn't aware he was going to buy drugs. Then I continued to give him a ride because I was kind of scared of him or at least scared to be on his bad side if I was going to need to be going to a house where he was going to be on a regular basis. He didn't seem to have any problem with me and then one day out of the blue he's ruining my life. Well, story of my love life I suppose. The East Side Where They Fight For Real (Feb.10.2003) I spent the first 8 years of my life on the East Side. I was lucky not to get into any fights in that time. I've lived the rest of my life on the West Side and so fortunately all of the almost fights I've gotten into here have been pretty dumb and totally mild. In the 1990s though I worked on the East Side as a mentor for an after school program for a couple years. I got to see quite a few very real fights in those days. There was a whole culture of violence that was like a war zone that I was trying to keep the kids in my charge away from. Specifically, I was the mentor for the computer lab. You could pretty much keep the violence to a minimum in the computer lab since most of the kids in the lab were the ones looking to escape the violence in the first place. Sometimes though for one reason or another I would be in the gym mentoring basketball. I like basketball. I'm good at it. The program had some young kids that were much better though. Basketball was taken pretty seriously at the program. The whole program had three different branches in three different schools. For a while they tried inter-program basketball games where they would bus a team and some spectators from one school over to another school for a basketball game. There was one game that was getting pretty ugly. They played a little basketball once in a while in between the fighting. I don't think they ever got to finish the game I think the administration just called it and tried an organized retreat of the visiting team back to the bus. The organized retreat became very disorganized and before you know it all of the kids were all outside and it looked like there was about to be a fight of about 20 teenagers vs. 20 other teenagers. I REALLY did not want any part of that but it was my job I guess, as part of the staff, to do something. The Assistant director of the program was a really huge guy and he ran right into the middle of the fray so even though I didn't want to I started following him toward it also, ready to do whatever I could. I don't know how but somehow the Assistant Director managed to break up the whole thing pretty much single-handedly. There was so much chaos everywhere I have no idea how he restored order but I was very glad that he did because I really had no idea what I was going to do when I got to the center of the commotion. That's pretty much all I can think of for my near brushes with violence. Oh, except that one time when Jerry almost beat me up. But I still haven't really told you who Jerry is yet. I'll get to that soon. Scars, Battle Damage & Serious Injuries (Feb.10.2003) Okay. A brief trip around my body. Ready? Set. Go.
So I guess now would be as good a time as any to make with some Jerry stories. [next: Friends] |
