Breaking into my own house

Once I started high school, I took the bus home in the afternoon. The house I lived in was never locked, but for some reason I liked to "break in" through my bedroom window. I would pop the latch off with a gentle tap of the wrist, slide it open, and crawl through. One day, instead of popping the latch, the glass gave way and shattered all over my wrist. I rushed to the back door like a normal person, and got somebody to take me to the hospital.

Now, that bedroom window was a fairly high traffic spot. When the kids on my street wanted to hang out, they didn't knock on my door, they just came up to the window. One kid had dad who installed windows for a living, and shortly after I broke the thing they dropped by the window together to do an estimate. Thing was, I was beating off. I had my little television on and Madonna was doing some sexy shit on MTV and I was going to town and then I hear the bushes rustle and there's little Stephen and some old guy. With the angle they had, I don't think they saw what I was doing. They sure didn't act like they did. They just said "hi" and looked at the window pane. I did my best to play like I was just hanging out, not masturbating. I could feel the blood in my cheeks. Eventually, they went away.

A few years later, when mental illness was fashionable, I would lie that the ugly scar on my wrist was from a suicide attempt.

Peeping mjk

My sister is 12 years older than me. One day, when I was a six year old kid and she was an 18 year old quasi-adult, I climbed up on a chair and tried to look at her through the bathroom window as she exited the shower. I suppose I was curious about the difference between girls and boys. I was discovered almost immediately and she screamed her head off. I scuttled down from my perch and made myself scarce for a while. I don't remember seeing anything, other than steam and the pinkish form of a naked body. I don't remember getting in trouble, either.

The Piano Recital

When I was five years old my mother signed me up for piano lessons. My teacher was from Sri Lanka, and I was fascinated by her. I grew up in a town where most people had pale skin and spoke like I did. Her skin was very dark and her accent was thick and unfamiliar to my ears. The decorations in her little apartment were colorful and intricate and they were everywhere. She had elephants and hanging tassels and intricately carved furniture, and generally the place just had more style than I was used to. Occasionally she told me about her piano teacher. Her piano teacher had a switch and whenever a mistake was made her little fingers were struck. She never hit me or even threatened to hit me, but that story scared the crap out of me just the same.

At the end of the year there was a recital. All the little children were to play in a little hall far all the little parents. I was to perform a piano duet with a little girl. The pianos sat next to each other on the stage and we had our backs to the audience. We played the opening phrase perfectly fine, and then I stopped. The opening phrase was probably about eight bars and the rest of the piece was probably about 64. I can remember what the music looked like because all I could do during that time was stare at it as my insides turned to jelly and my brain filled with electricity. I sat there in a pool of five-year-old anguish as she gracefully played on, unperturbed, for what seemed like at least an hour. For some reason, my piano lessons ended after that.

There is no Santa Claus

At the time of this memory, I was probably about six years old. It was Christmas eve and I had gone to bed thinking about Santa Claus. Some time in the night I woke up thirsty. I got up out of bed and headed for the kitchen for a glass of water. The kitchen door was closed, as it never was. Peeking underneath the door, the light in there was on. Aside form the Christmas tree the rest of the house was dark. I remember these things now, but being half asleep at the time I didn't think about these details. I just opened the door to get my glass of water.

Neon squirt-gun in a box, half covered in wrapping paper. My father looking up at me with an unusual panic in his eye. The door slamming shut in my face, forcefully.

I was no longer concerned with my thirst. I went back to bed and pretended to believe in Santa Claus for the next few years.

No Hands

I had twenty dollars and I spent it all on donuts. There was a Winchell's near my house and my little friends and I rode there on our bikes. We picked out what seemed like hundreds of pastries and I payed for them all with my twenty dollar bill. (I later received a lecture from my father about "the value of a dollar." This lecture failed. For one thing, it was poorly framed. I could not make the abstraction from "a dollar" to "money in general." I just kept thinking, "a dollar isn't worth very much at all." To this day I maintain my contemptuous attitude towards money, though I do try to avoid blowing it on donuts.) So now I had all these donuts to carry and I had to get them home so we could eat them all. My little friends didn't offer to help carry the load, and I didn't ask. They just told me to ride my bike with no hands as they rolled off down the hill. I had never been able to ride my bike with no hands and now I had to do just that, while holding two giant bags of donuts. I started off down the hill and almost immediately crashed. My little friends were long gone. There were boxes of donuts everywhere. I was laying in the middle of the street with blood pouring out of my leg. Some neighborhood woman had seen the crash from her front porch. She rushed out to help me. She didn't have any proper bandages, so she tried to cover the wound with a paper bag from some clothing store. The bag had a drawing of a woman's face on it, and it had the bright primary colors and bold lines common to the fashions of the late 80's. I was overwhelmed by the situation and the earnestness of the woman's attempt at first-aid. I felt she was too beautiful to be out there in the street with me and my donuts. Soon I was able to ride home, pushed away from the scene by a profound feeling of embarrassment. I still have the scar. It is a small white patch on my shin where no hair grows.

Flashing my Mother

I was coming up on puberty and developing a sense of privacy about my body. I don't remember what happened, exactly, but I somehow crashed my bike, and my penis took much of the impact. It hurt badly and it was bleeding. Something had to be done about it and I did not know what that something was, so I went to my mother. She was in her usual afternoon pose; large cup of coffee, newspapers, books, magazines, and a bag of chocolate chips. I hobbled up to her and mumbled something like "Mom, I have a problem." I didn't want to describe the problem because I didn't want to talk about my penis with my mother. So, I took down my pants and showed her my bloody little pecker. She didn't act surprised. She acted like this sort of thing happened every day. I don't remember what she did, if we went to the hospital or if she fixed it up herself or what, but she made it better.

The Big Dick Award

I'm not sure exactly how old I was. It was that golden time of youth that Wes Anderson calls ten and a half. In my neighborhood there were several boys at that age, all of us armed with bicycles and too much free time. We would sometimes congregate at my house where the storm drain cut through the backyard. There was an old fence that had long ago lost its footing and now created a suburban lean-to in cooperation with the trees and the ivy. We discovered this structure with its spiders and its assorted trash and quickly hollowed it out to facilitate future play. On one side was the large, leaning fence with the hole through the middle, through which the smaller and more nimble of us could crawl towards the top of the structure. On either side was an opening covered by trees and overhanging vegetation. Opposite the fence was the storm drain; a square river made of concrete, ten feet deep with a thin film of water and slime running down it at all times. It was there that I won the pissing contest. All of us lined up along the fence and let fly, and my stream reached the opposite wall at a point higher than anybody else's, at which point I was granted the Big Dick Award. This was, of course, before having a big dick had any meaning deeper than having a big car, a big cheeseburger, or a big balloon. Being that I was one of the smaller and younger of the group, I most likely would not have won this contest if our system of measurement was any more more scientific.

Shitting my Pants

I was just old enough to wipe my own ass and wash my own hands. I had developed a certain sense of privacy as a result of completing those tasks unaided, and that is why it was so terrible when I shat all over myself. It was mortifying to be covered with shit, not because I'd never been covered in shit before, but because I had believed up until that point that I had grown beyond shitting myself and that I would never shit myself again when this is entirely not the case because I have indeed shat myself again and I no doubt will do so again before I am dead. And yet there I was, in the middle of the night, crying in the shower as my father washed the brown goo from my legs.

Grass vs. Concrete

I was two years old and alone in the backyard. I was sitting on the ground, marveling at the blades of grass as they grew through cracks in the concrete.