you show me yours, and...

XXII.
When I was about 7 or so, this creepy family moved in next door. Betty, an enormous woman, her scrawny broken-English speaking husband Enoch, and their two wily, scrawny kids Lawrence and Jesse. Enoch was from Ethiopia, we think. We didn't really hear much from him, because he tended to sit back and let Betty and her bulk and loud voice take over.

Except, of course, for the time that they were having a yelling match in their front yard at midnight, which crescendoed into a chase scene with Enoch wielding a knife and Betty swinging a section of pipe at him.

Lawrence was my age, and he was a mean little kid. He used to loose their Doberman pinscher on their poor limping cat and watch the cat try to run away. Nonetheless, he was next door, and with the wobbly fence between our houses, it was sometimes just easier to play with him than to try and avoid him.

On one of these occasions, we were playing in the sprinklers (note: if your family can't afford a swimming pool, that's what you do in the summer: put on a bathing suit and run through the sprinklers and pretend you're having fun.) and Lawrence made the classic childhood bet:

You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.

I agreed somewhat hesitantly, and he pulled down his trunks. I remember thinking that it really didn't look anything like the textbooks. I looked up and he was leering in that creepy way of his. Go on, it's your turn, he said, and I decided that there was no way Lawrence was going to see mine.

I turned off the sprinkler and ran in the house. Lawrence started pounding on the door, which I ignored. My mother looked at me quizzically. Lawrence is saying nasty things, I said. Which, really, was a lie only in the temporal sense: he hadn't said anything particularly nasty just then, but there were enough other times that he had that I felt I was on pretty stable moral ground.

So my mom told Lawrence that I couldn't play anymore, and that if he kept knocking she'd go tell his mother. And I went to my "how babies are made" book and looked up the figure drawings of the penis and tried to match that up mentally with what I'd seen in real life.

Friday 15 February, 01:10 PM