Wally had always been a fixture on our street. He paid us no mind until we reached puberty. I was 12, Anda 13, so that made him almost 20. He felt it was his duty to “educate’ us. What did we know? He was short, fat and bowlegged. He was born on Halloween. He believed he came from another planet. We didn’t argue that part. We thought he was nuts. His best friend was really tall and really skinny. They made for a strange sight. We called them Mousey and Babitt. Not to their faces of course.
He started telling us about the birds and the bees and we were properly horrified but very curious. We felt like we were part of a huge secret plot and were the only ones in the world who knew about…s-e-x. But then we got scared and we were pretty sure our parents didn’t “do” what he said they did and we didn’t talk to him for a week after that. Over that week, we questioned our new found knowledge and realized he might be right. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves back on his porch. This time, we were ready to listen. This time he had “dirty” books.
He said he had gentlemen’s magazines, a polite term for porn mags. He told us he also had “erotica” and we felt bad for him because we thought it was some kind of disease. We sort of knew that girls and boys had different plumbing, I mean, I had younger brothers and we’d changed countless diapers babysitting all over the neighborhood, but for some reason we never equated boy bits to anything but peeing. We also never realized, until then, that we had hoo-hoos and we were on the verge of sprouting boobies. Anda maybe, but I was flat as a board. I still don’t have those glorious boobies he talked about. We didn’t know what to think and we sort of got scared…but not enough to leave.
He gave us a book of “erotica” and we were scared to death. We couldn’t take it to my place because my mother could smell “no good” at 50 yards. So Anda put it under her shirt and hid it at her place. We decided to read it in her basement. I wasn’t afraid of “basement” then. If we sat on the steps, about half way down, we could read by the light of the window. We read silently. This is how we learned one too many things…things we should not have known until we were way older. We were stunned that kissing wasn’t only on the lips. We pointed out passages and squealed, did you read this?! Oh my God!…We swallowed hard and got all sweaty. I was really freaking out because things were feeling funny in my body. We always told each other everything, but this time, we never discussed the physical feelings we were experiencing. So I thought it was just me and I felt really bad and really ashamed.
Just then her father needed something in the basement. When he opened the door, we jumped 5 feet straight up. He saw us reading stuff all the time, so he never questioned it. With our hearts in our throats, we ran out of there and straight to Wally’s, and threw his dirty book at him, telling him he was a pig. Then we cried. We were two confused and ashamed little girls, scared to death of the things adulthood had in store for us. Our world was changing fast and we couldn’t stop it.
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Tags: dirty books, erotica, porn mags, puberty, sex