THE S CLUB

The leaves on the trees had turned to a russet while others turned to a gold that in the sun turned to a more glorified gold, like the kind of gold you see in chintz. The leaves turned brown and fell to the ground and when the wind came up they would spread out on the lawn and shift like the sand on the desert. The leaves and the twigs would often get stuck beneath the lawn mower. In the Indian Summer sun, I would mow our two and a half acres of lawn. I often imagined myself as a convict doing time at a suburban Halfway House.

All I thought about when I moved the lawn was sex, sex, sex. Me fucking Boom Boom. Kennedy fucking Jackie. Richard Burton fucking Liz. All this over and over again. Just as many stripes that are on a freshly mowed lawn, I thought of sex that often.

Madge threatened me with a black eye if I told Mother and Father about the Strip Club or its alias “S Club.” I found what Neil had engineered was nothing but silly prepubescent sex orgies. The sex was only show and tell. Silly little children acting like silly old strippers with pasties and cellulite. Indeed the sex was nothing compared to what was going on in The Carpetbaggers.”

I can honestly say that even though sex was a swarthy and pink frontier; a virtual jungle of sensations and feelings that I was drawn and frightened of. I still had no interest in Neil’s Playboy Club especially when the headliner was my sister.

So they would go off and cavort in the glen of trees. And I only had the roar of the Toro lawn mower to console me. It was all I needed.

I again had to brave the realization that I had made a long time ago in fifth grade. In Junior High School, it was called “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” but my analysis is shorter and more visceral. People are just shit asses. They are simply cruel, conniving, superficial, and certainly just as self-absorbed as I.

However I found most people much more susceptible to the “machine” than me. By the “machine” I mean the “machine” of our culture that spews out the trinkets, trends, ideas and gadgets that people believe that they need. This could range from a spanking new Edsels to having Vitalis shellacked hair and having a blonde’s red fingernails run through it.

I believed that everything the machine promised could never happen to me. And if it did, it would embarrass me. It is just another TV show. It would look great but it would never happen. BUT I STILL WANTED IT.

To me reality, the real reality, we contend with everyday is a boring and less immediate one. The “machine” never admits it however.

Life simply trudges on. In American History, we were between the French and Indian Wars and the War of Independence. In Math, we are studying the binary system. Boys wear flat tops and loafers. Girls wear a blue or pink rayon hair bands. Girls wear lacy stockings and prescribed to a little fad called “Slam Books.”

A “Slam Book ” is a notebook in which each page is devoted to a popular or unpopular member of the class. The person is critiqued in a barrage of anonymous graffiti. Being that I am not liked or hated enough to merit a page, I deal with them in that matter. I leave them alone. They leave me alone.

And I still wonder what it is; like to be accepted and be inside someone. As the school bus rumbles along its route, my dick gets stimulated and hard from stilling over the back wheels. It reverberated and awoke full of testosterone like a dinosaur. Jutting up and painful like some kind of seizure, my toes sweaty and tense in my Stride Right oxfords. I look out the window and try to think of nothing as the split-level houses roll by.

I wonder. I wonder.

John O” Hara novels have good sex in them. But the sex always between two preppy people who were so constricted. On the other hand, Harold Robbins casts younger nouveau riche types who are far more serious, specific, and acrobatic about their screwing. Harold Robbins really writes a book you can really go to bed with.

“Hey Edmund,” purred Madge,“wanna play Carpetbaggers? ”

“How do you play that?”

“Well, Chris takes one of his mother’s wigs,” she says matter of factly. He gives me the wig and I dance around and strip. Neil takes out his Brownie camera and snaps pictures.” She laughed. “It’s a gas.”

“Does Neil ever touch you?”

“If he does,” Madge snapped. “I’d hit him right in the balls.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I drew an insoles triangle with a ho-hum disdain.

“So,” said my father. “It is Saturday afternoon and you should be outside playing with the kids in the neighborhood.”

“Ugh,” I uttered. “If A and B were equal.” I began to write.

“Do you want to throw the Frisbee around?” he asked.

I looked up at him. “How can you do that if you have bursitis in your right arm?”

“It’s not acting up so much now that I have these cooper bracelets.”

“I am glad.” I said because I was.

We stared at each other for an awkward moment. I had homework to do and I was in the middle of concentrating. “What is it?” I said. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

Oh shit, I was about to get busted for indecent exposure.

I swallowed. “About what?”

Boys, girls and babies,” he said.

“Ugh,” I said embarrassed for both of us. “I am fourteen years old. And I know all about that.”

“You do?” he said shocked.

“I know I am an ugly twerp,” I said. “But even ugly twerps know about sex.”

“You aren’t an ugly little twerp,” Father said. ”Where did you get that idea in your head?”

“Well I don’t know any girls that like me or take me seriously or think I am handsome.”

“That’s not true, your mother and I think you are handsome.”

“You don’t count,” I said. “You are my parents.”

“Well let me see, Madam Boom Boom once told me she thought you were handsome. She said you look a little like me.” He cleared his throat.” And I am handsome. You should have seen all the girlfriends I had when I was sixteen.”

“How about fourteen?”

“I had none then, I was an ugly little twerp,” he said. He smiled.

Really?”

“Yes, really.”

We were silent.

“Well do you have any questions?” he asked sheepishly.

No, not really.”

“Good,” he said looking relieved and walking away.