I almost Had Sex at Six
I was 6 years old in 1951 and in the first grade in a New York City public school.
While there I made friends with a group of white kids whose parents spoke Spanish and who taught me important lessons in life. The most important one is that Things are not always what they seem:
Newspapers were a big thing in New York City in those days, so much so that news stands selling them needed storage bins almost as big as the stands themselves to house the papers until the morning rush consumed them. By the time we got out of school, the big green storage kiosks were empty. My friend, let's call him Juan, took me into one of those empty kiosks. But it wasn't empty.
Inside was a friend of his, a young girl also my age. Juan asked me to drop my pants and underwear. Now I have to tell you, I was neither embarrassed nor did I feel that something bad was going to happen because I trusted Juan. I recall thinking this was some kind of game and so down went my pants and underwear.
The girl then came over to where I was standing and knelt down. I had no clue why she did that and before I knew what was happening I saw her face heading toward my private parts. Oh, let me stop here for a moment. I forgot to warn my readers that if you are easily upset by descriptions of sex and stuff like that, you might as well stop reading now.
OK, you still with me? As I was saying, her face was headed toward my private parts. I saw her mouth open and then I yanked up both my pants and underwear in one scoop and quickly crawled out of the kiosk and started running home.
After a block or so, I looked back and saw Juan running after me but without the girl. When he caught up he asked me why I ran out.
I told him that the girl was about to bite off my willy.
Juan laughed and said, "No, she wasn't going to bite it, she was going to kiss it."
"No, no!" I insisted, "she was going to bite it, she wasn't trying to kiss it." I made a gnashing grimace and then puckered my lips to convince Juan that I knew the difference between biting and kissing. I was no fool, once I saw her mouth open, I knew something bad was going to happen.
Juan just shook his head and went back, probably to the kiosk to get his willy bitten off. We never discussed the matter again and a year later my parents moved to Bayonne.
It wasn't until a few years later when a friend brought me some of his father's stash of porn photos that I regretfully realized that things are not always what they seem.
Postscript
Some of my readers may recall reading that I also attended the first grade in Bayonne, NJ; for an explanation why, please read my article Me, On Blog Talk Radio.
If you are wondering why I called my friends 'white kids whose parents spoke Spanish' instead of calling them Hispanics, it's simple: 'Hispanics' weren't invented until twenty years later:
LA Times, 12 Jun 2009, Judge Sotomayor, a mythic 'Hispanic'
Here's a good argument for putting Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court: She's knowledgeable, respected and deeply experienced. As a federal judge for nearly two decades, she's heard thousands of cases and written hundreds of opinions.
And here's a lousy argument for confirming Sotomayor: She would be the first "Hispanic" on the court.
I put the term in quotation marks because it's a recent invention, dating to the 1970s and '80s. Before then, when Sotomayor was growing up with her Puerto Rican family in New York City, she was not Hispanic.
...
How did Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans all become Hispanic?
Amid the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, many of these groups joined hands to demand voting rights, bilingual education and social services. Here they received a big assist from an unlikely source: Richard Nixon. Eager to bring Mexicans and other Latino immigrants into the Republican fold, Nixon also saw them as a potential bulwark against black political aspirations.
"All Spanish-speaking Americans share certain characteristics -- a strong family structure, deep ties to the church, which makes them open to an appeal from us," wrote one GOP campaign strategist on the eve of Nixon's 1972 presidential reelection bid. "The Democratic Party is under suspicion for favoring politically potent blacks at the expense of the needs of Spanish-speaking people."
So Nixon threw his weight behind bilingual education, which has since become a bete noire for the GOP. He also ordered the Census Bureau to add a query on its 1970 form asking whether respondents were "Hispanic," hoping to further solidify this new voting bloc.
