I began to get mischievous around that time. My relationship with Nickie couldn’t have been more cutthroat. Never was there a brother who was as inventive and intent on torturing a sister. I’d sneak into my mother’s room and steal a dollar from her purse, spend half of it and put the change in Nickie’s drawer. Nickie always got the blame and they would punish her by making her stand by the back door, watching me taunt her in the back yard until one day in a fit of frustration she kicked through the glass panels. I locked myself in car trunks, and once when I was left was a neighbor, I crawled into her woodshed and terrorized her with knives until my mother came and hauled me away.
By the time I was nine years old we were really having a rough time of it. My father didn’t know what he wanted to do. The last five years had been torture for him and my mother. It always seemed like he was behind the eight ball, weighted down with one problem after another. His nipping at the bottle worried him. His brother Lonson would call each week from Los Angeles and beg us to come out there. My father had been trained as a design draftsman in the Navy, and Lonson was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where there was a job available for him. Lonson had even rejoined the church, and was very contented in Los Angeles. So Dad promised himself that he could try Los Angeles again, and if things began to work out, he would return to the church and dedicate himself to God.
For two weeks we sprawled on sofas and mattresses across the floor in Lonson’s living room. Finally Lonson took my father out to lunch with two men from the Jet Propulsion Lab. Dad came home and told us that Lonson had an expense account! Money that doesn’t cost anything! Lonson drank four martinis during lunch and the bill came to twenty-four dollars. We were awed, even more awed when Lonson’s friends gave my father a job the next day as a draftsman in research and development in the space program. The day he started working we began to commute to a local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ in San Fernando Valley.
Puberty was a very confusing time for me. I was startled into puberty because I had no warning it was coming. I had no premonition my bald little dick would suddenly sprout a garden of pubic hair and mysterious life- giving substance would emerge if the right buttons were pushed.
The winter of my eleventh year I found myself inexplicably drawn to advertisements in the back of the Ladies’ Home Journal that were headlined ENLARGE YOUR BREASTS. I’d get a very warm feeling when I looked at the before and after pictures and didn’t exactly know why. I wondered, What is happening to me?
It was around that time, in the yard of church, that a skinny little boy named Edward Satriano explained in very authoritative voice to a group guzzling lemonade that a woman had a auxiliary hole in her body about three inches below her navel, nestled in a thatch of hair. In order to reproduce a man would insert his penis and pee.
I was flabbergasted and terrified. First of all I didn’t see how that kind of stuff could be any fun at all. It didn’t give me the same sort of thrill I got from breast-enlarging advertisements. And more important, my things was broken! Everytime I got an erection my little boy’s pecker would swing up to a ninety-degree salute, and whenever I tried to push it down to a right angle, in practice for peeing into a woman, naturally it hurt like hell, and I couldn’t pee. I thought my life was over.
I spent hours in the bathroom and in bed trying to bend my erection back. At night I would tear an old T-shirt apart and make a sling for my hard on, tying one end to my knee in hopes I could bend it into the right position. I went to sleep in pain every night, torturing myself and my penis into submission.
My parents never told me about the facts of life. They never even mentioned it. It wasn’t because they were religious, but because they were chicken. I don’t know why they found it embarrassing. I think it’s a great topic for exploration with children. Not only should sex education be taught in schools, but they should have guest lecturers, including prostitutes and perverts, to explain to the kids exactly what it’s all about. We’d probably all be so much better adjusted. My own parents put it off from year to year, until eventually my sister Nickie and I were too old for a talk with them and we had to find out for ourselves.
I had my first date with a girl named Melanie Mapes who had the biggest knockers of any thirteen-year-old girl that ever sat up. I was two years younger than she and not old enough at the time to use Melanie for fantasy material, but years later her memory warmed me on lonely nights. Melanie modeled children’s underwear in the Sears Roebuck catalog. She looked like an infant Raquel Welch. When my mother wasn’t home, I would invite Melanie over to play sex Monopoly. Instead of passing go and collecting two hundred dollars, I had the option of fondling her boobs. I didn’t even know what to do with them. When it was her turn to pass go she always opted to collect two hundred dollars, which I thought was reasonable, because I didn’t have any boobs.
The church was suddenly everything to us, a religion, a social life, a new family. My father’s devotion was inspiring. It affected my mother so deeply that within a month she stood up in church one day and asked to be baptized. My father did the same things a few weeks later, and after that our lives changed completely. A real conversion took place in all of us, my father the most dramatically. He stopped everything bad he was doing — cold turkey. He stopped it all, from booze to tobacco. He was incredibly strong and determined, and the entire family had renewed respect for him.
From then on I was in church with my father seven days a week! God, you wouldn’t believe it. We studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon backward and forward. I even had entire scriptures memorized. In a year I was a religious whiz kid. We went to every sort of meeting and church conference or social even in the West. Soon we knew ministers and church members from all the neighboring states and made little pilgrimages on the weekends.
At one conference we met a minister from Ohio who was doing missionary work with the Indians in Arizona, and he invited us to spend a Sunday with him on an Apache reservation. The way the Indians lived shocked us. They lay in filth out in the desert, living in pitiful cardboard shacks called Wikiaks. The children were all naked, and bloated from hunger and disease. There was no medical treatment for them at all, and when we set up a breadline to feed them I saw my father cry for the first time.
Back in Los Angeles Dad had several dreams that told him he would be called for the ministry, and after speaking to the church congregation about his dreams and the Apaches, they asked to ordain him.
I was submerged even deeper in religion during the preperation for my father’s ordination. When the other kids stayed home because the lessons were too deep, too obscure for a child to understand, my father would bring me. I went to the doctrine meetings with him and the other men who aspired to be ministers. I watched my dad transform himself, through God and the church, into a totally happy, self-sufficient human being. He ordained in April 1961 when he was thirty-four years old and I was thirteen.
He immediately wanted to move to Arizona to continue his missionary work with the Apaches. The church people in LA admired his zest but thought the move rather foolish. My father couldn’t buy a job in Phoenix at the time and our church doesn’t have a paid ministry. But there was no stopping him. In May we moved to a little trailer camp in Phoenix and started work with the Indians.
I had a whole new sexual awakening the first night we moved to Phoenix. We all got new linen and pillows, and my old battered feather pillow was replaced with a juicy, humpable foam rubber model. That night in bed I hugged the pillow against me and suddenly there was music and fireworks. It was Love American Style. I was madly in love with my pillow for a year. I was jealous if anybody touched it or fluffed it. I masturbated with it several times a day and eventually it was so stiff it would crack if I had put my head down on it. To this day I find sheets and pillows an enormous turn on, and I’m still a heavy wet dreamer.
My father made the rounds looking for a job every day, but nobody wanted a draftsman. Nobody even wanted a used-car salesman or a cab driver. Our savings began to dwindle and Dad got discouraged again. His depression was contagious and everyone in the family was suffering from a good dose of it.
Still, every weekend we’d drive the one hundred and fifty miles outside of Phoenix to the St. Carlos Mission, which my father helped establish. We fed the Indians, and at night while my father preached to them I sat around the fire with Indian kids, using my BB gun to pick off tarantulas that came to eat the desert moths fluttering around the flames.
On the Fourth of July, only two months after we had moved to Phoenix, there was a huge celebration at a church member’s home, and when I got home to my pillow, instead of fucking it, I threw up two quarts of lasagna on it. My mother chalked it up to spicy cooking. Later on in the night my stomach hurt unbearably, and possessed with the fear that I would be carried to the doctor’s office for an injection, I kept my mouth shut and suffered through the pain.
Two days later I was throwing up every hour, which I hid from my mother be sneaking into the bathroom in the back of the trailer and turning the water on full force to cover up the sounds of my retching. Eventually she got
