I'm 99% positive that my first memory relating to the whole motley crew of women, nudity and sex was when a couple of my sisters took me to the BYU Richards Pool to swim. Since I was a pre-schooler (is it possible that I may have been only three?), I got changed with them in the women's locker room. I remember standing and looking at two coeds in all their glory no more than 15 feet away from us. Both were brunettes. One sat on a white towel on the wooden bench. I saw only her backside, and can still see her cheeks, her crack, and her long white back leading up to her hair in a sloppy bun. The other was standing, facing me, her breasts bouncing as she toweled off her hair. The small locker was open at about her eye level. Her abdomen and crotch were mostly blocked by the head and shoulders of her friend, but I think I saw the curious, triangular patch of hair. Apparently I was gawking, and one of them gave a look in our direction that caused my eldest sister to protest apologetically, "Oh, it's OK. He doesn't know." To which I responded --and I remember how indignant I felt at her assertion-- "Yes I DO know! I DO! Know what?!" (Oddly, I don't remember having seen my sisters naked at that time.)
When I was very young, maybe still preschool-aged but no later than first grade, I would lie on my side, wedge my head as far under our big Magnavox console TV as it would go, and crane my neck in an effort to look up the skirts of women on the screen.
There was a book about art history in the living room bookshelves. I remember (probably around the same time I was upskirting the Lennon Sisters and Carol Brady) having found in it "a nude," translation: painting of a neked womin. I remember that she was neither thin nor Rubenesque, just average; that the background was dark green, maybe a forest scene; and that she had long, frizzy blond hair. I used to stealth into the living room and touch the tip of my tongue to one of her nipples -- just enough to make contact, not enough to slop up the page. In thinking about the style, it may have been a late Renaissance piece, although probably not (sorry, E. Buzz Miller) by Titian.
One night my sister, acting on my parents' orders, drained the bathtub while I was still in it, just lying still on my back. I remember watching my penis emerge first from the plane of the water and, thinking that the tip reminded me of a great, classical domed structure, exclaimed, "Look! My temple's floating!" My sister ran straight to my parents, and I got in trouble, maybe a reprimand or even a spanking, so confused as to why.
We had several house guests when I was growing up -- some stayed for a few days, some for entire semesters or more. We had a cute foreign exchange student from Japan. Short jaw-length bob hairdo and a big smile. She was the daughter of a friend of my father. She was in her early teens. I was no older than five or six. I remember once sneaking into her room, finding a pair of her panties and smelling the crotch. I remember there was something beige/yellowish (not liquid, but creamy) on the little cotton patch. A short time later, we had another guest -- this time a college student, a brunette. A little heavy but very pretty. She wore blue jeans and a red sweatshirt a lot. Somehow I managed to see her getting out of the shower once, although I don't remember whether it was through the crack in an open bathroom door, or by acrobatically peering down the laundry chute and at the shower's reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite.
My sisters usually had at least a Vogue or two around. I think this was in the days before Elle (I saw my first Elle in fifth or sixth grade, in the living room of the duplex my parents owned and rented to college-aged and young professional girls.) and before Cosmo really took off. I'd peruse their Vogues from time to time in search of the occasional goodie--oddly, I don't remember ever rifling through National Geographic with similar intent, although we had a subscription--and remember a very strong impression of something at seeing the famous photo of the woman sitting on the couch, knees apart, blouse unbuttoned down a ways, a man's shadow on the wall behind her and an aggressive come-hither-or-I'll-kick-your-ass look on her face. I can't remember the campaign (Halston?), the model, or the photographer (Ritts? Newton? von Unwerth?) so I can't easily find the photo, but you'd recognize it.
I saw my first "girlie" magazine at age 8 or 9, probably 9, in the "hut" built among the tall shrubs in the backyard of my friends' (twins) house. It was Harvey Magazine. I believe they'd gotten it from their older brother. It wasn't intact, but was instead torn at the spine/fold into several multi-page sections, which made it easier for several of us to, uh, read the fascinating articles at once. All I remember of its contents was that one of the neked ledies looked like the blond ABBA girl.
I saw my first Playboy at age 10, at a news stand at LAX. I just saw the cover, but remember exactly where it was in the room, in a stack at about knee height. I don't remember anything else about it, except that I'd sneaked away to go get a closer look, my parents had no idea where I was, I almost caused them in their panic to miss an international flight, and my dad hauled me all the way to the gate by my ear. A few months later, I refused to make even a three-hour, high-interest loan to my then-cashless friends (I was with three of them, brothers, ages 11, 13 and 15) so the eldest could buy an American Playboy that caught his attention at a Central European bus station. Around that same time, I was sleeping in the same room as my sisters in a Scotish B&B. I went to bed first on a cot in the corner, pulled the blanket over my head but left a little peephole through which I saw for the first time the pubic hair of one of them. On that same trip, I paused in an empty but usually-busy hallway to look thro
ugh the keyhole (this was a "classic" keyhole with simply an open hole) into the room of some college girls who were traveling with us, and at that moment, bingo! one of them was just getting out of her jeans. I watched only long enough to idiotically tell her the next day, "Nice purple panties." She looked at me confusedly and probably thought she'd had a wedgie or something.Back home, the youngest of my older sisters (i.e., the one nearest me in age, albeit several years my senior) showed me a photo in her high school biology book of sperm trying to penetrate an egg. I remember it looking like a solid marble covered in alfalfa sprouts. She also pointed out to me the fallopian tubes and ovaries of a little piglet cadaver she'd brought home to work on. Not long after that, she had me watch her while she changed a tampon, and explained what was going on. Fortunately, all I remember from that was how awkwardly she sat on the toilet, and I didn't understand a thing she explained.
When I was about 12, I was in a small bookstore with my mom. We got separated, and I stumbled upon a book (again, I remember what the cover looked like and where it was on the shelf) called "The Female..." then a word I didn't quite recognize. As we were headed to the car, I asked her, "Mom, what's a female organism? Or orgasnism?" She shuddered, stopped in her tracks, and scolded me, "You do NOT need to know what that means!!!" So of course the first place I went when we got home was to the dictionary, and thus began a more or less lifelong endeavor to expertize myself about The Female Orgasm. (Incidentally, I shared this story --with certain key vocabulary terms left out-- several years ago in one of those combined "Fifth Sunday" meetings in which the R.S. and Priesthood meet together. The topic was porn, and people were throwing out all kinds of the usual suspect problems and remedies. I got so tired of it that I finally stood up and said many things, the distillation of which is, "When our own hang-ups about sex keep us from discussing it openly with our children, they will soon learn that they will learn nothing from us, and will absolutely, positively seek that learning elsewhere. When you tell a deacon in horror, 'You do NOT need to know what that means!!' what's the first thing he's going to go do? And how long until his buddies are on board, as well? My friends and I spent the next several years trying to familiarize ourselves with the concept, and, while it's not certain this is causal, all of us have had struggles of some kind or other with porn.")
In seventh grade, my best friend asked me as a joke, "Have you ever been caught M-ing in the closet?" "Uh...(pause, while I still processed that long M-word in the middle and tried to make sense of it)...no?" "It's a good hiding place, huh! Ha, ha ha..." The family dictionary later enlightened me, and within a few weeks, I believe, mom's hand-held neck massager, I experienced my first O. (My body was not yet ready to E, so the first few dozen instances were actually nothing more than a weirdly pleasant surge of warmness.) A year or two later was the first and only time that I've ever been caught M-ing; it was by my just-older sister. I'd heard her footsteps approaching down the hallway in time to stop before she actually
entered the room, plus it was dark, so she didn't really see anything (hellloooo, trauma narrowly averted!!), but she knew. The image in my mind at the instant of interruptus was an animated variation of this Madonna poster, which I had on the back of my door at the time. (Although this was for me the most titillating Madonna pic from the Boy Toy era.)Speaking of Madonna, the summer before 9th grade I visited my eldest sister and her husband in New York. This was before Giuliani Did Broadway, so the successors of Debbie Does Dallas were still out in force. I remember going out on quick solo jaunts to Times Square and 42nd Street, gazing at the strategically-blacked-out window displays that nevertheless left nothing to the imagination as to what was behind the darkened door. I remember seeing vendors hawking posterboard-mounted nude pics of a very young, brunette, almost-breastless and then-unknown (i.e., at the time of the sessions) Madonna that had recently run in Penthouse to so much fanfare. I remember buying some nudie playing cards while shopping with my brother in law on the street somewhere in Lower Manhattan, and being surprised that he didn't seem to mind. Later that day, when I disappeared with them for evidently a suspiciously long time into the men's restroom at his law firm (although, surprisingly, I was not M-ing with them), he entered and, presumably seeing my feet beneath the stall and knowing I was alone, said, "Wow, you must really like those cards!" I remember finding (I don't think I was snooping) a "Today" sponge in the bathroom, telling my sister obtusely and out of the blue, "Well, I kind of want to be an uncle someday," not because I did but to show that I was sophisticated enough to know what it knew what it was, and then later that night having my brother in law tell me that I may be on the verge of wearing out my welcome. I remember being followed home by a middle-aged man as I walked from the Port Authority Terminal (I don't remember why I'd been there; maybe to look at the big pool ball clock they have, or used to have?) up to their apartment around 50th. Once I realized what was going on I ducked into a store; I watched as he passed back and forth two or three times, squinting through the glass with each pass, after which I started crying and explained to the early-30s guy behind the counter what was going on, to which he responded, "Yeah, a lot of weirdos out there. You can hang out here for a while. You'll be OK." I remember perching with binoculars (and not covertly; they knew I was there and what I was doing) on the big chair beneath their window that overlooked 8th Avenue, directly across which was the Ramada (I think), which I scanned intently for guests who'd forgotten (or not) to close the curtains and/or the remarkable visibility of an even dimly-lit room when viewed from a completely dark outside. I remember M-ing so much during that visit that my sister wondered aloud why her Vitabath gel was disappearing so quickly.
Although I'd kissed a couple of girls between 5th grade and middle school (only one, in 6th grade, on the lips -- when a buddy and I went with our respective "girlfriends" --his was my ex from the year before-- to my girlfriend's house during lunch and practiced kissing; my friend and ex would make out on the Lay-Z-Boy for a minute or two, "See? Just like that!" after which my girlfriend and I would perform a few cold pucker pecks that wouldn't have earned us a second glance from the chaperones at a stake dance), it was in 9th grade that I officially lost my innocence. She went to a different school. Her previous boyfriend had been a junior or senior jock with a reputation. I used to sneak my sister's moped across town to see her. We'd been "going together" about a month and hadn't kissed. On New Year's Eve of our 9th grade year, we left the big multi-stake dance at the Wilk after "New Year's Day" played (great song, but aside from the title, why the hell did they always play that song?), stood cold and alone in the middle of the bridge to the law building.
Me: Uh, Happy New Year's, [name].
Her: Thanks, you too. (pause) So are you gonna kiss me?
It was a little sloppy and abrupt at first, but within a few minutes I was a labialingual all-star. Within a few weeks, I felt her soft, wet insides, my hand having wended its way up her denim miniskirt and down the front of her panties, while her friends in the adjacent kitchen blasted Sly Fox's "Let's go all the way" through the door. A few minutes later, I rejoined my best friend (who had been tending our 10-speeds in the driveway) and told him, "Hey, smell my finger!" as I thrust my hand toward his face. He recoiled, then sniffed, then we pedaled home in the darkness.
That was the watershed evening and event of my transition from childhood to adolescence.
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