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skating down at Scarborough Pond, and that it was disgusting how the girls wore those “little skating skirts showing off their bumps and curves to the boys.” She said she had known a girl once who had done that, and one time some boys followed her into the woods “and gave it to her!” She went on to say that that was what was going to happen to the sixth-grade girls who wore those short skirts and she’d be glad because the girls would deserve it. Most of us didn’t know what she was talking about, but we were pretty upset anyway just from her voice, which sounded like she was going to break into flames any minute.
It didn’t take much to get Sister Sarah mad. And when she was mad, she was a riot. She’d place-kick her black book bag clear across the room. When she wasn’t mad, she was sad. She used to cry in class telling us about her sister who was dying in the hospital and who was a saint because she was dying so “cheerfully.”
We also had this parish monsignor who was about ninety years old and senile. He was rich, too, and used to travel all over the world. He’d go off somewhere and then turn up out of the blue, muttering about the places he’d been. The nuns didn’t ever seem too pleased to have their lessons interrupted, but they never said a word in protest. They’d just nod and smile at him while he wandered around the classroom. He didn’t know any of us; he never called anybody by name. He’d just drift around with his eyes glazed over, talking to no one in particular. People thought he was brilliant, probably because nobody ever understood a word he said.
One time he barged into the classroom and went straight to the front. He looked into the distance beyond our heads, pulled the folds of his chin up out of his stiff collar, closed his eyes and said one word, very loudly: “SMUT!“ Then he shuffled out of the room.
Nobody knew what it meant, except maybe Sister Sarah, but we were sure it was something horrible, a disease we didn’t want to catch.
I guess you could say I caught it.
My father’s a big collector of Playboy magazine. He’s even got some of the earliest ones, from 1955 or something, when Hugh Hefner was only about eighteen years old and horny as hell. When I was maybe ten, I came across this pile of Playboys in my father’s dresser. I called my friend Chris and told him to come over, and together we went through about twenty magazines and two bags of jellybeans. We were like scientists examining data. I did a lot of imagining after that, and it wasn’t too long before I began to have some terrific dreams. You know what I mean.
Alice Pierce was my first real girlfriend and the beginning of a pretty weird time in my life which is still going on. Alice grew up on the next street