Thirteen

I grew up in New York City. That's all you need to know. My childhood was not like yours. My father was a lawyer for show business people, who at that time were connected to the mob. I didn't know that, of course. I only knew that some family friends were named "Scarzy" and "Fingers." One, a particular friend of my mother's, a man who painted nice oil paintings that we hung on our walls, disappeared. I never heard where. My parents never told me when my relatives died, let alone the mobsters they befriended.

They later found the guy's remains in a vat of hydrochloric acid on a pig farm in New Jersey. No matter. We had a nice life. I'm sure I was "influenced" by my childhood, but I've never been able to sort it out.

When I was an adolescent, we moved from the German Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights in which I had grown up (alongside Henry Kissinger and Carl Hammerschlag, although I never met Kissinger and met Hammerschlag only much later) to the tony Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. It was a big move up, into a building with many more floors and a garage.

In Riverdale, I was a fat awkward adolescent, smart and uncomfortable. I went to a high school for nerds, far before it was fashionable to be a nerd. In the adjacent building lived a family with two kids, a girl my age and a boy three years older. The boy was gorgeous, in my estimation. I have no idea if it was objectively true. No dope, I befriended the girl. I knew I could get to the guy through her.

Sure enough, one day he invited me up to his apartment. I might have been thirteen. I think he was a junior in high school, or maybe a senior. I know I was in 9th grade. And I wouldn't say I was experienced; these were the days of Howdy Doody on television . But I was intrepid. I didn't know what I didn't know. And his parents and sister weren't home.

After a few minutes of what I thought was witty conversation, I got a big surprise. He sat down on the side of his bed and pushed my head down. He undid his pants and asked me to take his penis in my mouth. Never one to admit lack of knowledge, I hid the sinking feeling in my stomach and complied. Now, over half a century later, I still remember the feeling, and it wasn't fun. I felt like I was choking on that big, rubbery thing. And it smelled. After all, he peed through it, didn't he?

He told me what to do: cover my teeth with my lips, do it up and down. Not so hard, not so fast. How in hell did he know? And then he ejcaculated in my mouth. I almost threw up. But that would have been embarrassing, and I was trying to prove that I was a big girl. So I gagged and tried to spit it out, but of course that would have been on his mother's wall-to-wall carpet. He discouraged me.

He instructed me to swallow it, and there I finally drew the line. Finally, I didn't care if he loved me. No, I said, forcing him to get up and get me the Kleenex. Believe me, it was a mess. I'm sure he had a great time. I went home confused and chastened. I doubted this would happen again, for at least 5,000 reasons.

I never told anyone, until now.

What did I learn? Not to go to a guy's apartment if you weren't willing to swallow it. A great metaphor that would carry me through the rest of my life.