When it comes to a lot of the fundamental biological and social things in life that regular kids just sort of understood, I was really slow on the draw. So slow in fact that I probably wouldn’t have figured out how to eat if I hadn’t seen someone else do it first. When it came to sex, I was particularly clueless. Here’s a conversation I had with my dad when I was nine.

Dad: blah blah blah gays.

Me: What are gays?

Dad: Guys who stick their dicks in their asses.

At this point, thanks to my father’s ESL semantics, I imagined a guy trying to stick his penis in his own butt. I had no idea why anyone would WANT to do this. But there were many things I didn’t understand about grownups. As I think back to how oblivious my dad was to the profound confusion he was causing in his 9 year old son, I have to smile.

Me: Boy. Gays must have pretty long dicks.

Dad: No, they must have pretty big asses. (laughs)

Now I was even more confused. Why would you need a big ass for your dick to reach around your balls. Would your big ass somehow reach around your balls and meet your dick half way? It never crossed my mind that two guys could do that TO EACH OTHER.

Like I said, I was slow on the uptake about a lot of things. But once I got exposed to a good idea, like jerking off for example, boy, I ran with it.

It wasn’t long before I was going at it every night in the shower. At first it was just scratch scratch, touch this, touch that, see what happens. Eventually though, I got the hang of it and had my first orgasm. This intense feeling unlike anything I had experienced before worked it’s way throughout my entire body until I felt a kind of neurological “pop.” Immediately after recovering from the experience, the first thought that crossed my mind was: “So this is what all the fuss is about. This is the ultimate pleasure we humans are built to experience. Damn.” On a grand existential level I have to admit, I was disappointed.

But like a good trooper I kept at it, and like anything you work really hard at, eventually I got good. There was one problem though. As intense and enjoyable as the orgasmic sensations were, nothing would actually come out. I first became self conscious of this one morning on the school basketball court after summer break. A lot of bad things happened in the mornings on that basketball court before school, now that I think of it. But those are stories for another day. This day, the Jesuits were lining us up for class when Rob, one of the popular kids, said:

Rob: Dude, this summer, I started jerking off.

Me: I started jerking off too.

Rob: I came. Did you?

Me: (lying) yeah.

Rob: Cool huh?

Me: Yeah.

I hated myself for lying, and even more because I was lying to prove something to someone. But the insecurity Rob had so easily triggered inside me was more powerful than an 800 pound gorilla. So I lied just the same and loathed myself for it.

Soon it wasn’t long before the lying, and rest of my life, seemed like a distraction from what had become my main purpose: scouring the house for any new hidden porn stashes my dad might have acquired, and jerking off in the shower to see if I could ejaculate. I must have stolen every piece of porn the man ever brought home. To his credit, he never said anything to me about it. I whacked off like a madman for decades. At least that’s what it felt like. Still, nothing came out and the peer pressure was building up. By now, my friend C was also boasting about how he was ejaculating. I was getting worried. At least my auxiliary friend Coco hadn’t ejaculated either yet. So by comparison, I wasn’t a total loser.

Then one evening in my room, I locked the door, arrayed all my penthouse magazines in a fan on the floor in front of me, knelt down, and went at it. Sure enough, after a little work, the familiar orgasmic sensation engulfed my body. When I recovered however, something was different. I looked down and to my surpise, on the tip of my peepee, was a little itty bitty drop of white liquid. I had managed to ejaculate. A feeling of immense pride washed over me as I carefully hid the magazines under my bed and went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I was now a man.

Sometimes, I’ll thinkg back to the Penthouse Pet that did it for me that day, and imagine her now. She’s middle aged. Probably has a few kids, maybe she’s married. She and I will (hopefully) never meet. But man, I’m glad she existed.

Sometimes when I look at porn these days, and see a woman all turned on caressing her tit like it’s going out of style, I’ll remember the fascination I had with my own erection when I was kid. I got over it, and I guess she never did. Maybe that’s why she’s a porn actress.

When I was 11, I found out there was a movie about a killer time traveling robot from the future, I mercilessly badgered my father to take me til he caved like a Kentucky coal mine. I was as happy as a clam in the theater too, watching the terminator kill people and crash his car into things. Then suddenly there’s this love scene where Kyle Reese, the soldier from the future, is impregnating Linda Hamilton with the savior of the world, and her tits are totally showing!

Now Linda Hamilton had to be one of the hottest women I had ever seen. The full lips, the high cheeck bones, and that eighties hairdo. (JK about the hair.) Sitting next to my dad there, I noticed that I just didn’t feel right. In fact, to my horror I realized that I had an erection and my breathing pattern had completely changed.  So had my dad’s! The whole situation felt extremely awkward and WRONG. There I was all turned on sitting right next to my dad, and to make things worse, he was turned on too! It kind of felt like that day five years earlier when I had been caught dancing.

Instead of enjoying Linda Hamilton’s tits, all I wanted was for the love scene to be over so this bizarre feeling would go away. Either that or to crawl into a hole. This is the first time I remember feeling awkward about my sexuality.

The film that would have the most profound effect on my understanding of sex though, was Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” When I saw that scene where John Cleese has sex with his wife in front of the class I was utterly shocked by his violent pumping motions. To date, all the love scenes I had seen in movies like Terminator or Top Gun were in Hollywood slomo. To make matters worse, I saw the scene in a room full of people, so I made sure to hide my astonishment. Nobody seemed to notice, which makes me wonder about little kids and how hard it is to notice the things that are effecting them. After “The Meaning of Life,” it became obvious to me that sex was not only awkward and mysterious, but also violent. No wonder people reacted to it the way they did.

A few years before they shot and killed Al’s dad in a drug deal gone bad, he had owned a video store, and Al had somehow got his hands on one of the pornos. “Debby Does Dallas Part 4″ I think it was. Anyway, we locked ourselves in my parent’s room when my grandmother was distracted, stuck the tape into the VCR, and watched on the big screen TV what I could only describe as an anti-climactic humping bonanza. It wasn’t how I had imagined sex at all. In fact, when it came to sex, I would soon find out, not much was the way I imagined it. But it was cool nonetheless.

Al: “Dude, the way he’s fucking her, it looks like a piston.”

I have to admit, I learned a lot. No matter how dirty I felt sneaking around and stuff, this sex thing was really interesting. Somehow, without warning, puberty had snuck up on me and sunk its claws into my soul. In the absence of any real guidance about my sexual development, porn had gladly stepped in to educate me and fill in the void.

Thanks, Porn.

When I look back on these experiences, what stands out is that for me, the dirty feelings I had about porn were caused less by the porn itself than by other people’s reactions to it. Even at an early age, when I couldn’t understand the situation, I could easily read the emotions on people’s faces. And they were saying: This stuff is bad. Contrast that with the enjoyment I got from the porn, and you’ve got a recipe for sexual guilt so powerful, even a Catholic would be proud.

For example:
Why were all those amazing things like highway interchanges and skyscrapers built?

Answer:
For humans. I’m a human, so everything on earth was built for me.

Duh. That was easy. But some questions were harder:

For example:
If I’m five years old, yet history goes back much further than five years. How is that possible?
That stumper lead me to the age old classic…
Where did I come from? Where does everyone come from? Where do babies come from?

Answer:
?

Boy that one really puzzled me. So I decided to escalate my query straight to the source of all earthly wisdom. My parents.

My Mom, wearing one of those white 70’s tunic hippie shirts with the colorful collars, was standing in the living room with my dad when I dropped the stork bomb. Her face got all pensive as she sized me up. Then she sized my dad up as if a significant but not necessarily pleasant moment they had long been waiting for had finally arrived. From my perspective as a five year old, it was like standing at a skyscraper constructions site watching the cranes move back and forth. I wasn’t small, grownups were just tall.

The tipoff that my question was big deal came from mom’s voice. It switched gears from her normal tone into that overcompensating “I’m OK with this so don’t freak out, OK?” mode. You know the tone. It’s the one people take on when you tell them you’re dumping them.

Next thing I remember, I’m sitting on my father’s lap in the kitchen and on a piece of notebook paper in front of me, mom’s drawing a serviceable sketch of an uncircumcised penis. She explained the human reproductive process in detail, using all the medical terms: Penis, Vagina, you name it. By the intensity and measure of her explanation, you got the feeling she thought this was one of her significant rites of passage as a parent. It was her duty as a mother to properly inform her child about the ways of the world. And she was taking every precaution to make sure she did the job nature had assigned her with utmost skill and care. Gotta love mom.

I didn’t understand a word she said. The connection between this big somber AV presentation and where babies come from somehow escaped me. So I sat there bored & zoned out until she was done.

The only part of the entire ordeal that stands out in my memory is asking them what my grandfather was going on about. My mom explained that he objected to them teaching me all this. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would have a problem with my learning something. Then I thought maybe grandpa’s anger was justified. After all, Mom was boring the hell out of me and she hadn’t even answered my question.

After it was all over, I was very confused.

The big lecture about the birds and the bees didn’t much effect my obsession with women though. And it wasn’t long before I had two or three girlfriends going. There was my blond fiancé in kindergarten, who I romanced in the coat closet. There was my 18 year old neighbor, whose lips I couldn’t reach so I kissed her belly button.  And there was that Indian girl in the apartment across the hall who was the first girl ever I kissed on the mouth.

At first she was shy about kissing me. So I put a hoola hoop on the floor in the hallway between our apartments, and in center of that, I put a chair. The hoola hoop represented the boundaries of our private bubble kingdom, where outside rules didn’t apply. Inside the hoola hoop, I was the ruler of this kingdom, and she was my princess. In that context, she eagerly did everything I asked her to. Women man, some things never change.

At 5 I was girl crazy and blissfully ignorant that my sexuality was anything but the most natural thing in the world. When I look back on that time, I marvel at how natural and pure everything felt. Then I turned 6.

Whenever I heard music, a mysterious force in my little hips would just start moving back and forth, side to side. Like my sexuality, it was the most natural feeling in the world.

So one day in the kitchen of our little New Jersey apartment, some music came on, I started doing my thing, and my mom noticed. Now she’s a loud woman. And when she saw me gyrating and dancing about she said: Hayy! Haaayy! Haaaayy! This must have been meant as encouragement, but her loud squeals focused everyone’s attention on me. Suddenly I was on the spot. I felt a feeling come over me that I can only describe as melting, but in reverse. The fluidity of the dance was gone, and replaced with the paralyzing sensation that something big and significant was happening and if I did the wrong thing, I might very well mess it all up.  My Mom screamed “Dance! Dance!” in a tone she must have thought was encouraging. But it was too late.

People talk about Catholic guilt. But I don’t remember Catholic school ever really freaking me out about sex. The day my dancing got everyone’s attention though, was the first time I really felt a powerful fear of doing something wrong. Little did I know, this seemingly random event would have a profound effect on my sexuality later in life. I didn’t dance again until I was 18.

The public schools did have one thing my school didn’t: Girls. I knew this because Al and my nightly phone chats started getting interrupted by a mystery caller. After a lite grilling, he gave up her name, Belinda.

“Dude, introduce me.”

“No way.”

“Conference call us.”

“No”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

After what seemed like an eternity, Al relented. There was one giant string attached though. I had to promise beyond a shadow of a doubt that no matter what, I would NOT try to steal Belinda from him. So I promised, crossed my heart and hoped to die with a needle in my eye. This must have disarmed Al’s suspicions because a few seconds later, there was a 13 year old girl’s voice on the phone. Now I hadn’t been trying to deceive Al. The sad fact is, I’ve always been too terrible a liar to even attempt that. But after I heard Belinda’s Voice, I knew I was going to break my promise.

There are few steps to stealing a you friend’s girl. I couldn’t articulate them at 14, but my factory pre-installed instincts just kicked in. These are the same instincts that come built in to all of us. Just watch children in a playground playing or adults in.. well everywhere.

Step #1: Put Your Friend Down…Subtly.
I told Belinda about the day Al almost broke my neck on the trampoline, except I took out all my threats of kicking Al in the fucking face and played it like I wanted Al to jump with us. The part about him faking being hurt made Belinda laugh, and drove Al into a slathering frenzy of denial. At this point, if you’re Al, your subconscious alarm system is reeling, except your little peanut of a conscious mind is still trying to figure out why. It’s cause you’re losing face man.

Step #2: Rescue Your Friend By Giving Him a Compliment… That Categorizes Him.
Once Belinda was having a good laugh at Al’s expense, I came to his defense, saying Al’s the Rebel. He always does his own thing. Doesn’t let anyone tell him what to do. Doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Al, desperate to regain the status he had lost, immediately grasped the life line I was throwing to him and eagerly agreed with me. This was the nail in his coffin, cause it sent a clear signal to Belinda’s feminine radar that Al had just let me define him. Regardless whether the definition is good or bad, the definer is the dominant friend. And the defined immediately loses that female catnip known as mystery.
The real elegance to this dagger stab into Al’s psychic back though, was that I called him a Rebel. The Rebel doesn’t care what people think. So now Al can’t bitch about the whole story or it will look like he cares what we think, and contradict the rebel identity he’s just claimed! Check mate. At this point, Al was like a chicken running around with its head cut off, spewing blood from his neck stump, not realizing it’s already dead.

Step #3: Wait Til Your Friend Cuts Her Off, Then Listen To Her
So Belinda starts telling me about a similar story she had with Al at which point Al, trying to save face, cuts her off. I immediately cut Al off, and told him to let Belinda tell her story. I don’t remember her story, cause I really wasn’t listening. By letting her talk though, I was defending her while allowing her to seduce herself by basking in my male attention. My 14 year old brain was on total autopilot now, and Al’s headless chicken was going into convulsions on the other end of the line.

Step #4: Flirt With Her Just Enough To Maintain Plausible Denyability
At this point, I gave Belinda a subtle generic compliment by telling her only smart girls really like me but for some reason, dumb girls hate my guts. Sounds innocent, but to her feminine computer decoder, that means: “We’ve been talking for a while, and I don’t hate him, so he must think I’m smart. I like that. He appreciates me.” Poor Al’s chicken is in the fryer.

Step #5: Be Unavailable
Hey Belinda, it was cool meeting you. I Gotta go though. Why don’t we talk later? Now a really smooth cat would have made an excuse to talk to her later that seemed completely logical and innocent, but hey, what do you want? I was 14 and still a little angry at Al for the trampoline incident.

Like I said before, all these steps to stealing Al’s girl were instinctual. I had no conscious idea how I was doing it. And Like the first traumatic experiences of a baby’s life, my memories of what Belinda and I spoke about during those first weeks on the phone have been completely lost, probably for my protection. But I do remember how it FELT. I remember the tension of neither one of us wanting to be the first to admit how turned on we were by each other. I remember how it felt for a beautiful girl (Al had shown me her picture) to be attracted to me even though she had no idea what I looked like. It felt…powerful.
Then, one day, and completely by accident, Belinda and I met in person. Al and I went to the multiplex to see “Great Balls of Fire.” It’s this movie about a famous pianist who married a 13 year old. Anyway, Al and I are watching this thing when he turns around and lo and behold, there’s Belinda with some friends sitting right behind us. We only saw each other for a brief second in a darkened theater, but it was the first time she ever saw the kid who was enrapturing her every night on the phone. I was terrified, mainly because she was just as pretty as her picture. He dark curly hair made a shiny frame around her full lips and sexy half-Asian eyes. It was more than my hormones could handle. So after a brief hello, I awkwardly turned back to watching the movie. My reaction in her eyes must have seemed not much different than as if Al had pointed out a piece of gum on the floor behind us. This is the first time I hurt Belinda’s feelings simple because I was scared or clueless, and it started a pattern that would continue for years.

A few days later, I asked Al what Belinda had thought of me. He said she said I had crooked teeth. At least she was honest. While playing blind man’s bluff when I was five, I ran full speed into a steel door. My front tooth is still chipped, and cause I never wore my retainers, my teeth are still all crooked. But that didn’t stop Belinda’s phone calls.

Pretty soon, Al started complaining about how Belinda, who used to be his potential fuck mate “best friend,” was now ignoring him. I even got the feeling that Al secretly blamed me for this. The nerve. I couldn’t be really angry at him though. After all, he was now at the receiving end of that cold opportunistic feminine instinct that women keep neatly tucked away behind their superior socials skills. Belinda had simply found someone she liked better, and she had no more control over her new feelings for me than she did over the vacuum that had replaced her feelings for Al. Since she couldn’t force herself to like Al, why bother leading him on? I’m not sure how Al felt about all this, cause I cut him off when Belinda called.

You see, I had bigger fish to fry. Since Belinda had called me after that random meeting in the theater, a thought started growing in my virgin 14 year old mind. If I could get Belinda to hang out with me when her parents weren’t home, I might actually have sex with her! After all, she was a public school girl. So more and more, our conversations started focusing on how we were going to finally get together. And finally one day, she invited me over…when her parents weren’t home!

But I’ll tell you all about that disaster later.

Al and his family were the personification of the stereotype. Al’s little sister would tear the heads off her Barbie dolls and kill her pets. Their ugly brown little lap dog was just mean. His mom drove a silver Buick Riviera, and would run around the house in mismatched designer clothes and dye burned hair screaming at the top of her lungs.

Al’s father always wore a blazer with blue jeans and penny loafers. He was a good looking guy just like his son, except he was involved in some sort of shady business that was a mystery to all the kids in the neighborhood. He drove a silver Cadillac with the first cell phone I ever saw. A big white rotary house phone bolted between the two front seats. It was identical to a house phone, only it was in the car.

Even though Al’s family was tacky and insane, you wouldn’t know Al was stupid by looking at him. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he looked almost normal. He was after all a good looking kid. But alas, he was the dumbest of the bunch. And if there’s one event that really personified this, it was The Trampoline Incident.

My friend C had a trampoline in his back yard. When we jumped two or three at a time, even as kids we had enough sense of self preservation to give each other our space. Trampolines could be dangerous, and none of us wanted to end up like that drooling quadraplegic kid at school that everyone tried to ignore. So we NEVER invited Al to come jump with us. We knew better.

One day tough, the single transistor in Al’s skull must have somehow misfired, and he figured out that we were trying to get rid of him so we could go jump on the trampoline.

He called me on it immediately: “Hey FRAAAANK!” (that’s not my name, but that’s what he would call me.) “Are you guys going to jump on the trampoline?”

“No Al, we’re not”

“Can I come jump with you guys?”

“No Al, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re stupid Al, and the trampoline is dangerous. And when C and I start tandem jumping, you’re going to want to do it too. And you’re going to do something stupid like try to jump over me, but it’s not going to work, and somebody’s going to get hurt. Now if you’re stupid enough to break your neck on the trampoline, I don’t give a shit. But I’m not going to let you break mine.”

“But FRAAAANNNK! I promise I won’t try anything stupid! I promise!”

As a 14 year old kid, I completely missed the irony of a stupid person promising not to act stupid.

“No”

“FRAANNK please!! Please!!!! Please!!!”

Jees. He looked so pathetic. As I squinted into his big kid/puppy eyes, I felt a little thing inside me collapse slightly. Al really did want to jump. I looked at C and he shrugged. “I’m not jumping with him.”

“OK fine, Al, you can come jump on the trampoline. But I swear, if you try anything stupid, I’m going to kick you in the fuckin’ face. OK?”

“OK.”

So we shuffled across the nicely mowed lawn and started jumping. Al watched C and I go at it in tandem, and how C, with his larger body mass could catapult me about twice as high by timing his jumps just right. It really is difficult to do justice to the feeling of jumping on a trampoline at five PM on a warm sunny day. Your eyes squinting at the sun in the blue sky, the wind in your hair, and that sense of weightlessness you chase til your lungs burn in your chest and you have to take a break. It felt pretty good.

And then it was Al’s turn.

“Hey Al” I said. “When we tandem jump, don’t try to jump over me alright? It doesn’t work that way. If you try to jump over me, I’ll fly up into your crotch and somebody will get hurt. I know you’re going to be tempted, but don’t try it OK? It’s against the laws of physics and you could break my neck.”

“Yeah no problem.”

“I’m fuckin serious. Al. If you try and jump over me I’m going to kick you in the fucking face.”

“Yeah man. I got it.”

So Al and I start jumping tandem. First we jump together, synchronized, then slowly we start jumping sequentially. I’m up at the apex of my leap, flying in the sky, as Al, at the bottom of his leap springs up from the trampoline. I feel the wind rushing around me as I come down and make contact, prepping for another leap, just as Al hits his apex and then, wait a second, what’s he doing?

Al is right above me coming down with this big stupid smile on his face. For a split second, time stood still and I could read what was passing for a thought in Al’s peanut of a mind. “Since we’re jumping sequentially, while ‘Frank’ is down there, I can jump over him and land on the other side. It’s going to be so cool!”

But it wasn’t cool. It was stupid, and against the laws of physics. So much so, that just as I achieved maximum upward momentum and he achieved maximum downward momentum, my head went right into his crotch. And so as to drive home the point that this was against the laws of physics, my neck made a wet crackling sound as it smashed into his testicles.

“Aeiiiiii!” was all I heard from Al as he crumpled up into a ball in mid air. My limp body bounced into the trampoline pad as my neck snapped over the edge and the rest of my body followed. I flipped over the frame and landing face first in the grass.

I lay there perfectly still. As C ran towards me, I couldn’t hear a thing. It was like the movies when the sound goes out after an explosion. The pain was so intense that my body shut down and I felt nothing. All I could think about was the fresh watery smell of those blades of grass pushing against my cheek, and how because I had felt sorry for Al, and had caved in a moment of weakness when he pleaded with me, that I was now destined to be that drooling quadraplegic kid in school that everyone tried to ignore. If I would have had the ability to feel anything at that moment, I would have hated myself for being weak.

Slowly though, the pins and needles started shooting through my body, and the severe pain in my neck and back let me know with little subtlety that I was not paralyzed.

C helped me up, as his parents came running outside. They had seen the dramatic spill and my ears could vaguely make out C’s dad screaming that he had warned us not to try to jump over each other. My cheeks flushed red, embarrassed that C’s dad thought I was so stupid, that he would have to repeat the obvious to me. The burning in my face hurt more than the throbbing ache in my neck or the pins and needles waking up in my body. And for making me feel this way, at that moment, I hated Al more than anything in the world.

After mustering the strength to stand up, we found Al crumpled up in a ball in the grass on the far side of the trampoline. He must have also flipped off the frame and fallen on his head. As I limped over, I could hear him whimpering in pain. Something about his neck and his balls. Sure enough, one arm was stretched down to his crotch where my head had cannonballed his testicles and the other was on his neck.

“Frank, I think I broke my neck.” He whined. And suddenly it hit me. Something from deep inside me, some ancient built in kid instinct wrapped in contempt whispered in my brain that Al was lying. He was pretending to be hurt so that we wouldn’t be so hard on him for doing exactly the stupid thing we had told him not to do. He was trying to weasel out of his responsibility by making us feel sorry for him. Instead of compassion for his suffering, though, as I looked down at his crumpled egg of a body lying in the grass, an intense disgust erupted inside me. Maybe it was that I hated myself for having caved in the first place and letting him jump with us. Maybe it was that this kid and his kind really were stupid. Or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, I took a step back, wound up, and kicked Al in the face as hard as I fucking could.

His head shot back with snap, and… No seriously, I didn’t kick him. A part of me wanted to, but another part of me imagined the lawsuit and the fact that there were three witnesses. Besides, an event like that on my permanent record would really have screwed up my chances of getting into a good college. So instead of kicking Al in the face like I had promised, I swallowed my pride, and with that little twinge of self hatred a man gets when he breaks a promise, I turned around and walked away. “You’re a fucking cocksucker Al, I’m glad you’re hurt. You’re never jumping on the fucking trampoline with me again.”

“But my neck is broken.” Al whiningly insisted. Eventually, when C and I walked away, and he realized we weren’t buying it, he got on his bike and rode home to his whacked out screaming family.

If this would have happened to me as an adult, I would have stopped socializing with Al after that incident. But we were 14, and somehow, our friendship recovered.

I learned an important lesson the trampoline incident that day. Never let your compassion for a dangerously stupid person let you forget that they are a dangerously stupid person, and not to be trusted with your well being.

Years later, after Al and I lost touch, someone shot Al’s good looking father in the face and killed him. Drug deal gone bad.
But years before all that happened, and just a few months after the trampoline incident, Al introduced me to his girlfriend Belinda (not her real name), which I promptly stole. But that’s another story.

M

I would like to resolve the limited status of my account so I can make and receive payments again.

My account is limited because I haven’t accepted the new user agreement.

I’ve searched high and low on the Paypal website and there’s apparently no clear way to rectify this!

I can read the user agreement and a bunch of your other legal agreements. But no matter how much I yearn to make the exciting lifestyle choice of accepting your user agreement, I can’t. There is no button to let me do so!

So I’d like to cancel my account. Unfortunately, I can’t do that either, because my account is limited, because I didn’t accept the user agreement!

Way to go Paypal.

Who’s your webmaster, Franz Kafka?!

Please cancel my account, or at least point me to a user agreement I can accept, so I can do it myself.

M

“During a man’s teenage years, there are two important lessons to learn.”

“The first is that you are mortal. You will die one day, and your time on earth is limited. Kids usually learn this in high school when someone they didn’t really hang out with dies in a car wreck during the prom.”

“The second lesson is that love is more complex and varied than what you see in the movies. It involves all sorts of strange things like responsibility and commitment. That’s the stuff movies aren’t made of.”

“When a boy accepts his mortality and can commit to love, that’s the beginning of manhood. Which is why you see so many 40 year old boys running around.”

“Sex and violence is a journal of my learning these two lessons. The events come in no particular order, other than that which I remember them.”

Looking back on this entry, I think I learned one more important lesson in my teenage years: How to lie. When to do it, and to what degree it was necessary to withhold your true opinion in order for other people to like you.

It seems like a simple skill, but when you consider that almost everything from buying a glazed donut to having a baby involves other people, and that when other people like you they often feel compelled to give you what you want, it’s the one skill that makes all the difference in the world.

For example: I’m thinking of buying a Triumph 675 Daytona triple. So I went to the motorcycle show looking for the Triumph display only to discover they didn’t have one. Disappointed, I walked around sitting on all the other bikes, nothing really catching my attention.

Then at the back of the place, on a display stand, was a Triumph 675!

It was being used as a demo for a company that sells Motorcycle stands, so you couldn’t sit on it. I spoke to the guys a little bit, got a good vibe going, and they took the Triumph off the stands for me so I could sit on it and get a feel for the bike. They’ve both ridden the bike, and they told me all about its characteristics. They took the time to do this cause they liked me.

If I would have told one of those guys that he had a funny way of talking, and the other that he had a lame sense of humor, do you think they would have gone the extra mile for me? I don’t think so. All in all, I liked both the guys, and because I didn’t tell them everything that crossed my mind each minute, they liked me.

Those who never quite master censoring their expression so that others will like them call this process hypocrisy. These days I call it social skills, and if there was one thing I stubbornly refused to learn as a teenager, it was social skills.

M

I’m a grown man in my thirties, and by most accounts, a normal guy. What my friends and family don’t know, is that from the age of 14 to 18, I went through an extreme period of antisocial criminal behavior that I managed to keep a secret from my both my loved ones and the authorities.

Until puberty hit me at around 14, my life revolved around staying on the honor roll at my Catholic school, reading comic books, and learning about art and science. I was the kind of cute articulate kid moms and dads parade around at social gatherings in order to rub their superior parenting skills in other people’s faces. After 18, I went to a top tier college, and since then have had a normal and satisfying life, the contents of which is none of your business.

But for some unknown reason, whether it be hormones or the Miami heat, during the four years in between age 14 and 18, I was obsessed with sex and violence. I cheated on tests, talked about all my friends behind their backs, used women as sex objects, destroyed private property, got into fights, even built bombs and set them off in public places. My journals are all that remain of how I got away with it all.

Now just in case you’ve been watching too many movies, I am not the product of a broken home, poverty, drug abuse, or stupidity. (Well, stupidity is debatable.) As a teenager, I had a loving if slightly dysfunctional upper middle class family, maintained a high GPA at one of the most academically competitive elite private schools in the country, got a merit based financial scholarship to a good college, never got arrested, and never did illegal drugs. In fact, being an immigrant and all, my life was the personification of the American dream.

I will however maintain my anonymity, just in case any of the stories I tell here could still get me in trouble today. The names of the people involved will of course, have been changed just enough, to allow plausible deniability, and I’ll leave it up to you to guess during what four years all these events happened.

Normally, I wouldn’t be doing something as stupid as airing my dirty laundry on the internet, but lately, I’ve had trouble sleeping. The way I see it, if a man is going to stay up til four in the morning frittering away his set ration of existence, he might as well tell his story. So whether you like it or not, get ready to see what the life of this teenage boy was really like.

M