In my teens, when I began to take notice of the ever-more marked differences between boys and girls, there was a girl in our neighborhood I’ll call Jeannie. Jeannie was a tomboy of sorts, played baseball, threw dirt clods, hunted for frogs. At around fifteen she started to display other attributes, which made her quite popular for a variety of reasons.

Now, we lived in trash. I mean, we had a nice house, surgically sterile due to the constant ministrations of Mom, sound and safe, due to vigilance by Dad, but still, we were surrounded by some real trash. Anyway, Jeannie was a well proportioned, pixieish brunette, with athletic legs, and clothes that always seemed a bit small. Jeannie was trash, but she was easy on the eyes. And I looked. Boy, did I look.

She took to hanging around a lot. She would come ask me to join in a ball game, or some other kid adventure, and I usually followed, if I was allowed (I spent a lot of my youth grounded, which should come as no surprise to regular readers).

Anyway, I never read the signs. I had no idea she was interested at all- in fact, the idea that my adolescent lust for her was anything but one-sided. I simply enjoyed hanging around with her, and did as much as possible.

Later, she looked me up to confide in me that her parents had explained me to her, and she now understood how some men just don’t like girls, and how some men like other men.

I was flabbergasted. It didn’t dawn on her- or her parents- that a man who didn’t just immediatly have his hands all over a woman could be anything but gay. I disavowed her of that notion and would have offered to prove it to her, except that at that time, she had become a used up piece of trash, missing teeth due to run-ins with boyfriends and boyfriend’s wives. She still had that great body, and to my knowledge, still did when she ended up living in a cardboard box under a train trestle and taking nutrition from a bottle.

Had I been sophisticated enough to understand her overtures at the time, who knows what trailer park I might now be living in? Or what fine state institution?

As it was, I consider myself lucky- but still think about that fine teenaged body and the mysteries I never knew it contained.