CHERRY KUNDALINI 

by Bennett Stevens

(Authors Note: This is essentially a humor piece, but for any Puritans or otherwise 'morally' afflicted persons--yes mother this means you--fair warning: explicit sexual situations and pithy trucker/sailor speak abound.)

Northern California, 1971 

It was a simpler time. It always is. A time when the mention of silicon still brought visions of Raquel Welch fighting off dinosaurs in One Million BC. A time when Silicon Valley was still the Santa Clara Valley, more fruit trees than office space and million dollar tract shacks. The 70’s were young, a heady hangover from the 60’s and no one saw Disco coming. If we had I’m sure the entire decade would have ducked.  My friends, the bastards, were still twenty-odd years away from their silicon fortunes and far more interested in jerking bone sodas than in the dawn of high technology.  As was I. 

There was no video porn yet, no home video for that matter, and the Internet as we know it had yet to be conceived. There was no MTV to pump pubescent skulls full of the kind of pop-cool, slump-shouldered anarchy that would incite the Slack Revolt of the 1980’s; no trailer trash talk shows to inspire whole new generations to rise up and reverse the course of human evolution; no pants crotches dragging the ground that were not involved in vital function; no crack houses, crack-heads, gangsta rap or drive-by’s; no $200 sneakers from Sirius; no pagers, cell phones, Walkman’s, Boom Boxes, Game Boy’s, PDA’s or other mobile hazards to normal human intercourse; no TV legions of talking-heads spinning bullshit like so much cotton candy; no keyring/belt buckle detectors at airports; no blockbuster terrorism; no AIDS.  

There was the enigmatic Richard M. Nixon in the White House; the lingering spectre of Kent State and the ongoing madness in Vietnam; Huntley & Brinkley and Walter Cronkite bringing you the nightly news; Howard Cosell sparring with Muhammad Ali, Sonny sparring with Cher, Rowan with Martin, Johnny Carson with Ed and Doc. Plaid bellbottoms and peace symbols enjoyed a counter-vogue ride; rotary dial telephones were busy chafing busy fingers; only 100 million assembly-line beef cakes had been served; just the 31 flavors were available; marijuana was still sold by the lid; coffee was still a dime; tattoos were still for sailors, bikers and Samoans; kids still played marbles at recess; fights were still settled with fists; Spin the Bottle was still a kissing game; Japan was still best known for Pearl Harbor and cheap transistor radios; the Mainstream Media was still owned by some 25 separate corporations; the Speed of Time was still in a school zone; television was still a few years away from substitute parenting; and Mom’s still stayed home with the kids making reasonable attempts to build a little something called ‘character’. 

Like I said, it was a simpler time. That being said…

She was 20 and I was 12.

Amanda was a hippie, a flower child, a devotee of free love and marijuana mysticism. I was an Establishment  kid, a sports junkie, a shy but budding miscreant fresh off an educational week of sex & drug propagand—er—education films. She was one of the reasons they made sex & drug education films. On me, the drug films worked, properly scaring me straight before I ever even considered swerving.  Cold sweating speed freaks, car crashing barb-heads and cherub faced pot smokers driven to heroin and the horrors of withdrawal in some seedy skid row dive were more than enough for me, thank you.  Bufferin was a gateway drug as far as I was concerned. The sex films worked too, but not necessarily in the way they were intended. Not even close-ups of pus oozing vagina and chancre festooned penis were enough to keep me from a raging hard on twenty or thirty times a day, mostly, thinking about Amanda.

My first orgasm was more than just a liberal 70’s homework assignment. It was a Revelation. I was beside and beyond myself. I had entered another dimension, one of supernal fireworks, astral pulsars, crab nebulas, super novas, and of course, globular clusters.  My fate was sealed. I was then and there, seeded through this simple act of studious self-discovery, a confirmed and dedicated explorer of the sexual universe.

Sex & drug education week was an inspiration for my friends and I. These future pillars of society shall be name protected, and include a Silicon Valley CEO, a senior VP of one of the largest high tech companies in the world, a highly successful cocaine dealer to many of the largest high tech companies in the world, an army colonel and a DEA pilot, of all things.  

The inspiration was dubbed, Operation Spank. It involved pooling our resources and conducting a thorough search of the neighborhood in order to uncover the wondrous marvels of cheap porn. Remember, we had no Internet, no video, and precious few true smutting options.  Naked women were scarce, breasts sure, a few glimpses of bush, but the holy grail of what really lay between women's legs was a dark mystery almost beyond conception.

We set out like a platoon of miniature porn commandos. Stashes of Dad-mags were found hidden under parental beds, buried in closets, garages, in a drawer under a perfectly innocent handgun, and in a meat freezer under a stack of fresh-slain Texas heifer. Uncovered in Mrs. Cargotti’s underwear drawer was a disturbingly large black dildo, well wrapped inside an equally disturbing pair of Big Top panties.  Strangest of all, unearthed under the closet crawl space leading under the Sutter’s house and stuffed in a box full of National Geographics, were four marble-sized balls on a brownish string that smelled, oddly, like shit. The magazines we rooted out ranged from Playboy, which barely gave a hint of pussy at the time; to Penthouse, where an eager boy could get a reasonable idea of what a genuine beaver was really like under all that 70’s bush; to an underground raunch-fest succinctly and elegantly titled, ‘Shaved Beaver’, where no bush, left no doubt.  (Hustler was still a few years from launch).

We took one magazine from each stash and every week or so would meet in Biff Baker’s tree fort to swap. When each magazine had made the rounds we’d venture back to the Dad stashes and trade in for new ones. Coming on the pages was strictly forbidden, though errant shots were inevitable. “Shaved Beaver” seemed to get the worst of it, and in the end the best pages were left hopelessly splooged together.  Since putting it back in that condition would be a dead giveaway, we decided not to, figuring that if Mr. Cargotti did indeed notice it was gone, he wasn’t likely to question the entire family about where his hidden copy of “Shaved Beaver” had run off to.  We held a brief memorial service for the revelatory  magazine, afterwards stuffing it inside old lady Beardsley’s mailbox right along with her latest copy of The Ladies Home Journal.

Amanda, a few weeks into my newfound masturbation life, had turned up at Biff Baker’s house. She was his cousin from upstate New York sent out to attend San Jose State University, and, as the gods would have it, soon to become my little brothers’ new babysitter. The first thing anyone noticed about Amanda, couldn’t help but notice about Amanda, was her tits, which began somewhere around the weekend and encroached into the following Wednesday. Seeing those thumb-tops for nipples that were always protruding out like—well, thumb-tops—was like seeing into the future. They weren’t just big those jugs, they were fucking M-class planets, each capable of supporting human life, each with their own orbiting ring of testicular asteroids. Their gravitational pull was such that if you got to close you began to look thyroidal, and to keep your hands from being sucked to the surface required a strength none of our young limbs possessed. So mostly, we stayed in outer orbit.  We were 12, what the hell we were gonna do anyway? It was enough to hold her heavenly oscillations suspended in our perverted little imaginations.

They became the talk of the neighborhood, these extraterrestrial titans, understandably so. Even the parents were overheard discussing them, the Dads in lecherous, manly ways of course, and the Moms in motherly ways—of course—worried about her certain future of back problems unless something was done about them. “She should get a reduction” was advised on numerous occasions. To us they were magnificent, just magnificent, and to tamper with such heaven sent perfection was to risk angering the gods. Why, it was downright blasphemous!     

Amanda, when her face finally pulled into town, was seen as no great beauty to be sure, but she didn’t need to be.  She had preceded herself. She had rather thin, dark brown hair and reasonable features, neither fair nor unfair, including a matched set of baby blues that were entirely too large and innocent for one steeped so deep in ribald rumor—the likes of which I shall soon endeavor to tell. 

That she was a hippie chick was evident in a glance, as even with such a heavy burden to bear she was usually bra-less, a grand testament to youth’s ability to stave off the ravages of gravity. Her hippie uniform also included a handkerchief headband, (navy blue, baby blue to match her eyes, and red); an Indian mala, a tasseled suede vest far too small to conceal those thumb-like protuberances; two mood rings that rarely synchronized, and the requisite worn Levi’s that sagged in the ass, partly from infrequent washing, but in her case, more from a rather severe case of Half-Ass Syndrome, also known as HASS. (HASS is the unfortunate affliction bore by so many large breasted women, where it seems as if God was involved in some sort of fair trade agreement—neglecting the gluteus maximus in favor of beefing up the pectoralis major.  It should be noted that HASS is not related to Asian posterior underdevelopment, and though it can afflict black women, it rarely does.) HASS  of course lent Amanda an out of balance look, a look that was kept somewhat in check by an arched back the likes of which Olga Korbut would have admired. It was her eyes that belied her past, so big and sky blue, so searching, so innocent. Could those really be the eyes of a man killer?

Biff was frothing at the mouth with titillating facts and scorching rumors. We were all ears and semi-erections, anxious to bolster our porn stocks with fresh fantasy.  It was the “mankiller” story that he held out to the last on, after the high school principal/blowjob during the Morning Announcements story, after the LSD five-some in her parents bed story, after the sprint squad in the pole vault pit story. Now, “mankiller”, as it turned out, was a bit of overkill. Involuntary Manslaughterer twice removed, maybe.

It seems an 8th grade Amanda, already jutting conspicuously towards Greenwich Mean Time, found herself drunk and undulating at a high school kegger one fateful night, whereby she was marked for sexual indoctrination by an 18-year old, blue-chip-stud-quarterback heading for Penn State. The relationship was consummated, her virginity vanquished under a black light in a back bedroom in wee hours of her innocence, and continued on for some months.   It may have continued on for some months more, except for her getting seeded with blue-chip-stud-quarterback sperm and confessing everything to her mother. Her mother in turn confessed to her father, and her father in turn went three shades of berserk. When the dust finally settled weeks later, even though Amanda had since miscarried, the blue-chip-stud quarterback was left with a grim and unwavering choice—certain jail for statutory rape, or the Army.  Six months later he was found blue-chip dead, the victim not of North Vietnamese bullets, but of bad Saigon street smack.  

All over a pair of precocious, prehensile mammary glands.             

She blamed her father for the quarterbacks’ death of course, and never forgave him. This was, apparently, the underlying trauma that pushed her into the revenge of promiscuity, the very same promiscuity that got her kicked out of an upstate private college and transferred as far a way from her father as possible, across a nation, to San Jose State and to me, a gawky 12-year old horn-dog with a penchant for jerking bone sodas.

She had a way about her, Amanda, a certain needy vulnerability that lay under her take no prisoners’ façade. She was open to just about anything if it held the promise of discovery, pleasure, and an unconscious swipe against her father. But it took numerous visits over numerous weeks, supposedly to see Biff, to get her to notice my pubescent perspicacity.

What she had that Biff didn’t, besides a Pontiac mounted on her chest plate, was a Hi-Fi and a stack of records.   I couldn’t have cared less about music at the time, preferring to play catch or shoot baskets or join a pick-up game of one brand or another. But these were no ordinary records—they were Amanda’s records. Not only were they Amanda’s records, but they were Amanda’s records in Amanda’s room, and Amanda’s room was a fairyland to me, dusted supernal by Seraphs and Nymphs and dappled with patchouli panties, steel reinforced bras and hippie chick accessories. 

She didn’t take kindly to our seeming ever-presence whenever she returned home from a hard day at college.  She would usually find Biff sunk into her fluorescent green bean-bag and me strewn across her heaven scented twin bed, The Beatles, The Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane or The Strawberry Alarm Clock blaring from her Hi-Fi. We were summarily dispatched elsewhere each and every time. Only Biff’s mother, the resident June Cleaver of the neighborhood kept us from being permanently excommunicated, as long as we didn’t poke around where we weren’t supposed to, or break anything. After all, it was the only Hi-Fi in the house.     

Then one afternoon Fate stepped in to lend a hand and embarrass me in way never before equaled, and only once since.   And if I could go back I wouldn’t change a thing. There we were, Biff and I, ensconced in our accustomed positions, with The Strawberry Alarm Clock chanting a hippie ditty called ‘Sit with the Guru’, when in walked a beaming Amanda who joined in the disjointed chorus.  As we prepared to make our usual retreat she suddenly burst out, “Don’t run off so fast silly boys! Sit with the guru!”

“Huh?” 

“Sit with the guru, silly boys!”

Biff bolted. I bolted me and my cut-offs to the edge of her bed, wondering what could be next, not caring a whit or a whittle, as my Grandma Dot used to say, just as long as I could stay here and sit with the guru of the giant jugs, my own living goddess.  Hearing that song had induced from her the dreamiest flower child smile one could imagine, and got her to talking about some guru or another, but mostly about this one in India she was planning to go see called Neem Karoli Baba, who sat around naked under a plaid blanket all day being god-like. According to her this Baba guy was “discovered” by some American* who used to teach LSD classes at Harvard before the Establishment freaked out and made it illegal and kicked him out. Or something like that.  I didn’t care a whit. Or a whittle, for that matter. But I nodded and “uh huh’d” and “really’d!” like I was ready to pack off for India the very next morning. 

“Kundalini” was her big word. Kundalini this or kundalini that, the coiled ‘serpent light of love’ uncoiling up the spine through meditation or sex or—

Wait a minute!

 “Sex?”

“Yes, sex. And it’s so beautiful, this pure and loving ecstasy, oh it’s just the purist bliss, and--

Wait just a cotton pickin’ minute here!  “Sex?”

“Yes, sex!”

“O.K., well, uh, just how does one go about this sex, er…kundalini business?”

Suddenly the dreamy flower child had been replaced by a glowering, reproaching adult.

“Do you know what I think, Benn?”

“What?”

“I think you’re just a horny little shit who’s discovered his first little boner and now only cares about   one thing, getting his little boy rocks off, on not one little bit about the deeper spiritual aspect of it all, which is really what it’s all about!”

“That’s not true, that’s not true at all”, I declared, knowing every little bit of it was. “I care, I do. I care very much. And it’s not…little.”

“What’s not little?”

“You know, what you said.”

“Oh! You mean—no, of course not, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sure it’s a fine…boner. For someone your age.”

“My age?”

All this talk about my boner was starting to give me one. I tried best I could to rid the rise, but at ‘my age’ it was impossible. Add to that the highly unlikely fact that up to this point in the conversation I had somehow blocked out her abundantly under-clad breasts and was focused solely on what she was saying.

“You know, you’re 12. Things get bigger when you get older.”

Things were getting bigger now, and in a hurry. Her jutting juggernauts, where just a second before had been miraculously invisible, zoomed suddenly into focus. It looked like the boom booty she never had had been surgically removed from her haunches and grafted to her chest, only with a couple of thumb-tops sewn on.

I tried to cover my unfurling beast by crossing my legs, ankle over knee, but having been constricted into the “down position” prior to lift off, this only brought the situation to a crisis point, forcing the now engorged head and part of the shaft down my thigh and out the end of my cut-offs. Only I didn’t know it right off, not daring to risk a glance in the direction of the unruly appendage. I grabbed my knee and forced a smile, unaware of the full and unobstructed view I was offering her.

“Holy boner’s Batman!”

“Huh?”

I peered through the perfect isosceles triangle formed by my crossed legs just about the same time I heard the words:

“Would you kids care for some—oh my!”

It was none other than Mrs. June Cleaver standing in the doorway, with young Wallace sticking his head in by her side.  Amanda was already laughing uncontrollably, the big butt  on her chest jiggling menacingly now, in slow motion. Biff’s arm thrust through the doorway pointing and voicing the painfully obvious, all in a surreal, slow motion voice: “Bennett’s got a  Grouper!” For some unfathomable reason we had taken to calling erections, Groupers. Yeah, after the big, fat-lipped fish.

“Biff, go to your room!”, demanded Mrs. Cleaver.

“Why? I’m not the one poppin’ a Grouper!” retorted young Wally, and while this is going on I am struggling to get my Grouper back in the aquarium, but am so panicked things are not going smoothly.

“Biff, please!”

And finally it is back safe, and NOW the blood reverses its course, quick as air from an untied balloon, and I am red as a rump roast.

“Oh now don’t you be embarrassed one little bit”, intoned the saintly June, rather rump-roast-red herself. “It’s a perfectly normal thing to have happen for a boy your age. Would you like to use our bathroom?”

I could have died. She couldn’t have meant it that way.

Amanda my guru rolled off her fluorescent green bean-bag, laughing so hard now she was silent.   

“Uh, no thank you, Mrs. Baker.” I managed.  “I think I’m…OK now.”

“Well, good for you”, she said in her homiest Cleaverese.  Big smile. “Now, whaddyuh kids say to a nice big glass of milk and some fresh baked cookies?

****

A few nights later Amanda was over at our house babysitting my little brothers for the first time. Apparently I was spending too much of my youth in the bathroom to be trusted. Ricky was nine, and little David was gettin’ on towards three. Both were handfuls; David in a wonderfully joyous, bouncy red-cheeked little boy kind of way, and Ricky in a duplicitous, angel-faced hellion kind of way. It was this devious nature of his that I would employ in support of my own in carrying out my master plan, the idea for which, ironically, came from the plan’s very target the previous afternoon.

Biff and I and Mikey Cargotti and a kid we called Stupot (Stuart Potman) were excitedly heading up to the tree fort to take a look at some fresh smut Stupot had just kiped from the Cork & Bottle.  It was a promising looking rag called, “Swank”.  So there we went tumbling into the tree fort with our stolen booty chirping away about big tits and hairy cunts and the like, only to be stunned into silence at the sight of Amanda sitting in the lotus posture serenely smoking a joint.  It was the first joint I had ever seen outside the drug films at school, and boy did it smell funny.

“Hello boys. Whucha got there, a naked lady magazine?”

She was smiling distantly, but mischievously.

“Is that…marijuana?” I asked.

It was then that I spotted a bag of tawny looking plant matter on the floor next to her.

“This isn’t just marijuana boys, this is Colombian, Colombian Gold. The best. Wanna toke?”, she offered, extending the malformed cigarette.

While Biff, Mikey and I went into oral lock-up, our minds speeding through horrific visions of needles plunging into bulging veins and skeleton faces contorted in heroin withdrawal, Stupot, clearly a miscreant advanced beyond his tender years, had no such misgivings. “Hell yes!” he exclaimed, and sat down next to her, assuming the position.  We stood frozen and watched in morbid fascination as one of our own partook of the evil weed.

“Hey, boner boy!”

She was talking to me.

“Whaddyuh say we have a look at that naked lady magazine, huh?”

I had completely forgotten I was holding it.  Against my will, but drawn by gravity, I orbited slowly towards her. As I passed into the cloud of smoke that surrounded them I held my breath. I also held my nose with my left hand while I stuck naked lady magazine out with my right.  It was this last bit, actually holding my nose, that sent her into peels of laughter. Stupot blew out a puff of smoke and joined in her mirth, soon followed, albeit nervously, by Biff and Mikey, and eventually, me. Amanda took the joint from Stupot and put the last bit of it out on the floor, waving a hand through the smoke. Then she took the magazine.

“Alright boys, it’s safe now! C’mon and have a seat while I get a look at what gets you little pre-verts all hot and bothered.”

Sit with the guru.

She flipped through the pages matter of fact, stopping here and there to examine something or other that caught her eye. “Hmm.” “Goodness”.  She’s been taking it up the ass.” She showed us the page and we scrambled eagerly to get a good look at what an ass that been ‘taking it up’ looked like. Her anus was darkish with a swollen pulp of pink, and did appear a bit expansive, just as one might imagine. Six or eight hairs sprouted from it.   We “oooh’d!” and guffawed and chortled, just as one might imagine.

I would be reminded of this marquee moment, of these rumpy coiffs some twenty-five years later while roaming the upper reaches of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.  Seems old Pablo had a thing for butt sprouts, as six or eight of them protruded from perhaps a hundred or more sketches which included womanly nethermosts. Always six or eight—or nine, but not ten and not one, two three, four or five. I don’t know, perhaps they were all of they same woman. I was too busy reminiscing to notice. 

“You know”, said Amanda, holding the full center page open at arms length, “I look better than this. I could be any nudie magazine I want. I could be in Playboy.”

The mere thought sent a shudder through our young loins. Even Biff’s, I suspected.

“Maybe, but maybe you should get a second opinion!” I blurted out, laughs all around.

“I’ve had a lot more than two opinions, let me tell you little boy.”

There was a moment of silence as our minds replayed the rumors Biff told us. 

And then she added, “But I’ll let you know if and when I need another one, Bucky boy.”

“Oooh, Bucky boy!” teased Mikey, and just for a moment I considered the impossible.

“Amanda?”, uttered the now red-eyed and knowing Stupot, “whaddya mean by…A LOT more than two opinions?”

She hesitated only briefly. “Let’s just say I’m lousy at Strip Poker and leave it at that, shall we?”

She stood, and left us at that.

******

I had the deck stacked three hours before she arrived to babysit. Ricky was already in his pajamas. Little David was doing his customary twenty laps around the house before bed. Baby sister was still curled and forming in Mother’s womb. Mother was telling us not to give the new babysitter any trouble when the new babysitter rang the bell. Stepfather, having heard the rumors, made a mission for the door, stumbling over the change in altitude between shag and linoleum. The door swung wide and there, sheathed this night in an unforgettable cling of yellow sweater, entered the double barreled, pendulous rhapsody of Amanda.  Stepfather was transfixed. During the formalities led by Mother he stood dumb and beaming before those twin Hindenberg’s like the Kaiser before the conflagration. In this case the ‘conflagration’ was Mother, who all but shoved him out the door. Half an hour later little David finally ground to a halt and was put to bed. It was time to get down to business.

If marijuana was the gateway to heroin, I figured Go Fish just might be the gateway to Strip Poker. With the dirty deck tucked into the drawer beneath the bar that divided the kitchen from the family room, Ricky and I pulled up a couple of stools on either side. I had a full view of Amanda, who’s yellow totems had been somewhat and unfortunately camouflaged into a matching yellow vinyl chair, where she sat watching Jim Lange and The Dating Game. Ricky may have only been 9, but he was going on 13, sexually speaking, and the devil wasn’t just dancing in his eyes, he was doing the Locomotion.

“Go fish.”

“You go fish!”

“Fish you!”

“Quiet you two, I can’t hear the TV.”

“Fish off!”     

Mouth agape, mocking. “Did you just tell me to “fish off” little boy?

“Yes”, said Ricky. “Why?”

“Hey, you wanna play?”, I offered oh so smoothly.

“No thanks. Fish is for kids.”

“Yeah well, how ‘bout a little poker then?”, I asked leadingly.

“Maybe later. After the Dating Game”.

Yes! This was going to be easier than I thought.  Ricky suddenly leapt from his stool. “I wanna watch the Dating Game!” He took three quick strides and did a belly slide along the linoleum, coming to a stop at Amanda’s feet and beaming ever so sweetly up at her.

She fell for it.

“Well aren’t you the cutest thing!”

Truth be told, he was the cutest thing. He may have been 9 and a hellion going on 13, but he looked 5 and innocent as a puppy.  If he was 1% more sweet and innocent looking he would have been Winnie the fucking Pooh.

“Why don’t you come up here with your auntie Amanda.”

Auntie Amanda? They just met! I was shot full with an irksome envy and wanted to shout out the truth about the little bastard as he climbed onto her lap and into her arms, but I held my tongue. This could work to my advantage, getting her to feeling all comfy and homey and Auntie-like. Besides, I knew that sooner or later the devil would tip is hand.  He was already positioning himself so that his cheek rested in the downy yellow Tsunami of her sweater. You should have seen the look of satisfaction on his face. SMUG as a bug on jug rug. I kept telling myself this was a good thing, and to be patient.  But I was anxious. I couldn’t look. If bachelor’s 1, 2 and 3 could’ve seen what I saw, both on the other side of the partition and on the other side of the television, they wouldn’t have given a damn about the chunky minx asking the stupid questions.

I checked the dirty deck. If I had ever had a drink before, I would have had one then.  I couldn’t help myself. I looked at over Ricky sinking ever deeper into Xanadu. The sight of his evil little head resting between those baby’s was galling.

Then it happened. Sticking more than halfway out of his pajama vent was the truth. Grouper! He saw me see it, saw me crumple with muffled laughter, and began a snigger wholly appropriate to the position of his disposition, doing nothing at all to conceal the obvious betrayal of his Winnie the Poo-ness. I wished like hell I had a camera. I mean this Grouper was a keeper.

“What on earth are you two laughing at?”, she asked.

This sent me peeling.  So soon off my recent embarrassment, I couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity, pointing and shouting just had Biff had at me. “Ricky’s got a Grouper!”

At first she appeared amused.  “What is with this family?!” She moved to get up, rolling a now rollicking Ricky onto the floor. She stood over him. “Put that thing back in your pajamas you sick little freak!” He made a move to do so, or so it appeared, but instead exposed it even further and began waving it at her like a checkered flag.  I withered to the floor.

“Don’t think I’m not telling your parents!” With that she opened the sliding glass door to the backyard. “I’m going out for a smoke, and you’d better have that thing put away by the time I come back. If I see it again, I’ll cut it off and shove it up your butt!”

Not to be outdone by any 20-year old, Ricky retorted. “Oh yeah? Well, if you cut it off and shove it up my butt, I’ll pull it out with poop on it and shove it down your throat!”

“You two need serious help”. The door slid shut.

The chunky minx picked bachelor number one. It was always bachelor number one. More importantly, much more importantly, my master plan had been blown. There was no way she was going to play Strip Poker now. Not with two pre-teen perverts anyway, both of whose Groupers had already been thrust unbidden upon her.    

When 9pm came round it marked Ricky’s bedtime. I had since gotten him to apologize under threat of an endless series of Charlie-horses, and an offer to let him spy on us if I got her into a game of strip poker. All was calm and he “went to bed” peacefully, appearing to all the world again like a perfect little angel. Immediately Amanda slid open the slider to the backyard and sat straddling the metal track, pulling out the same bag of tawny plant matter she had in the tree fort.

“My Mom ‘ill kill you.”

“Yeah? Who’s gonna tell her? Bonerboy number 1, or bonerboy number 2?”                

She had a point. She rolled on while I tried to think of something “hippie” to say. “So, whaddya think about Vietnam, drag huh?”

“Whaddya say you turn off the boob tube and put on some records?”

“O.K. but, I don’t think we have anything good. Mostly old stuff.”

She said, “boob”.

Then she said, “Well, see what you can dig up. Almost anything’s good when you’re high.”

I dug up Elvis. A pre-porcine Elvis singing gospel. ‘Almost anything’s good when you’re high.’ Apparently Elvis singing gospel fell under the auspices of “almost”. She told me to bag the records and put the radio on KOME. It was the cool bitch’n station, the dirtiest.

Making a name for himself in San Jose at the time was a precursor to Howard Stern who went by the name of Dennis Erectus. It was Erectus who began calling KOME, “The come-spot on your dial”.  By 1976, the year Erectus would run for president against Ford and Carter by promising a big breasted 14-year old virgin to every man—or woman—who voted for him, “Kome Spot” window and bumper stickers were ubiquitous as six inch sideburns in the valley, heralding a New Age of public depravity.

But let’s get back to the private depravity that was about to unfold. And since I have no memory whatever of how the game of Strip Poker actually began, let’s just jump right into it and save me having to think something up. As planned, I lost the first hand and promptly removed my shirt, displaying her exact polar opposite: dime nippled skin and bones and abject pectoral under-development.  She was giddy over it, as was I, underneath the façade of shame. The next hand would be mine, and ever since the stoning and the removal of her Birkenstocks, I knew I was in for an eyeful. She was wearing a bra this day—the label no doubt showing a number and letter correspondingly large enough to house a pair of U-boat torpedoes—but this did not in any way quell my enthusiasm to deal. I had three of a kind to see her pair. Literally and figuratively. The die was cast, and matter of fact as could be, she began to pull her sweater over her…over her—THUMP—GIGGLE. Huh? She stopped, peering along with me down the hall where the noise had come from. There, not 20 feet away on his belly, wearing a toy army helmet and picking up the binoculars he’d just dropped, was Winnie the fucking Pooh.

I could’ve killed him, would’ve killed him, if not for Amanda’s laudable sense of fair play. She could have easily backed out under the circumstances, but instead suggested something out of my wildest dreams, that we continue the game, keeping track of the ‘score’, and paying up after in the privacy of my room. Holy shit!  Ten minutes later she was stark fucking naked—in theory—and yapping on about her kundalini and how it had become dormant since moving out here. Whatever baby, it’s show time!

I was at full mast before we hit the shag.  I couldn’t believe this was happening. Neither could Ricky, who just stood dumbfounded in his doorway as we passed. Goodnight Winnie. You little shit.

I closed my door and propped my barbell up against it.   Amanda sat on the edge of my twin bed and I at my desk, swiveling the chair to face her. I had untucked my shirt earlier in the evening in anticipation, and had made an adjustment to the vertical on the walk to my room, so I wasn’t showing. I was smiling, probably stupidly.

“Well?”

“Turn off the light.”

“Huh?!”

“You heard me. I’m no welcher. I’ll take my clothes off in front of you, but we never said the lights had to be on. Besides, you know darn well that pre-vert little brother of yours is going to try and sneak a look.”

This was a crushing blow. It was plenty dark outside and my curtains were drawn. It would be pitch black, the full naked glory of her mammoth mammaries denied a permanent address in my cerebral cortex.      

“That’s not fair! What about the second opinion, you know, for Playboy.

“Take it or leave it.”

A light went on in my head. “Fine. I’ll take it. I guess hearing you being naked is better than nothing.”                    

I got up and switched off the room light, feeling my way back to my chair. She wasted no time, and I could hear her sweater coming off as I felt blindly for the desk lamp. My ears were peeled. I needed to time this just right in order to catch her in all her glory. I asked her if I could undo her bra.

“No you can’t undo my bra. Besides, you wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

I decided to keep my mouth shut so I could hear the proceedings. My finger was itchy on the trigger. A seemingly interminable amount of time passed without me hearing a damn thing. What the hell was she doing, just sitting there pretending to be nude-ing up? A rustling. A creak of the bed. Now? Should I do it now? The stress was taking it’s toll, my young heart beating like a hummingbird’s.

The light snapped on. Did I do that? Damn! Too soon! She was leaning over, her bra straps slung across her forearms, the cups just off the ends of her tits even at that distance, the ends of her fat brown thumb-tops obscured. The areolas were the size of dinner plates. Alright, saucers. She pulled the bra back on, quick but calm as could be, almost smiling.  I switched the light back off.

“Oh no you don’t! You blew it boner boy.”

Shattered. Light back on. Then, for some inexplicable and unwarranted reason, I launched my self from the chair and past the back of her, bouncing to a reclining rest at the headboard.  She didn’t move except to look at me, sitting there in her bra, her big sky blues seemingly resting on me.  Neither of us said a word or moved a muscle for a good minute.  I thought I sensed her wheels turning. Then she broke into a big but quick smile and got up to leave. Or so I thought. What she did instead was to turn the desk lamp back off.  I felt the weight of her sit back on the bed, precisely where she had been before.  What the hell was she up to? I immediately refilled a half deflated erection as a strange excitement took hold. No, it wasn’t possible. She was thinking up some diabolical trick to play on me. A brief moment of silence passed. Then, as if from the ether, a hand, not mine for once, fell, unbelievably, onto my Grouper. 

“Goodness” she said softly, “is this thing always hard?”

Well yeah, pretty much of late. But I was to much in shock to speak. She removed her hand and I felt her weight lift from the bed, barely able to make out the moving blackness of her form. At first I thought it was all over, that was it, and waited for the light but it never came. Again I heard the rustling of clothes, then the unmistakable sound of a zipper. My mind spun donuts like a drunk 16-year old in Dad’s Buick.  The next thing I remember is a pair of hands clasping at my ankles and pulling on my sweatpants. Instinctively I raised my ass from the bed to facilitate. Was this really happening? What was she going to do? The waistband caught on the end of my erection pulling it about 110 degrees forward before releasing, a slapping double thud against my belly. It lay there bare, gasping and pulsing like a fish out of water, like—well—a grouper. It ached, but it was a good ache. Hell, it was a great ache.

Then the weight of her on the bed moving towards me like a cat, parking herself, the backs of her thighs pressing down across the fronts of mine and…the great electric warmth of her hand on my pulsing innocence, ever so softly, ever so slowly gliding her fingers along it, back…and…forth, back…and forth…each lap a small eternity of delirious new pleasure.  Had she moved the slightest fraction faster I would have gone off like a 12-gague shotgun. 

ADOLESCENT BLOWS OWN HEAD OFF

No Weapon Found

I really had no idea what the hell she was doing or thinking, only that I hoped she would never stop, never, never ever.

Then she stopped. And began inching forward. Now what? Was she….? No… I felt a bristle of fur, then an alien moistness gliding the length of me, up past the tip, then reverse course to catch it just as the waistband of my sweatpants had done. Only there would be no flopping backwards this time. Holy shit, is she going to fuck me?! Am I inside her?! I didn’t dare to utter a word. Pressure. Heat. Wetness. Opening. Oh my God, I think I am inside her! Barely. Just the head. Well, half the head. She began the same slow motion as before, only now from the inside, all in one slow spiraling slide downwards, never reversing course, not even for a fraction of an inch, and the sensation  was so otherworldly I think I may have left the space-time continuum.  

I lay there in slow ecstatic immersion.   In a matter of weeks I had gone from my first hand crank to my first experience of sexual intercourse. I was overwhelmed, exactly sure what was happening, sure only that I never wanted it to stop.  The silence was finally broken, not by words but by the first soft moans of female sexual pleasure I had ever heard. They began as she touched bottom and began to rock her self there, in small slow circles. I could make out her contours now, against my white walls, and could see she sat fully erect in her Olga Korbut posture, her head lolling. I would have thought it impossible, but up to this point I had been so overwhelmed I had once again completely forgotten her tits! I could see their silhouettes as they swayed out of line with her body and I remember wondering if it was OK to feel them. Here she was fucking me, and I wasn’t sure if the dictates of good sexual manners allowed me that privilege.

As if on cue, she took both my hands and placed them on each jug. I didn’t have to reach far.  I couldn’t see my hands for the dark really, but I am sure they disappeared somewhere into those billowy behemoths.  You know, those nipples even felt like thumb-tops, only without the nails. Not exactly a beginner’s pair, these teats, and although the discovery was fabulous, even magical, I had nothing to weigh them against, (save gravity), no perspective that might offer a more refined appreciation or devotional worship. I thought then of Mikey Cargotti and Bobby Sutter and Stupot and Biff, and how they would go completely berserk when they heard about this. This emboldened me, and I really started to hoist those babies around. I pushed high as my arms could take them, then released, only to try and catch them before they could Bunjee back and hurt somebody. Three rounds of this and she grabbed my hands and pinned them back behind my ears, leaning forward. They were in my face now, their pendulum gently careening off each cheek.  Turn the other. And the other. It would have been a good time to die. 

Then she whispered in my ear. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound, and don’t you dare come. I’m going to raise my kundalini now.”  Whatever you say babe. With that she was upright again, and began the gentlest rocking motion imaginable, softly chanting something unintelligible, softly moaning her mantra. This went on for a few minutes while I tried not to burst out in laughter, not because of what she was doing, but because I was actually lying there inside her and could not fucking believe my luck. I didn’t dare move, lest I do something wrong. Her chanting moans rose gradually in their intensity, ever more hypnotic, and as they did so I could feel myself ready to come, building towards a Howitzer---

BANG! CLANK!

The barbells. Ricky. The door.  Shit!  Amanda leapt from me before I knew what happened, my now wet grouper slapping back against my gut.  She lunged at the door, slamming it closed and yelling at the now pre-deceased little Pooh bastard to get back to bed. The, not saying a word to me she got dressed in the dark. I was still in shock and could think of utterly nothing to save the day. She left the room.  I  lay in a vacuum.  And so it ended. Whatever it was.

A few minutes later she returned, not for the reasons I'd hoped, but to tell me if I uttered a word of this to anybody she's string me up by the balls. 

Not wanting to wreck any chances of getting another crack at her, I kept my mouth shut. She stopped showing up at Biff's after school.  Apparently she had a boyfriend, and not two weeks later moved out and in with a guy named Shamus near campus.  The second I heard I was ready to spill the beans. I was dying to spill the beans!  I told the porn commandos all about it in Biff’s tree house one sunny afternoon, and once they decided I was telling the truth, did indeed go completely berserk.  I was a star. A regular 12-year old fuck stud.  It was all around school in roughly 30 seconds. I wanted more sex now and the sooner the better.  Brimming with confidence, I began the hunt.     

And struck out five years straight. Five years made all the more painful for the one experience, but it was an experience I would not have traded, not for anything. To this day, nearly thirty years later, I can still hear Amanda’s voice, can still hear the soulful moaning of her mantra...  

Sadly, so can fucking Winnie.

Bennett Stevens

TheArtichoke.org              

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