Reebok sitting in a pile of trash at their curb?
Yet I was no fool. The homemade pornography was hard to defend. Stick figures or no, the lusty intention was there. My erotic thought bubbles had recently evolved into diatribes, as well, bursting out of Lindy’s head as she knelt in front of me on a piece of construction paper torn in a fit from my school binder
.
She spoke in long sentences in these scenes and said things like,
I have always wanted this since that time you tackled me last summer.
Or,
This is the way I like boys to give it to me.
Or, in the one I really regret, when she was on all fours, screaming,
Yes! Please! Again!
I had no excuse for such things.
And even then I understood the despair that must have sunk into my mother’s bones when she saw this. I also understood the way this discovery must have recast for her the conversation we had with the police officer in our living room, when she realized, in other words, that this box may have already been sitting there silently, beneath my bed, when I performed so innocently for the Simpsons. What was she to do with this idea?
I didn’t ask.
Yet it all looked so devilish out in the light, my private collection,where it was never supposed to be. This was especially true of the way I had pasted Lindy’s face onto the torn-out pages of those magazines. Heaven help her. There she was, glued to the page, disembodied and smiling innocently for the school photographer as she unknowingly bent over some enormous penis or pinched her nipples with a trail of semen on her breasts. The poor thing. I see that now.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Please understand that. I don’t want this confession to lose you. No boy knows what he is doing when he first stumbles upon masturbation. We become amateur inventors, we gawky and lunatic teens, and Lindy was simply the stuff of my workshop, of my laboratory. And I’ve spent years wondering how different my life would be if I was like the millions of boys who hadn’t been caught, if I was like any other normal person who had the privilege of privacy, if I’d have been able to keep these fantasies locked up where they should be, in my mind, in my heart, with no empirical evidence to speak of.
But who am I kidding? I’ve never been any good at keeping things locked away.
Look at me now, for instance. Look at me telling you, of all people.
Yet the real problem, it turned out, was not the pornography, which my father laughed off when she told him. Nor was it the Astroglide lubricant that, in a fit of unbelievable bravery, I had purchased at the K&B Drugstore within biking distance of my house. Nor was it even the rambling poetry or mix tapes I had made but never given to Lindy, nor even the blue Reebok, which I was able to explain to her in the way I have to you.
No. The real problem was the pair of binoculars, and the photo I confessed to her came from the Landrys’. These items brought repercussions. Our home was never the same.
16.
T he binoculars first:
In 1988, the year before Lindy’s rape, the Landrys fostered a young criminal by the name of Tyler Bannister. He arrived shortly after Tin Tin’s quiet and unexplained departure and was sixteen, the oldest child they’d ever fostered. As it turned out, his years of bouncing from one family to another had done to him what it did to many other young boys in that limbo and made him distrustful and cruel. His presence in Woodland Hills was unwelcomed. There were several reasons for this.
Tyler Bannister introduced a new set of problems to the neighborhood that the younger kids, myself included, had yet to develop. And since we were already dealing with our own budding messes in Bo Kern and Jason Landry, his sudden appearance seemed overkill. He brought to our streets the knowledge of drugs and vandalism, and he did not even look like a child. He kept his head shaved bald in all seasons and had blue tattoos on his wrists, neck, and ankles. He once claimed he’d
Yet I was no fool. The homemade pornography was hard to defend. Stick figures or no, the lusty intention was there. My erotic thought bubbles had recently evolved into diatribes, as well, bursting out of Lindy’s head as she knelt in front of me on a piece of construction paper torn in a fit from my school binder
.
She spoke in long sentences in these scenes and said things like,
I have always wanted this since that time you tackled me last summer.
Or,
This is the way I like boys to give it to me.
Or, in the one I really regret, when she was on all fours, screaming,
Yes! Please! Again!
I had no excuse for such things.
And even then I understood the despair that must have sunk into my mother’s bones when she saw this. I also understood the way this discovery must have recast for her the conversation we had with the police officer in our living room, when she realized, in other words, that this box may have already been sitting there silently, beneath my bed, when I performed so innocently for the Simpsons. What was she to do with this idea?
I didn’t ask.
Yet it all looked so devilish out in the light, my private collection,where it was never supposed to be. This was especially true of the way I had pasted Lindy’s face onto the torn-out pages of those magazines. Heaven help her. There she was, glued to the page, disembodied and smiling innocently for the school photographer as she unknowingly bent over some enormous penis or pinched her nipples with a trail of semen on her breasts. The poor thing. I see that now.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Please understand that. I don’t want this confession to lose you. No boy knows what he is doing when he first stumbles upon masturbation. We become amateur inventors, we gawky and lunatic teens, and Lindy was simply the stuff of my workshop, of my laboratory. And I’ve spent years wondering how different my life would be if I was like the millions of boys who hadn’t been caught, if I was like any other normal person who had the privilege of privacy, if I’d have been able to keep these fantasies locked up where they should be, in my mind, in my heart, with no empirical evidence to speak of.
But who am I kidding? I’ve never been any good at keeping things locked away.
Look at me now, for instance. Look at me telling you, of all people.
Yet the real problem, it turned out, was not the pornography, which my father laughed off when she told him. Nor was it the Astroglide lubricant that, in a fit of unbelievable bravery, I had purchased at the K&B Drugstore within biking distance of my house. Nor was it even the rambling poetry or mix tapes I had made but never given to Lindy, nor even the blue Reebok, which I was able to explain to her in the way I have to you.
No. The real problem was the pair of binoculars, and the photo I confessed to her came from the Landrys’. These items brought repercussions. Our home was never the same.
16.
T he binoculars first:
In 1988, the year before Lindy’s rape, the Landrys fostered a young criminal by the name of Tyler Bannister. He arrived shortly after Tin Tin’s quiet and unexplained departure and was sixteen, the oldest child they’d ever fostered. As it turned out, his years of bouncing from one family to another had done to him what it did to many other young boys in that limbo and made him distrustful and cruel. His presence in Woodland Hills was unwelcomed. There were several reasons for this.
Tyler Bannister introduced a new set of problems to the neighborhood that the younger kids, myself included, had yet to develop. And since we were already dealing with our own budding messes in Bo Kern and Jason Landry, his sudden appearance seemed overkill. He brought to our streets the knowledge of drugs and vandalism, and he did not even look like a child. He kept his head shaved bald in all seasons and had blue tattoos on his wrists, neck, and ankles. He once claimed he’d
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