My Sexless 1960s...

Not exactly a love-in, my 1960s. But, being born in 1956, I guess that was acceptable since I was just a fledgling pervert gradually sniffing around the perversion tree. Didn’t know much about anything sexy as a kid. It just wasn’t around in the culture. Too young. Too sheltered.

Remember, we were still ensconced in the days of TV couples in separate beds.

I do recall my Mom, making Dad draw a “dickie” of sorts, no, not a penis, but a turtleneck shirtfront to cover the cleavage of a model pictured on the front of a Dukes of Dixieland or a Firehouse Five +2 LP. I remember seeing it before she made him censor it and being completely enthralled. Probably a good move, Mom.

The model was wearing a straw hat and a striped man’s dress shirt opened to the waist and tight Capris. No nipples showing, only cleavage, but WOW, it was something. I also recall that my Dad, who had been a vice cop, had a stack of four or five LPs in the hall closet that they had confiscated. They were up on a high shelf with the old Deanna Durbin albums of 78s that he didn’t play anymore. They were “Stag Party” records (not only the genre but the label, I believe). Off-color humor that I really didn't get when I snuck them down and listened to them...nothing you don’t hear on the Comedy Channel these days or even on network TV for that matter. Somebody named Bert Henry and I think there was even one by Redd Foxx and this was years before "Sanford & Son".

I remember going with Mom, my grandma, my six-year-old brother, and my two cousins who were my age (nine years old) to see the movie “The Great Race” at the El Rey Theater in Alhambra and there is a scene when Natalie Wood comes out of the water soaking wet in her clingy, white, Victorian bloomers thing and a kid yelled out “A-HA, look at de booozums”. That cracked us up and of course to this day when the four of us are around each other we crack up when someone says this.

Also when I was ten and we went to see “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” and my brother created a fuss because he didn’t want to go. “You and Dad just want to see it because it’s dirty.”

What the hell was he talking about? I found out, when Katherine Ross opened her nightgown for Redford, all backlit and whatnot. Though we didn’t really see anything, my, how I wanted to. The funny thing was that after all of his complaining, it was the other picture on the bill was the "dirty" one (ah, remember when ALL movies were double bills?). The first feature was “Marlowe” with James Garner and when the scene with a stripper twirling her pasty tassels came on, my brother high-tailed it up the aisle “to the bathroom”. Mom told me to follow him, which pissed me off so I walked backwards up the aisle to not miss the scene. I’m no fool. And who was at the top of the aisle peeping through the curtains but my seven-year-old little brother. Always a step ahead of the rest of us, even then.

Other titillating childhood memories that pop up are the distinct memory of the first breasts I ever saw…my older cousin Michelle, who I just loved – “My Michelle” I used to call her.

She was babysitting us once and we were all bouncing and wrestling on my folks' bed and I remember she was wearing a yellow, gauzy nightgown. At one point, she bent over to tickle me (oh, how I loved her wild laugh) and I could see down her neckline at her bare breasts. Small handfuls, pink tipped in the soft light filtering through the fabric. I wasn't sure why, but I had to try to catch another fleeting glimpse. I’ll never forget it though I wasn’t even sure why that was interesting to me at the time. It was probably because I didn’t have any myself.

My family didn't run around naked so the one time I remember seeing my mom's boobs stands out. She was taking a bath and my Dad brought me in to say goodnight. Also I remember seeing my Dad's penis just once. He was standing shaving his face and I walked in accidentally. I remember thinking it was huge and I realize now that it was soft and average and looked pretty much like mine does now. At the time, I was completely amazed and jealous. I was ten. I'm sure I took showers with him when I was really little but I don't have any recollection of that.

I also remember walking in Hollywood with my family somewhere near Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the greatest of the Hollywood movie palaces, and I recall seeing a “pretty woman” with what looked like a mustache. Ah, the joys of growing up in Southern California; if it’s not Ricky Nelson and his pregnant wife Chris at Denny’s, it’s cross-dressers on Sunset Blvd.

I’d had big crushes in grade school on Sage N. in 3rd grade, Mrs. Weinholdt’s class – that girl could play a flutophone...until she miraculously developed a foreign accent overnight, which spooked me. She eventually married a good childhood friend of ours.

In the 4th and 5th grade, it was Alise P. who was a doll, thin, sporty and blond and I was way too shy to ever approach her (she eventually married a wild neighbor of mine three years older than us and had about a million kids – whew, dodged that bullet).

Out of my reach at this time was Liz McF who was wild, always had boys after her and a bit too aggressive (i.e. advanced) for me. One of the first “smokers” then “stoners” a few years later, she hung with a wilder crowd earlier than most of us. But, she had dimples. The first in my long line of attraction to dimpled girls. I wonder if that’s what drew me to Charlene, my ex-wife…yes, I've had a long proclivity for dimples. Unrequited dimple fixation that needed to be quenched.

So, these are the pre-pubescent, roots of my teen angst. I was a bit too young for the swingin’ ‘60s. Missed all of that free love and most of that open lifestyle experimentation…okay, so I made up for lost time a bit in the late 70s and in my late 40s but those are two other bags of worms…I sure absorbed the concept and influence of the freedom ethos through the media and culture though…the music and even advertising became more sexy and women and teens had more freedom than ever before…we thought we could actually speak our minds…anyway, I’m sidetracked, back to the sex stuff….

In 7th grade, I remember being on the lawn in the quad at lunch and hearing Franny tell us that a girl's privates were called "Virginia". He later spent some time in prison, coincidence?...I think not. He was immediately corrected by one of the jocks who had older sisters and brother, "No, you idiot, it's "virGIna (sic)." The female mystery organ had come up in a conversation about Lucy H, who it was rumored had been caught in the girls’ bathroom counting her pubic hair. She wasn't in there very long.

I also recall missing classes while I waited for my uncontrollable hard-on to die down as I sat in the library, praying that no one would notice. Oh, the glory days of hourly spontaneous erections. I like to say now that I was constantly infatuated with a breeze. Didn't take much.

We spent a whole lot of time trying to “catch a beaver”, i.e. see girls' panties as they sat with their legs open. Gary P. was such a hawk-eye that he claimed to have x-ray vision and could tell what color panties a girl was wearing before he caught a real glimpse. He even named everyone’s dick a funny nickname. Somehow I don’t remember mine, though I think I was Rod. I recall there was a Mortimer (Lenny R, I think) and Garry C’s was Flip because he has a different turn on the end from his circumcision scar. Now, Gary P's real claim to fame was that he claimed to have seen our hot (or at least fairly young) Social Studies teacher’s beaver. He claimed Miss Garrett sported, “a puffer”. As did Cathy R. For you, with little experience on the beaver trail, this refers to girls with MAJOR hair down there. Remember, these were the days before bikini waxing and landing strips and the like. So to be "a puffer" you had to have some intense forestation going on.

The thing about going to our particular Junior High was that it brought together kids from, not only the three elementary schools in the district, but the Catholic school as well. So there was a huge influx of cute girls who you somehow felt you might have a chance with since they didn’t know you like the girls you’d spent the last six years being ignored by. There were kids whose names you had heard over the years from students who transferred into your school or through their delinquency legends. There were also kids who you had played Little League with or gone to church with. It was a time of budding friendships and suddenly new cliques and alliances were heating up. Somehow, many of the kids who just 3 months before had been your good friends would be off in their own new worlds and just a passing glance for the rest of your days in school.

Then there was the trauma of not only having lots of new and exciting girls to drool over but they were freshly bursting at the seams. Where had all the skinny, flat-chested girls gone? You know, those silly, frivolous, foursquare and jacks playing girls who we'd pick on in class and ignore the rest of the time?

Someone had injected them with curves and height and funny smiles that didn’t mean what they used to. And they dressed better. The light shone through their hair much more enticingly. They seemed to walk in slow motion across the schoolyard with their books pressed against them where you somehow instantly realized that you wanted your hands to be. They giggled incessantly, their heads swirling around to look over their shoulders at…no, not us, but the older 8th grade boys.

These boys were the bane of my existence. All tough and smiling and confident, knowing something we were sure we needed to know. We hadn’t the vaguest idea of what they knew but we were ready to find out. My biggest trauma is that I was completely infatuated with Donna B., one of these girls from outside my particular grade school, i.e. my previous world.

Donna was beautiful, with wavy, long, blond hair and she wore neckbands, and vests (I remember distinctly a navy blue sweater-vest and a long sleeve yellow dress shirt underneath with hip-hugger jeans)...a very cool, stylish not hippie but hip-type thing at the time. She never gave me the time of day. Oh, the occasional smile and a couple of brief fleeting conversations. But I always tried to sit a the lunch table with her friends and sit across from her so I could be just one or two people away from her.

I remember that the day we were having our class photos taken, I was wearing a ludicrous outfit that my good-hearted Mom had put together for me to wear. I was a 7th grader; a nobody and in my yellow shirt, sweater vest, yellow socks and pants, I DID look like a banana. What was my mother thinking? Donna's older brother Dick (appropriately), decided that he'd point that fact out as I stood next to the goddess that was his sister. Nice.

They had dances at school but I never went to one. No reason to. There was no one I deemed approachable and what did I know about dancing? All the girls I was friends with (a couple who would speak to me for more than a sentence or two, had boyfriends). I did go to my first party and drank my first (half of a) beer, which I walked around with all night not wanting to get drunk but wanting to be seen with a beer. It was in a house on Emperor by the school and I walked there with my friend Gus. There was a band set up in the kitchen that played “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull and Allman Brothers tunes.

Thus began a harrowing year that would repeat this same sickening pattern when we arrived as freshman to high school two years later.

But, in between, there was the New World: 8th grade - 1970-71.