The following story is rated R for mature language and sexual themes. Reader discretion is advised.

The kid with the older brother or older cousin is always the first guy in the neighborhood to know about sex. It’s just the way it works. Parents think the “birds and the bees” talk is something special, but they rarely know that we are way ahead of them. What we don’t know is that the parents actually know what “blowjob” means. But I guess that’s still hard for me to deal with.

I first learned about sex when I was 9 years old.

I met my best friend Mike when I was 6, the summer before 1st grade. We became instant lifelong friends. He had three things of any real value: a professional electronic keyboard in his basement that could make the sounds of a helicopter, a construction truck slotcar set, and a cousin who knew about sex. Only the keyboard and the slotcars were in his basement.

We’d often spend afternoons down in that basement with the slotcars, hauling logs and dumping coal. More often than not, the construction site became a morbid demolition scene after the trucks, with full load in tow, jumped the tracks and collided with the townspeople.

Occasionally Mike would play the keyboard. At age 7 or 8, Mike could play that keyboard like a seasoned semi-professional. His dad was a professional/amateur musician who could sing and play guitar, keyboard, drums, trumpet, and just about anything. Mike picked most of it up naturally, by ear, and to this day, I still want to kill him for not doing music professionally. In any case, Mike could “sound out” most TV theme songs, and we would have a hilarious time thinking of stuff to play, and listening to him figure it out. My favorite was always the theme to Hill Street Blues. He would play that tune at full volume, and the hair on my arms would stand straight up. I’ll never forget that. The keyboard itself was hooked to an ancient amp/monitor setup. The best part of the whole thing was that the steel toggle switch for turning the amp on and off was improperly grounded. Mike would have to put on huge rubber boots and use the keyboard cover to actually flip the switch off. God forbid he, or I, forgot to don the gear, the shock literally blew the toenails right off our toes. The screams could be heard all the way at my house. It felt like your whole body was a tongue against a giant 9V battery. It happened more than once, and it sucked every time.

The basement was also used for deep, dark conversations about girls. Mostly girls from school, what we wanted to do with them, to them or around them. At the time, we knew basically nothing, except maybe how to kiss on the cheek. It wouldn’t be long before that childhood innocence was long gone.

I grew up on a street called Edgegrove Ave. My group of friends were all exactly the same age, with one guy a year younger, and a couple guys with slightly younger brothers. Mike, Mike, Jimmy, Joey, Albert, and me. I have never been sure exactly how that happened. The next block over, for the same strange reason, was packed with boys all the same age as well, only a year older. These were Darlington Boys and they were our nemeses. So we all grew up together, fighting, fleeing, or destroying each others’ club houses in the scattered empty lots around the neighborhood.

One afternoon, during a pillaging run through one of the Darlington Boys clubhouses, we uncovered a chest that was buried in the dirt. One of the Mikes opened the chest as the rest of us stared over his shoulder at the dusty treasure within. When he lifted the first porn magazine out of it’s resting place and dusted off the cover, we all scrambled to get a hold of it. The cover displayed the beautiful breasts of a perfect young woman, and I can almost see the synchronized drops of drool hit the dirt floor of the clubhouse at the same time. As he flipped the pages, the cumulative levels of excitement, fear, and disgust grew as the photos became increasingly explicit. I remember some of these pictures vividly. Without describing each one in detail, I will say that we saw a number of “money shots” and we had no idea what they were.

At some point Mike panicked. The pictures were so raw and disgusting that we all agreed to put the magazines back before we got into trouble. Carefully repacked, redusted, and reburied, we scurried out of there as fast possible. A pack was made never to speak of the images we had seen.

It took all of 45 minutes before Mike D. ratted us out yet again, and his mother stormed out of the house like a madwoman. Instructed to follow her and point out everything, the pack of us sheepishly obeyed. As we approached the wooded area where the clubhouse was hidden, I remember answering one of her questions about what we saw in there.

“It was nothing really. Just a guy peeing in s girl’s mouth.” I didn’t know it wasn’t pee.

That didn’t go over well, and things got worse when the Darlington Boys’ clubhouse sign was seen from the street. It read, “Wet Pussy”. She asked the group,

“Do you know what that says?”
“Wet pussy,” replied the 8 year old Jimmy.
“Do you know what that means?” She was almost in tears.
All of the boys but one replied in unison, “no.” And we weren’t lying.
“I know,” replied the Mike who wasn’t her son.
The conversation ended there.

The trip into the woods to find the clubhouse, to find the buried treasure was too arduous for Mike’s mom, so the quest was abandoned. That evening, all the appropriate mothers and fathers were called. I remember explaining to mine that I hadn’t seen anything really bad except some boobies and “that guy peeing on that girl.”

Mike’s “I know,” comment during this event ignited my curiosity, and the next time Mike and I were alone in his basement, I started asking questions.

“What does wet pussy mean?” I got right to the point.
“I know, but I can’t tell you. My cousin made me promise.” Mike pleaded.
“No way. You have to tell me. I won’t tell anyone else. I promise.”
“OK, well, do you know what a [whispering] “pussy” is?”
“No. I have heard the word before, but I don’t know.” I was whispering now too.
“It’s the part of the woman where the man puts his pee-pee. Girls don’t have pee-pees like us.”
Instantly, and no longer whispering, “No way! My mother didn’t do that!”
“Yes she did,” matter-of-factly.
“No.”
“Well do you want to hear the rest, or not?” He was growing impatient.
I was too curious for my own good, so I urged him on, “No, I want to hear. Keep going.”
“The man put his penis in the wife. That’s sex.”
“Oh.”
He was whispering again,”Then it happens.”
“What happens?” I was on the edge of my seat. Really, we were sitting on the cold, hard, concrete, basement floor. It was dusty and dirty, and stained from frequent flooding.
“It comes out.”
“What comes out?” I practically begged.
He couldn’t say it, so he spelled out in the dust on the floor.

S….C….U….G

I whispered, “Scug?”
“No. Mmmmm.” Mike tried to explain.
“I don’t understand. It’s called scug?”
“No, scu…mmmm.” He tried again.
“Scum?” I whispered.
“Shhhhhh!”
“And then what happens?” The story was incomplete and now I was out of my mind to know it all.
“Well, the the mother gets pregnant, and that’s it. Unless you wear a [whispering again] condom. Do you know what a condom is?”
“No. What is it?”
“It’s like a balloon for your pee-pee.”
“It blows up?!” I was surprised.
“No. It goes over it.”
“I don’t understand.” I was so confused by now it really didn’t matter.
So Mike proceeded to draw a condom with his finger in the dust on the floor. His drawing made no sense. To this day, I am still sure he drew two intersecting uppercase D’s. He tried to explain more, demonstrating on his finger, then eventually with a reall balloon, but he never quite explained that it captured the flying “scug.”

I let it go after that, and my next semester of sex education didn’t come for a few more months.

[This one goes out to Mike. Thanks bro.]