This is one of those stories that sounds so much better coming from my mom. When reminded of this story, she rolls her head back and says with great enthusiasm, “You were so rotten that morning, I could have…” made me a pancake mom? She was so not looking to make me breakfast.

Those of you from my generation will remember the birth and success of Star Wars and the Pound Puppy craze. Well that year I wanted nothing more than the Ewok Village play set. I remember going to Randall Park Mall in Cleveland and having to wait in the line with the other kids and their parents for the chance to request that number one toy that would make my year. The line and the surrounding area were coated with too much glitter and cotton webbing. I remember smelling the combination of Sanka, Enjoli and popcorn.

I don’t know if I told that sad, fat alcoholic that had the cotton webbing on his face that I really wanted the Ewok Village. I must have. Either way you look at it, the stupid drunk got the orders mixed up and he gave that god damned village to my brother. I remember being quite shocked that it was Carmen’s name that was written on the tag that stuck to the “Ho- Ho- Ho” wrapped box that contained my coveted Ewok Village. After witnessing the travesty and cursing the obese red nosed liar I unwrapped the rest of my gifts with great discontent.

I’m sure that Carmen let me play with his prize that morning and I’m sure that some time soon thereafter I dismembered the Ewoks and set the village ablaze in retaliation. I was sort of wicked like that way back when. I am so different now. I would have sold the village and its inhabitants on Ebay.

The majority of my summers as a lad were spent at the YMCA day camp. They wisely took us on all kinds of fun field trips, but Fridays were always for roller skating.

Finally there was something I could kick ass with – I was the best skater in the entire camp, counselors included. I could back skate and chose to often to show off to anyone looking. That got me in hot water with the wheeled referees monitoring the floor. Nobody was allowed to back skate unless it was an official “back skate.”

The problem with that rule was no one else could back skate. That was, until JoyceLynn came into the picture. She could skate better than any of us and somehow managed to get an official back skate. She and I would have the entire floor and two songs all to ourselves. Too bad there was never a roller skating team in high school; that would have made a big difference to my student status on campus. Well, maybe…

Get a load of my “skating” shirt when I was all of eight-years-old. And how about those ears, huh?

or

Donkey’s lips do not fit onto a horse’s mouth.

It was after school in April. I normally stayed late to catch the middle school bus home from my high school. Our schools were all on the same campus, K thru 12. The upper classmen took to making fun of me that year. I knew that in ten years they would still be taking the same bus being miserable and living at home, but it did not help to alleviate the afternoon of pain and ridicule that I would have to endure if I chose to ride the bus home from school at 2:30.

There were about ten of them that ran in a pack preying on the weak, timid and the different and all of them were on my route home. So I stayed after; an hour of empty time was worth avoiding the torment. She was there as well, probably for the same reason. She was one of the different, she always had been. She frankly never had a choice. She was adopted and through the years of grade school never really got along well with everybody else. She tried so hard to fit in that in the end the only way was to fit out. It did not help that she failed a couple of grades along the way and was two years older than us. She developed far beyond her years and at 16 she could have passed for 20 and in some cases she probably did. She was always extra nice to me and I tried very hard not to be to nice to her in public; it would surely mean that both of us would be targeted by the pack and in that case there was not strength in numbers.

Just to pass the time I found myself talking to her and before I knew what was what we were upstairs in the girls bathroom and she had her breast out. I remember not knowing what to do except what I had seen in movies so I kissed it and felt its extreme size in the palm of my hand. It was weird and all I could think about was what would be for dinner that night after I rode home with the 6th and 7th graders.

It did not go very much farther than that. I was hungry and at that point, was not looking forward to visiting the other bases; I had forfeited this portion of the game as far as I was concerned.

The next day in the lunchroom she approached me quietly; she knew not to act too friendly. In the communication hub of the school if anybody suspected anything it would be common knowledge by 8th period. She did not mention anything about the encounter over the American Standard, but instead held out a condom, giggled and walked away.

At the time I had two buddies in school. We all owned mopeds and lived relatively close to each other. We had nothing in common during school hours for we all ran with different crowds, but after school we were always together. As soon as I was handed the golden foil packet I ran to show my friends, hoping that this would finally be the dose of male acceptance that I had hoped and longed for. It was just enough for them to almost shoot in their pants; their friend had just been given the get go to go all the way. In their minds it was just as good as if they had been given the golden ticket themselves. For two days thereafter we discussed everything about her, her body, what she may have looked like “under there” and what she might do… and not do. Eventually the subject of a 4 way came about. This excited me greatly. I had yet to experience anything sexual with either sex and now I was going to have it all at once. Thank God because I was not digging the thought of pussy on its own without assistance of my buddies.

My parents were both home and upstairs talking to each other unaware of the orgy their son had arranged beneath their feet. She was the last to arrive. I cannot remember if she agreed to the quadra-fuck or even if she had been asked, but I was going to try. Again I cannot remember how we got there, but there we were just the two of us in front of the washing machine on the cold concrete floor. At that age all I needed to do was take my cock out and it was hard so it did not matter what or who was in front of me. We had our pants off and I had just put the rubber on myself. She had to guide me in because I had no idea what I was doing, I was just hoping that my boys would show up soon and “lend a hand”. As I began to do what I thought I was supposed to I heard the sounds of shoes on concrete and began to get very excited. The footsteps stopped and the sound of giggles echoed quietly. The laughter faded to the TV room where the boys waited for me to report to them every dirty thing that I we did. Little did they know that way before they got there I had shot my load; it took 2 pumps, I was a 2 pump chump.

I created a story for my buddies based on a Penthouse forum article I had read. It didn’t matter because they believed every word I said. I had won the approval of my male friends, but now I had something else to tackle.

It isn’t shocking that I was totally unaware of the emotional connection women have with sex. In her mind we were a couple. I put a halt to that, but did allow us to be friends, “secret friends” - we would not talk during school hours and only in the private of one another’s home would we interact. She seemed very happy with this arrangement and was willing to be sworn to secrecy. We messed around for a while and I experimented with the different sexual acts that I had seen in XXX films. I did not take very well to the oral part of things. I almost gagged and have since never returned.

As the years went on we grew apart. In 10th grade I was at my peak of being angry at any and everybody including myself. I was using lots of drugs and cutting school. The desire to visit the upstairs girl’s bathroom was soon replaced with smoking in the boy’s. I do not know what happened to her. There are plenty of rumors though like, like she is living in Kentucky with 7 kids or she is some bargain bin porn ho; that one is my favorite.

I hope she is happy and I wish that she had been happier and treated better then (myself included). It was a very hard time for a lot of people in very different ways; it was the worst 3 years of my life and I cannot believe I endured so much at that age. I guess that is why I had acted out so severely. It didn’t kill me, it made me stronger. Hopefully it made her stronger, too.

At an airport recently I caught a glimpse of a hamster, or maybe it was a gerbil, on a poster with its wheel. It was a metaphor for the human habit of continuously circling with no where to go. I found the image a bit unsettling; though, it reminded me of one of the funniest stories that my immediate family shares. I believe this is one of Ma H’s favorites too, and yes it has everything to do with hamsters, or was it gerbils?

I was in the 8th grade. My mother, Aimie and I were somewhere and they had hamsters for sale. After a double team by Aimie and me, Ma H caved in and bought one for me. On the ride home I was happily getting to know my little, furry friend. I put my finger through the hole to introduce myself and was met with several jagged little teeth that easily pierced my flesh.

I screamed and shook my finger spraying the interior of the mini van and Aimie with blood. This was not starting well at all.

We got home and after I washed my finger and bandaged it up I began to construct a home for my violent, furry friend. This was enjoyable because I loved to build things at that age. While I constructed his cage I had visions of a plastic tubing fortress built with multi-leveled chambers connected by rodent runways spanning the length of my room.

The experience worked out so well that Ma H agreed to allow me to expand the population by two more. They were all the same sex because I wanted to avoid any reproducing; I had heard that the young were in danger of being consumed by one or both of their parents once born or something horrific like that. To accommodate the growing population I went out and bought one of those elaborate plastic hamster mansions with the plastic tubes and connectors. My vision was starting to come together.

One morning soon after the construction was completed, Ma H woke me up by saying that one of the hamsters had been found in the dryer. He was alive, just trapped. I still have no idea how he got down there since the basement was where the laundry facilities were and he had somehow managed to descend three floors. I scooped him up and found that he had chewed through one of the plastic connectors. I searched the village for the rest of the inhabitants only to find that they too had decided to join in the exodus. I had one of three. Ma H asked if the others had escaped as well and I told her that they had not. I then went to my brother to inform him of the situation. He offered no help since he was denied access to the hamsters or anything to do with them.

I went to school that day thinking over and over where they could have gone and also wondering why in the Sam Hill the manufacturer created such a shitty product. It was designed for hamsters, but on the first try the little bugger chewed right through it like it was cardboard.

I arrived home and I searched and searched until it was time for dinner with no luck. Mid way through dinner, during a quiet moment in the conversation, I noticed both my parents exchange a look of bewilderment. It took me a moment to figure out what the looks were about. There was a scratching sound that seemed to be coming from the ceiling. I looked at my brother. He matched my look with the same degree of concern and panic. We knew what the scratching was. Somehow the refugees had managed to find their way in between the floor of the upstairs and the ceiling of the kitchen where we were now eating our pork chops and trying to mask our panic.

After dinner, Carmen and I devised a plan. There was no way that we could get to the space beneath us, but our cats could. This was very unnerving as we wanted to avoid bloodshed and rescue the little guys from beneath our feet.

We sent Harvey in. Harvey was the most docile of our three cats. He never brought home mangled corpses and never seemed to want to kill anything; the other two were a different story and were not allowed upstairs during Operation Habitrail.

Harvey went in and under quite happily as Carmen and I waited anxiously hoping that our parents had dismissed the sound to a bird or something; we lived in the country so the concept of a stray critter somewhere in the house was pretty standard fare.

After about three minutes of biting our nails and thinking the worst we received confirmation of contact. The confirmation came in the form a high pitched scream that we only assumed came from the frightened floor dweller. We had a hand held mirror that we rigged up so we could see down the length of the plank with aid from a heavy duty flashlight.

I wedged myself in the crawlspace, arranged my surveillance gear and saw Harvey calmly looking at the dusty creature standing on his hind legs screaming. I had no idea that hamsters could utter such a shriek, but they can and he did.

Remarkably the flashlight attracted him like a moth. He scurried by Harvey, who was looking rather confused, right up to my flashlight and into the palm of my hand. Success! Carmen and I now had our plan in order. We would use Harvey to track down the last hamster, listen for the shriek and use the light to attract him back to camp. The only foreseeable flaw would be if we couldn’t get to where we needed to be. Luckily that was not the case; he was only five planks over in the floor of Carmen’s room.

Operation Habitrail was a success. Harvey was awarded with corn on the cob for his gallantry and all the hamsters were returned to base a little dirty, but otherwise unharmed. Unfortunately, that was the end of my vision. The small city I had built was broken into angry pieces and the inhabitants were relocated to a slum of wire cages.

Years later we told our parents of our evening of search and rescue and their reply was…

“You Little Shits!”