I had many friends in my neighborhood. There was Jake, whose older brother hated me and wanted me to beat me up and would call me a “faggot” before I even knew what that was.
It seemed like everybody’s older brother back in those days was a sadistic prick.
I don’t even remember his name, Jake’s brother, but do remember his horse face and buckteeth and that he was a raging asshole.
It could be that he hated me because of the egg battle me and Jake had.
After school one day, when our parents were gone at work, I’m not sure who started it, but we raided our respective fridges and pelted each other and each other’s houses with eggs.
Neither of our parents were thrilled to return home after a long day at work and see the house covered in slimy egg yolk, cracked shells lining the streets.
It was one of those times, as a kid, that I felt guilt, when my mother told me how eggs cost money, they weren’t free, and that she’d gone to work, worked all day
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent so we had these to eat. Even as a kid, usually lacking empathy, I felt like a dirtbag for that, and we never had an egg battle again.
Jake and I both loved baseball. I recall him having the coolest Washington Senators jacket. His family had originally been from Washington DC.
We’d trade baseball cards. We’d talk of the Senators, Walter Johnson, famous baseball players from the past like Shoeless Joe, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. There was something cooler about the old baseball players than the current ones, their big baggy pants, and the grainy black and white photos of them, the tall tales of their exploits.
Jake, like me, was into girls at a young age. He was a fellow lifelong admirer of the females, and it was with him that I saw my first Playboy magazine. It’d been stashed by his dad somewhere. In a locked bathroom, we perused the pages, as if archeologists discovering an oracle, and jaws agape, we gasped and wondered, in awe at the mature female form.
They were so shapely, the models, so curvaceous. They looked like girls but were so different than the girls at my school whose bald little snatches I gaped at and clumsily, cautiously touched.
I didn’t know exactly what it was or why, but I liked them, I liked their nudity, their geometry.
I began masturbating young, not long after that, touching myself, fucking my pillow and poking holes in stuffed animals and pieces of fruit, but I didn’t really have orgasms until later. Still, I enjoyed the act of fucking something, even a pillow, and loved fantasizing of engaging in sexual activities with naked women, and those pictures I saw at Jake’s house, those images, those virgin glances at naked, developed female bodies remain etched into my memory forever.
Another friend I remember was Tim. He was a Black kid, from a less financially fortunate family.
Not that I was rich, but my mother being a shrink, she did okay, and my father, while around, did well too, well enough to provide a comfortable middle-class life.
Whereas I’m guessing Tim came from a lower economic stratum.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I know this because he was flabbergasted when he came over, saw my basement, which had many toys in it. He’d obviously never seen so many toys, likely because his parents didn’t make enough money to provide them, or maybe didn’t want to.
I don’t know.
We had a couple sleepovers at my house. I remember him vomiting one morning, on the stairs to the second floor. Nothing precipitated it. He simply looked at me with this confused glaze, slapped his hands to his stomach, hunched forward and upchucked.
I didn’t see him for a while, other than at school, until one night, him and his mother came by my house.
His mother, her face rigid, eyes narrowed, angrily declared, “Tim has something to tell you,” and she yanked him by his arm, thrust him from behind her, to face me.
A guilty looking Tim struggled to maintain eye contact and handed me a toy, a GI Joe figure, and whimpered, voice shaky, “I’m sorry I stole your toy.”
I received it, wasn’t sure how to respond. They left. I never hung out with him again.
Once at school, afterwards, he joked about it, saying how “remember the time I stole your toy,” and we laughed about it, but his laugh was forced. It’d be ironic if he grew up to become a professional thief, bank robber, banker, or politician. But whatever became of him, I wish him well.
Another friend of mine was an older guy, who lived with his parents, I’m guessing he was in his 20s or so. A lean, tall, wiry Black man named Anthony. I remember his family lived around the corner from us. I think they were Haitian.
They had a gray dog, a runty, scruffy fleabag sack of shit called Ralph, which looked almost like an overgrown rat. And that dog would be out in their backyard, day and night, snapping, growling and barking incessantly. I recall really hating the animal, as it was so loud and annoying and had an ugly, mangy, and menacing appearance. Not to mention it stunk like shit, aside from always barking. Why is that the smallest dogs always seem to bark the loudest and most frequently?
Anthony, me, other kids, young guys would play basketball and baseball in the park nearby. When the Jehovah’s Witness lady who’d been babysitting me left, or
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I think got fired for getting too pushy and freaky with the Jesus, my parents asked Anthony to look after me when they were off at work and I wasn’t in school.
Reflecting on it, I’m not sure why he was hanging with kids like 7, 8-years-old. It was unusual, I guess, but he wasn’t a pedo, or anything like that, and he never touched me.
I do recall him having a strange proclivity, though. He’d rent “adult” movies from the video store (he wouldn’t let me see the tape covers, but I’d see him sneak off into the “little room” in the back of the video store labelled 18+) and after I went to bed, he’d sit downstairs, in the living room, and watch the videos, I’m sure whacking off.
Since he lived with his parents, he probably couldn’t jerk off freely at home, so it was a nice break for him, to sit in our living room, with his cock out, spanking his monkey to the porn. Back in those days, we didn’t have smartphones and porn wasn’t as easily available. Times were harder for wankers like him.
Not that I’m complaining, and I never told my parents about it. Not that I care. I’m sure he cleaned up, because I never saw cum or Vaseline on the couch or floor.
I’m lucky, too, he was a wanker and not a pedo. He was a nice fellow, really, a gentle giant. I’m not sure what became of him, but he abruptly stopped babysitting me. Maybe it was because I got old enough to be home alone, or maybe my parents returned from work to find him on our living room couch, hard cock in hand, doing the five-knuckle shuffle…
There was another kid who lived nearby, named Jonas.
He lived in a basement apartment with his mother, an attractive blond, a single mother.
Though attractive at first glance, there was something off-putting about her. She had a dark aura, a presence to her that was unnerving, and a foreign accent I couldn’t place, but it reminded me of Dracula, like a female Dracula. Her skin was pale as bone, too. Maybe she did hail from Transylvania. I don’t know. But I’d never seen anyone that pale in Miami. It was unnatural. The lady scared me more and more every time I saw her. I started to imagine her as one of the flesh-eating zombies.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent She’d smoke cigarettes and drink vodka in the shadowy corner of their basement apartment, sitting there looking like something weird from a French film, and she and Jonas would share a bottle of water, drinking straight from the bottle, which, even then, I found gross.
She offered me a sip from the bottle, and I refused, which made her angry. She asked if I thought they had germs. I thought she probably did but was too polite to admit this and kept silent. She looked creepy, that lady, like a ghoul. There really was something off about her, the way she’d sit in the dark corner of their basement apartment, with her legs crossed, head tilted. The way she’d smoke and peer over at us, smoke purling from her nostrils. It was fucking demonic.
I’d liked Jonas, though. We’d bonded over WWF wrestling. Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, Andre the Giant. We, being kids, thought it was real, and loved it.
We’d imitate their moves, throw stuff, throw each other. It’s amazing no one got killed or maimed.
But our friendship ended after the incident with the bottle. I think Jonas’s mom took a serious dislike to me after that, was genuinely offended.
Later, Jonas and a few other kids ganged up on me after school, pelted me with fruit, chased me through the streets, but I was fast enough to outrun them.
I was bruised and bloodied but never told on them. Actually, it was the last time I saw him. I think him and his crazy mom moved somewhere else. Maybe his mom went to jail. I can see her being a criminal of some sort, a bank robber or drug dealer, or a check forger. Maybe it wasn’t even his mom. Maybe she was a sick lady who’d kidnapped him and was molesting him. I could see that. She seemed evil. She just had a look of duplicity.
Jonas wasn’t the best friend I could have had, but another guy, Peter, and his brother, Dave, were good people. We’d hang out, ride bikes, watch wrestling, play Nintendo, “Legend of Zelda,” “Mario Brothers.” They were solid people. They came out to my father’s funeral.
I felt bad that I wasn’t the best of friends to them. I was quite embarrassed to have eaten a handful of candy out of a Christmas decoration stuffed with chocolates, which were supposed to be eaten over the 12 days of Christmas.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent They were to be eaten one day at a time, but, passing by, and being Jewish, not celebrating Christmas as more than an American holiday, I didn’t know they were to be rationed, eaten slowly, and I ripped open the decoration and ate a few days’
worth of the chocolate treats.
They were disappointed because it was a special thing they did as a family. It was one of the first times I can remember being disappointed with myself.
There was another time, too, with them, that I was incorrigible. We were on a long road trip, and I was sitting in the back of their station wagon. Nature was speaking to me, and I desperately had to piss.
I don’t know why I didn’t speak up, but for some reason, I let go, and pissed in the back, angling my dick, shooting the stream down into the trunk.
Amazingly, no one noticed, then and there, but I remember later, after I pissed in it, Peter complaining of how his parents’ car stunk, that it smelled like “pickles.”
I didn’t admit it at that time and am finally confessing it to the world.
I pissed in that car.
It wouldn’t be my first act of malfeasance, malevolence.