The First 1000 Words of My Book About My Childhood

People ask me if I intend to write any more books; the answer is, well yeah, but maybe not about English Teacher X. My porn writing is much more profitable; remember I'm helping pay for my dad's assisted living now.

However, my porn writing has sort of morphed into "erotic thrillers" and I might be sharing some of those with you readers soon. (I have an idea for one about an English teacher who starts fucking the wife of a Russian billionaire, with predictably dangerous results.)

I did intend to write another memoir, about my childhood / teen years, and I wrote about 10,000 words of it. Maybe I'll get back to it ... but  maybe I won't.

Anyway, here are the first 1000 or so words of it.

ZERO TO TWENTY-FIVE: CHAPTER ONE

My first memory is falling in dog shit outside the family house.

I must have been 3 or 4. It was in the suburbs of a large Midwestern city. Out on our lawn, which I remember as being bright green under a bright blue sky, somebody, I believe a neighbor about my same age, pushed me and I fell into dog shit.

This disgusted me so much that I vomited.

My second memory is of walking through a long drainage tunnel under a street near that house. I couldn’t have been older than 5. I don’t suppose it could have been longer than, say, a hundred feet, maybe shorter, but as a 4 or 5 year old child it seemed like an immensely adventurous thing to do. My brother – a year and half younger than I am – and I hatched and completed the idea in secret. I remember giggling as we stomped through the slurping mud in the darkness and how we cheered when the light appeared on the other end of the tunnel.

Kids got less supervision in those days.

I also have a memory of going to pre-school and a kid scribbling all over a picture I was drawing, and wondering why people were so fucking annoying.

I remember almost hanging myself in the playground across the street from the house we lived in. I was playing with some ropes – I liked playing with ropes, probably inspired by Spider Man – and I got it wrapped around my neck and a pole on a jungle gym and my feet slipped for a moment, leaving me strangling in mid-air.

I found my foothold and got out of that one okay, though.

I don’t remember it but I’m told that I disliked pre-school so much that at age 4 I went outside and tied my mother’s car – a Ford Pinto – up with a rope, wrapping it through the door handles and wheels with complex knots.

I wouldn’t say I was a difficult child so much as I was just an odd child.

We moved to a small-town in the south when I was five.

I started kindergarten, and I remember a formative event. I wrote and drew my own little comic book, and I was eager to debut it at show-and-tell. But it was Easter, and there was an Easter egg hunt. It was only supposed to end after everybody had found two of the plastic eggs, which I suppose had plastic treats in them of some sort. I found mine and put them in my box and started asking the teacher when we could do show-and-tell.

But there was this stupid kid, and he couldn’t find his second egg. Apparently the teacher had lost track of it, also, because she couldn’t locate it either. The kid was in hysterical tears, of course.

Idiot! I thought. Who cares about some stupid egg? We’ve got show-and-tell coming, where we can look at my comic book! Where I can express my brilliance!

I kept bugging the teacher about it. Finally she told me to stop bothering her and sit down, that we had to find the lost egg.

Crushed, I put my comic book in my box and sat quietly while the rest of the class ran around like morons looking for the stupid plastic egg.

Finally it must have been sorted. An egg was found and given to the stupid kid.

Then we had show-and-tell, and the teacher asked me if I wanted to show my comic book.

I just shook my head, blinking back tears.