Well, I liked to play flashlight under my flannel sheets. I'd pull the bedding tight around my head, tent it over my knees and then slash the yellow beam back and forth, saber-style, like my older brother Luke Skywalker. My modest collection included a traditional tubular flashlight, one of those squat deals angled like elbow macaroni, two penlights, and some of those glow-in-the-dark sticks you had to break and shake to activate. Sometimes I'd bring them all to bed with me and have a sensational light show, although more often than not I'd leave one on and it would be dead in the morning. Or I'd fall asleep on one of the big ones and it would leave a deep red and white impression on my abdomen.

In the summer it wouldn't get dark until after ten, meaning I would play flashlight well into the night. I slept on a foldout couch in the rear living room of my grandparents' house. It was me, my sister, my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather, a thin man who fought in the war, would sleep on the davenport in the front room when he got drunk, which was four to five nights a week. He would speak or shout gibberish for a good hour before passing out. I would have to be ultra quiet with my flashlight play or I'd sense him standing at the side of my bed, just waiting for the next sound. At this point I'd have to wait him out, huddled there under my sheets, or God knows what he'd do.

As for the flannel, my grandmother knew I liked the feel of it so she kept the sheets on my bed year-round. In the summer I'd forgo a blanket. Before bed I'd tell Gramma to make sure I was up by eight to watch Super Friends, and after the animated program she'd make me poached eggs on toast, soft enough to have a little play in the yolk but not so runny that they were gross. Then I'd take my Evel Knievel ramp out in the garage and jump Evel over piles of firewood, thinking how great it was that my dad was a world famous daredevil who jumped over canyons, so no wonder he was too busy to come home and see us.

This was not the summer I found my penis.


We took our baseball cards out into the woods and buried them in a box that we had wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. Initially we marked a nearby tree with a red rag but then realized this would give away our treasure, so instead we made a map. Actually Sammy Parker made the map; I was confident I could find the cards without any help.

After, we took off our shirts and ran through the woods. It was a warm sunny day so we took off our pants. Then we took off our underwear and ran around the woods like that, naked and whooping and hollering like Indians. It felt nice to have my genitals flopping in the warm breeze and my very best friend, Sammy Parker, whooping and hollering next to me.

Although our privates were fully exposed, this was not when I found my penis.




 I was a year older than Sammy Parker and Sammy's sister was a year older than me. One day I went over to Sammy's house and discovered that his mother had taken him shopping for shoes. This left only his sister in the house. She took me to her bedroom and we listened to a Queen record. We both stood while the record played and I looked at her posters of David Cassidy and Scott Baio. During the playing of "We Are the Champions" Sammy's sister came over to me. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit with daisies on it. We looked at each other for a long moment and then we hugged. Then we kissed, close-mouthed, several times. Then we separated and I peeled off her bathing suit. Her skin was very pale and there was no hair anywhere on her body. We hugged and kissed some more and I grasped Sammy's sister's buttocks. I felt no pressure to do anything else.

You might think this is when I found my penis. But no.




One day I spent too long in the downstairs bathroom and my grandfather, drunk, came into the bathroom with a wooden brush in his hand. I was sitting on the stool peeling sheets off the toilet paper roll. I pulled up my pants and then ducked under his arm and ran out the door and up the stairs and into the living room. My sister and grandmother looked at me strangely. My grandfather was shouting an angry form of gibberish and coming up the stairs waving the brush. Part of me wanted to stay and confront him, to subdue him if need be with the strength of my colleague and fellow astronaut, Steve Austin, otherwise known as the Six Million Dollar Man, but instead I ran out the front door and into the dirt alley that ran in front of my grandparents' house and then up the hill and around the block. My grandfather gave chase, though he was unable to run and it wasn't much of a chase. The only thing that came out of it was that our neighbors and even my sister and grandmother got a laugh out of the whole thing and I felt extremely embarrassed.

Obviously, nothing to do with my penis.


I found my penis a couple summers later while I was lying on my abdomen thinking of a girl in school named Koni Brown. My penis hardened from the friction and I moved my hips up and down until I squirted into my sweatpants. Later that night I took hold of my penis and did it that way, again thinking of the way Koni Brown's buttocks fit into her Jordache jeans.

I masturbated every day that summer, sometimes three or four times a day, and a few years after that I was sticking my penis into a couple of girls' vaginas (although not, unfortunately, Koni Brown's). My penis, found, became the driving force in my life and no longer did I participate in innocent hugging and kissing, or naked dancing in the woods with my best friend Sammy Parker, or sensational light shows under the flannel sheets in the rear living room of my grandparents' house. With penis in hand, no longer did I wonder what my brother Luke Skywalker was up to, or which bad guy my colleague Steve Austin was bringing down, or whether my father Evel Knievel would come home to see us. If he had, maybe he could have knocked some sense into my drunken grandfather. Or taught me about the ladies. Or shown me how to use a fucking condom.