see me, but as soon as Daddy got back home from his janitor’s job at a nearby office building, I met him at the front door, yelling at the top of my lungs, “Daddy, Mama was sitting on a man’s face!” Daddy didn’t respond, so I assumed he didn’t hear me. But Mama heard me all the way from the kitchen. She flew into the living room and batted my head with a spatula. For the next two days, she reminded me about the long labor she’d survived on account of me and how ugly she thought I was when I was born.
Just before I turned nine, Daddy got a job driving for some shady-looking white man who owned a restaurant with a bar that a lot of rich people went to. I thought that he was shady because every time I saw him, he had on dark glasses, even at night, and a black hat and dark clothes, which made him look more like a bandit than a businessman. Mr. Bloom lived in a big beige mansion in the Berkeley Hills. Up until then, the only work that Daddy and Mama had ever done in the States was farm or janitorial work.
Right after Daddy started driving for the shady businessman, he talked him into hiring Mama as a nanny for his three children. Like gypsies, we moved from one miserable old building after another. Moving around so much was the only way we could eventually get rid of all our “roommates.” Each time we relocated to another apartment, it was always one that was smaller than the one before, so Daddy had a good excuse not to drag all of his rootless countrymen along with us. By the time we found a one-room studio apartment that was so small, it looked and felt like a doll-house, it was just Mama, Daddy, and me.
With the long hours that my parents worked, I pretty much had to raise myself. During that time, I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. The days that my parents would leave the house before I got up and would come home after I’d gone to bed, I felt like an orphan. I roamed the streets like a stray dog. I started smoking when I was ten and drinking a year later. When I couldn’t steal any of Daddy’s cigars and when there was no alcohol in the house, I stole what I wanted from convenience stores. Sometimes I stole from the parents of some of the unsupervised kids I ran amok with. Nobody ever told me not to do it or that it was wrong. So I kept doing it.
About a year later, the restaurant owner bought up a bunch of old apartment buildings throughout the Bay Area. He made Daddy the manager and maintenance man of one in Berkeley. The neighborhood was fairly rough, but Daddy didn’t have to pay rent as long as he managed the building. My folks didn’t like to spend money, so I knew that as long as we could live rent free, we would be in this place. And I was glad.
It didn’t take long for me to make some new friends. Across the street from us lived a Mexican family with nine kids. The only girl, Maria Cortez, was my age. We hit it off right away and before I knew it I was hanging out with Maria and some of her friends. Like me, they were not really bad kids. But I was glad to see that they were not as confused and impulsive as I was. Our conversations almost always included sex. I was the only virgin in the crowd so I tried to absorb as much information as I could. I couldn’t wait to have my first sexual experience so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
Maria had to look after her younger siblings so she didn’t have too much free time on her hands. “Christine, be glad you are an only child. You can do whatever you want and not have to worry about changing diapers, cleaning toilets, helping cook dinner, doing laundry and all the rest of the bullshit I have to do,” Maria told me. “You can have all your time to yourself. You a lucky girl.” Compared to Maria I guess I was. I had time to spare.
After school I would go home and watch television and eat whatever I wanted to eat. It was a good thing I enjoyed healthy things, like fruits and vegetables, as much as I did candy and soda pop. I was as healthy as I was supposed to be. But there were other things around me that were not healthy. The lack of guidance was one. Because there was nobody around too much to tell me what to do and what not to do, I did whatever I wanted, and I didn’t have to worry about any consequences.
I was so hungry for attention that I put myself in a situation that cost me my virginity on my thirteenth birthday. Nobody raped me or took advantage of me like with so many of the other girls in my neighborhood. I initiated my first sexual encounter myself.
He was one of the many boys in our neighborhood that a lot of the parents had warned their daughters to stay away from. But that only made him more appealing. My parents had not warned me to avoid this boy or any other boy, so their interference was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. Almost every time I saw him, some girl was up in his face, trying to get his attention.
Not only was this boy cute, but he was popular. By the time he caught my roving eyes, he’d already been with just about every black, Asian, Latino, and white girl I knew. He was already in high school, and even though I’d seen him looking at me long and hard, he had not approached me yet. But in the Bay Area, life was too short for some people. I didn’t know how much time I had left, so it made sense for me to speed things up. I trotted over to his house the Friday after Thanksgiving to return a roasting pan that Mama had borrowed to cook our turkey in and to bring the twenty dollars that his mama, Miss Louise, was borrowing from Daddy. But my real purpose for going to his house was to claim what I thought should have been mine a long time ago.
As soon as I realized that the boy was home alone, I backed him from behind into a corner in his mama’s kitchen, wrapped my arms around his waist, and kissed him on the back of his neck. I still had the twenty-dollar bill clutched in my hand. Even though the house that he and his mama lived alone in was large, the kitchen was small. There was barely enough room in it to accommodate the appliances and the large table in the middle of the floor. But it was neat, and the floor looked like it had just been waxed.
Not only did Miss Louise have a handsome son, but she was a clean woman. She kept such a clean house, you could eat off the floors. But she was also a materialistic woman with extravagant tastes. A lot of people didn’t like her, because she borrowed money from everybody she knew to support her expensive habits. She even borrowed from me the pocket change that I made running errands for old people.
“Girl, what’s gotten in you?” he laughed, pushing me away. He grabbed my wrists and turned around to face me. He had eyes like a cat. They were gray and shiny and so mysterious that when I looked into them, it seemed like I was looking into his soul. I felt something that I had never in my life felt before, and it was something I would never forget or stop searching for: passion. I would have settled for some kind of affection from just about anybody, but I only wanted to experience passion for the first time with this particular boy. I was getting signals from places on my body that I had never paid any attention to before. My crotch alone felt like it was on fire, so I wanted to get this over with as soon possible so I could cool off and move on to something else. In addition to having sex, there were a lot of other things that I wanted to do while I was still young enough to do them.
I started rubbing his dick with both of my hands as hard as I could.
CHAPTER 10
“Talk to me, Christine. I asked you what done got in you, girl.”
“It could be you, in me, if you want it to be,” I said, trying to imitate a look I’d just seen on HBO the night before, on Kathleen Turner’s face in Body Heat.
“What are you up to? Could be me what?” he asked, with a dumb look on his face. My hands were still on his dick, and it was as hard as a rock.
It disappointed me to see that this boy was not as smart as I thought he was. Couldn’t he tell what I was up to? Did I have to come straight out and tell him I wanted him to fuck me? Or just go ahead and get naked and start the job myself! I didn’t think that I could make myself more obvious. “It could be you in me,” I offered, pushing myself up against him and grinding. He was several inches taller than me, so I was grinding against his thigh. “I’ve been asking around about you, and I hear that you are going to be an actor,” I added. I wanted him to know that he was already on my agenda. “Going to be in the movies and on television and stuff. Just like John Travolta.” I spoke in a firm and serious tone of voice. I wanted him to know off the bat that I was not just trying to be funny. “But you are way cuter than John Travolta, so you’ll be more rich and famous than he is.”
That got his attention