Now, I left in ’42 and I didn’t see Art again until ’46.
* See Cast of Characters on page x, for identification of speakers.
| 2 | Patti1930–1944 |
I HAD my first sexual experience I can remember when I was four or five. I was still living with my parents in Watts. They had some friends who lived nearby, Mary and Mike, who had a daughter, Francie, about four years older than me. Francie was slender, she had black hair, she had little bangs cut across and a pretty face, and she had a look about her of real precociousness. She had a devilish look about her, and she was very warm. Hot. She had nice lips, her teeth were real white, a pink tongue, and her cunt was pink and clean. A lot of little girls smell acid or stale, but.. . I remember sometimes we’d be playing together on the front lawn—there would be other kids around—and she would sit on my face in her little bloomers; nobody acted like they noticed anything. She’s sitting there, and I’m sniffing her ass and her cunt and her bloomers, and it always smelled real sweet and nice.
My folks used to go out with Mary and Mike and get drunk and leave me with Francie. They’d make a bed on the floor, and we’d go to bed, and she’d want me to kiss her, to kiss her cunt. She’d make me get down there and lick her, and she would do the same thing to me. It was very exciting, and I always imagined, when we got older, that we would really make love like grownups do. Years and years later, when I was divorced from my first wife I ran into Francie, and I wanted to ball her, but she was in love and she wouldn’t do it.
In addition to Richard and my father my grandmother had a stepson named Shorty, and Shorty’s wife, Thelma, later married my father, but when I was a child she was my aunt and I thought of her children as my cousins. She had two boys a little older than me, John and Bud, and a daughter Edna. One time I remember we were sleeping together, me and John and Bud at my grandmother’s house, and my grandmother happened to come in; she might have heard us giggling. She turned on the light, and we had the blankets off and were playing with each other’s little peepees. She wigged out at us. She said she was going to tell Thelma that we were evil, she was going to tell my dad, and I said, “Oh, please don’t tell dad!” She told us that our peepees were going to grow real long; they were going to grow out of our pants legs and trail after us down the street; and everybody was going to laugh at us and say, “For shame!”
Thelma and Shorty lived near my grandmother so I used to see Thelma a lot. She was sweet and pleasant, and I always wished that she had been my mother because she was very understanding and I could talk to her. Where my mother was harsh Thelma was gentle. I felt I could get her to sympathize with me and baby me.
Thelma had that typically American look, a sweet, clean look about her. She had mousey brown hair and light skin. She had a very trim body, and she was soft, like a little dove or a little doe. She wore cotton housedresses that she made herself. They folded over in front; she’d put a pin there, and you could always see part of her breast. I’d go around and watch her doing the dishes or the laundry and I’d look down her dress. And when I hugged her I would always want to put my head between her breasts.
As I said, my grandmother locked the door when she went to the bathroom and she’d leave the key in the door so you couldn’t see through the keyhole. It made the idea of going to the bathroom something that was nasty, that you had to hide. But also, because of the locked door, it seemed to me that it was exciting, really evil, and I became attracted to bathrooms to see what went on in there. I started looking out our windows at night, when the lights went on, and sometimes the woman next door would be in the bathroom. I couldn’t see anything, but the idea that she was there excited me. I started walking around at night and looking, when I was walking, if there were lights on in the windows.
At Thelma’s house the bathroom had two doors and there were keyholes but no keys in these doors, so I used to peek at Thelma or at Edna when they were in there and get an erection and play with myself. I would go in the bathroom after they left and play with myself.
By the time I was eleven I was totally preoccupied with sex. Every time a woman bent over or crossed her legs my eyes automatically saw her. It was constant. I never stopped fantasizing. I could virtually strip women naked as they walked by me. And then it wasn’t like it is now. They didn’t have bookstands or movies. You couldn’t find pictures of naked women or people balling. I couldn’t. The only thing you’d run into was an occasional little funny book. They had little, teeny comic books in those days, about four by six, about Hairsbreadth Harry, Maggie and Jiggs, Terry and the Pirates, all those old cartoon people, Blondie and Dagwood. I don’t know if they were made in Mexico, but that’s where people got them, and they were drawn just like the funny papers only sexy. People made love. The girls all wore little cotton dresses, and that’s what turned me on—the sight of a woman in a dress that was cotton and clinging. I could just imagine what was underneath. In the funny books you buy now sex is ridiculed and used as a tool to rank some political figure or party or to protest, but these were purely sex magazines, and I used to get turned on by them.
I started asking around if there were any girls who . . . I wanted to actually have contact with a woman. I did have this little girlfriend who played the accordian. She was very sweet and nice. I used to carry her accordian home from grammar school and it almost killed me because it was so heavy, but I was afraid to try anything, so I’d just rub my arm against her or something like that. Rub my hand against her ass accidentally.
Some kid I knew in school told me about a girl who would let you see her and play with her. She wasn’t pretty or sexy. She was real thin and tall. She had black hair and a bony face with a long, pointed nose, but her eyes had a look about them, oh, she had a real saucy look, and just the idea that she might let me do something! I started pursuing her and talking to her and finally one Saturday we went to the park and she let me look at her cunt and play with it and she played with me until I came. I walked her home, and she invited me to come over and see her where, she said, we could get more comfortable. But I was disappointed because even though it was exciting, and I knew I would be after it all the time, it wasn’t the way I wanted it to be.
I started working on Central Avenue in 1941. I’d play at nightclubs and some chick would come in, a black chick or a white chick, and she’d say, “Come on out with me at intermission. I’ll make you feel good.” Or, “I’ll take care of you.” I’d be at the Ritz Club, which was very informal; the musicians just sat and played at the tables and a chick would come and sit in the chair next to me and put her hand in my lap and play with me and look at me, saying “Oh, you’re sweet. I’d sure love to take you home.” She might take my hand and put it on her leg, put it up under her dress. Then we’d go out and get in a car and go to a liquor store and get a jug, and we’d stop someplace. If she lived nearby we’d go to her pad real quick, and she would suck on me until I came or I would fuck her. I enjoyed parts of it, but it wasn’t what I imagined when I looked in windows and played with myself and I thought that the real experience would always be denied me for some reason.
There was a girl I fell for at San Pedro High, she really moved me, and I thought everything might be different with her. She had long hair that hung over her shoulders, full lips, very light skin, and a nice body, rounded with not overly large, but full breasts, and she had pink nipples that got hard, which always denoted a lot of passion to me in a woman. She had a sexy smell, a clean smell, and she just loved to neck and to touch. I remember one time we were sitting in her dad’s car in the alley. She lived in an old wooden house set way back on a big lot. We were playing around and were just about to the point where I was going to fuck her when all of a sudden here comes her dad out of the house with her mother. Her mother was hysterical. Her father screamed, “We’re at war!” The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and a bunch of our battleships were sunk and thousands of Americans killed. Delano Roosevelt was going to declare war.
The war started, and they were having blackouts in San Pedro because of Fort MacArthur and the harbor. The girl left town with her family. I felt that something could have happened with her. I went back to the window peeping, and I ran into some terrible experiences