mile away, was an adventure for me. There was a drugstore at the corner of Watt and A Street whose magazine racks opened up the world to me in bizarre and bold ways — Mad Magazine was a special favorite, but I would also catch a glimpse of smudged photos of scantily clad women alongside gritty black and white articles splashed in the scandal rags of that time, or a paperback collection of science fiction short stories that featured lurid prose about sultry women undressing in the dim light of alien moons.

Sex was like a gas the permeated everything I sensed. I was beginning to go beyond mere touching myself to prolonged masturbation. I still hadn't come to full ejaculation yet, and I'm not even sure I knew what that was. My knowledge of "the act" was incomplete and full of gaps. I knew about penetration, but nothing about what it led to. These were the early 60s, and the act was more suggested in fiction and on the screen than actually depicted.

There was no sex education in public schools back then, and certainly not in the 6th grade. I suppose it fell

exclusively to parents to detail "the act" at some point, usually when their children began the transition in their teens. I wasn't even 12 yet, and so I suppose I was presumed innocent. I didn't ask my mother or Bob, preferring instead to dwell on this new sensation in the privacy of the bathroom or in my room.

As always, I was alone a great deal, especially in the summer before I enrolled in the elementary school a quarter of a mile down the road from where we lived. I took great pleasure and walking through the house naked, stroking myself and dwelling on the images of those scantily clad women suddenly stripped as naked as I was. I didn't touch any of them, not even in my imagination. To see them like that was enough. Kim Novak was especially appealing to me back then, and a fantasy favorite when I was alone.

When I wasn't alone, I drew pictures in the privacy of my room — some of them fleshy, most of them just absurd parodies such as my crude drawing of a never published front cover of Attack of the 50 Foot Parakeet, for which Pretty Boy was my patient model. At night, my curious eyes would almost pop out of my head to catch a brief glimpse of Mary Tyler Moore as she bent