wickedflea | true confessions of childhood stupidity

In the sixth grade or so I had a friend who referred to pubic hair as "venereal hair." Hell, I guess he didn't know any better. His parents weren't exactly the type to explain that kind of stuff.

Way back in junior high, my homies and I tried smoking peanut skins for a buzz. Didn't work worth a damn. Years later we tried eating marigold seeds because we'd heard it would give you an LSD-like trip. Didn't work worth a damn.

The first porno movie I ever saw was this '70s-ass flick with music that sounded just like the tune from "The Little Rascals." Oh, wait, that's not true. The first porno movie I ever saw was a softcore edit of Sex World on closed circuit in the hotel room on a ninth-grade school trip. I still have an audio tape of the psychedelic theme song ("Sex World, go on a spree, Sex World, do it with meeeeeeeee!") that we made with Fool's boom box. And the next morning, Stymie, our teacher, triple-charged us for it. It was graft, pure and simple. We had to pay the woman; we didn't want to risk her telling our parents. And the next day we were wandering around all giddy from no sleep the night before, and we kept forgetting the name of the movie we'd seen--and when we did remember, we couldn't pronounce it. "What was the name of that movie again? Sex Earth? No. . . . Oh yeah, Sex Wol-red! Sex Wol-red, go on a spree . . ."

In the fifth grade I heard talk of kids asking one another to "go together." I always wondered, "Go where?"

Evan Fager and I used to astound our first-grade classmates by telling them that we weren't normal because we didn't watch cartoons. Oh, no no no--we were much too cool for that. We were into KISS. (But really, what's more cartoonish than KISS?) Twelve years later, my classmates were having normal freshman years while I was skipping class to get baked and watch Warner Bros. cartoons. Funny how these things work.