The Joy of Saying "Cock"

When I was a kid, the Nazarene Church prohibited us from using "the Lord's name in vain."  To the extreme.

No goddam, of course, or the word damn, except in the phrase God will damn you.  Even darn was too much.

Gosh, gee, and golly, all shortened forms of "God" and "Jesus," were forbidden.

The British term Lord was shockingly blasphemous.  I got in big trouble with my counselor at Nazarene camp for carrying around a copy of Tarzan, the Lord of the Apes:

"You're practicing idolatry!  You're worshipping a false god!  There's only one Lord!

I never tried zounds, which means "God's wounds."

God also hated words that were obscene or even risque.

The word sex could be used only as a noun: Adam was of the male sex.  Never to refer to coitus.  Instead, the preachers and Sunday school teachers always used the phrase: going to bed: "God will send you to hell for going to bed before you're married."

I can only imagine the younger kids in the congregation misinterpreting that statement and being terrified of bedtime.

You must go to the bathroom, never pee or piss.  So you might say, "I was in the bathroom, going to the bathroom."

We had a lot of fun with the King James Bible's prohibition against coveting "thy neighbor's ass," but referencing the animal was ok.  To reference a section of the anatomy, you had to say backside.  Never butt or ass.

You insulted someone by calling them sinner, heathen, or Catholic, never asshole.

You could imply that someone's parents were unmarried, but you had to use the term illegitimate, not bastard.  Although we sort of cheated with dastard.

For the frontside, you had to use the word shame, or if absolutely necessary, the technical term penis.  Never, ever cock, not even in reference to the rooster.

Once in high school Verne and I tried to joke about the rooster.
Verne:  "I have a cock at home."
Boomer: "Can I see your cock?"
Verne:  "Sure.  You can even play with my cock."

Claiming that we meant "rooster" didn't help.  We were both grounded for a week.

During my senior year in high school, tired of the restrictions and bigotry, I  started breaking away from the Church.

The guilt was heavily internalized, so it had to be gradual, skipping the Wednesday evening service and a Sunday evening service here and there, reducing the amount of money I gave during the four weekly collections, and systematically breaking the rules.  From the least to most horrifying:

1. Reading the Sunday newspaper.

2. Buying on Sunday.
3. Listening to rock music.
4. Wearing short pants in public.
5. Going bowling in an alley that served alcohol.
6. Dancing
7. Going to a movie

By the time I got to my freshman year in college, there were only a few rules left to break:

  

Drinking alcohol.  Too advanced for me.

Going to bed with a girl before marriage.  No way!

Using the Lord's name in vain.

If I said bad words, I could finally be free of the Nazarene guilt!  So I started throwing them into casual conversations with my friends, Mary and Bruce.

Gee, it's hot today.  
Golly, I don't think I can finish this pizza all by myself.

Not even an eyebrow raise.

Our goddam paper is due tomorrow!

 Only a few eyebrow raises.

Excuse me -- I have to pee.

Nope.

This class is a real pain in the ass.

 That got an eyebrow raise.

That asshole cut in front of me!

A brief stare, but no comment.

Ok, time for the ultimate of bad words, the word that horrified men and God alike.

I walked up to Bruce, and tried to say Men have c...

Nothing came out.

Again.  I looked at Bruce, he looked at me.  I said I have a big c....

"What?"

God was looking down at me.  All of the Nazarenes were watching.  It was time to take a stand.

Bruce was staring at me as if I was crazy.

In a loud, clear voice, almost a yell, I said I like to look at cocks!

He laughed.  "Me, too.  And ducks and geese and cows and horses, down on the farm.  Ok, now I have one: want to hear a dirty joke?  The boy fell in the mud!"  

Bruce didn't get it, but by saying cock in public, I was free of Nazarene guilt.  I could go through life without expecting God to strike me dead every moment.

And I had come out.

My Boyfriend Bill Grows Up

Remember my first boyfriend, Bill, from Denkmann Elementary School?  We were inseparable for three years, walking to and from school, watching Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat, reading comic books, inviting cute boys over for sleepovers.

We had our own gang -- me, Bill, Joel, and Greg -- who liked looking at men with muscles.

I have lots of good stories about Bill:

The naked Indian god at the pow wow.

The time we went to A Little Bit O'Heaven for my birthday trip, expecting statues of naked Greek gods?

The time we got Dad upset by claiming to be a Mama and a Papa.

We stayed friends in junior high, but we drifted apart into other interests and social circles.

The last time I was at his house was for a Halloween party in tenth grade, probably October 31st, 1975.  I spent most of the evening talking to his big brother Mike, who used to call me "Bud" and drive us places.

The last time I saw Bill was during 12th grade, probably March or April 1978, when we visited David Angel in the mental hospital.  He thought we were a couple.  We laughed it off as ridiculous.



The years passed: Augustana College, Indiana University,  Texas, West Hollywood, San Francisco.
I didn't hear anything from or about Bill, though I often spoke of him as my first boyfriend.

The years passed: New York, Florida, Ohio, Upstate New York.  I started a blog about my childhood memories, and recorded all of my Bill stories.

I tried to look him up, but none of the high school or college friends that I was still in contact with remembered him, and he had a common name, impossible to google.

Before I knew it, I was 54 years old.  Nearly 40 years had passed since the day Bill and I visited David Angel.

Then out of nowhere I got a friend request from him on Facebook.

Eagerly I scoped out his Facebook profile.

Where was he living?  Reno, Nevada
What was his job?  Restaurant manager.

Most importantly, was he gay?  Were my memories real, or a misinterpretation of a straight boy's friendship?

Status: single.
Favorite TV shows: Breaking Bad, Lost, CSI.  
Favorite movies: Back to the Future, Men in Black, Star Wars
Favorite music: R.E.M., The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jefferson Airplane

Didn't tell me anything.  But then, my facebook profile is also vague.

Time for our first chat in 40 years.

We exchanged life histories in that stilted, obituary style that you use when reconnecting with someone after many years.  He studied culinary arts at Black Hawk College, then worked as a chef at Jumer's Castle Lodge, across the river in Bettendorf.  During the 1990s, he opened a restaurant near the resort of Wisconsin Dells.  It went bankrupt after the stock market downturn of 2004, and he moved to Reno, Nevada, where he now manages all of the restaurants in one of the casinos.

"But I've dabbled in other businesses, too," he continued.  "In 1999 I became co-owner of a strip club in Moline, out by the airport."

My heart sank.  A strip club?  Straight!

"I insisted that we were equal opportunity," Bill said.  "We had male strippers on Tuesday nights."

"I've been there!" I exclaimed.  "Christmastime 1999 or 2000.  On male stripper night.  I saw my old Sunday school teacher's sons, Mickey and Dom!"

If Bill noticed that I had just outed myself, he didn't let on.  "Sure, I remember them.  College boy act.  Very good, very professional, and they had the goods.  I always auditioned the strippers personally, to make sure they were up to speed."

"Men and women both?"

"Of course!  I have a pretty good eye for beauty, as you saw with Mickey and Dom."

Bisexual?  Or straight and nonchalant about gay people?

"What about romances?" I asked.  "Any long-term relationships?"

"I was married for 15 years.  We had an open relationship, though. We both saw other people.  Since then I've been single."

Bisexual?  Or straight?

"But what about you?" Bill asked.  "Any boyfriends, lovers, husbands?  After Dan at Washington Junior High, I mean."

Boyfriends, lovers, husbands -- he knew about me!  And he interpreted my friendship with Dan as a romance.  

I told him about Fred the Ministerial Student in college, Raul and my celebrity boyfriend in West Hollywood, 10 years with Lane, 5 years with Troy. 7 years with Yuri (we were friends, but closer than many lovers).

"You've been busy!" Bill exclaimed.  "Me too.  I'm single but not lonely.  I can still attract the hotties -- look."

He sent me a nude photo.  

It was eerie looking at Bill's face again after 40 years.  He was a little chunky, with a muscular, slightly hairy chest and big biceps.  

In all of our sleepovers, I never saw Bill nude.  He was a little small beneath the belt, uncut.  

"Hot!" I told him.

"Thanks.  It gets me a lot of action."

Ok, still noncommittal.  Time to ask.

"Action with men or women?"

Bill didn't hesitate.  "Oh, men, of course.  Women are nice and all -- I wouldn't kick Scarlett Johansson out of bed -- but at the end of the day you really want two muscular arms around you and a baseball bat pressing against your leg.  We knew that back in third grade, didn't we?"

"All but the baseball bat part.  I didn't figure that out until after high school."

"Well, I was precocious.  I started getting busy in 10th grade.  Remember Aaron, the Rabbi's son?  And Tyrone, on the football team?  And what about that cutie who played the violin...what was his name?"

"Todd."  Had he gone to bed with everyone I had a crush on?

We should have stayed friends.  It would have made high school a lot more fun.

Bill died recently.  One of our last chats on Facebook was his memory of the day we became a Mama and a Papa at the A&W Restaurant.

Island in the Sky: My First Boyfriend

Rock Island, February 1969

Just after Christmas in 1968, when I was in the third grade, a boy named Bill, short and deeply tanned with black eyes and small hard fists, suddenly started to chase me across the schoolyard to my house every afternoon, threatening to pound me for some offense. But I proved too swift, and my house  too close by, to make pounding feasible, so Bill took to walking next to me instead, pointing out the other boys he had pounded or planned to pound.

This isn't him, of course.  This model is well over 18.  But it will give you an idea of his arms, shoulders, and smile.


The "pounding" attempts went on for a month or two.  One day in February, when we reached the chain-link fence, Bill announced, “I’m gonna go to Dewey’s and get an ice cream cone.” Dewey’s was a store in a white building on 20th Avenue, facing Denkmann to attract rich South Side kids as they walked home with allowance money bulging in their pockets.  It sold mostly kids’ treats: ice cream, candy bars, Hostess Twinkies, little bags of Lays Potato Chips.

“It’s too cold for ice cream,” I said.  "Anyway, a Mean Boy named Dick hangs out there."

“Ok.” Bill turned abruptly and walked away, his boots crunching loudly on the ice-encrusted snow. But after a few steps, he turned back. “They have other stuff, too,” he said in a low dismal voice.  "Uh. . .you know, if you want, you can come with. I got money.”

Finally I understood, and I almost laughed. Bill was asking me for a date! For all his tough-guy posturing, he was shy and nervous when it came to talking to boys. Maybe this was why he became a bully – they rarely dated anyone. They substituted pounding for hugs, pointed out faults to avoid being rejected.

“That sounds cool,” I said. Bill had muscles, and he was forceful, always in charge, so we could play adventure games and Bill could rescue me and I could exclaim “My hero!” And it would be fun to date a bully; imagine the stares and double-takes when we played together at recess!

After buying a Milky Way for me and Hostess Snowballs for himself, Bill suggested that we eat at his house instead of staying at Dewey’s, where the fat man behind the counter always glared at kids and muttered about long-haired hippie freaks. Besides, Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat would be on in a few minutes.

Bill was rich.  He lived in a gigantic house with lots of levels and an arbor out back.  He and his brother and sister all had their own rooms. There was a separate dining room, and a family room with oak panels and chairs shaped like barrels and a piano in the corner.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in the family room, watching Bugs Bunny and The Three Stooges on Cartoon Showboat and drinking Squirt from thick, heavy glasses, the first I had ever seen that were actually made of glass, not plastic.

Bill’s family kept rushing in, all bubbly and excited. His Mom, a squat brown smiling woman, invited me to stay for dinner. His Dad asked what I was studying in school and lent me a book on the ancient Aztecs. His older brother, a high schooler named Mike, mussed my hair and called me “Bud” and offered to drive us places.

Later I found out why everyone was so excited – Bill had never liked a boy before! This was the first time he had ever invited a boy over as an actual date!

This photo is not really of him; I only have a few photos of me and Bill together, and most of them make us look like little kids (that's really his house, though).

After that Bill invited me over to his house almost every day after school, and on weekends he always thought of something fun to do: miniature golf, hiking at Black Hawk Park, a “young people’s” concert at Augustana College, a trip to the Putnam Museum in Davenport to see Egyptian mummies and a huge Aztec calendar stone.

Sometimes Bill asked me to sleep over, and if it wasn’t a school night we got to stay up as late as we wanted, even later than his big brother. We lay propped on thick starchy pillows on Bill’s bed, eating Lay’s Potato Chips and listening to “Chicken Man” on the radio and reading comic books. I had only a few comic books of my own, donated by uncles or traded with cousins, but Bill had hundreds, of every type imaginable: Superman, Tarzan, Archie, Donald Duck, Little Lulu, Casper.

One of the Casper comics was so beautiful that I begged Bill to let me keep it. The cover showed the ghost-boy scaring a superhero. In the story inside, Casper flew an island in the sky called The Elysian Fields. There he met the gods of Greek mythology – Zeus, Apollo, Ganymede, Hyacinth – all with beautifully sculpted muscles. They lived together, eating grapes, throwing a discus, playing horseshoes on a unicorn horn, their idyll threatened only by the mischief of a green-faced trickster god.

They lived together – that was the most important part, the reason I asked for that comic book out of all of Bill’s hundreds. I had never heard the word "gay" before, but I knew that this was proof positive that grown-up men got married and lived together, and maybe when we were grown-ups, Bill and I would get married and live together  too.

The comic book reappears, when Darry and I search for it during my senior year in high school, and when I write a story about it during my freshman year in college