Summer of '76. It was my first trip to the United States. I had a girlfriend named Cherry who was from the Texas Panhandle. Her family would head home every summer. Mine would usually head to London or France or somewhere while my stepfather went back to Canada. He didn't like us much, we didn't like him either, and we all tried to spend as much time apart as possible. This particular summer I joined Cherry in Oklahoma.

I had no idea what Oklahoma was about. The map I had showed it covered in teepees; I knew it was once the Indian Nation but when I arrived all I could see was a wall of blondes with feathered back hair, boys and girls both; the way to distinguish the boys from the girls was that the girls were wearing skin tight on the ass designer jeans made by whichever designer was designing for K-Mart at the moment-wide legged flared pre-faded with elaborate stitching on the pockets and braided piping and all sort of other stuff that really doesn't belong on denim-these were not the kind of jeans you would ride a horse in, even though there seemed to be a lot of horses smack dab in the middle of Oklahoma City-and the boys were wearing Daisy-Duke cutoffs, athletic socks and sneakers, and baby-tees chopped to bare their scrawny teenage stomachs. It was the total Santa Monica Boulevard Hollywood gay male hustler look, only I didn't know about Santa Monica Boulevard or gay male hustlers, thought Hollywood was about the movies, didn't understand that these tight little cut-off baby tees were a fashion statement, and figured that the boys in Oklahoma all came from poor families and were wearing tattered hand-me-downs they'd long outgrown. It wasn't the glamorous platform shoes London androgeny I was used to seeing. I didn't know about teenage boys dressed like slutty suburban schoolgirls. I thought they were just poor and felt bad that their parents couldn't afford to buy them new clothes.

We stayed with Cherry's mother Erlene's parents, stern Okie Baptists who scowled and prayed and were furious because the United States was thinking about switching to the metric system, some sort of European commie outrage they wanted no part of, and they blamed Jimmy Carter. How could a true Christian embrace such a heathen anti-American system of weights and measures?

Their house was on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, which didn't seem like much of a city to me. The outskirts were located very close to the center of town and they really were outskirts; a wooden fence was all that separated their barren Christian backyard from the middle of nowhere, with nothing but prairie and a few roaming cows as far as the eye could see.

Cherry needed a summer-long replenishing fix of American culture and besides there wasn't very much to do in OK City so all we did from the moment we got up was watch TV. She would sprawl out on a Naugahyde Lay-Z-Boy recliner and watch game shows all morning, desperate to guess the price of a washer and dryer on the Price is Right, leaving the den only three times, the first to fix lunch-Oscar Meyer bologna sandwiches with French's mustard on Wonderbread. We'd leave the den again briefly around 5pm to grab some frozen dinners which we'd eat in front of the TV and then make a final trek out just after sundown, actually leaving the house for a quick trip across the street.

There was an old couple who lived across the street in a house they'd haphazardly decorated to resemble a trailer home; they had storm windows that wouldn't open, 20 years of chainsmoking had left everything covered with a thick yellow film, the air was incredibly stale, almost all of it having been repeatedly processed through their creaking bodies and the window unit ac. Cherry liked to smoke and we both liked to fuck, we were very enthusiastic about our nascent sex lives, but there was no smoking or fucking allowed in her Christian grandparents' den, and so we volunteered to look after the neighbor's house while they vacationed at an RV Park.

Shortly after dark we'd make our final trip out of the den to check on their house. There was a lawn chair lounger in the entry hall. We'd flick some lights on and off so that from across the street it looked like we were checking on stuff, and then we'd drop our pants, Cherry would lay on her back on the lounger, and I'd fuck her while she furiously puffed on her cigarette, me trying to hurry so we'd both finish at the same time. Our Marlboro long interlude would end, we'd pull our pants back up flick some more lights on and off and then head back to the den and watch TV until Cherry passed out during the late movie on the Naugahyde Lay-Z-Boy and I'd go to bed in the guest room.

It was the summer that Frampton Came Alive, the first non K-Tel album advertised exclusively on TV; I will forever associate Peter Frampton with the Price is Right, blond Okie boys in daisy-dukes and cut-off baby tees with feathered back hair, Oscar Meyer bologna sandwiches on Wonderbread, and fucking Cherry as fast as I could at the old folk's home, designer jeans from K-Mart at her ankles while she lay on her back beneath me, her only movement being her arm as she puffed furiously on her Marlboro. There were two other songs that summer, we'd hear 'em waiting in the Cadillac while her parents were at the bank or some other place that wasn't K-Mart and thus held no interest for us: Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" and some Gino Vanelli tune. They both used a lot of synthesizers, and along with Peter Frampton's vocoder thing I guess this was the dawn of electronic music. Punk rock couldn't come soon enough.

Cherry's dad Lloyd managed a drilling mud company, collected paintings of clowns and came from a town called Canadian Texas in the Texas Panhandle, a tiny town with a weekly newspaper on the front page of which was printed the high school lunch menu. Canadian Texas had a celebrity, the guy who held the Guinness Book of World Records record for the longest distance ever crawled, but there wasn't much in Canadian, Texas, not even a suitable place for crawling, and so he had to go to Amarillo to do it.

Cherry had posh ambitions. She would never drink beer from a can or bottle. She'd open a new one, delicately pour all but the bottom inch into a glass, and guzzle it down like a lady. I'd ask her why she left the bottom inch. She'd toss back her feathered blond hair and scoff "Haven't you heard? It's 90% spit." She figured they packed the spit right in there at the bottling plant.

We headed off to Arkansas for a family wedding. Due to her posh ambitions, Cherry insisted in that mercilessly shrill voice she would use when she wanted something that her parents take the Cadillac and not the Mercedes, since she didn't want anyone to see her riding in a "ferrin' death trap." Grandpa Ernie and the Missus came up from Canadian to join us. Grandpa Ernie was the scourge of Canadian. He had a long running feud with the neighbors who were unhappy with him on account of the unofficial used car dealership he ran in his front yard. The Missus collected knick knacks, and Grandpa Ernie would take his favorites and have them bronzed. The top of the TV set was covered in the strangest assortment of bronzed objects.

There was some talk about taking a slight detour so we could drive through Muskogee. One thing Lloyd and I emphatically agreed upon was neither of us had any use for Peter Frampton, Gary Wright or Gino Vanelli. I was into Lou Reed and David Bowie. Lloyd was into George Jones & Tammy Wynette but most of all he was into Merle Haggard, especially the live album with "Fightin' Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee". Whenever he had the chance, Lloyd liked to drive through Muskogee, which I wasn't particularly into, not really wanting to spend time in a place where, according to the song, "even squares can have a ball", but nobody asked me. From what I could tell, Muskogee looked just like the rest of Oklahoma.

Cherry gave me my first blow-job ever one morning in a Howard Johnson's motel room just inside of Arkansas. I don't remember much about it and there isn't much to remember anyhow. Lloyd was loading the car, Erlene was taking a shower, and Cherry had just enough time to pop into my room, turn on the Price is Right and attempt to suck me off while simultaneously smoking one of her coveted cigarettes, her eyes darting back and forth from my cock to the TV screen. I didn't get off. . Somehow this blowjob thing didn't seem like all it was cracked up to be.

Grandpa Ernie liked whiskey and he liked cows. The Cadillac wasn't the car best suited for the red clay roads of rural Arkansas, and skidded into a ditch a few miles outside of some tiny town. We managed to push the car out of the ditch, dusted ourselves off and were ready to go when we noticed Grandpa Ernie had gone missing. We men left the ladies in the air conditioned Cadillac and walked the few miles back to town, checked the bar and then the liquor store. The liquor store owner remembered Grandpa Ernie; he'd stopped by an hour or so earlier and bought a couple of pints, which meant he was probably off with the cows somewhere, and that's where we finally found him, sitting in a field finishing off the second bottle, drunk and talking to a heifer who looked at him with big cow eyes while contentedly chewing her cud.

We drove on through the country side, occasionally passing a house, and in my memory it was always near sunset, spectacular red sky merging with the red clay roads, hot and humid, and the house was always some sprawling two story plantation home with a huge front porch and I could imagine the Confederate ladies with hoop dresses and twirling parasols sipping mint juleps from tall sweating glasses.

The wedding was between a pair of cousins. I'd had about enough of Cherry's family, especially the decades old and growing rancor between Erlene's stridently pious Okie Baptist mother and Grandpa Ernie, who wouldn't stop egging her on in his wind parched West Texas cackle, spewing out blasphemies that grew more mean spirited as the warmth of the whiskey chilled his heart, washing through and emboldening him, and so I sat alone outside the little wooden Baptist church and played with a lazy one-eyed dog while the cousins were finally declared both legally and in the eyes of God man and wife.

The wedding ended, everyone wished the cousins well and we all headed back to some uncle's place an hour or so drive away in the nearest town, or rather on the outskirts of the nearest town, because this was truly an outskirts of town family. This uncle was the most successful member of the family aside from Lloyd. He had a big backyard with a chain link fence and an above ground swimming pool, one of those blue sided plastic and metal contraptions that was about three feet deep and leaked water all over the lawn. The wedding was either a cause or an excuse for great celebration and so everybody ate barbeque, stripped down to cut-offs and went swimming, and the grown-ups drank a lot of booze. Eventually they were loose enough to urge us to grab a couple of beers and join them, and Cherry and I knew it was gonna be a successful night. Lloyd started telling the same jokes and stories two or three times in a row and everybody laughed uproariously because they didn't remember he'd just told them 20 minutes earlier and that was our cue-we knew they were beyond noticing us. Just to be sure, Cherry smoked a cigarette. Nobody cared. We grabbed a couple more beers, slipped inside the house, turned on the TV, made out, Cherry smoked another cigarette, we pulled a blanket over our laps and she gave me my first real handjob.

This whole sex business was new to us, and we practiced it whenever and wherever we could. It was the mid '70's, and some guy named Anonymous was publishing a lot of paperback sex manuals, many of which my parents owned for reasons I could never quite fathom since as far as I could tell they genuinely disliked each other and seldom even slept in the same room. And no kid really likes to think about their parents having sex, or anyone else's parents for that matter-it just doesn't seem like the thing old bald people in their forties should be doing. One summer night a bunch of us went out and did what we did every summer night, which was got drunk and stoned, and our lightweight Canadian buddy Garth could no longer stand up, so we forced him to drink some more liquor until he passed out completely, making him more manageable, and then we carried him home. We got the keys out of his pocket, opened the back door and quietly started carrying him up the stairs to his room. Unfortunately Garth's parents' bedroom door opened onto the landing, and they were on the bed fucking loudly. The sight of those middle aged flabby white bodies heaving up and down, the squishy slapping sounds of their sweaty flesh and a middle-aged Mom shouting out "Oh baby give it to me" was a real buzz killer. We dumped Garth on the landing and got the hell out of there as fast as we could before the night was ruined. As best we could piece together this is what happened next: the primal horror of the approaching-orgasm parental fucking noises jolted Garth out of his stupor. He panicked and tried to get up. One of the parents writhing in the throes of orgasm looked up just in time to see their frantic eyed son stumble across the threshold, puke into their bedroom and then trip and tumble back to the floor, landing in his own vomit. Evidently the whole family was traumatized. We didn't see too much of Garth after that.

This was what parental sex meant to me and so I figured I was doing everyone a favor by stealing my parents' sex manuals. I studied them carefully. Some of the chapters filled me with dread. There was the chapter about how really fat people should fuck, advising they lay at a 90 degree angle to one another so their stomachs wouldn't get in the way, complete with a series of drawings to illustrate the position, all of which I found just about as disturbing as the sight of Garth's flabby parents flailing about all sweaty on the bed squealing and grunting and making these barnyard sounds, like somebody should have been playing Dueling Banjoes in the background. There was the chapter on cunnilingus, which the book advised would drive the ladies wild. I became determined to master the Velvet Buzzsaw. As far as I could tell this technique involved burying your face in a girl's crotch, sticking out your tongue and shaking your head as vigorously as possible without causing spinal injury. Unfortunately the author supposed that readers already had a working knowledge of female anatomy, but all I knew at that age was basic kindergarten round-peg-in-a-round-hole sort of stuff and so I wasn't exactly sure what my tongue should be rubbing against while performing this velvet buzzsaw maneuver. Luckily, neither did Cherry and so she enjoyed it pretty much as guaranteed.

Cherry and I were going to stay together forever or at least until high school ended, but if we spent more than a week apart we always wound up fucking someone else. The next summer came and she was back in Oklahoma, presumably flat on her back on the lawn chair lounger in the old folks home furiously puffing on a cigarette while some neighborhood boy fucked her as fast as he could, his Daisy Dukes around his ankles, and I was still in Cairo hanging out with Lynn, a hot little French Canadian girl who was by all accounts very sexually precocious but we were also ingesting an awful lot of weird pharmaceuticals like Parkinal, which is perfectly fine to take if you have Parkinson's disease, I guess, but a real mind bender if you don't, and due to all these drugs nearly a month had gone by and Lynn and I had yet to manage to fuck.

Lynn's folks worked for the Canadian government and the family went back to Ottawa. My family went to Calgary, on the other side of Canada. I have never in my life been more ambitious than when in the throes of teenage lust and so I devised this outrageous plan where my sister and I would spend a week in Calgary with the parents, persuade our Aunt to call her daughter, our cousin, whom we hadn't seen since we were little and was now married with children and living in Ottawa, and my sister and I would travel to Ottawa to visit them and stay a few days and then check into a cheap hotel and I would finally fuck Lynn. More outrageous still was that I pulled it off.

We stayed a few days in the suburbs of Ottawa with our cousin and her husband who had obscenely large lips, had just bought an expensive new quadraphonic sound system and was totally into his reel-to-reel tapes of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Paul Horn at the Taj Mahal, and those proto new-age quadrophonic hippie albums of nature sounds like waves on the beach or wind blowing through the forests. You had to smoke a lot of pot to listen to that stuff, especially in quad, and they did. After a few days of obligatory family pot smoking I persuaded them we didn't want to be a bother and we checked into a flea-bag hotel in down-town Ottawa and I hooked up with Lynn.

Elvis died right about then. It was big news.

Lynn would stop by the hotel no wasted motion as she'd immediately strip off her clothes and jump on the bed. For the first time that summer we weren't too stoned to talk and she told me she'd heard Cherry raving about this velvet buzzsaw thing so I stuck my head between her legs and went at it. Despite being only 15, Lynn had more experience than almost anybody else at our high school except maybe Connie, who was also Canadian and was always so stoned she probably had no recollection whatsoever of having been fucked at least 5 times by every guy in 10th grade or above. Connie was a slut. Lynn, on the other hand, was experienced, and rumor had it most of the experience came from fucking adults, starting some years earlier with her baby sitters. Lynn advised me to aim a little higher with the velvet buzzsaw, saying something about a man in a boat that I wasn't completely sure I heard right since my ears were wedged against her thighs, and this minor adjustment got her writhing so hard I thought she was gonna snap my neck with her scrawny little 15-year-old legs.

She'd get off fast, then it would be my turn, and then our half an hour would be up and she'd have to leave in a hurry before her parents started wondering where she was, and I'd sit on my bed the rest of the day with a big dumb grin and watch Elvis movies.

That was the summer I became a man.

 

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