The Carrs lived next door to us in a falling-down purple house. There were five kids in that house. Queenie Carr, the youngest, was a dumpling runt who would change into a glittering sex princess in high school. Her brother Whitey was a year older than me and used to beat me up just about every Sunday. Like me, he suffered from asthma, and he would often come over a couple of hours after he beat me up to borrow my prescriptions. He was a nine-year-old Lucky Strike smoker. His father was a giant with leukemia, and his mother had died when he was six. In a few years his oldest brother would go to Vietnam and lose his mind. Whitey had long, straggly white hair and a bluish tint to his lips and eyelids, and hard little fists. He hooked his arms when he fought, as if hugging a telephone pole, his eyes glinting sadistically as he laid the hard little punches in.

Out behind our drab pink elementary school was a series of neglected arroyos and small canyons and brushy vacant lots where people would dump their junk: tires and mattresses and refrigerators and old cars. We’d wander down into these sunken otherworlds, these Roman ruins of junk, and look around, sit behind the wheels of rusted cars, lie on mattresses and watch the clouds sail over, catch scorpions and put them in jars. Whitey Carr would talk dirty and smoke cigarettes with Snooks Miller. Snooks always carried around a tube of Crest to cover her breath; she’d smear the blue-green paste on her tongue. We would practice talking like adults (“God damn it, I forgot my cigarettes”), holding adult subjects up like mysterious glass balls for consideration. Snooks had a brother my age named Fubsy, a fat kid who was always practicing his pseudojudo on me. The only reason I went down to their house at all was because, though Snooks acted like a boy, she liked me in a way I didn’t understand. She often told me she was horny, which I thought meant she needed skin lotion. (She did, especially on her legs.) Snooks’s father drove the ferryboat to Coronado and didn’t live at home anymore. Her mother was a barmaid. They had a clock in their house that said, “No Drinking Till After Five,” and all the numbers on the clock were fives.

Every time we went to the End Store, Roland or Langston had to steal something. We called it the End Store because it was the last in a row of shops. The man who ran it was from another country and spoke very little English. Where he came from, children probably did not steal the way they did here in America. America is all about freedom; we have an idea in America that things should be as free as possible. This was Roland and Langston’s idea, too. They would walk into the End Store, load up, and come out looking like lumpy scarecrows, their sleeves and socks and underwear jammed with Paydays and Abba-Zabas and Neccos and Red-Hots. Roland would fill the saddlebag on the back of his bicycle, stuff it until he could barely get the flap over. Then we would go back to their house and sit in their room and gorge. In a trunk under the bed they kept nudist magazines and old Playboys that their father had given them. Uncle Langston would light a cigarette and blow the smoke in yellow streams out the louvered windows. Once, when Mr. and Mrs. Sambeaux were gone, we put away the magazines and played Twister with Roland and Langston’s three sisters in the living room. The sisters all had skinny legs and big, yearning eyes, like stained-glass windows in French cathedrals. Bizzy was the prettiest and, at seven, the eldest of the three. Langston asked me if I “wanted” Bizzy. He had the most curious look on his face. The question made no sense to me. Everyone laughed when I blushed and said no. I went home, jaded and jumpy from sugar and nudity and crime. I ate poorly, thinking of bushy-looking adults playing volleyball or shuffleboard in the nude. My mother cut sharp glances at me. She had the kind of vision that went right through you and saw into your future. She saw me taking LSD, or driving drunk off a cliff, or marrying a Filipino go-go dancer with a long scar across her abdomen. She saw weeds coming up in the garden of my innocence, and wormy, wild apples waving in the wind.

The Millers had a pinup calendar in their garage — you peeled up the cellophane and the girl’s bathing suit came with it. Fubsy claimed to know all about sex firsthand: he had been with the baby sitter, who was fifteen. I didn’t believe him. He said he’d tasted mother’s milk. So had I, I told him, but I’d forgotten what it was like. Snooks rubbed up against me and talked in the language she heard through the walls after her mother came home from the bar. Once, I came over to spend the night and watch Lost in Space and giggle in Fubsy’s bunk bed. The barmaid mother was rarely home. Snooks kept up her edgy patter and periodically went out on the patio for a smoke.

Whether I was at the Sambeauxs’ or the Millers’ or the Carrs’, or just out in the street with my little buddies, it was always the same. They were like hothouse tomatoes pushing hard for what they thought was the light. We would hide in a bush, or cluster in the treehouse, or lean back among the interstices of the towering, ragged, catwalk hedge, and the topic would invariably arise, spelled out in red letters above our heads: S-E-X. And if Langston or Roland was there, someone might say, Go get your sisters. I kept my ears up, listened sharply, but at the same time I kept a hand on the door handle, looking back at the receding point of innocence. If you knew too much, you ended up a drooling, bug-eyed hermit living in a cave with people’s fermenting decapitated heads all around. My mother’s voice rang out across the neighborhood, the diamond-mother vibration of salvation, calling me in earlier than anyone else. I was scrubbed and in bed and staring at the ceiling with the burble of the Dodger game on the living-room radio before the red letters disappeared.

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