19. The First Time

Before I left this block, I’d had very little experience with—and absolutely no curiosity about—sex. All I knew about it was that it was something men—or people who thought they were men—did to other people to keep them silent, to keep them here. Death, it seemed, was the only way out. As far as I could tell, sex was like school, like church, like families: While involved with them, people seemed to do whatever it was they learned from whomever they encountered first.

And so it was for my first trick. I sucked a man who, though he was older than my father—wherever he was—would’ve been, had a face nearly as smooth as mine was not long after the day I received my First Holy Communion (What it meant, I still don’t know.) when someone about the same age as I am now cornered me in a rotting boxcar on the abandoned railroad track just beyond the rows of masoleums at the end of the neighborhood.

Ask kids, or adults for that matter, about childhood and they’ll tell you when they were the most scared, or the first time they were scared: the first time they were faced with a situation in which they couldn’t run, fight or hide. Most likely, it was also the first time they couldn’t tell anybody what happened. For some, it’s also the first time they realized they could die, or that someone wouldn’t let them.

Having had no brothers or sisters, I’ve never seen anybody’s body more closely than my mother’s in a housedress. And because almost no one but mother—or grandma, when she visited or stayed—ever approached me, not even to start a fight, I couldn’t react to those short, sharp steps the man who corenered me in the boxcar took toward me, from behind. Or to his hand, my first physical contact with him, clamped over my mouth. Or his command, “Inside!” in a voice I recognized: raspy, like he was trying to spit out chunky peanut butter.

I’d had no choice—I didn’t talk to strangers or talk back to an elder. —and I was in the grasp of someone whose face I hadn’t yet seen. When the things you’ve been taught to keep you out of harm’s way fail, nothing’ll get you out. At least, nothing you’ve planned or been taught. You’re not thinking about obedience or resistance; you’re just hoping the sitaution will be over soon, that maybe you’ll make it home, which is to say whatever you knew before that moment, however dismal it may’ve been.

“Don’t turn around!” As if I could—his palm sealed my mouth and forefinger nearly blocked my nostrils. He leaned; he didn’t tell me to step toward the boxcar. Or up the small ladder that climbed its side into the air inside the damp yet sandy darkness when I could suck in my first full breath, I couldn’t see a corner or the walls, but I knew they were only a few steps in any direction from me. For that matter, I couldn’t’ve seen him, even if I had turned around. It occurred to me, in a moment, that he probably couldn’t see me, either. But in that place, darker and more vacant than what I couldn’t see those nights when I closed my eyes but couldn’t fall asleep, he’d had--even after he’d momentarily let go of me—control over whether I could breathe, much less move. And I knew—but I didn’t know how I knew—that I couldn’t resist, much less defy, him.

I’d heard that voice before: like something you remember from a dream or some other repetition of some time you can’t recall. I knew it: I couldn’t mistake it for any other. For I wasn’t reacting simply to an authoritative, imperative tone I’d learned to react to in grown-ups—and to which I still react when someone seem to have the power, or rather, sufficient capacity toward violence, to kill or paralyze me.

It’s a force I’ve seen only in men, and it’s drawn me to actions I’d’ve never chosen consciously. Like my first trick. And why, when I sucked him, when I licked his groin, his ass, it all came back: When, as if I’d lost my eyes and ears, even the pores of his skin rasped, coarse as his hairs, against my salty tongue turning to powder back toward my throat while saliva—Where did it come from?—slicked between its tip and the crown of his cock. He said nothing; so did the man in the boxcar after he got what he wanted—at least for the moment—from me.

But something—I was going to say I knew what to do, but I didn’t—I just did. I sucked what was thrust into my face. And didn’t draw my tongue back into my mouth when they threw their loins, their rear ends, toward my face.