A rushed beginning. Again I demonstrate my endless capacity for procrastination by using the time that Persis has bequeathed me by taking Burt on a bike ride by the river to instead of write to you (as I have been dreading all week; see, you are now a source of dread, a burden) to figure out how to download the audio version of Death in Venice that I just seized as part of my free trial for [of] an audiobook company that, unfortunately, sucks. Oh well, I got Death in Venice and The Fountainhead out of it. And Persis just printed out this article from the New York Times on the best novels (American) of the last 25 years. And of course, me being the sucker for lists of any kind, I now feel that I should read them all (surprisingly (why [surprisingly]?…I don’t know…perhaps because I like to think of myself as relatively well read; but in fact that’s horseshit: being a childraiser and being well read are, like, matter and antimatter) [I’ve read only 7 of 27).] Anyway, so I’m determined to read as many of them as I can find on audio. These, of course, are all unabridged versions. I’m not white trash.

Onward.

So the girl next door took offense, or was embarrassed rather, when last weekend I dealt with Burt’s tendency to have innocently roving hands (he does it with me all the time; the irritating habit of his being that he will not just pass his gentle hands all over my back and chest; he will, with his index finger, finger concentratedly selected moles on my back, and sometimes my nipples. This eventually sends me…well, rather it leads me gradually into a state where I would like to grab his hands and cut them off, but instead I just gently tell him that what he is doing doesn’t feel very good, or that I would prefer he touch me somewhere else, or that my nipple is getting sensitive (or ‘overstimulated’ is the word I should probably use with him), or that I don’t want him fingering my moles like that. And if he doesn’t respond within a half a second, I grab his hands and throw them away, swat them off of me like the pests they are. I am feeling as you can see a good deal of hostility toward that precious little morsel right now. More on that later.) Anyway, so Burt’s hands have started to pass over Melissa toward her breasts (oh, those breasts; I don’t blame Burt one bit) and occasionally down toward and perhaps under her waistband (that kid has…what?...good instincts), and she has gently and gigglingly pushed his hand away, which I probably should just have left alone, but instead I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t getting the wrong message (he is doing it innocently, after all), but also that Melissa have something that she knows she can tell him. So I said that if he ever starts trying to touch her anywhere that she feels uncomfortable [about], she can just say, “Burt, I would prefer it if you didn’t touch me there.” Anyway, she said, “Thanks, Josh,” sort of sarcastically, but since I couldn’t understand what I might have done that she would have resented, I just assumed she was, if not sincere, then at least not actually resentful, I don’t know. I guess I suspected that there might have been something going on, because later I asked her, in front of Persis, if she would mind if I told Persis what I had told her [(Melissa)] earlier about the touching. And she, with her knees folded up to her chest (we were sitting on a blanket in a park), said yes. And I said, “You do mind?” And she said “Yes.” That bitch. Anyway, Persis wandered away, and I said to Melissa, looking at her quickly so as not to put her…or make her feel further exposed…I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.” But inside I was resenting her…prudery…no, that’s not fair…her embarrassment. I mean…well, let me just add that after that episode with Persis, Melissa decided that she was so embarrassed…or, I didn’t know what she was feeling at the time…all I knew was that a minute later she went and sat behind a tree…and it certainly seemed like she was hiding. So later after I had left, Persis checked in with her and found that, yes, she was very embarrassed by what I had said, and that those were things apparently that she didn’t, or perhaps I should say ‘wasn’t to,’ talk with guys about. And Persis brought up that she…pointed out that which didn’t need pointing out…that she was being raised Catholic, going to a Catholic school, and that this wasn’t a topic that she felt comfortable discussing. But what really makes me burn is that – and this is going to sound terrible, but bear with me, because I don’t feel like I’m being that unreasonable – judging by the clothes she wears (oof, I cringe saying that), exposing her nascent cleavage, the high regions of her lanky latte thighs (I have not yet sneaked…well, I’ve sneaked a glance, but what I mean to say is that I have not caught yet a glimpse of those lucky panties)…I should chime in here about Tracy Green in junior high, and how I would sit across from her in Spanish class in the library and find excuses to drop things and so look up her skirt and see all the way up under that institutional uniform skirt to the one and only pussy of Tracy Green, covered of course with a thin layer of white (generally; I think once or twice there was a pattern; and what an amusing, whimsical thing to see up there: a little girly pattern bedecking that womanly, hairy pussy of hers. And I say hairy not because I had to fantasize what was under that thin layer of cotton. In fact, the whole reason I would look up there was because she evidently was so overwhelmed by the volume of her pubic hair that she could not keep it inside of her underwear (I supposed she could have shaved, but per—…I wonder why she didn’t, why she let it grow like weeds in a field down her nice Jewish alabaster thighs))…and the sight of her buzzing (that was the psychic texture of the sight of her bounteous pubic hair – a buzz – as if the very sight of it was so vivid, so impoating [I have no clue what this word was supposed to be.], so real, that it not only was projected onto my retinae but actually materialized inside my head and ears, causing a buzzing as it grew, a buzzing, a muffled “whish” as those individual lucky, perhaps clean from her morning shower, perhaps glazed with…well, perhaps I am getting a little indulgent here. Let’s just leave it at that…(not that I’m afraid of getting indulgent…let me just say it, that maybe they were glazed with her secretions, maybe they got there because she had masturbated the night before, because I certainly would not be able to keep my hands off my pussy if I were her, and so fascinated (as I was [by hers]) by my public hair (I keep writing ‘public’ hair…I think I’ve discoursed on that before)))…anyway, this is all just a fantasy on my desire there in the Spanish class as I spied like an explorer in the desert happening upon a lush verdant jungle the twin thatches of her emergent pubic hair fanning, buzzing, exploding, puffing out of the two sides of her exiguous cotton veil. I didn’t always see them – and that’s what made them so precious to me, those two thatches – it was periodic reinforcement, and so I would try all the more and occasionally catch a glimpse… I want to get back to Melissa. But let me just for a moment describe (let me first leave the library with an aside about how some other guys in that class got in on the game, dropping things to look up that grey skirt, and that I have since come to feel very badly for Tracy, who probably just didn’t know what to do with her pubic hair except cross her legs and hope that her sniffing suitors went away. Poor Tracy. Much as I wish I could go back and run those panties down her legs and do a triple gainer into that lush pussy, much as I desire that, I feel for her and wish I could take her in my arms and tell her that it was no fault of hers the rude excesses of these little boys, that she was beautiful and that that was the ultimate cause of her oppression – her beauty – and that these poor boys were so (unfortunately, her most beautiful aspect was that pubic hair, but she deserved to feel beautiful and desirable nonetheless) immature because they did not know how to express pure appreciation for beauty, and that some of them (like me) would never be able to do it and that instead of feeling oppressed by them, she should feel sorry for them, that they were enduring such torture at the hands, or should I say the strands, of her pubic hair. She should feel proud, cross her legs or not, as she wished, and dismiss these sniveling horny twelve-year-old boys.)

But the first sight of Tracy (and is this synecdoche…(I saw Akeelah and the Bee last night because Reinhardt told me I should because…she said it wasn’t a perfect movie but that the message was one that I should…what?...soak in. And the message was blah blah blah we are not afraid that we are inadequate; we are actually afraid that we are powerful beyond measure)…anyway, one of the words that was spelled by Akeelah (incorrectly as it happened) was ‘synecdoche’ (I’m not giving anything away; she misspelled it in a casual…or unimportant moment). Anyway I wonder if saying ‘Tracy’ when I mean ‘Tracy’s underwear [pubic hair]’…(it’s like you could imagine a bow tie, and the two wings of the bow tie are these thatches of pubic hair, and the little roundabout holding them together was her underwear….wouldn’t that be awesome, to wear a bow tie that looked like that?) Anyway, is the whole of Tracy standing in for her pubic hair display synecdoche or…fuck, come on…what’s that other part-for-whole word that I’ve never learned to distinguish from synecdoche?…it’ll come to me…anyway, is ‘Tracy’ as in “the first sight of Tracy” when what I mean [by ‘Tracy’] is “the first sight of Tracy’s underwear with that amazingly shocking and wonderful burst of pubic hair blasting out either side” synecdoche or that other word I can’t remember?) was on the concrete overlooking the playground, where she was sitting having lunch, no chair, butt on the concrete, and she went to get up, and clearly she hadn’t learned yet (she was probably twelve at the time, or thirteen) to rise from the ground like the horses she loved, graceful and unrevealing, legs together and to the side, right?...she hadn’t learned to do that, so what she did instead was to plant each hand just behind her and then her feet just in front of her and push up like that, which would have been fine if she were wearing pants, but since all she had was that hated uniform skirt, when she pushed up to rise, her knees parted, and the hem of the dress was no match for them and it rose, and she gave me the sight of my life, a sight I will never forget and the thrill of which I despair of ever experiencing again. And in my recollection, I looked at it (it of course didn’t last long, but I swear, for the impression it made on me she might as well be there still, on that concrete lunch area, rising from a seating [seated] position in that awkward thirteen-year-old way, pussy draping out there for the world to see; she might as well still be frozen there until I die), that beautiful sight, and then glanced up at her face which was looking at me. And her expression is one of…well, much as I want to imagine that she was inviting me, saying “How’d you like that? That was for you.” Instead I think she just sort of caught me looking and registered that and probably didn’t feel much of anything except maybe thinking that I was a bit of a letch. But my God, if she knew what that sight did to my head, she would have, should have been embarrassed indeed.)

So Melissa. I’ve forgot where I left off, but…I think I was about to go off on how I de--…oh yes, what she was wearing. You know, her clothes are pretty revealing. And it’s not like...you know, some young girls (see Sally Mann’s book of photographs called At Twelve. I’ve never actually bought it because, as opposed to Immediate Family, which is one of those works of art that will stay with me forever and has shaped who I am, At Twelve makes me profoundly uneasy because of the failed, failing pretension of those poor deluded innocent and ugly girls in those photographs. It reminds me perhaps of my failure, my being endlessly frozen in a state of professional twelveyearoldness, being essentially innocent and yet sexually impotent but aspiring to power. But I’m never going to get there is the only thing, like Tracy there frozen on the launching pad (it [Tracy’s stage] wasn’t actually that space that was called ‘the launching pad,’ which was where parents drove up to pick up their kids, but it was just opposite the launching pad and made of the same white smooth concrete, so I might as well call it that since ‘launching pad’ is more evocative than ‘concrete lunching area’), pudendum exposed [hinted at] for the world to see but never actually amounting to anything, always just two thatches of promising but ultimately snuffled, stifled pubic hair.), some girls wear their innocence on their nonexistent sleeves, but not Melissa. She owns her body, at least that’s her carriage. And so when I try to be respectful and forthright about how she can respect and guard her body, to talk about it directly and simply, and to give my son not a message of shame, but one merely of preference, a simple limit rather then a condemnation, so when I go there and she goes and hides behind a tree, I have such contempt for the implicit hypocrisy of that. I know she’s only twelve (she is in fact ‘at twelve’), but you know, if she doesn’t want mature people (Am I mature? Are mature people branded still [at thirty-six] by their first glance of real live pubic hair?) to notice and address her body, then she should damn well cover it up. I’m not saying she owes me anything for her relative nakedness. I’m just saying that if she goes out in the world naked, she should be prepared to be able to have her relative nakedness pointed out to her without her having to afterwards go hide behind a fucking Douglas Fir.