When I was eleven, or twelve, thirteen – I can’t remember which – my best friend showed me some dog-eared and yellowing sheets of paper she’d found in her dad’s desk drawer and we lay on the floor in her bedroom while she read them out to me.
It was a sex story. A really filthy story but written as a letter. Pornography without the images. Pornography before video tapes, DVDs, cell phones and the internet. Pornography where the dirty pictures are inside your head.
We figured out that this letter didn’t originally belong to her dad but her grandpa, who had gone overseas to fight in the Vietnam War. The only part of him that came back home was a battered footlocker filled with dank and moldy reminders of the place he’d left behind and the family that lost him. A silk slip belonging to her grandmother that still bore faint traces of the perfume she wore on their first date, some photos of her dad as a tiny baby that were old and faded and looked as if they were streaked with tears, and a bundle of peeling letters tied with blue ribbon. And this letter, the letter that told the dirty story, was one of those. It was addressed to him. But we didn’t know who it was sent from because we couldn’t find a signature. It seemed to be missing and there was no return address on the envelope it came in.
A few days ago, I found the story posted up on an internet forum. The same basic story but the details were off. A couple of people commented that they thought it started as something passed around on mimeographed sheets as beat-off material for soldiers stationed overseas. And passed down through all the ages and all the wars since then until it ended up in my friend’s dad’s desk drawer and found its way into her innocent hands.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have told her to stop before she got to the end. I would have told her to stop before she’d even started. Put the papers back where you found them, back in the drawer. They’re not ours. This is not for us. We don’t need to know what’s there. Not now, not yet, not ever.
Children have many beautiful, natural talents that are to be envied and admired. The one thing they lack is foresight.
For some reason, they just can’t make the connection between running down the road with their laces undone and a nasty trip and fall in the immediate future. Along with two grazed knees that will sting like nothing else they’ve ever felt.
That if they poop in their pants it’s going to feel unpleasant, and smell real bad. Not to mention that whole business of running to mommy and fighting to tell her what’s happened through all the floods of tears. Because while a child lacks foresight, they are not without cunning. So if poop comes out one end, it must be time to turn the waterworks on at the other. If only to inspire enough pity to make the humiliating process of cleaning up afterwards that much easier to bear.
So if I knew then what I know now, when my parents took me to the Christmas grotto in our local shopping mall for the very first time, as a toddler in my pretty pink frilly dress with striped candy canes stitched around the skirt, and walked me over the white astroturf, past the creepy-looking mechanical elves who waved their arms stiffly like a grandma at a New Year’s party rocking out to Katy Perry, and plopped me down on Santa’s big, red log-sized knee so that he could lean in until his white beard was hanging in my lap and ask me the obligatory question about my heart’s desire, I would have looked up into his rheumy, gin-soaked eyes with all the childlike innocence and wonder I could muster and said, ‘Gimme foresight.’
It would have saved a whole lot of hassle, heartbreak and shit-stained underwear later on. It would have saved me from myself.
And back then, lying there sprawled across the shagpile carpet in my friend’s bedroom as she clutched those yellowing sheets in her hand and prepared to read them out loud, I might have been right on the cusp of womanhood but I was still a child. What did I know?
So I egged her on.
We were like Adam and Eve preparing to take a bite of the apple. Curiosity got the better of us, we couldn’t stop ourselves and we ate the whole damn thing up in one go and almost pissed our pants from laughing at all the really dirty bits.
But the rest of the story, the stuff that was dark and weird, just seemed strange and alien to our young, still innocent and developing minds. Because we didn’t understand, because we hadn’t experienced anything that would give it meaning or context, it didn’t affect us. Or at least, I thought it didn’t. And here’s something I can’t really explain.
Somehow the story as I first heard it from my friend – all of it, every last word and detail – stayed with me, burrowing deep into my subconscious like a parasite, where it set up camp and made a home for itself.