In second grade, I always brought two bags of lunch to school: one for food and one for candy. People would talk to me to get the candy, but mostly I'd just crack one sour ball after another in my mouth until the chewing surfaces of my teeth were filled with bits of candy that I couldn't get out. At recess, I'd trade stickers with the girls: Scratch 'n' Sniffs, puffies, changees, and googley-eyes. My favorite stickers were the Hello Kitties and Holly Hobbies that my mother wouldn't let me buy: they were for girls. I wanted to get all of Holly Hobby's purses. I'd talk with the girls about how much we hated boys-they were so immature-while the boys waved sticks at us and called me sissy. Faggot. At home, there were faces in my blankets, monsters under the bed. I couldn't sleep in the dark.

The hostage crisis came and went. My sister, Lauren, and I sang "Thriller" in my grandmother Fran's Cadillac. Fran said my voice wasn't good, but Lauren might have talent. My grandmother Gladys gave me a red nylon bag, you pulled the inside of the bag out and it turned into a jacket. Gladys also gave us tiny, bright-colored plastic animals that you dropped in water and they turned into sponges. I'd hold the sponges over my crotch when my father would unlock the bathroom door with a scissors to come in while I was showering.

At night, Lauren would scream HELP ME until my mother would soothe her back to sleep. I'd hold my breath. I dreamed of being smothered to death in shit, woke up screaming because there were eyes on my walls. In the morning, I'd chew my Flintstones vitamins and get a stomach ache. One day I looked at a picture of me as a baby and I figured I must have weighed more then than I did at ten. My father said most fat babies grow up to be fat adults, and I stopped eating. My sister and I watched Tina Turner in the "Private Dancer" video, my mother said can you believe she's forty? Tina had great legs, but her hair was a mess.

Besides Tina, Lauren and I liked Cyndi Lauper, and we thought Madonna was just some expensive copycat. Cyndi and Madonna were fighting it out on the charts and we were rooting for Cyndi. Cyndi had those gummi bracelets way before Madonna. Later, after Cyndi disappeared, I had a slumber party on my birthday, but I wasn't allowed to invite girls. We all went out to Ambrosia for dinner: Yohance, Kevin, Robert, Dennis and me. We leaned out the back window of my family's Datsun 510 hatchback (wasn't that neat?), and sang "Like a Virgin" to the passing cars. At home, we watched each other hump pillows on the floor like we were fucking. We called phone sex lines and talked about each others' peppermint sticks.

When I was studying, Lauren would scream for me. I'd run into the family room to find her pointing at some model on tv. "She's so fucking beautiful-don't you want to kill her?" Lauren got Benetton sweaters and I craved their softness. In sixth grade, the boys memorized the rap part of the Chaka Khan song "I Feel for You," and I thought Chaka Khan was the rapper. Lauren went to get a perm and I wanted one too, then my hair would stay in place and I wouldn't have to slick it back with mousse. I saw Lauren's perm and changed my mind.

On bad nights, Lauren would wave a knife at our parents and say I'm going to chop you up and put you in the frying pan. Lauren got acne before I did-even though she was two years younger. But then she got Retin-A, so she had one zit and I had two. I got Retin-A, which made me break out. Benji Goldberg gave me "Purple Rain" for my bar mitzvah, but the first tape I ever bought was Falco. In seventh grade, after I was in bed, I'd listen to the Top Ten at Ten on Q107 and "Rock Me Amadeus" stayed in the number one spot for a record number of weeks.

In sixth grade, I started paying attention to how I dressed, and in seventh grade all my girl friends started having crushes on the boys we used to hate together. I stopped talking to my father, except to argue; I practiced staring through his eyes until they were empty holes, and I could look out the window. For a while, I wore Generra t-shirts and wayfarer sunglasses with baggy pants, but soon I switched to black turtlenecks with mustard or army green v-neck sweaters, pegged black jeans and loafers. Jeannine Leflore saw me outside at recess one day and she said are you a mod? In art class, the trendies would play Madonna and the mods would play the Violent Femmes. I'd sit in the middle.

Jerome Stewart sang, "We don't have to take our clothes off... to have a good time," and I thought so, too. One day, after school, I was at the urinal in the bathroom at Woodie's department store and the man next to me got hard, I couldn't breathe. I reached over to touch it and he reached for mine. Someone came in and I zipped up my pants and ran. In ninth grade, I went to Woodies almost every day. Always promising never again. My father and I argued about what refrigerator to buy, and I won.

Matt Bernstein Sycamore is the editor of Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (2000), and Dangerous Families: Queer Writing Beyond Recovery (Haworth, 2003). His writing has appeared in Best American Erotica 2001, Best American Gay Fiction 3, Best Gay Erotica 2000, 2001, and 2002, Blithe House Quarterly and numerous other publications. He can be reached by email here.

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