Show me your GIRL PARTS

In the second grade I admitted to my friends for the first time that I liked girls at the public swimming pool and to this day I find myself hauntingly wondering back to that strange afternoon.

It started in the men’s changing room, amid a sagging forest of sun-tanned hair-sacs polka-dotted with moles and sores of unidentifiable origins, we hopped into our suits with great haste, our eyes to the ground. Avoiding the pendulous little meat-birds that swung in and out of our peripherals we nearly lunged outside to escape the perverted humidity of that damned room (it can be said that most rooms made completely of tile have a perverty vibe).
I remember telling my friend in the flesh-free bask of sunlight that I liked Jennifer Lopez. More specifically, I remember hearing “Waiting for Tonight” over the intercom that surrounded the pool and telling my friend “I like her little boobs.” He wasn’t paying attention. I could tell he was concerned for the third friend who hadn’t emerged from the sausage disco. “Have you seen her little boobs?”
He squinted under his glasses. “You like girls now?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” The third friend emerged unharmed. “I like her butt better.”

One has to keep in mind that in the fragile, uncorrupted, sweet-baby-virgin state of my second grade mind this concept loaded itself like a gun aiming at a thousand different triggers of a thousand more guns. Not only had I admitted to liking girls in front a respectable peer, but I did so by reducing womankind into “parts.” Loving and obsessing over someone as a “piece” instead of a “whole.” This was revolutionary.

My friends and I, being the very daringest of second-graders, always tackled the waters of the deep end first, but this time the water was different. Through my goggles I opened my eyes and held my nose to a bubbling reef of womanly bodies, all angelically decapitated by the silver-creased surface of the water. In that moment I became the chief mechanic of my very own chop shop. Hips, ankles, navels and breasts, I engineered my women from toe to neck as if collaged from a magazine with scissors and glue.

Then, like every revolution of thought, I was immediately bludgeoned with an axe of sobering realization. In my reef there were many clams. Clams I could see plainly beneath water-resistant cloth in bright tropical colors, like the houses of third world countries their vibrancy caught the eye and guided to a dark window. You see I knew the simple basics of what it was (some slitty thing that, one day, I was suppose to smoosh my stuff into when I was hairy enough or married or in love or something so some baby of mine could flume its way into the world sometime later), but I didn’t really understand what was going on, like, up in there.

My first thought was that there must be some sort of tongue down there. Otherwise, how does it lock around a penis? How does it push a baby out? If there was a tongue it wouldn’t just stick out or pant on a hot day. It would just, sort of, be up in there. This idea, although fair enough in its origin, did not stick.

The next thought came from a question I’d asked myself countless times while visiting public restrooms with my mother. You see, we’d be in some department store shopping for a mother-son relationship with a lower interest rate when all of a sudden we’d both have to pee at the same time (hooray family time!). We’d leave the cart in between the men’s and women’s restroom while we visited our designated facilities and I, confident in my ability to firehouse my way through a speedy urination, would rush my way through the whole process so that I could beat her to cart. But when I’d emerged she’d always be there asking if I had washed my hands. “How is it that my mom pees faster than me?”

Needless to say, this was incredibly puzzling to me. For one thing, I knew my mom would have to sit in a stall, which means she had to shut the door, lock the door, inspect the seat, drop the pants, sit on the seat, do her business, and move on. That’s a whole process. I didn’t have some long process. I’d walk straight in there and fire hose like a champ. She couldn’t firehouse! Then it dawned on me. Maybe instead of peeing in a steady stream all women had some sort of hatch, like the large doors you see opening at the bottom of planes when you see old war footage of bombs being dropped. Maybe women could just drop their load like a popped water balloon and be done with it. This became my strongest theory as to the puzzling mechanics of the female labyrinth and, although I could never quite prove it, the belief stuck with me through most of high school.

I remember surfacing, seeing the heads of the women I’d Frankensteined into headless sexual abominations. I saw their faces, another hole filled with mysteries. Their eyes were indifferent to mine and I remember feeling confused guilt; like I was one step closer to becoming one of the sweaty bags of frankfurters in the locker room. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. So I didn’t talk about it.