Category: Stories

In the summer of 1970, my summer between kindergarten and 1^st grade, my Mom returned to part-time work.  Our town initiated a daytime program called recreation that took place at different schools and parks in town.  My parents took advantage of their tax dollars to immediately enroll us in recreation, which took place on the playground of our brand new beloved school, Crescent Elementary.  Recreation had morning and afternoon sessions.  As it was free, many kids would just come in the morning or afternoon or miss days all together.  As we had nothing else to do, my older sister, Lauren, and I religiously attended every session of recreation possible.  My attendance was crucial, as I planned on winning the trophy for “Best Girl in Recreation.”  In the beginning of the summer, the counselors displayed two unengraved trophies; one for the best boy and one for the best girl in recreation.  Whether you won an arts and crafts contest, a game of kickball, a game of checkers or Sorry or won the recreation talent show, you would earn a number of points for each win or participation.  Each time you won a game, scored a run, or won a contest, you were supposed to record the number of points into a black and white composition notebook.  Even though, I had a commanding lead by virtue of perfect attendance along with some other mad skills, I made a commitment that I would win the trophy at all costs.

While the other girls busied themselves with making arts and crafts or by playing house, these games were time consuming and wouldn’t enable me to accumulate points fast enough.  The tote board wasn’t going to run up, while I was pretending to be a baby boy or the family dog. I needed to pile on the points counting each paper, rock, and each scissors that smothered, smashed, cut each opponent’s Rochambeau move. Tic, tac, toe got tossed, when I realized that unless you play with someone who still has a soft spot on their head, rarely did anyone win and I lost precious tallying it up time.  While I’m sure my Mother would have appreciated matching planters hangers, I left crafting the macramé to Lauren knowing that if mine were even judged to be the best, I’d only accrue 5 points.  Plant that losers!  While Lauren busied herself with the art of decorative knots, I played 8 games of checkers, 3 games of CandyLand, and arm-wrestled all-comers.  While I might spend time playing kickball, I was the only girl who could kick the ball into woods gaining a bona fide home run.  I would get a point almost every time I was in the kicker’s box and led my team to victory earning me another 5 points.  I would eschew the relay races knowing that my speed wouldn’t garner me any points choosing instead to participate in the hot dog eating contest, where I could beat, if not eat, my 45 lb. peers.  While sign-ups for the talent show yielded 8 girls doing ballet, 3 tap dancing, 4 boys playing the trumpet, 3 baton twirlers, and 2 boys demonstrating karate kicks, I felt that my special brand of humor would stand-out performing stand-up comedy at age 6.  My Mother helped me with my lines that were based on commercials current in the late 60s and into 1970.  I slayed the audience with lines like, “Oh, my girdle is killing me!” and by squeezing my rear-end, while I said “Don’t squeeze the Charmin.”  Not only did I differentiate myself from the banal trumpet renditions of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and twirls to “God Bless America”, but I brought the blue-ribbon home with the joke, Why didn’t the chicken cross the road?  To avoid getting hit by the Partridge Family bus.  Even though that 10-point win, resulted in me having a 70-point lead above the next girl, I still wasn’t satisfied wanting to leave my competitors in the dust.

I began padding my wins awarding myself an extra point for good pop-a-matic action during Trouble!  I added a couple of points for the achievement of executing right-hand red and left-foot green in Twister!  I awarded myself for altruism, as I gave another kid the car in monopoly.  Of course as monopoly easily turns into monotony, I needed to make-up for lost time giving myself points for being the banker and for buying Boardwalk.  I gave myself 2 points for having excellent vibrato, while screaming, “Yahtzee.”  The die had been cast, morals had been thrown aside.  I unintentionally made a minor one-point indiscretion, when I claimed that I had earned an extra run in whiffle ball, when my invisible man had already been called out.  Fortunately, no one saw him go back to the bench. 

All-in-all, this padding resulted in me gaining an unfair 10-point additional advantage.  By the end of summer, I had an honest 76-point advantage winning working within the system or a dishonest 86-point advantage taking minor liberties.  While I knew that I clearly was the winner in my heart, my little math embellishments caused me to feel a tad tawdry, when the counselor awarded me with my glittery gold trophy.  The woman who must have served as the model of my trophy must have been molded after a goddess of beauty.  She resembled the Statue of Liberty, but had a gilded exterior not green one.  She held a wreath above her head in victory much like my honest 76-point victory.  If the 10-point embellishment would have been part of the mold to make her, the mold would have afforded her flabby arms to make up for my deceit. The trophy had a killer figure and, were she human, she would have flaunted her double Ds perhaps being able to win her own trophy in a wet t-shirt contest.  On her pedestal, my name was engraved along with the distinction of Best Girl in Recreation-1970.  As I bicycled home on my hand-me-down pink Schwinn bicycle with its double rear baskets clutching my trophy in my sweaty little hand, I pondered whether or not I felt that I had earned my “Miss Recreation 1970” honors fairly.  On one hand, the angel on my shoulder pondered that I still crushed all the other girls with my 76-point lead with every home-run I kicked, with every shoot and ladder I conquered, with every fiber of my being that successfully removed the water-on-the-knee from the patient in Operation, and with each time I correctly deduced that the murderer was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick.  Yet, the devil on my other shoulder told me not to care that I had awarded myself points for letting others have the racecar in monopoly, when I preferred the hat anyway.  The devil soothed me by repeatedly complimenting me for the best delivered articulation of the word “Yahtzee!”  I had almost made it home anticipating my happiness in putting my first trophy on my dresser, when I took the shortcut.  The shortcut was really the unpaved ¼ mile driveway of a family, who had a tree nursery that, years later, we’d drink and smoke in.  As my internal angel and devil duked it out, I hit a sizeable rock, which caused my bicycle to begin a handlebar over back tire maneuver.  During the tumble, my death grip on my trophy loosened causing her to land in the gravel just ahead of me.  After I caught my breath, I crawled to my beloved trophy, which was lying face down in the gravel.  When I picked it up, it’s beautiful gold coloring had chipped away the gold paint covering her protruding mountains majesty and on her nose.  While I cried for the loss of my trophy’s beauty, I kind of understood that her damages were the penalty of my 10 unearned points.  I drove her home and still placed the trophy on my dresser, after my Mom painted “Miss Recreation’s” boobs and nose with a gold shade of nail polish that barely masked her damages.  I’d like to think that seeing the trophy’s boob and nose job each night might have set the rest of my life on the right course.  However, it turned out that as an adult, when you pass through my own pair of chipped Double Ds to get to my heart, the false vibrato of “Yahtzee” can still be heard echoing from within.

Funny thing happened on my way to the cervix…

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I was supposed to come out named Paul Andrew.  Despite the fact that my parents and their friends and family were certain that I’d be a bouncing baby boy, I passed through my Mom’s cervix as Karen Beth.  While a bouncing baby, I lacked that special “Je ne sais quoi” known as a penis.  So, what became of Paul Andrew?  Somewhere and somehow, Paul Andrew’s essence must have clung to me, as I moved down the birth canal, since I emerged from my mother with a head filled with pink fuzzy hair on the outside and notions of wanting to be a boy on the inside.  As a baby, I filled my days with my chubby little hands wrapped around a Gerber baby sausage link, as I lacked a link of my own to play with.  During a diaper change, I’d look down past the mountain of my baby Buddah belly and see no pine tree towering in the valley below.  If I could articulate my desires as an infant, I would have been the shortest and youngest patient on Freud’s couch.  (Sometimes a bubble gum cigar is just a bubble gum cigar).  Then, I would have had the earliest reported case of Penis Envy.

I had the Pinocchio Syndrome.  I wanted to be a real boy!  Instead of being called by my real name, Karen, I preferred to be known as KK using my more gender-neutral initials.  If I could have gotten away with it, I would have suggested to others, “Just call me Paul.”  As a kindergartner, I’d regularly ask my parents, when I was going to become a boy.  As my mother was an earlier version of Dr. Ruth (Crotrojan Woman), she had no problems deflating my hopes and dreams by clearly defining that boys have penises, while girl’s have vaginas.  Mommy Ruth explained that since I was born with a vagina, I’d always be a girl.  At bath time, she’d point out where in my anatomy I was lacking external equipment.  Despite my Mother’s “My Body, Myself” discussions of gender definition, I would always burst out my war cry yelling, “IT WILL GROW!” to my mother or anyone who’d challenge my transformational growth towards becoming a boy.  (Perhaps this is currently why I don’t automatically delete spam e-mails promising penile enhancement from http://www.exxxcite.com, as these spammers at least believe in my potential.)

I have a sister, Lauren, who is 15 months older than me, so naturally, friends and families would regularly buy the “the girlies” dolls.  Instead, I would covet my neighbors (actually my cousin, Chuckie’s) Hot Wheels and GI Joes.  If we’d play house, I’d always assume the role of a\the two-year old son or the family dog never doing time as the mommy.  If we played Barbie’s, I’d have Ken.  No matter which male doll or action figure I’d chose whether I played with Ken or GI Joe, I’d always pull-down their pants to check out their plastic package.  I’d find that when their waistbands were pulled down below the knees, just like me, we’d all be as smooth as Kojack’s head in the nether regions. 

I still held fast in my proclamation that “IT WOULD GROW!” Now, in the tub, having discovered “the little man in boat” clinically termed the clitoris, I’d pull on myself showing my Mother and sisters evidence that I was turning into a boy.  I was a tomboy and had many male friends.  In fact, from an early age, I was attracted to and loved boys. As a friend once pointed out, somehow I was a young gay boy.  While this wasn’t true, while my friends wanted to grow up to be “mommies, nurses, and teachers,” I didn’t want to grow up versus growing out to fill the zipper region of my pants.  I’d settle on a career of being a policeman, cowboy, or fireman and even once after probably being served a batch of expired Hamburger Helper, I wanted to be a drum.  No wonder why I was jealous, when Robbie Brovero got to play along with the chorus to “Little Drummer Boy” over me during the Crescent Elementary School Winter Concert.  (Being a Jew didn’t help mw land that coveted role either.) My missing member wouldn’t get me membership into the boys’club, as it continued to refuse to grow.  To try to get some mojo, I walked around bare-chested in the summer and enjoyed my pair of boy’s Husky jeans that gave the appearance of a bulge.  The transformation was happening; if only in my mind.  Being a chunkster, as I filled my Husky jeans, I began to have some “oven-stuffer roaster pop-ups” action on my chest.  With my speed bumps emerging, I began to get teased as I’d play the role of the shirtless teenage hunky son, when the girls in the neighborhood played house.  It became harder to act like Leif Garrett, when you’re packing a couple of buds that belong more on Mrs. Garrett from the Facts of Life. 

While I held onto a few vestiges of hope that my Husky jeans might eventually fill out, my Mother sat me down and explained to me that I was beginning puberty.  She took me through the whole her whole puberty talk.  We revisited that the man has a penis (seemed a great deal more ominous than the earlier talks in which the “boy has the penis”) and that the woman has a vagina.  Much like my Nanna, my mom’s mother would say, “Don’t be embarrassed.  You have nothing that I don’t have only mine is older and more hairy.”  In my mom’s version of this talk about my emerging breasts, she’d discuss why “my girls’ would need to be put into a torturous lingerie device from now on.  I not only lost the freedom of letting “my girls” swing freely in breeze, but when my mother stridently told me once more that I was born with a vagina and would never become a boy, I didn’t answer with my usual “IT WILL GROW”.  Those words withered in my throat like the erection that I would never have.  Eventually, those tiny oven-stuffer roaster pop-ups became more the size of DD chickens and years later, I grew that hair that Nanna told me about down below.  Not even Ken had that.

I gave up on wanting to grow a Johnson, but continue to hold their membership in high esteem.  As is said when someone harbors a bias, “some of my best friends have penises.”  I’ve gone through life without the ability to pee standing up or to write my name in the snow.  Maybe I should just change my name to Dot so I can enjoy that male snow-day rite of passage? All-in-all, it doesn’t matter, as in the Titanic moments of life, I’ll beat Paul Andrew’s ass into a lifeboat every time!

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When I was 3, we lived in Westchester County, NY. I was the youngest of 3 girls with Lauren, 15 months older, and Debbie (now Devra) being 6 years older. My Nana or Aunt Roshi would usually babysit us, but occasionally my parents would need to hire a babysitter. When this happened, we’d usually have a neighborhood girl, Mickey Resicue, babysit us. One of our other neighbors living up the street had an age appropriate daughter, Joanne, who was a known bad seed. Joanne’s mother regularly would tell my Mom that her daughter loved the 3 of us and wanted to babysit us. She’d beg my Mom to just give Joanne a chance and to let her prove herself at least once. Joanne not only could be seen coming out of the woods blowing smoke rings, but had a much older boyfriend with a car. My Mom feared that Joanne might smoke in the house and burn it down or ignore the 3 of us, while she might be getting felt up in our rumpus room. Finally, one night, with no other choice of a babysitter, my Mom had little choice but to give the little scamp, Joanne, a shot at sitting for us.

My parents dressed up, as Joanne warmed up some Swanson Turkey TV Dinners; which already made it a special night for Lauren and me. On their way out, my Mom told Joanne that she’d be calling regularly and that no smoking or boys would be allowed in the house. Joanne told her not to worry that she’d play with us until our bedtime and would ensure that we got to bed on time. With that they cautiously left us for the evening in the hands of the bad seed babysitter.

First, we played a typical game of Candyland, which posed no danger as we travelled along the Gumdrop Mountains and Candy Cane Forest. That killed the first 20 minutes. We moved on to a heated Kerplunk Tournament and we were quickly growing bored. Joanne started holding the pick-up sticks like a missing cigarette. With a little time before bed, Lauren and I decided to have Joanne join us playing Barbie’s, before we would be read a bedtime story and sent off to dreamland. Since Lauren and I were not only Debbie’s younger sister, but we were the youngest girl cousins of a long line of girl cousins, we had hand-me-downs of probably some of the earliest Barbie’s and Ken’s not to mention a few of their predecessors from the Old Country. From my really old cousins with their then-1950’s state of the art dolls, we inherited Helga who had a thicker waist than Barbie along with the Shirley doll, who came with corrective shoes instead of Barbie’s “F-me pumps.” Debbie and Joanne did us a solid and took the Eastern Bloc Barbies. I chose my usual, Ken. Lauren got the premier pick of our newest Barbie, who probably was at least 10 years old by then.

As we nicely played, Joanne started filling our little pliable minds by pointing out that our Barbie and Ken couldn’t have Jones as their last name, as our models just weren’t keeping up. Joanne kept baiting us saying things like, “you know the new Barbies have real hair and not paint” or “have you seen how real the new Barbie looks? She even has bendable legs.” Just as Lauren and I started really feeling like the “Little Match Girl,” Joanne told our little Play-Doh brains that she could give our Barbie and Ken real hair and bendable legs. Being older, Debbie thought we should make the Helga and Shirley dolls our Fair Ladies before moving to the A-Listers, Ken and Barbie. Joanne pushed back saying that she never heard of a Shirley or Helga doll and how they certainly wouldn’t have real hair except maybe a moustache. She kept talking about how she wished she was our age and could’ve had the new Barbie and Ken. Lauren and I were hooked on plastonics and agreed that Joanne would become our Barbie and Ken stylist.

With Debbie watching the black and white tv, Joanne found the raw materials of the real hair drawing from her young charges. Lauren lost a few inches of her black curly locks to be sacrificed for Barbie, while Ken became the recipient of a strawberry blonde donation from me as less of my tress was need to coif a male doll. She explained that in the transformation process, the bendable leg process had to come ahead of the real hair attachment. She grabbed my mom’s cast iron pan and a stick of butter and got to work. Instead of going to a Barbie spa, Ken and Barbie were unceremoniously dumped into the frying pan to soften the legs into the new bendable versions. While the legs now bent, they also flattened a bit, as Joanne proceeded to glue our hair onto Barbie and Ken’s heads. The euphoria that Lauren and I felt was short-lived, as Barbie and Ken’s bendable legs cooled off and hardened and the Elmer’s clumped up under the hair. Forget the Barbie Dream House, this was a nightmare! Lauren and I cried ourselves to sleep with our new Barbie and Ken now ruined forever at the hands of Dr. Sitterstein.

When we woke up the next morning, my Mom had already walked up the street with her cast iron pan with its Barbie leg residue telling Joanne’s Mom that her daughter would never again be trusted to take care of her daughters, our dolls, or even her cookware. Later that day, my Mom made an arts and crafts project out of de-wigging Ken and Barbie and painting their heads with real looking hair. Fortunately, that bad seed kept her freaky hands off of my favorite toy leaving Raggedy Andy unscathed.