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was the normal business of spending the night at each other’s houses, soul-searing arguments, riding bikes out into the country, stealing watermelons and ripe tomatoes, and playing with our “ding dongs.”
    Up till puberty I was omnisexual, and extremely so! Genitals were the most fascinating things I’d ever known about—my own, the little girl’s next door, those of all the other boys and girls I knew, even the dog’s and cat’s. After I was twelve or thirteen, girls suddenly decided we boys could no longer be their doctors, so we had no choice but to turn to each other. This pleased me.
    I had perceived quite early that girls’ “things” were hollow in roughly the same proportion as mine was protuberant and precociously suggested to Sadie Sue (the little girl next door) that we try sticking mine into hers. “Don’t be stupid!” she huffed—”Yours doesn’t belong in mine.” She was exactly nine months older than I, and I believed whatever she told me (if I didn’t, she’d hit me), and this was no exception. I wonder at times, only half-facetiously, whether I don’t still believe her.
    At puberty, I entered my “romantic” phase, suffering through Wuthering Heights and such like, writhing in ecstasy (with real tears) over Shelley’s more maudlin efforts, though at the same time building ship models, reading Treasure Island and the Bounty trilogy over and over again, and dreaming of adventure.
    Team sports never interested me in the least, though I liked swimming and track quite a lot, and was good at them in an offhand sort of way, as long as they weren’t on a competitive level, which turned me off completely. I never cared about winning. In fact, the only ambition I ever had was to be happy.
    I was also taking piano lessons and tended naturally toward the most severely classical pieces, like Bach, and the more lyrical things, like Mozart, etc. I heard my first opera—one of the first Met broadcasts, I guess—one Saturday when I was in bed with measles, and liked it right away. Rigoletto, I guess it was. So I became a devotee of the opera broadcasts—the only opera Baton Rouge offered at that time. Though Huey Long had brought down one of the old Met stars, Pasquale Amato, to head the opera department at the new Louisiana State University, and they gave a couple of operas a year, which I didn’t see.
    I remember the flap when Long was assassinated. It meant nothing to me, but I was fascinated by the marks of the bullets in the Capitol walls and kept going back to look at them. People talked of nothing else for ever so long.
    My first acquaintance with anything like jazz, other than what we heard on the radio, came from a maid who worked for us (seven days a week, including laundry and cleaning and cooking, for $ 4 . 50 a week!). She was always singing jazzily away in the kitchen and taught me some of her songs, mostly spirituals, true to the stereotype. She also, at my insistence, once showed me her breasts, which I evilly pinched.
    And when I was twelve there was the incident of “Sweety,” the ice cream man, who would give me and my friends free ice cream and invite us up to his room for sex. We went gladly and thought nothing of it—after all, it was what we did all the time anyhow—the novelty being the ice cream! He also unknowingly provided more data for my foreskin file. Then he was arrested and we were all taken down to the police station to identify him. He was naturally packed away to prison, poor guy.
    This was all taking place against the ghastly backdrop of World War II. I see it only now as ghastly. At the time I found it merely exciting or, at times when the discussions at table took a serious turn, tedious. Whereas life had been, before the war, comfortable (despite the Depression) and peaceful and nice, it was still all these things but was now charged with an energetic