Actually I had quite given up on Confession by the time I was nine. By the time I was five I was extremely confident of my damnation, and figured I should get used to it as soon as possible in order to get a jump start on eternity.
That's why I thought Sartre was a bit of a weenie, although I quite enjoyed NO Exit. I thought, however, that he had dumbed down Milton with the notion that Hell is other people. Hell is your head.
In my damnable innocence, perversion was a virtual modus operandi. Much to my mother's mortification, I had a natural erotic bent which first went public in Trashtown at a playground called Salem Park (an amusing bit of trivia for those naive New Age gibberers who have accused me of having been a Warlock in a previous incarnation).
I had a lovely favorite playmate named Gail, and I delighted in her company as it appears she did in mine. Like most intelligent children we cared not for the company of the the sand flinging baboons we were kept with.
We retreated into our own private play space behind a small pigeon tormented monument dedicated to some two bit political whatever. When I visited the place years later I was astonished at how tiny it truly was. I had forgotten that it had a seat, albeit one that could barely fit a pair of adult midgets. Sic transit gloria mundi. Nevertheless, for us seemed like a looming fortress of privacy. And it remains a monument in my memories.
We found entertainment first by holding hands and kissing on our pink little four year old lips. We made golden pledges of forever friendships and talked about stealing a knife from our parents in order to carve our initials in a heart on a tree.
We settled for drawing hearts with sticks in the dirt as "practice" for the "real thing" that those huge grown up eleven year olds would do. Every day we'd meet and draw the hearts again and pledge affection that would outlast each heart that we knew never even survive the night. We'd check each day and found each one had one way or another been wiped away.
Into this little paradise came ruin and damnation, and alas, its name was mine. Ever the explorer, I encouraged greater degrees of intimacy.
I had no real idea of what I was doing. I loved to stroke her cheek with my pinky. I tried to kiss her neck, but it made her ticklish. In our secret pigeon shit protected world, we became little explorers.
Most of the territories were not as conducive to our affections as our favorite acts of holding hands and lip to lip kisses, and we usually settled back on those familiar comforts. I believe these two actions really are the most "natural" acts to children, and even at that time I felt most of the other "experiments" were foolish failures, but worth the effort. As any scientist will tell us, failure is the only measure of success.
In any case, Satan-like I have digressed and diverted you from the perdition that awaited our Paradise. After many a beautiful summer day, just after we had written a fresh heart with a an oak twig we had torn fat acorns off, Gail had to pee.
She wanted me to watch. I was fascinated and right after she was done, I wanted to kiss her there. She said something like OOOH, that's disgusting. I said I didn't care, and I'd do it if she dared me. She dared me. (I've gotten in more trouble accepting dares...)
The denouement: I did it. She liked it and didn't want me to stop. Her mother stumbled on us and went nuclear. Grabbing my arms out from under Gail’s open ivory thighs she scooped me up by the armpits, and tossed me into a freshly raked pile of moist Autumn leaves. Musky with mud, their aroma made me think of cinnamon when I landed on their cushion of orange and gold.
She screamed for my mother, who was on the other side of the pocket park (a world away as far as Gail and I were concerned), engrossed in the lecture notes she was composing for a calculus class she was giving the following day. After an eternity of maternal hysteria and phone calls I could barely understand, but involved my name in very unpleasant tones, we were never together at the park again.
A few weeks later (it felt like centuries to me, thus my understanding of the damned) Gail got pneumonia and started crying my name in the hospital, and apparently was very ill. The mothers had an entente and I was brought to the hospital, and so help me God, er...Satan? When I walked in, and this part I remember with luminous clarity, she rolled over on her side on the sick crib and looked awful. Then the next thing I can remember, she started jumping up and down on the crib like it was a trampoline! Smiling and laughing. I remember a wave of happiness in my heart that felt like a California tubular surf. I had missed her with an orgasmic depth, and her transformation brings joy even in the memory forty four years later.
Nevertheless, in some kind of mutual maternal understanding, which we two children were never to be fated to understand, apparently our mothers decided that that meeting would be our last. And so it was.
Of this kind of perversion I have been guilty from earliest childhood, but I knew that its confession would be a waste of breath. I accepted my damnation with understandable misgivings when I reached the age of Reason at Seven, but figured that since there was no turning back, why bother to bring anything to the confessional? In fact, in prayer once I said to God, that since she'd built it(I knew God had no sex so I'd interchange it at will) why doesn't she come by and visit me sometime?
I knew perfectly well that withholding my sins was also a mortal sin, but I had pretty much thought the whole thing through. You can't be damned twice, and a child in a Catholic School still has to go through the weekly confession on a cumpulsory basis. To pervert Rimbaud-Why rock a drunken boat?
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