“Learning the Birds and the Bees via the Playboy Bunnies”
…it surprised me when my mom decided to turn our basement into a functioning apartment by installing a bathroom and paneling the brick walls prior to taking in a border. She insisted that we needed the extra money. (I later came to realize that for my mom “extra” meant money for more than just survival but for relative luxury, too.)
Our border, Mr. McConnell, and I squared off on the first day as his way of teasing me included playful poking while calling me punk, “C’mon, punk, let’s see what you got.” Meanwhile, he treated my thicker older brother with cordial respect, which even then I felt certain amounted to the shrewd Mr. McConnell planting a seed for the future in case my mom’s big boy needed to intervene on her behalf.
Indeed, not too long after Mr. McConnell settled in, I noticed that whenever my mom descended the basement stairs, presumably to check up on him, the conditions under which he lived, she started returning to our home upstairs later and later in the evenings; and eventually on weekend days, when she didn’t work nights, she crept up in the early mornings.
I don’t recall having particularly strong feelings about whatever their relationship. I may have felt that my mom, still quite young and beautiful, deserved love, and if what she and Mr. McConnell shared constituted a love affair, at least for a while she seemed happier, freer.
Though he remained in the basement, he began joining us for our regular meals, sitting manspread at the head of the table, and otherwise indulging himself in the benefits of being the “man of the house,” (the man of my mother’s house, mind you). On that score, specifically, he provided unsolicited and seriously unwanted advice to my big brother and me about being a “man,” all the while reminding me of my “punk” nature.
As Mr. McConnell kept stacks of Playboy magazines in his basement, which my brother and me regularly slipped down the stairs to probe (while maintaining an intense silence between us), one of Mr. McConnell’s funnier attempts at de facto fatherhood involved teaching my brother and me the birds and the bees via the bunnies, the Playboy Bunnies!
“See that, punk, that’s a pussy.”
“A pussy?” I teased because I liked the sound of the word.
“A pussy, punk!”
When I muttered “pussy, punk,” my big brother smiled because he knew how I enjoyed playing the rascal.
“Your-dick-goes-in-to-the-pussy, punk.”
After his automated explanation, Mr. McConnell demonstrated by sliding one hand’s pointer in and out of an improvised circle made by the other hand’s pointer and thumb.
“Like this?”
I immediately mimicked his gesture and encouraged my brother to join in, and so we three men, three fucking dumbasses!, sat jerking our fingers.
Excited by his effective teaching strategy, which seemed to affirm his manhood, Mr. McConnell flipped up his mattress and grabbed his secret stash of the raunchier Penthouse magazines, clearly more explicit than the cartoonish Playboys.
He pointed to a picture of huge and fully extended dick about to penetrate a widened and moist-looking pussy, which, I must admit left me wide-eyed, entranced, and savoring the word “pussy.”
Mr. McConnell seemed exceedingly proud, so I wondered if he identified with the big dick dude in the picture, and I felt conflicted about that because I knew he must have had a big one himself as he didn’t seem to have much else going on—and, after all, he was fucking my awesome mom.
Still, I shouldn’t have asked.
“Is yours big like that, Mr. McConnell? (You got a big one?)”
I can’t exactly recall my tone, but anyway he took it the wrong way.
“You a faggot, punk? You ain’t no faggot, is’ you, punk?”
Mr. McConnell appealed to my brother who, to his credit, refused to betray me that time by maintaining a blank face.
“A faggot?” I asked innocently as I could muster. “What’s that, Mr. McConnell?” (I had to suppress my giggle when I asked.)
“A faggot is a man worried about another man’s dick!”
THE END