The Best Little Boy in the World Read Free

I mean, the BLBITW couldn't possibly be so OUT OF IT! I was superpolite, maybe, but not superbright as I was supposed to be. What kind of idiot doesn't even know his own religion? I was sure everyone else in the class knew. Chip Morgan certainly knew. He knew what was coming off, believe me. Chip Morgan was wearing white bucks and playing spin the bottle before I had ever heard of either one, for crying out loud.
    And if I was superpolite, it was for the wrong reasons. I was not polite because I loved other people or was considerate or believed in the Golden Rule, or any of that other crap. I was a goody-goody because it was the proven road to reward. It was the way to play the game. I was one very Establishment little kid. And deep down, I knew I wasn't "good" at all—just selfish, just out for myself. I was a phony, and I knew it.
    Meanwhile, the religion thing went even further. If I didn't know my own religion, do you suppose that could mean that I didn't believe in God? Aged seven, and already a heretic. With one simple question the researcher had discovered the evil lurking within me.
    There really was evil lurking within me. I didn't want there to be. I didn't ask for it. But it was there. For example, I always forgot the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and to the Anointeth-My-Head-With-Oil psalm that we did at the beginning of every day. And while I made the best show of mouthing the words that I could, deep down I knew that I was the only one in the class who didn't understand what the things meant, even, let alone believe that the Lord was my shepherd. "Anointeth"?
    But while I was dumb, I was not so dumb as to let on just how dumb I was. You never caught me asking what "anointeth" meant. Or, later, "masturbate."
     

 

     
    I learned to masturbate the same year I learned to fart. Eighteen. I was a sophomore in college. I had been to Europe twice, had won most of the academic honors at my high school and six varsity letters. But I had not learned to fart. Or to masturbate.
    I had never farted because I knew it was a bad thing to do: The family would drive to Brewster every Friday evening, and back on Sundays, eating the peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwiches my mother had made and listening to Our Miss Brooks, whenever we could catch it on the radio, or, mainly, fighting. That is, my brother and I would be fighting in the back seat—DON'T CROSS THAT LINE!-and my father would be for crying out loud in the front, wondering how he could be responsible for such brats, while my mother would be predicting imminent 60-mile-an-hour gory disaster if we didn't behave ourselves and let our poor father concentrate on his driving, during all of which I would be getting clobbered, physically and psychologically, by my brother's intimidations—which I probably invited out of excruciating boredom—when all of a sudden the tables would turn. GOLIATH! The car hushed. We all knew instantly, without a word spoken—it is bad enough to do it, let alone speak of it (of course, at the time I didn't know there was a word for it).... GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! I would already have rolled down mine, hand to my throat, looking as nauseated as possible, playing my brother's lapse in manners for all it was worth, again... gasping for fresh air, but really basking in my undisputed supremacy: The BLBITW would never do a disgusting thing like that. Here was a level on which I, at little more than half his age and something less than half his weight, could compete and win time after time. For some reason it took him years to learn control, and by the time he finally had, and we could make it all the way from Brewster to the East Side without so much as a single GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! he was about ready to go off to college. Which left me, naturally, the undisputed best little boy around.
    Though sibling rivalry had a lot to do with my hermetically sealed anus, there was more to it than that. Once when I was very young, three or