STEVE HENDRIE had been my friend first.

After Carl and my mother got married in August of 1974, the month before I started eighth grade, we moved to a brand-new subdivision. Briarcliffe sold seven kinds of house, all with bogus British names. The most popular models were the split-level Richmond and the L-shaped Somerset ranch. Three out of every five houses in Briarcliffe were Richmonds or Somersets. I had grown up believing that poor people lived in split-levels and ranches. Rich people had full staircases.

We lived in an Andover. A two-story, four-bedroom Dutch Colonial, the Andover was the most expensive Briarcliffe model, at $45,500. There were only five of them in the entire subdivision. Three pillars graced the front porch, but the window shutters were resin, the porch itself was unfinished concrete, and there was no center hall. The last two houses we lived in before the divorce had center halls, and now my mother had settled for a living room that led right into the dining room without even the possibility of pocket doors. The demotion bugged me even more because she acted like it didn't matter. Less to keep clean, she said.

After a week of watching me mope, my mother pushed me outside one Saturday afternoon while she painted the laundry room and Carl worked at hooking up the central air-conditioning system. Up and down Kingston Drive, flats of lumber waited to become Richmonds and Somersets. Three houses had sod deliveries; their front yards were dotted with grass snack cakes, giant chocolate mint rolls drying in the sun. The littlest kids were racing down the brand-new sidewalks in their Big Wheels; the ten-year-olds were throwing dirt clods at each other through the ribs of half-built houses.

I walked around the block to Durham Drive with the vague idea of investigating a horse farm behind the south border of the subdivision, but the pillars of another Andover, this one with gray siding, not our goldenrod, stopped me. A boy was lying propped on his elbows on the driveway, a basketball pinned between his ankles. He shaded his eyes and said hey. Steve Hendrie was a year younger, but standing up he was two inches taller. His widow's peak, his brush haircut, and his pointed teeth made me think of the Wolf Man. The dark hairs on his arms made my stomach turn over. Mine were blond and sparse. Steve Hendrie was miles ahead in the race to puberty. I pushed away the image of the Bower Junior High boys' locker room, an all too imminent proving ground, and announced that I lived in an Andover too.

Steve said that his Andover cost more than mine because their lot bordered the Morton Arboretum and their view would never be spoiled. After he told me that his sister Tanya had silver-dollar-sized nipples and that his parents, who were chiropractors, shoved their fingers up their patients' butts to fix their backs, I knew it would be easy to avoid shooting baskets with him. I had only to mention the magazines in our basement for Steve to heave the ball onto the front porch and fall in beside me on the sidewalk.

Covered with two inches of small white rocks, our basement crawlspace was home to Christmas decorations, tax returns, bags of salt pellets for the water softener, and Carl's porn. He had boxes of all the latest magazines, but also every single issue of Playboy. He kept the ones from the fifties in individual plastic bags. Collector's items, worth real money, my mother had said, scraping a spot on her pants with a thumbnail when I brought up the subject of what I'd helped carry down the basement stairs during the move. She never said I was supposed to keep out of them.

I led Steve to the box of the most recent Penthouses and Vivas and Ouis; their pictures were raunchier. His knees collected a layer of fine rock powder as he hunted for beaver. When he twisted to reach for more, he'd swat at the light bulb string, thinking an insect had landed on his neck. Sitting apart, I played host, on supposed lookout for Carl. The real fact of the matter was that apart from the rare man-plus-woman photo spreads, known as Playboy pictorials, my basement pleasures were literary. Steve would zip through the pictures while I pored over Xaviera Hollander's Happy Hooker column and the Playboy Advisor. In those days, Penthouse also published a separate magazine of personal experience letters called Forum that I couldn't get enough of. No detail that the writers described to reach their identical destination—a mind-blowing, world record orgasm—struck me as extraneous or repetitious. I read letters in the gloom until my eyes hurt. Carl had books too: Casanova's complete Memoirs, all of Henry Miller, and Fanny Hill lined up on shelves by his workbench. I didn't bother with them, but one September afternoon, with Steve mouth-breathing in the crawlspace, I opened a volume of drawings called The Erotic Art of Japan that was sitting out next to a cracked fish tank.

The contrast between the blank faces of the Japanese couples and the angry, diving animals beneath their robes made me physically sick. Every pubic hair on the women's quivering pussy lips was a separate, bristling spear. The hard cocks, every vein a river, every pee hole a gash, were a shock, as were the aggressive squats and jets of squirt. Turning the pages, I saw giant black dildos, an octopus sucking between a woman's legs, a boy spread-eagled on a standing bald-headed monk, and everywhere the same blank, unreadable faces watching me.

I threw the book down like a hot potato. Thumbing through it, Steve said he'd rather look at real people. "Me too," I shouted with relief. I preferred the soft-focus pictorial shots, women swishing cotton drapes between their legs or unhooking their garters in meadows, mustaches tickling nipples, sunlight baking a man's butt fuzz.

For months of Saturdays, I watched Steve Hendrie tent his trousers in my basement. I watched his teeth, white as the rocks beneath us, the soft purple creases at the corners of his eyelids, darker in the morning or when he was sleepy. The same purple was streaked in the folds of his elbows and the backs of his knees. I was thirteen years old and praying for the hair on my arms to get dark, and everyone and everything was sexed up. Or maybe it was the silicone seventies that were oversexed, I don't know. But I do know that because I was thirteen, I thought sex began with me. That the Japanese had been doing it, and doing it all those crazy ways for hundreds of years, was the most upsetting thing.

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