Southern Comfort_(0)

Summer in the south was always unpleasant to me: hot, humid, and with very little to do. It wasn’t that I liked school; no fourteen year-old does. It was just that, without school, I was really the only kid my age living in my town. It was an old mining town, but the mine had moved on, leaving a small cluster of old houses and a few tired old stores on the main street. The highway no longer passed through, so there were seldom any visitors, and much more importantly to a boy my age, the girl in town closest to my age was four. At least when I went to school there were girls there, but I felt myself doomed to be a spectator, because they were all from the city to the west and I was nothing but a hick.

My mother, rest her soul, died when I was seven, so for half my life the only family I had was my daddy and the dogs. Daddy worked as a trash collector in the city, so most of the time it was just me and our four dogs: Fudd, the youngest, a droopy basset hound who seemed to be unable to do anything other than sniff things; Townes Van Zandt, named for the singer, whom everyone knew as TVZ because he was a common sight on anyone’s porch; the old hound Po, who had been my mother’s favorite and who was older than I, and the bitch, Jinni, a soft, likable dog, about knee-high, whose name was really Virginia Wolf, which I thought was pretty funny at the time, even though I didn’t know who Virginia Woolf was.

I mention them all because they really were like family to me, and they all thought I was a puppy because I had been running with them since I was old enough to know how. I used to run naked through the fields, laughing and tackling them, and they in turn would lick my face and jump on me and knock me over, and then Fudd would sniff my butt. A dumb dog, Fudd, but I loved him anyway.

But in the height of summer it was too hot to do anything other than sit in the house in my underwear with a fan blowing on me, and all four dogs would come and lie at my feet and pant. We couldn’t afford cable TV and being in a valley as we were, no one in our town could get much of anything on the rabbit ears, so usually I sat there and read.

Now it’s a myth that southern country folk are more conservative sexually; they may not show it off, but there’s just as much hanky-panky going on in a small town in the holler as there is in a big city up north. There were two boys other than me in our town, although to call them boys isn’t really accurate because they were more than old enough to shave, as people said. But they treated me like a kid brother, and it was from them that I learned everything I knew about women and carnality, as our preacher used to call it. They sometimes got nudie magazines from the city, and when they got tired of their old ones they would give them to me. I think my daddy knew about it but he never said anything; he even caught me once with my hand down my pants reading one behind another book, but he just grinned and left the room. I guess he figured that at least I wasn’t turning out queer from not having any women around. Truth was, I knew some “queers” and they seemed all right to me, no different from anybody else, but I had no desire to join them. I loved the female form too much.

So on those hot summer days when there was nothing else to do and my daddy was away in the city, I would sit in front of the fan and look at my copies of Playboy and Penthouse, worn from use and sometimes stained by unknown liquids, and I would imagine what it would be like to have a girl like the one in the pictures ready and willing.