recall the summer that Jody introduced me to the beast as a dry, thundery time. The smell of ozone filled the air and each day threatened to be the one when rain might finally come, yet didn't. A looming thunderhead brooded over the Coast Range westward like a sentinel, and the atmosphere felt as still as stone. Of course, after all these years, it's a fair bet that my memories have lost touch with sharp-edged reality. Looming thunderheads seldom threaten the tranquility of the Willamette Valley. My turgid recollections aren't going to change that.

It was my twelfth summer. Mom and I lived in an apartment complex called Shiloh Glen, a dismal place built of yellow bricks, miles from anywhere interesting. The only diversions were swimming in Shiloh's kidney-shaped pool or riding bikes on the driveway which circled the complex. Beyond that drive, tulip fields stretched to infinity, or at least to the range of a boy's bicycle.

I was a semi-member of a loose confederation of eighth graders who all lived in Shiloh. We hung out together not so much because we were friends, but because we had territory, teachers, and gonads in common. Yet I stood apart from the other guys, though unwillingly. First of all, my mother had named me Leslie. While Leslie may have been a perfectly decent boy's name in her day, it had been co-opted by girls in the years hence. I went by Les, but everyone knew that it wasn't Les-as-in-Lester, or something cool like that. It was Leslie, period. I was also the youngest of the group, more than eight months younger than anyone else. I hung around with them. I shot the bull and bitched about school with them. Nevertheless, because of my name and my age, I felt like a boy among men.

Yet the main thing that set me apart during that turbulent summer was the curious discomfort I felt whenever the topic of sex came up in casual conversation. And because sex was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about, I always felt curiously uncomfortable. We had received our first dose of sex-ed the previous school year, and we yearned to put our untested, yet clearly expert, knowledge to work. In fact, by the time school let out, we all had put it to work. At least, we told each other we had. The tales grew with the telling, each yarn surpassing the last through a boundless escalation of detail. To hear us talk, you'd think the sexual exploits of the Shiloh Confederation were something out of legend.

There was a standard formula for relating a sexual conquest. It usually started with a bunch of us studs-in-training sitting around someone's bedroom comparing the length of our pubic hair while we traded fantasies around like baseball cards. Eventually, one of the studs would mutter something like, "Man, wait till I tell you who I made it with." If we were willing to grant that he might have "made it" with anybody, we greeted his comment with choruses of "All right! Who?" The stud would briefly feign reluctance, and then finally allow that it was someone like the hot student teacher from typing class. Having accepted his lie, the rest of us would moan with delight and wriggle around because we were developing uncomfortable erections.

"Well," he'd say, "she came up to me after class. She said she thought I was pretty hot. She said she wanted to me do her up right."

"All right! Excellent." We'd wriggle some more, praying that no one would notice our big boners. Of course everyone noticed, but to mention another's unplanned boner was taboo, even in a joke.

The stud continued. "I took her into [absurd location, like the equipment room in the gym]. Man, she was all over me, she wanted it so bad. First she [unlikely act involving mouth] and then I [improbable act involving the rending of clothing] and then, after she was naked, I whipped it out. It was a monster, I was so hot. She was all over it. She [truly implausible act involving mouth again]. 'Enough of that,' I told her after a while. Then I [completely unbelievable act involving the friction of genitalia]."

The genital acts were always the least imaginative part of the stories, yet inevitably greeted with the most enthusiasm. Plenty of throaty "All rights!" urged the stud on as he described his frictive activity in heroic detail. And he always produced herculean amounts of semen—usually enough to drown a small dog.

Ultimately, the tales all ended pretty much the same: "Man, she loved it. I wore her out, but she was begging for more." Which was the most unbelievable part of all. The trouble with these stories was that, like all outright lies, they quickly crumbled when held up to the light. Therefore, to question inconsistencies closely was the greatest taboo of all.

My own tales of conquest were always greeted the same. "Yeah, right, Les-lie. Bet you left her achin', eh, pal? Har har har." My distinction as eight-months-younger was a chronic barrier to verisimilitude in the eyes of my cronies. And as if that weren't enough, I put too many details into my tales -stuff like the color and pattern of my conquest's underwear, which everyone knew real studs didn't take time to notice, they were so hot.

The details weren't something I could help. Everyone recognized that a boy named Leslie couldn't possibly be as studly as a boy named, say, John Roberts. As a result, John got at least five turns at bragging for every one of mine. Since I didn't get as many chances, I tried to compensate by making them as spicy as possible, at the expense of credibility.

The simple fact was, everyone believed John—no one believed me. Especially John. He'd stare at me while I rambled through one of my imaginary capers, shaking his head. I found his stare daunting, and too often I cracked under the pressure. Once I faltered, John would say something like, "Wow, Les. I especially liked the pink flowered panties part."

John was almost fifteen, and as much of a leader as the Shiloh Confederation had. His stories all had the virtue of breaking the formula. He never mentioned names, as though he was protecting the virtue of some fair maid. It was always, "The Girl." Plus, he was less interested in recounting the mundane details of wetness and friction than more unusual tidbits. "Yeah," he told us once, "we did it on her bed while her mom was downstairs baking cookies or something. The old lady didn't even know I was there. In the mirror beside the Girl's bed, I could see my head and shoulders. Every so often my butt bobbed up high enough that I could see it too. It was pretty hilarious. Every time my butt popped up I started to laugh. I think the Girl got kind of pissed.

"Then her mom yelled something and started up the stairs. I thought I was gonna choke. I rolled onto the floor and slid under the bed. I heard the Girl pull the covers up. My clothes were all over the floor and I started dragging them under with me, but I missed my underwear. They were in the middle of the floor when the door opened.

"The old lady stood there for a minute and I thought it was because she saw the underwear. But then she said, 'Honey, what's going on? Why are you in bed?'

"The Girl said, 'I'm just tired is all.'

"The old lady was quiet for a while again and I was really sweating. The only thing I had going for me was that the room was enough of a mess that maybe she wouldn't notice my shorts.

"She said, 'Sweetheart, is there something you want to tell me?' The Girl said no and her mom came and sat on the edge of the bed. All she had to do was look down to get a big eyeful of Fruit-of-the-Looms.

"She said, 'It's okay to tell me, dear. I won't be angry.' There was another long quiet and the Girl didn't answer. Finally her mom said, all serious, 'Honey, have you been . . . masturbating?'

"Man, I thought I was going to bust a gut. I can't believe the old lady didn't hear me snorting under there, trying not to laugh. But she didn't and after babbling about it being natural and all she left. I wanted to finish what I'd started but the The Girl told me to get lost. Kinda touchy, I guess."

With the aid of John Roberts, the Shiloh Confederation and I confronted what I later came to realize is one of life's great truths: sex itself is often less of an adventure than the efforts that go into finding it or into escaping safely after it is over. Amen.

Jody lived around Shiloh somewhere. She was the same age as John Roberts, and she was pretty sweet. Ordinarily she would have made a prime target for our verbal conquests. Unfortunately, she knew most of the guys well enough that it would have been pretty easy for her to reveal the truth of any storied events. I recall thinking she was involved with John, though I can't remember seeing them together any more often than I saw her with anybody else. And besides, John was the kind of guy who seemed to be involved with everybody.

Jody showed up one weekday morning while my mom was at work. The day had edged past eleven, and I was lying around in the spare room watching Gilligan's Island. Gilligan was keeping a diary and the other castaways were desperate to learn its secrets. Everyone had a trick. The Skipper appealed to friendship, the Howells to greed. Ginger tried to seduce Gilligan in order to get a glimpse. I remember wishing Mary Ann would try to seduce him. I had a crush on Mary Ann and I certainly felt a bond with Gilligan. Of course she didn't comply with my longings—she baked him a coconut cream pie or something. But my mind was only half on the show that morning. I was mainly waiting to see if the thunder would keep the pool from opening at noon.

Other studs might come over at any time, just to hang out and swap lies or to harass me, so I wasn't surprised when the doorbell rang. The surprise came when I looked through the peephole and saw Jody. I pulled the door open and there she stood, wearing a white tee-shirt that hung midway down her thighs with pink shorts peeking out underneath. She seemed edgy, and not just from the impending thunder. She transmitted the feeling to me. A faint, uncertain smile graced her lips.

"Hey, Les. What's going on?"

I shrugged. "Just watching TV."

"Oh."

At once I felt a cool sweat break out on my lower back. At twelve, I wasn't real quick on the uptake, but I recognized that girls showing up at a boy's door with nothing more to say than, "What's going on?" was suspicious behavior. I didn't know Jody all that well. The gulf created by two years age difference and by Jody's pubescent good looks served to keep us from ever becoming close. Not that she couldn't be friendly, but the bottom line was that she had never been to my apartment, and in fact, I had never been alone with her before.

I think I must have just stared at her long while my syrupy thoughts oozed relentlessly forward. She was taller than me, blond, with a tiny little nose and brown eyes too small and too far apart for her ever to be considered truly beautiful. She ranked high in my estimations nonetheless. Her plush lips could fuel more than their share of fantasies, and her breasts had progressed beyond the nubs that most girls my age possessed. Even were she to turn around and walk away right then, the very fact of her appearance would have later given rise to all sorts of impure thoughts. But she didn't leave. She stood there and matched my stare.

She broke the silence at last. "Can I come in?"

"Uh, yeah. Sure." I moved out of the way and she stepped into our living room. She glanced around, her brow slightly creased. Her attention seemed unfocused.

"You want to come watch TV?" I asked after another long silence. She startled slightly, then turned to me. I remember hearing a distant rumble and realizing that swimming was probably out that day, and I remember an aroma, kind of verdant and steamy, that I associated with Jody. Her cheeks were red and her pupils dilated. Part of me wanted to be somewhere else, but what could I do? I'd invited her in.

"I heard your mother got a new bed," she said.

Her statement caught me off guard. Hard telling what I expected, but reference to my mom's bed—a huge, orthopedic job that she had gotten to help her bad back -was definitely not it.

"Yeah," I said, bewildered. "So what?"

"Do you mind if I try it out?"

Why, I thought, do you have a bad back? But I didn't say that. I shrugged and said, "Sure." I led her to my mom's bedroom and pointed to the bed. "Sure is big," she said.

I nodded. "Mom's a big woman."

Jody sauntered to the bed and I backed away, figuring—hoping—she wanted to be alone. I wandered back into the tv room in a daze. I felt a warm spot in my stomach.

All my stud compatriots would have told the story like this: "Yeah, she came to the door and I could tell she was hot. Man, she wanted it bad, and I knew I was the one to give it to her. I took her into my mom's bedroom and put it to her right there on the orthopedic bed." That's how they would tell it, but that's not how it happened, and I doubt that's how it would have happened if it had been one of them in my place.

At twelve, you dream about the warm pleasures, but you never believe that they will come to you. Ever. You talk like a macho man, but in the presence of the fairer sex you behave like a dweeb. I have no idea if Jody was "hot" when she came over, or if the heat rose later. For all I know, she was as nervous as I was, and just as uncertain about how to proceed. When I went back to Gilligan, it wasn't because I was a moron who couldn't see the obvious. It was because I was a scared boy trying to pretend that the obvious wasn't what it seemed. Jody's motives for being there, her true motives, weren't an issue. I was too unsophisticated to concern myself with the subtleties in the deeper regions of her mind—the stuff on the surface had already scared the pee out of me.

In something like two minutes she showed up at the door of the den. "Don't you wanna join me?" she said. (Or, as a stud would tell it, "Come take me, you brute.")

I like to think she didn't notice me swallow thickly before I said, "I'm not tired." I doubt she heard me—the words came out as a hoarse whisper. She smiled and came to me and took my hand. "Come on. It's a good bed."

I can't remember much of what happened during the next several minutes—I only know that they were minutes and not hours because when I finally returned to the den it was not yet noon. Jody led me down a hallway filled with scintillating grey light. Windows were open all over the apartment and a rising wind rushed in past the curtains. The thunder tarried in the distance, but it was coming. I knew it was coming.

I found myself in my mother's bed. I can't remember taking off my clothes. I recall an image of Jody with her tee-shirt off but still wearing her pink shorts, followed by an image in which the shorts are gone as well. I saw her body as a cream-colored silhouette haloed in grey. I lay on my back on the bed and looked at her, and she told me once to close my eyes, but I couldn't. She frightened me. When she touched me, I thought I would scream out loud, my skin felt so alive. An ache grew in my groin. I began to concentrate on the thunderhead, praying that it would somehow deliver me from what was about to happen. I wasn't ready. I would never be ready. If only the thunder would save me. But instead, Jody rose above me, a storm front in her own right, and when she descended, it was in a torrent that engulfed me. All around I saw the grey light.

At that moment, my mind seemed to split into two halves, each with its own perception of the event. I felt both warm and cold, alone and enjoined. Jody moved and I tried to move with her, haltingly. After a time that seemed both endless and fleeting, I must have groaned, for suddenly Jody hissed, "Oh shit! You're gonna come!" The sound of her voice brought my mental halves back together with a crash. She launched herself up off of me and I fired a creamy stream across my belly. Its heat startled me and I gasped. Jody rolled off to the side and lay in a heap. Then the beast came. A shuddering wave of warmth spread outward from my thighs, followed by another and another. I couldn't move and I was afraid it wouldn't stop, that my body was no longer my own but now belonged to this new creature made of heat and moisture. A dim, hidden part of me realized that this horrible warmth was what the talk was all about—yet its alien nature terrified me. I was afraid to move, to breathe. I was afraid I was going to die.

When the waves finally passed, there followed a quiet moment when I sensed Jody's body beside me as something far away, a distant mountain with steaming jungles at its foot but wearing a frosty cap. My own body was far away too, warm and loose and light as dust. A sharp breath would have scattered me. I caught the scent of my mother's hair from her pillow and I felt my eyes water. In the deep distance, a roll of dry thunder rumbled toward me—the thunderhead issuing its opinion of what I had just allowed to transpire. I felt the thunder all around me, thick and soft as down, yet remote and ominous as an avalanche. A moment before I had prayed for it to deliver me, but that time was gone—now it would pass judgement upon me. If I moved or made a sound it would find me. A deep ache developed in my stomach. I wanted to lay there by myself on my mother's new bed and gaze at the ceiling. I wanted to listen to sounds, to smell the wind through the window. I wanted to run to the shower and wash the evidence of the deed from my belly before it burned a permanent mark in my skin. I wanted Jody to leave me to soak in my misery and my contentment. If I was to going die, I wanted to die alone. And yet, at the same time, I wanted her to mount me again. If I was going to die, I wanted to know the beast one more time.

But Jody just lay there, silent, unmoving. I couldn't speak, couldn't ask her to rise above me again like a cloud and descend in her torrent. The grumbling thunderhead held me back. Someday, I thought, it may rain again.

At that moment, the warm, deep spell broke. Another long belch of thunder grumbled outside and pulled my eyes toward the open window. The half-shut curtains ballooned out in the rising wind. John Roberts and two girls I recognized from around Shiloh stood outside the window watching me. I was too startled to move but I must have made a sound because Jody glanced at the window and sat up.

"Say, Johnny," she said, her voice full of breath. "How'd I do?"

"You oughta be in pictures," he answered. "Les, on the other hand—well, maybe he just needs practice." Jody giggled and turned back and looked at me. She still smiled, but in a heartbeat her eyes grew sharp and her skin suddenly looked tight and dry. Some part of me understood that John and the girls had watched the entire event, and that Jody had known they were there, but the thought refused to rise to the surface where I could do anything with it. I continued to lay there, my body a stone, my mind watching from that place where the ice-capped mountain lay. The moist semen on my belly began to grow cold.

"Well, now you're a man, Les," John said. I looked at him. His voice played at friendship, but his eyes said something different. As if to punctuate the message of his eyes, he added, "Was it love, or was it Mammorex?"

I thought the girls beside him would laugh but they'd already hooked onto the irony in John's first comment. "Les is a man," they chimed. "Les is a man. Les-man, Les-man, Les-man."

Jody snickered. "He's certainly less of a man than I've ever had." She turned to me and added, "Les, you sure your middle name isn't Richard?" She laughed out loud, and I felt the bed shake. Still, I didn't move. I was too far away to respond. Jody reached out and gave the shriveled head of my penis a quick flick with her index finger. I hardly felt it. "Maybe you should let the little fellow lift weights or something." From my distant land, I heard John and girls har-har as Jody climbed off the bed and gathered up her clothes. She moved matter-of-factly, apparently unconcerned with her nakedness despite the audience. John followed her with his eyes and I felt dimly grateful that his attention had shifted. I watched her dress in silence, unable to move, afraid I'd be noticed again.

John said, "Come on, Jody. I'll finish you off if you want." That generated more tittering on all fronts. Jody started out the door, then stopped and turned toward me for the inevitable parting shot. "Hey, Les, tell your mom she's got a great bed."

Her words succeeded in breaking through the barriers that John had been unable to pierce. I suddenly realized that only one thing that bothered me about the entire situation. Not the deceit, or the audience, or even John's comments afterward—I was used to John. It was something both smaller and bigger, something related to those fantasies I never could share with the other studs. My eyes found Jody's and for an instant held them. I blurted, "Jody, I thought you—I mean, I hoped—" The words were there but it took me a moment to put them in the right order. When finally they came out, I felt like a child. "Don't you like me?"

Her eyes promptly grew dark and bewildered, and I knew I'd struck a chord. But not deeply enough. For a moment, the still air vibrated with the power of her uncertainty, but she regained her composure quickly. She was a slick one, that Jody.

"Les," she said, "I like everybody." With that, she vanished, John and the girls with her.

My distorted memory tells me that the thunderhead broke at last that day. Probably it didn't. Possibly there never was a thunderhead in the first place. But the thunderhead lived in my mind, and it released its load that stormy morning that Jody introduced me to the beast. When it was over I went and stood in the shower and let its rain rinse away my spilled seed. I didn't allow myself to think about John Roberts or the girls, or even Jody. My thoughts were only on the beast. God help me.

III

Days rolled by. Some time later, a couple of studs stopped by to hang out. We went swimming, and afterward we went to someone's apartment. We put music on the stereo in their room and sat around talking. One of the guys tried to tell a sex story, but everyone knew he was lying and the tale fizzled.

I hadn't seen John at all since the Day. As me and the guys were shooting the bull I heard a sound and when I looked up I saw him. I thought I would swallow my tongue.

John came in and sat down. I thought he was staring right at me the whole time, but I dimly recall that he muttered things to different people. "Hey, man. What's going on?" Things like that. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and started to light up, but the kid who's room it was threw a conniption.

"Good grief, John, my mom is home! Are you crazy?"

John dropped the cigarette and laughed. He turned to me. My pulse hit hammered at my temples.

"Hey, Les. Hear you had a visitor the other day." His eyes grabbed mine, and in the back of my mouth I could taste the thunder. Shut up, John, I willed, but to no avail. John was too elemental to be sensitive to the psychic energies of a twelve year old boy. I felt like I stood in the center of a fiery circle, with all eyes on me. There were only three other kids in the room, but it seemed like a thousand.

"Come on, Les," John said. "Tell us about your visitor."

My throat felt thick and spongy. "I don't wanna," I managed. I can't say where I found the nerve to speak. Perhaps my unwillingness to discuss Jody was greater than the dismay that John inspired in me.

"Aw, Les," John said. "We wanna hear."

After a long pause, someone said, "What do you know about it, John?"

He grinned and broke his stare with me to look around the room. "I believe he had a visit from Jody. I saw her go in to this place the other day, and I saw her come out. When she came out, she was looking mighty beat. Or maybe it was beat-off. So come on, Les, tell us about it."

"Hey! All right!" someone said.

And, "Les, you stud. Let's hear it, man."

And, "Yeah! Jody is so hot."

John's eyes came back to me. "Come on, Les. Was she hot?"

Weird details of that morning dominated my thoughts—Gilligan's Island, the orthopedic bed, the color of light in the hallway. Was she hot? Was I hot? We hardly knew each other. All that happened was that our bodies participated in an act our minds couldn't comprehend. And the thunder broke and the beast rose and things would never be the same. That was it. What did these guys expect me to say?

"Come on, Les. Tell us," John said. Part of me suddenly wondered if John didn't perhaps think he was doing me some kind of favor when he sent Jody to my door. "Make Les a man," he might have said to her. "He needs it—real bad." And perhaps his insistence that I tell the Confederation was part of the favor. All I had to do was tell the tale, letting the mighty John Roberts confirm it. With that, I would no longer be just Les in the eyes of the Confederation. I would be a man, and in terms they could accept—I had fucked someone.

"Was she hot?" John said, his voice a lure. His eyes were the hook.

What the hell could I tell them? She came to the door and I could tell she was hot—Right. These boys around me had never known the beast. They'd never felt the gulf of solitude that the beast can bring. Not the way I had. Not even John.

Especially not John.

Suddenly I met John's stare. "No, she wasn't hot," I said. "She wasn't hot at all." The words spilled from my mouth like falling rocks. "She was pitiful. . . And you're even more pitiful. I thought she was your friend. But it pretty obvious how you treat your friends." I didn't expect anyone but John to understand what I meant, and I didn't care if he ever enlightened them. I stood up amidst the rock-n-roll and the startled faces. Without waiting for anyone to speak, I stalked out of the room. Though I didn't realize it at that moment, I had just tendered my resignation in the Shiloh Confederation. Studs would no longer stop by my place, or let me hang out and shoot the bull. They'd continue to rag on me about my Leslie-ness, but it would be mostly behind my back, where I wouldn't notice. They'd call me a baby, and they'd laugh.

And they would be wrong.

The years have distorted my memories of Jody, inflated them until the practical details were all absorbed into a great, soft mass of sensation and adolescent emotion. But I will never forget her, or that thundery summer when I discovered the beast.

© Bill Cameron