The Naked Truth

The first time I was kissed by a boy, aged five, I ended up getting stitches. He smacked me up against a metal window, and split my head open. When I was older, courting also resulted in injuries. I used to jump off the top of garages with a beautiful boy, both of us impressing the hell out of each other. One day I jumped off something lower, forgot to bend my knees in time, and cracked a bone in my foot (undiscovered until years later – my parents were of the “Stop whining, you’ll be fine” school of sympathy. Now that I think of it, this may well be the reason for recurring back problems over the subsequent 30 years).

It wasn’t only me, that suffered, though. I once made a boy jump into a huge roll of rusty barbed wire (by accident, OK? ) If I was inclined to half-baked psychobabble, which of course I am when it suits me, I could read all kinds of significance into this… actually, now that I think about it, I do. The barbed wire boy, after his screaming extrication from his cocoon of horns, used to come and show off his stitches and healing wounds to me (I don’t remember feeling wracked with guilt about this (not like the time I slammed the door on someone and the top of their thumb was lopped off) – I still felt indignant that he had insisted on chasing me when I had made it perfectly clear I didn’t want to be chased). Perhaps this accounts for my penchant for men with a habit of piercing bits of themselves when this was a lot less common than it is now. Maybe the kiss and the ensuing stitches in my head explain my passion for playing with potentially violent psychopathic nutcases in my youth, and the legacy of the kiss and the cracked bone come to fruition in my rather specific yen for pain.

Presumably the part of my brain that should have been focused on “passion”, short circuited and went for “danger” instead. Having been there, done that, and emerged relatively unscathed (well, I was alive, anyway, which sometimes seems fairly miraculous, looking back), I then sensibly eschewed danger, decorated men, and, as usual, passion, and just about bored myself to death in the process. In my maturity (these things are relative), I managed to get passion and a tenuous sort of thrilling uncertainty. I once suggested (to a married man) that perhaps I was attracted to married men for the amount of trust invested in me – that I was vicariously getting off on other people’s leaps of faith. He eyed me worriedly and suggested that it was more likely to be that I was pathologically antisocial fiercely independent and hate being tied down (this is true – bondage is so not my thing).

If our early experiences do have any influence on our subsequent development, then I think I learnt a valuable lesson as a child: Boys can be rough and hurt you, but if they annoy you enough, you can hurt them more.