Chapter 1

This whole problem started way back when I was fourteen. That summer, as soon as school let out, I joined the swim team. We practiced at the pool near us, and I could ride my bike to it. Dad had told me I had to pick a sport, and it was either this or summer football prep. Not much of a choice, really, the way I’m built. I enjoyed the practices; I didn’t even mind getting up early to be there by five or six o’clock. It was a lot of fun, actually.

Until the first real swim meet. Now, I knew my proud dad would be in the stands with his camera set on video, because this is what he’d done at all of my old brother Wayne’s sports. Yelling Go!like a maniac and stomping his feet when Wayne didn’t do well. I knew it would be embarrassing, but everyone’s got a dad, right?

So at my first meet, while I was standing on the diving board, and my father was already filming everything, I got the first inkling that, well, fuck, what can I say? How can I put this? Bluntly, I guess. I got a huge boner watching my classmate James dive into the pool, his ass muscles clenching and, oh, my dear God. With my dad and God and everyone watching, Dad with his zoom lens on probably. Not that he needed to, what with the skimpy tight Speedos we wore, it’s not like it could have gone unnoticed.

Back home, after I’d won my race because of trying to catch up with James while at the same time trying to outrace my own dick, which didn’t work, of course, we watched Dad’s movie. And my brother Wayne, who was then sixteen, pointed out my big problem.

“Oh look!” He laughed, actually pointing, not that you could miss my nylon and spandex tent. “Look!” he roared. “Nickie’s got a hard on! Nickie’s a little gay-boy. I told you so! No wonder he wanted to be on the swim team. All those half-naked boys and then the showers afterward!”

Mom started to fan herself with a dish towel. Dad cast stink eye first at Wayne, and then a severe side-eye at me, with his left eyebrow raised way up past where his hairline used to be.

Wayne added, “It’s a miracle you won that race. That big problem of yours really created drag! Ha-ha, I said drag!”

I quit the swim team and decided to take up piano. At least there, you could hide your bottom half under the keyboard. And since Grandma had played the piano, we had one, and Dad gave in gracefully to Mom’s suggestion that it might be for the best, if sports weren’t a real priority for me.

There were no more sightings of James’ or anyone else’s tight little butts for me, but I found I had a talent and a great love for music, so there’s that.

All my music teachers were women, except for one old guy who played the organ at the nearby Christian church, the big one, with the huge worship center and the Holy Spirit in the fountain outside by the main gates. I could have learned what sex with a man was all about if I had stayed there, I suppose, but my parents wouldn’t have believed me, so I told them I was allergic to their particular incense. My parents had both been raised Catholic, so maybe they would have believed me if I’d told them he was a priest, but no, only a lowly, rich, television evangelist with a huge following. I always wondered if I was smart or stupid, brave or cowardly, to have shoved him off the piano bench when he grabbed my private parts that day. I ran out the door into the cane fields, where I shivered, hid, and cried for an hour before taking a bus home.

Up until that time, we had one car, which Dad drove to work. Then we got a second one, which Mom drove to the grocery store. Then Wayne got a car for his sixteenth birthday, which he drove to the parking lot behind the closed down Supermart, which was as close as Maui came to having a lover’s lane. So I fully expected that we might, when I turned sixteen, become a four-car family.

I was wrong. Well, no, that’s not quite true; my grandfather had died when I was five and left me his car in his will. It was an old POS, if you know what I mean, something dirty and big and really weird looking and ugly and it didn’t run. Locals would call it a Maui Beater. Dad parked it behind the garage where it couldn’t be seen by passers-by. My mother was big on “God forbid, the neighbors,” at that time.