When I was 4 years old I had a girlfriend. She stood at an adorable 41 inches with naturally blond hair, blue eyes and a spunky attitude. She was very polite in front of parents and always attracted their attention with her quirky remarks. She loved to eat her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without the peanut butter or the edges, and always cut into small squares. She was the girl of every boys dreams. She played sports. Loved to be outside, swimming, climbing, jumping. She was very open and forward and the best thing of all: she loved to kiss. I hated her.
I didn't even want to go out with her. She made me. I don't remember exactly how the conversation went but it was something like this:
You're my boyfriend, you got a problem with that shrimp?
I would have put up an argument but she made sure to mention:
I'm an entire ½ foot taller than you, and a whole ½ year older, so you have to do what I say.
What do you say to that? She WAS half a year older than me. And maybe she wasn't a ½ a foot taller but, shit, we never really measured. She had at least a head on me. It didn't really matter how much taller than me she was because the fact was that she WAS taller than me. So I did have to do what she said. It wasn't just the height and the age though it was everything. She ran faster than me. She caught better than me. She threw a better baseball than me. She was smarter than me, more outgoing and likable. She outdid me in everything that there was to outdo a four-year-old boy in. So what did I do? I went to her house every day and I kissed her got beat by everything in the world by her and left her house each day feeling like a prisoner. I was Sabrina's own little love prisoner, forced to kiss and fulfill her every desire, which usually consisted of constant trips inside to bring her out a plate of Oreo cookies and a glass of milk. Every once in a while Merry when I went inside, Merry would ask me why Sabrina did not go inside to get the cookies herself I was instructed to reply with, I love her. I never did though, would tell Merry the truth and then Merry would walk outside and yell at Sabrina. Sabrina would spend the rest of the playtime not talking to me. This made me happy.
One day, and I only know this because my mother told me about it years later, after playing at Sabrina's house for the day I con fronted my mother with the situation. I sulked the whole car ride home and would not tell my mother what Sabrina and I had done the whole day. When we finally arrived back to our second floor apartment on Napier Avenue in the Bronx, I came out with my secret, I don't want to kiss Sabrina anymore. My mother asked me why, making sure to state what a pretty young girl she thought Sabrina was (which now, I think, was more of her way of making sure I came out straight- They probably started to worry about me when my favorite show became reading rainbow). I don't know what my reply at the time was but if I was me now in my four year old body I would probably say, "Shes a fuckin' bitch. She makes me do all this shit I hate and I'm a little afraid of her because shes like a damn foot taller than me." Whatever it was that I said, her reply to it was "You don't have to do anything that you don't want to Johnny. If you don't want to kiss her anymore, just tell her."
The story goes, that the next time we saw each other, Sabrina and I were playing upstairs when our parents heard her scream and throw something and stomp down the stairs into her fathers arms. She had tried kissing me while we were upstairs and I told her the deal, "I don't like you! Stop trying to kiss me!" Okay, it probably didn't go exactly like that, knowing me it probably went something like, "My mom says-" scream- throw- stomp- hug. After a couple of seconds of hugging, her father asked her what it was that she was crying about. Through disjointed words and sniffles, Sabrina told her father that I told her that I told her my mom said that I can't kiss her anymore, to which his reply was "Awww honey, you can kiss Johnny all you want", like I wasn't even part of the equation.
The kissing didn't end. And neither did the tormenting. I found little ways of getting Sabrina to not want to kiss without me having to be a snitch. Instead of hanging out alone with her, I would make sure that her parents were always in the immediate vicinity.
Lets go upstairs.
No. No I wanted to make cookies with your mom so that I can eat the dough before it goes in the oven.
Merry's gingerbread house. It was that big.
But, as hard as I would try, pretending to be interested in her mother or father's little projects which they scattered throughout the house but never finished, or listened to her sister read stories to us, or even pretended once to want to knit or sew, whichever it was (they were both the same to me at the time). Every once in awhile we ended up alone. When this occurred I would resort to the last place in the world that I would rather be, besides in her room: outside.
I hated being outside with Sabrina for numerous reasons. Really, the only advantage of being outside was that it was a avoidance from those little lips that made me want my mother to wash my mouth out with bleach. Of all the things I hated about being outside with Sabrina, the one thing that I hated more than anything else was the tree rope that her father had hung the year before, I think, as a special torture that he devised just for me. I could see him in his basement with a white lab coat, his goggles over his eyes and bubbling beakers strewn about the various contraptions he had scattered across the numerous tables.
Moo ah ha ho, a rope. This will teach him. Hee hee hee hee hee.
I'm not joking, he really laughed like that. And I think he must have been laughing in that manner every time he watched me fail in my attempts to reach the top of the rope while his daughter would climb to the top of the rope and jump off from its peak like she was some kind of superhero, bounding from the top of a building. The usual taunts were always awaiting me at the bottom of that rope, I'm half foot taller than you, I'm a half year older, you're a girl, yada yada yada.
But there was seriously no taunt worse than this. I swear, if I heard this taunt today I would cringe up into a ball of rage and spit in your face. Yes spit, because only a person who wanted to be spit in the face with a enormous green loogie would ever sing this song to someone. Maybe you guys remember it:
John John Leprechaun,
Went to school with nothing on,
Teacher teacher, that's not fair,
Give me back my underwear
Urrrrrrragggggghhhhhhhh. First of all! I'm no leprechaun. Even then I wasn't. Ive never been a leprechaun. Never in my whole life was I ever a leprechaun. I''m not even an Irish. Second of all that whole story is made up. There is not one occasion that I went to school and my teacher took my underwear from me. And if she did I wouldn't cry like that. Well okay maybe, but it never happened. I never ever had a teacher take my underwear. Besides, if I went to school without anything on, how is it that the teacher has my underwear. Huh? Answer that smarty pants!
Ill tell you what really happened though. But this was way later and there is no possible way that Sabrina knew that it would happen. In third grade, I dressed up in my Tae Kwon Do gee for something. I don't think it was for Halloween. I think it was the day after I watched the Karate Kid. I was so friggin' psyched to kick blond-haired skeleton butt that I decided to wear my Tae Kwon Do gee to school the next day, jock strap and all. By the end of the day, that thing really really started to bug me. So I went into the bathroom and took it off. Well some fourth graders saw this and decided to take the cup from the counter I had set it on, while I was washing my hands. When I turned around, it was gone. I chased them out of the bathroom and was horrified to find that my jock strap had been thrown into the girls bathroom. Now this is not a high point in my life and I'm almost ashamed to admit this but I didn't know what else to do. So I cried. I sat and sobbed and told the boys about how my father was going to kill me for losing his jock strap. I had worn his instead of my own because I didn't want people to think that my cup size was small. The boys went into the girls bathroom to retrieve my fathers cup for me and that was when I first realized the devastating effect that Sabrina had on me. Even though I could throw an awesome wheel kick, one like you've never seen before in your entire life, I had become, because of Sabrina, a big fat juicy WIMP.
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