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I grew up in a three bedroom suburban ranch house in Long Beach, California. My birth had been unplanned and unexpected. I was what my parents called "their little accident", a term they used without malice, but also apparently without considering what this might tell me about my place in the world. Oh well, it was one little fuck up in an otherwise adequate job of parenting. And anyway, in those days people did not chose their words quite so carefully, deconstructing them for any potentially offensive nuance. They can't be held to our more enlightened standards...

Since my sister Carol was almost nine years older than me, we had few of the quarrels between us that a lot of brothers and sisters have. When I was born she was old enough to help take care of me, and she was delighted to have something more responsive than a dumb plastic doll to cuddle.

There was a time---when she was around thirteen---that she seemed to think I was just too strange to hang out with, like I was embarrassing to be seen with in front of her friends, which really hurt, but luckily this phase of hers was short lived.

And as I grew she became my mentor and role model, who always knew such grown-up stuff, like that The Beatles were a legitimate rock group while these Monkees were a pathetic commercial sham; and in years to come she would introduce me to sophisticated writers like Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath- the whole sick crew.

When she turned sixteen and could drive, under the pretext of taking me down to the Foster Freeze for an ice cream we would get on the freeway in her bright red rebuilt Thunderbird and she'd slip on her driving gloves open it up to over 100 mph! This was just one of our nifty little secrets. Or we'd go to East L.A. on Saturday night and drive up and down Whittier Blvd. real slow with all the other owners of nice cars, scrunched down low in our seats, listening to Wolfman Jack on XERB and drinking RC cola with the bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. Like the song says, we had fun fun fun in that little T-Bird.

She was the best big sister a kid ever had, and in ways she never imagined I wanted to be just like her. Or did she?

One night we were talking in the bathroom while she put on her makeup for a date. As usual I was fascinated by the whole girly ritual.

She picked up a type of device that I had never seen before. You worked it like scizzors, but at the front end there was this crescent shaped metal frame containing a part that opened and closed like a sluice gate. It was an eyelash curler, but to me it looked like some arcane surgical instrument they would use on Dr. Kildare...

"What is that thing?" I asked.

"What's this? What's this?" she asked in a playfully menacing voice, snapping it open and shut in front of my nose.

I shrieked and dodged out of the way, "Yeah! What's that?"

She lunged at me, " It's a weenie-cutter-offer! And I'm gonna cut your weenie off and turn you into a little girl!!"

I screamed, and there was a mad chase all through the house, both of us whooping and laughing until our mother cornered us by the washer/dryer-

"What the hell are you kids doing? It sounds like a heard of buffalo running through here!"

"Sorry Mom, we were just playing," said my sister, in a way that seemed to invite Mom to put all the blame on her.

"Well simmer down, both of you! You know better than to get him worked up like that, Carol. It's almost his bed time..."

And in fact I was unusually worked up. This game had thrilled me in some profound way. I knew it wasn't really a weenie cutter-offer, but what if it was? And what if she caught me?!

The next time I was there when she did her face, she picked up on my hints and chased me with the device again, and ended up pinning me against the couch, where I giggled and squirmed until I almost peed.

After about the third time I think she was starting to worry. Of all our weird, quirky little games why had this one become important to me? Somehow it didn't seem right to her.

But Carol did enjoy seeing the delight I obviously took in it, so an unspoken compromise was reached. While most times she would tell me "Not now, I'm kind of in a hurry," or "I think you're getting a bit old for silly baby games..."; once in a while---usually when was I least expecting it---she would whip out the dreaded and coveted device and trot along after me, threatening to make my entire boy's wardrobe obsolete and start me on that new course in life that I was beginning to imagine, and covet.

Then one day she'd had her fill even of this. She sat me down and we had a "talk".

Meaning she talked. She said that she was worried about me, and even though Mom and Dad were so resistant to the whole notion of counselling and psychiatry, somehow or other I really needed to get some some kind of help!

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My whole face burned with shame! I fled out the front door of the house we had inherited, got in my SUV, cranked up my XM radio full blast, and---crying uncontrollably---drove down to the Surfsider Tavern where I got drunker than I had ever been in my life.

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