Chapter 4 - Sex and the City

Chapter One - Boring but Short.
Chapter Two - Death Cheating Maniacs.
Chapter Three - Death Cheating Maniacs Part II

The story is going to jump around a little because at this point, lots of stuff was happening but not in any particular flow that lends itself to good segues.

Well, taking a step back, I'm 9 and in the 3rd grade of a Catholic grade school run by and taught by nuns. One of my 3rd grade teachers is Sister Maria C..... She was the hottest female I had ever seen to this point, even though I had only seen her face and hands because of the habit she always wore. I think she was about 24 or so. I wanted to tell her what a crush I had on her, but that simply wasn't done eh.










One day, I happen to bring a novel to class with me. It is the James Bond 007 episode "Moonraker". Plenty of sex and violence. She spies this novel on my desk and wants to know what it is and where I got it. "Robert, what do you have on your desk?" "A James Bond novel" - "Where did you get that book from? "I stole it from my brother..."
She knows my brother because she taught him last year. She no doubt had some troubles with him as well. As far as I could tell, she looked a lot like the lady on the cover too.










She is oddly upset about this (to my thinking anyway) and, sitting at her desk in front, calls me to the front of the classroom. And bring the book. I go up, not knowing what to expect, and when I get there, she takes the novel and drops it in the trash can. Then she tells me to lay across her lap. Va-Va Vooom ! A dream come true ! She spanks me pretty good. Well, I have been spanked by the master - my dad, and this version is pure nirvana. I am thoroughly enjoying this, which becomes quite obvious to her after a short while.

She, red-faced, tells me to get up and go back to my seat, which is in the back of the class. Me, red-faced and smiling, head back to my desk, walking past 20 or so classmates, male and female who are thinking incorrectly that I'm unhappy. She never spanked me again, and I really didn't give her any reason to anyway. I wasn't looking for it. It was like getting a Monopoly card that says - "Get spanked by super hot nun; pass Go, collect whatever you want for desert".

I'll just toss in that a couple months later, some guys and I are in the playground on the school grounds playing handball. I'm at the plate and in comes the handball. Right as I hit the ball and send it sailing over second base, I see that she happens to be in the center field area facing in my direction. The ball is somewhat of a line drive with a little loft and unfortunately, it hits her right in the crotch area, sending her to the ground. The guys and I run over, me apologizing profusely, asking if there is anything we can do. "NOOOOO!". We help her to her feet. I sure felt bad about that. I still had a huge crush on her. I think she knows I didn't do it on purpose. I hope she does. The following year she quit the nunnery and went back into private life and I never saw her again.

Here's what the school looks like today. It is the building with the large cross on the front. Assumption Grade School

The taller building behind it was the elementary school, grades 1 through 6 I believe, then the one in front was grades 7 and 8. The playground was behind what is now the CoGO. The building behind the elementary school with the two spires is the Assumption Church. Very impressive inside. All marble and stained glass. I was actually a choir boy in that church right around this age range.

Anyway, this whole period seemed to kick off an era of odd sexually based episodes, none of which actually culminated on anything physically happening, but the buds were opening and the stamens were pointing skyward looking for the wayward female honey bee. I made my first communion in Assumption Church at 8 years old, and I went 'steady' with my communion partner, Particia D An.. for about 6 months. I walked to her house just about every day to see her, and we'd sit in her back yard. We kissed once and her older sister yelled at us. Eventually we just drifted apart for no particular reason.










Occasionally, a homosexual pedophile would cruise by on his speedboat on the Ohio River, looking for a 'young man' who wanted to go for a ride, and we'd deal with the sucker in a variety of ways. We knew what was happening. We'd say No. Sometimes the sucker would say Ok and drive off. Sometimes the sucker would be a little more persistent. Not a good plan.

There were always at least 3 of us and we'd pick up some rocks and tell him to head off or suffer the consequences. A couple times, we actually pelted some dude and his boat with rocks taken from around the train tracks. They're about half the size of your fist and nothing to sneeze at. None of them ever tried getting out of the boat and making it the 12 feet or so vertical between the river and the train tracks. Good thing for them. We were expert rock throwers and the tracks offered an unlimited supply of rocks.

At this point in the adventures down by the river and the train tracks, we felt like we were a gang - not by today's standards of violence because there really wasn't any violence other than of a defensive nature and hardly any of that, but just by camaraderie, and so we needed a clubhouse.

Dwayne, who you know from the last chapter and his brother Daryl (No, seriously), lived right along the Ohio River Blvd, between said Boulevard and the Ohio River, separated only by the 100 foot cliff and the train tracks. It seems that a house about 4 or 5 houses down from theirs had a basement which would pretty much always be open for business and where we could congregate to exercise gang fellowship type activities like learning how to smoke cigarettes and look at Playboy magazine. My first cigarette was a Viceroy and it tasted like shit. How I ever ended up smoking is beyond me, as I know I wasn't addicted to the nicotine for some time to come but just had to be a smoker because everyone I knew at that point in my life was a smoker, and it was just the cool thing to do. We were Cool Jerks. I smoked for another 40 years then quit.

Well, it turns out the basement was the basement of a Cathouse, as we would soon find out, because the sounds upstairs weren't muffled to any extent by the building itself and we would hear the comings and goings and the conversations between the ladies and the customers. We would hang around down there in the early evening and chuckle at the things we heard going on, on the floor above.

Sometimes the women would come down in the mornings and talk with us. One of them would bring her cat which she would hold close to her bosom and we would pet the kitty and, by accident of course, our hands would stray ever so slightly and touch some skin in the general vicinity.. She didn't seem to mind and neither did we. We were interested but shy, and grateful for the hangout, so we didn't take any liberties with the ladies.

The next thing that comes to mind is our meeting down at the tracks in the summer and we're around 10, and it was kind of a show and tell session. I think I blew everyone out in this category that day, because I brought a German P-38 Lugar that my dad brought home from WWII. It was loaded of course Monsieur.








Well, what are you going to do with a loaded pistol down at the train tracks with a freight train hurtling by at 45 mph but shoot at the freight cars ?

So, we each took a turn shooting a 9mm bullet at a speeding freight train, not expecting much to happen, and it didn't. All you could notice was a little puff of rust being blown off the side of the freight car.

One of the dudes who was with us was kind of new to our group and we handed the pistol to him and he promptly shot a round off, then next thing we know he was pointing the pistol at his head. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! we all shouted. Apparently, His dad never taught him anything about guns and he had not a clue about how a semi-automatic pistol operated. This was even more odd since he'd seen us take a few shots with it. We explained how a semi-automatic pistol operated and took the gun away. He came very close to being dead. He was a one day member of our gang.

Soon after, the group came to my house one day in the morning to get me and we'd all go down by the tracks and do whatever as usual, but my Mom said (she told me later) she had a really bad feeling about this day and she would not let me out. I was beside myself, but what could I do. I found out the next day, a dude who wasn't really part of our gang, but who would come by on occasion, Mike S, who was climbing the cliffs with the guys that day, fell from about 50 feet directly onto the tracks and broke "every bone in his body". The other guys had to scramble down the cliff and pull him off the tracks before a train came. He was in the hospital for many months. I didn't know him that well, and wondered if it really would have been me on the tracks if my Mom wasn't physic.

By the time he got out, my brother and I were in the Boy Scouts and occupied otherwise. People would simply come and go in those days and one didn't pay a lot of attention to it. Whoever wanted to hang would show up in the usual meeting places and that was that. Whoever wasn't there obviously wasn't interested and we assumed they were off doing something else.

We were starting to get pretty bored with the train tracks now and since we'd done everything with moving trains that red-blooded 10ish year old boys could do, we got involved in other things. I remember a couple of the guys talking about robbing gas stations and at that point, I told them I wasn't interested. They went off and did their thing and I don't know if they actually robbed anyone or not. Never saw em again.

A couple years went by, and one day, myself and 3 of the guys who would generally be down at the tracks just happened to be hanging around close to the tracks and one thing led to another and we headed down there. We walked along the tracks, tossed some rocks, reminisced about the old days (We're 12 or 13) and walked the tracks in the direction of Pittsburgh and close to our houses, just talking until we got to a cut in the cliff.

The cliff would go straight up from the tracks about 100 feet and at one point there was a ravine cut into the cliff so that maybe 20 feet of the tracks would be exposed at the bottom and there was a gentle slope leading up to the top of the cliff that you could simply walk up to get to the Ohio River Blvd. We decided to take this route back up to the boulevard and about 3/4 of the way back up is a discarded semi-trailer tire. These things are around 4 feet high and fairly heavy. You've seen 18 of them on trucks passing by on the freeways.. So, we stand the truck tire up and point it down the ravine and give it a little push.

Just as we do that, a railroad dick (Detective) appears, walking along the tracks closest to us, from the right to the left. At the bottom of the ravine is a water catch area that is bordered by a square assembly of railroad ties and a little tunnel that goes under the tracks and allows the bulk of the water to flow on out to the Ohio river. We noticed this thing had a couple feet of water at the bottom of it that was still there from the last rain. We could see what was going to happen. We probably should have yelled 'Lookout!".

Sure enough, the railroad dick was centered in the ravine and directly in front of this water catch when the tire hit a boulder, bounded up into the air, and came smack dab down into the water dead center, throwing enough water on him to get him pretty wet. He was pissed.

Apparently, dudes other than us had been down to the tracks and unlike us, must have been causing some real trouble down there, prompting the railroad dick to be walking the tracks in the first place.

The dude pulled a .22 caliber pistol and began shooting at us. We're like 75 yards away and we immediately duck down behind boulders and trees and we could hear the bullets ricocheting off the boulders.

The dude reloaded three times and each time he did we stood up and tossed rocks at the sucker. Hey, we didn't deserve to be shot at! And the rocks were motivation enough for him to not come any closer.

Anyway, we didn't have enough time during reloads to make it to the top of the ravine and away so we were pinned down. After the 3rd reload he was out of bullets and he started yelling at us to never come back down there. We told him to ...errrr..and arrrrr, and finally convinced he really was out of bullets as he walked off and disappeared behind the next cliff face, got up and out of the ravine. I mean really, this time we're doing Nothing and end up getting shot at...

Well we didn't head back to the tracks anymore anyway. We had done everything we could think to do down there and now it's time to get into some other stuff like the Boy Scouts, Girls and the rest of our lives.