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C H APTER 14 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Kissing Linda Smith and Loving Jannis Jones THE FIRST REAL ATrRACTION I FELT TOWARD A PARTICULAR GIRL, APART FROM that session lying on Dolly Roberts's bed as she babysat me at age five when the strange fascination with her legs seized me, was in the fourth grade in Livingston when I came to believe that Linda Lee Smith should be mine. She had long dark hair, ran around the schcdyard in a precise gait, and once let me kiss her on the cheek during a game oftag. I denied that to Mrs. Amerine after one ofmy classmates had turned informant, knowing what I had done was much too exciting to be permitted by the authorities. I lied so persuasively to my teacher that I almost wept, tears standing in my eyes and my stutter in full gallop. "You're much too nice a boy to be doing that, Gerald," Mrs. Amerine told me. "That's a nasty thing, and you're much too smart to want to act that way." I assured her I agreed fully with those sentiments, and Linda Lee covered for me, denying anything had happened except that I had caught her in the game and she had become it. I knew that I was not nice, and I was not too smart, and I wanted to be as nasty as the rest of the boys, but I couldn't tell the grown-ups that. I made too many As on my report card to be able to behave like other boys. So I listened to the nasty jokes from Joe Baxley and Ben Royden at recess , I learned that babies were not delivered by the stork but came from the doctor sticking his thing in women who came to his office for checkups, and I lusted steadily after Linda Lee Smith. All that was in the fourth grade, and by the time I was a fifth grader, I learned that the doctor was offthe hook. Instead of the medico, children's parents did that nasty thing which caused babies, Linda Lee Smith was out of my league, and I would never have her as a girlfriend . I also learned that the Boy Scouts in Troop 53 in Livingston were not dedicated to living by the Scout Law, to learning woodcraft, and how to survive 59 60 HOME TRUTHS in the wilderness, but were committed irutead to jacking off and seeing who could do it the most often and sh

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