City Kid by Nelson George Read Free Book Online Page A

mine and she had hers. But that necessary change exacerbated the growing distance between us. The days spent conversing, much less playing or dancing, together had ended. Even how Andrea achieved in school differed from how I did—while I was a reading/writing maven, Andrea excelled at math. We had a classic left brain/right brain split.
    By the time I was a teenager I sometimes experienced nostalgia for the days when Andrea had followed me around. That big brother/little sister affection had been replaced by indifference or downright hostility. I remember a particularly nasty argument in the kitchen over something, and it started getting physical. I grabbed her and tossed her to the ground for stepping to me with way too much attitude. I was much taller and stronger, so as far as I was concerned, she could fuss all she wanted, but she wasn’t gonna swing at me and get away with it.
    Vengefully, Andrea pulled a knife out of a cabinet and came at me with it. I sprinted to my room and closed the door, as I heard the knife bounce off the wood. We fought often, but this knife incident was a new low. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she cared if I lived or died, and that made me sad when I wasn’t thinking of kicking her ass. Her favorite song when we were kids was the soul ballad “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” by the Persuasions, and for too many years my sister and I lived out this melancholy title.

PEER PRESSURE
    As a child, my interest in reading greatly fueled my erotic imagination. My mother was a big reader of pop pulp fiction: Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, Valley of the Dolls , Peyton Place , The Carpetbaggers . By nine I was already a voracious reader, and I’d sneak into her bedroom to check them out. I soon figured out that there were code words on a page that meant sex scene: “bosom,” “loins,” and, my favorite, “vulva.” When I saw them on a page I’d stop skimming and slow down.
    These words were often modified and amplified by “heaving,” “inflamed,” “engorged,” and “sensitive.” Any combination of these words meant characters were having sex. I got so good that within ten minutes of opening one of Ma’s paperbacks I had identified two or three scenes. It would be my pleasure afterward to show these passages to my friends, displaying both my reading skills and growing sexual sophistication.
    Like a lot of city kids I lost my virginity on summer vacation. Either in July or August Ma would ship Andrea and me off to Virginia for a couple of weeks, where we’d shuttle back and forth between Grandma George, Uncle Son, and Aunt Frances. We usually had the most fun at Frances’s place, since she ran the loosest house, had fun kids (cousins Becky, Chubby, and Quinton), and was the most dynamic character. Aunt Frances was a big-boned brown woman, with wide hips, a hearty laugh, and a passion for beer, bid whist, and men.
    Neighborhood kids circulated through Aunt Frances’s house all day. It was there that I met a local gal I’ll call Tammi. I was about eleven, and she was maybe three years older. Like a lot of Virginia gals, Tammi was what we called “healthy”—wide hips and a butt that undulated when she walked. Back then I was frequently complimented for having curly eyelashes, and Tammi found them quite cute, along with my New York accent.
    One afternoon, in a neighbor’s toolshed, she let me fondle her beautiful brown breasts, which started a stirring down below. I was in that phase of boyish adolescence when just the sight of a sexy woman got me uncontrollably excited, so the feeling of sucking Tammi’s breasts was just unbelievable. I didn’t really know what to do after that. Tammi did. She pulled down her pants and panties and lay on the floor. She unbuckled my Lee jeans. I remember how we wiggled about the toolshed floor, my knees against the concrete floor, the