Up There

When I was a little boy, around nine or ten, daily after classes at three o’clock I was sent down to City Park, a good mile’s walk from school – later I would be picked up by my stepmom in her little blue Maverick around five o’clock to be taken home.  This all happened in Valentine, Nebraska.  So I had a coupla hours to tear around unsupervised after school, and I did lots of exploring, mostly trails and streams.  One day in spring I was swinging on the creaky chain swings, those ones with the black rubber seats, just very gently swinging after having caroused away an afternoon on the trails, and having shoplifted a whole pocketful of candy on the way to the park, I’m chewing on a Rocky Road marshmallow bar biding my time ’til the step came (before which I wash my mouth out in the creek so she doesn’t smell the candy), and lo and behold what should I observe but the two hottest chicks in the local high school come screaming into City Park in their Camaro, smoking and laughing and cussing and looking hot with their feathered hair and tight bell bottoms – one of them’s gotta shit but the bathroom’s not open yet ’cause the park service won’t open it ’til summer.  So I’m sitting there spinning around in my swing listening to the chains unravel, and they’re cussing around wondering what to do, and boy they sure are cute (I know this because the step has just started giving me sex ed – with my pa’s Playboys no less, so I have a good barometer to go by – “Keith, this is the clitoris, here the vulva, these are the labia, and inside the body there are the fallopian tubes, and the ovaries attach here, and down at this point is where the kaka comes out…” and so on through the various parts of the female anatomy).  Well, after their little conference the girls glance over at me and of course I look away when they glance, and in the end the one who’s gotta shit pulls down her jeans behind the partition that gives entrance to the girl’s can and she squats down and from where I sit on my swing I can see the round flush of her ass cheeks peeking from below the partition and from between them comes these little droplets of girl poo.  Somehow, in my child heart and soul, I know I am privy to something sacred, so after they roar off in their hot car, I take a look around, saunter off my swing, and wander over there to the girl’s restroom.  I have my favorite stick with me.  Hmmmm, I wonder, strangely aroused at ten, “Do girls shit the same thing as boys?”  I squat down on my haunches, flip the turds around with my stick.  “What is this liquid here?”  I scratch around in it.  And this piece – it looks like there’s some hairs attached to it.  I decide they look like deer turds, only bigger, and better, and stinkier.  I am mesmerized.  I had seen one of them hand the other paper towels out of the glovebox.  These towels were neat to me, too.  Not really much on them, but to know they had been “up there” really made me shake inside.