High Price by Carl Hart Page A

moments.

CHAPTER 4
    Sex Education
    Abandon the urge to simplify everything . . . appreciate the fact that life is complex.
    — M. SCOTT PECK
    I was certain that I’d caught some shameful and disgusting disease; terrified that I’d gotten a girl pregnant. At twelve, I was just beginning to understand the mysteries of sex, just starting to get clued in to what all the drama was really about. It wasn’t like I was inexperienced with girls: in fact, the opposite was true. After all, I had five older sisters, so I had plenty of time to observe up close the behavior and desires of the opposite sex. And where I grew up, the girls started chasing you and claiming you even in first and second grade, so each grade from first through seventh, I’d had a “girlfriend.” It was these girls who, strange as it may sound, played a crucial role in keeping me out of trouble.
    Paulette Brown, a long-haired girl who lived a few doors down, was my first-grade crush. We’d peck and hug, but not much more than that. In my neighborhood, the girls set the pace: a cool cat would go with the flow. You didn’t want to seem desperate or pushy. A real man made the ladies desperate for him; he didn’t beg or take liberties. That was how the men I looked up to behaved.
    And when I was eleven, I distinctly remember walking down the street and overhearing two older girls talking about me. One of them said, “That boy’s going to break a lot of hearts someday,” and the other smiled and nodded in agreement. That stoked my pride and piqued my interest, of course, but I was too nervous to approach them. I didn’t want to undermine my cool image.
    By sixth grade, however, I had fooled around with a girl, whom I’ll call Vanessa, in a school closet. She was a year older than me; she’d told me to pull my pants down and showed me what she would let me do, all the while keeping an ear out for teachers and lunch ladies. But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I fully understood what it was all about.
    It was the summer of 1979. Five days a week, I participated in a summer camp program in the park for underprivileged kids, one of many such initiatives that would soon fall prey to Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts. They had hired some of the older neighborhood teens to run it, made a few young adults into supervisors, and offered organized sports and activities meant to keep us off the streets. Mostly, it did.
    That day, however, I had other plans. A very attractive girl, whom I’ll refer to as Monica, had invited me to her house: her mom wasn’t going to be home. We’d been talking on the phone and she told me to come by when I went to the park. That summer, everyone was listening to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” on their JVC boom boxes. Much to my chagrin, my mother had recently forced me to cut my Afro into a shag (something like a mullet for black people), an injury to my self-image for which I seriously resented her. But I wore some denim shorts, a football jersey, and Chuck Taylors, kicking it seventies-style.
    Monica was a brown-skinned athletic beauty. Her breasts were just starting to bud. Her muscular legs were slightly bowed, which gave her a sexy walk and stance that emphasized her hips. Her brown eyes were a shade lighter than mine. She had a small, delicate nose and wore her hair short, straightened. Monica wasn’t on any sports teams—but boy could she run. I’d watched her fly past many boys on the track in PE class. I knew her from school. She lived in a small bungalow on Eighteenth Street near the park. We started on the couch in the living room and then moved into her bedroom.
    Soon we were on her bed. We were grinding and kissing, touching all over. We both had our clothes on; it was summer so she must have been wearing cutoff shorts. I was definitely not at all sorry about missing that day’s basketball drills. Because suddenly, I had the most amazing feeling ever. It overwhelmed me, was completely beyond my control. Scoring