High Price by Carl Hart Page B

a touchdown, making a clutch jump shot: nothing had ever felt like this. But then there was this sticky stuff in my jeans. For a moment, I freaked out. I had no idea what it was. Still, outwardly, I kept my composure; I didn’t want Monica to know about it. It seemed like I had wet my pants. What cool muthafucka wets his pants when he’s alone with a girl? I was mortified.
    Then I began to imagine all kinds of even more horrible possibilities. Trying to hide my embarrassment, I got up quickly and I’m sure rather abruptly, hoping she hadn’t noticed what was now a stain on my jeans. I muttered something about having to get back to my friends in the park. With rising anxiety, I went to find my cousin Anthony, who was sixteen. He would know what to do.
    While I kept my eye out for him, the more I thought about it, the more worried I became. By the time I found my older cousin, I was sure that I had some scary and probably incurable VD, which was the term I knew for such problems. Or maybe what I’d done was what got a girl pregnant? I just didn’t know.
    “Yo, Amp,” I said, using Anthony’s street name. I started anxiously trying to describe what had happened with Monica. I didn’t want to sound like a fool. He let me go on. I looked at him; I suspect my anxiety was visible, despite my efforts. And then with a big smile on his face, Amp proclaimed, “You ain’t got no damn disease.” Soon he was laughing uncontrollably. “You ain’t done shit,” he said, then mercifully filled me in on the facts of life.
    Because masturbation was seen as less than manly in our circle and because my parents hadn’t educated me about puberty and what to expect, I’d had my first orgasm in the company of a girl. I had no preparation for what had happened. My first experiences of pleasure and desire had occurred in total ignorance, completely without expectations or even language. But as soon as I knew what was going on, I was immediately on my way to becoming that heartbreaker those girls had predicted I would be. And although many of them would never know it, my girlfriends played a key role in my success, keeping me out of harm’s way and boosting me up when I really needed nurturing.
    I had very few conventional people to look up to in my life, male or female, to show me how to have a committed, loving relationship. My parents’ breakup and the fighting that led up to it had been driven largely by infidelity: I still don’t know what caused that but I’d certainly seen it. Most men I knew had women on the side. I didn’t really know anyone who practiced what was preached at church and I didn’t know how to navigate this treacherous emotional terrain. Sometimes, I’m not sure that anyone really does.
    Although I didn’t know about it until I was an adult, my maternal grandfather had long had a mistress whom he spent early evenings with, returning home to his wife by a certain time. He also had children with other women. And several years after my parents split, my mother herself became involved with a married man. I don’t mention this to judge my family: if you look closely at virtually any family history, there are complex, tangled relationships and secrets everyone wants to keep hidden.
    But in the world I grew up in, people had multiple partners and their relationships were just as often sources of conflict as they were of comfort. For me, my sexual relationships also kept me busy, when hanging out with male friends might well have gotten me involved in much riskier activity. Since my sisters and cousins all stressed the importance of using condoms (although I could have used more direct instruction; the first time I tried one I failed to leave enough room at the end), being with girls was actually a much safer situation.
    My mother’s boyfriend then was a man named Johnson. Starting when I was about ten or eleven, I worked for his roofing company. Installing and repairing roofs in the relentlessly humid South