Chapter One

Cousin Juno, Short Plaid Skirts

& Lipstick In The Girls' Room ...

 

Sometimes I think I never should have left Back Streets-there are too many memories I can't forget and would never want to. The smell of tamales and beans in Pepe's Café... the bell in St. Mary's church... and Old Gomez who smokes a cigar while his fingers fly over thick guitar strings. Little ones play kickball in litter-lined streets, paying no mind to honking taxis and the mustachioed stallions in their old jalopies. When I was six, the pretty girls had long black hair that grew right to their asses. Their hips rolled, one plump cheek and then the next, as they strolled the broken sidewalks, flirting.

When I was thirteen I became one of them, piling my black hair on top of my head, painting my face with too much make-up and having more fun out of school than in-and who wouldn't? We smoked in back alleys, giggling like we were drunk. Then, at fifteen when Sonia, Jess and I began to drink, we'd stumble out from behind old dumpsters, looking like we were twenty-five and acting like kids. The truant officer would haul us back to school, just so we could sneak out again-sometimes twice in one day. They hauled us home and I'd get a licking from Papa's strap-that is, if he was around. He rarely was. Mama would cry over me as though I was lost to sin forever. I smiled at her a lot, and said the nicest things to make her think I was reformed. Next day, my party began again.

I can still recall the day, the three of us skipped out of Social Studies before it began. How could they expect us to concentrate on Rome and Greece when the sweltering heat of Back Streets turned our classrooms into ovens? Mouths parched, we grabbed a quick beer from Carlos out of the back of his bar and hit the streets. Peering over the fence at the Fidelity Bank construction site my eyes settled on tan sweaty arms and a muscled chest. For fifteen minutes, I studied every move that hot boy made-every flex and bend. Every quiver that made me quiver. And every time he ran a hand through his curly hair, I wanted to run mine through the same space. When he turned around, his smile eased into my crotch melting it to liquid, so I was sure my fluid arousal dripped to the ground. I blushed. Thinking I'd explode on the spot, I dragged Sonia and Jess away with me where we cooled down with a smoke.

It didn't work, though. I was ready to explode. I must have been sixteen by then-I remember begging Papa to let me borrow the truck when the evenings got too hot. I would drive out of the city to the county park where I could masturbate in peace.

Boys got into my blood. Even the guy from the construction site, when I met him at Carlos' bar. He thought I was much older than I was and almost rode off with my virginity until my big brother's best friend, Joey, starts acting like a saint protecting me from sin. He spilled my age to my muscled friend, and my poor crotch ended up waiting another six months before it got its first taste of cock.

Sonia had been screwing around for years, Jess at least eight months. But me, I wanted something special that I couldn't even name. So I waited. And when special didn't come, I finally let the whole thing slide and took my first cock in Daddy's truck. Thank the Lord it was quick because it hurt like hell, so much I didn't want to try again for months. "You're just small and tight," Sonia told me. "You do it enough, you'll loosen up." I got this picture of my cunt sagging open and my insides falling out-no thank you!

Special took lots of forms in my mind, but the one I remember most was the day my cousin Juno spanked me at the family Christmas party. My sassy mouth was on a roll, and Aunt Rose had just said one too many things about my short skirt. I flipped her off and started toward the kitchen, ignoring the stares of my relatives whose rowdy conversation ceased instantaneously. Getting fifteen of my relations to stop their crazy half-Spanish, half-American jabbering for even ten seconds was quite a feat. I did it for nearly sixty. The quiet in the room became so eerie that I stopped and turned around.

"What the fuck are you staring at?" I blurted out, knowing that all their eyes had been on my jiggling butt.

Their blank-faced expressions turned into a few anxious gasps before the remark finally registered.

Cousin Juno was twenty-three, quite a hunk with the girls, and very strong. He'd been a wrestler in high school and still lifted weights so his biceps looked like mountains. Pissed off, he threw me over his shoulder-with my panties showing-and hauled me upstairs. He didn't even give me a chance to apologize, which just seeing the look on his face, I would have done in a second. He had me over his lap, spanking my ass with the force of thunder before I mounted a decent revolt.

"Ouch, you evil bastard!" I blared, while the house was still silent enough to hear. After that, I don't know what they heard.

Juno laid in to my butt with such rip-roaring passion, that my cries and the sound of his hand connecting with my ass cheeks were all that I heard. Maybe they were listening, maybe they went back to their arguing. I didn't care. I wouldn't be showing my face for the rest of the day.

My ass wiggled, as my cheeks roasted under the beat of Juno's hand. Surely, his palm had to be hurting as badly as my ass, but, he was immune to the pain. Worse yet, because my skirt was so damn short, the hem rode high on my ass, and he hardly had to push it away to have bare skin. Thank heavens I'd worn panties-which I sometimes didn't. If he'd had my butt free and clear, I would have had to knee him in the groin before I ran off. But as long as he kept my pink lace panties between us, I let him have me-grudgingly of course, and with a heck of a lot of hollering.

Problem was, it wasn't just pain, humiliation and rage I was feeling. Something sexual was happening inside my next to virgin body. The sting backed off, hardly hurting anymore, even when Juno would smack me harder. The heat was glorious and confusing, doing frantic things to my mind, and dangerous things to my crotch. I'd only felt this way when I was thinking about sex, and it made no sense to feel this way now. But I did, in a big way. I kept seeing pictures, and imagining stuff no girl my age should think about. My shame made me blush, even if no one including Juno saw the red on my face. It was all I could do to hold myself down and let the spanking come to an end without my body giving away the truth.

Thank God he stopped before the sensation took over and I did something I'd regret. Back on my feet, I had Juno's black burning eyes pinning me to the wall behind me as though he saw the guilt in my scared expression.

"Don't you ever, ever, flip anyone off again, you hear me, Angel?" His voice was as curt as his eyes, and as hot as the palm of his hand.

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," I tried to be smug.

"I meant it," he jumped right back, obviously unhappy with my answer. "I'll blister your ass with my belt-you act like such a vulgar brat."

Something about his holy attitude was making me so mad that I almost forgot the wild warmth in my ass. "She's a witch, Juno!"

"I don't care if she's the devil incarnate. You don't sass her, or anyone else in the family, you understand?"

I didn't exactly know what he meant by 'devil incarnate', but I got his drift.

"You hear me?"

"Yeah, I hear you." Seeing the heavily laden look of anger in his eyes-and the way he was about to pull me over his lap again, I retreated just a little. "Sorry, Juno, don't know what I was thinking."

"You sure didn't. Now, get down there and apologize to Aunt Rose."

"I will not!"

"Oh, yes, you will!"

Now I really shook, and it wasn't all just fear. But I didn't want to feel it, I didn't want to think about it. Whatever I could do to get this day behind me, I would. "Okay, okay. I'll tell her anything you want me to tell her, but I won't mean it, and she'll know the truth-and so will everyone else."

"And that's fine. Some things you do in life just because you need to make peace, because there's something more important than your personal thoughts-and because it's just plain common sense. This is one of those."

Wise words for a guy as young as Juno. And ones I'd probably remember more times than I can count in the next few years.

 

Except for Aunt Rose, and getting caught by the truant officer, and Papa's drinking, I tend to remember my Back Streets neighborhood with a sappy, idyllic sort of filter that forgets what really happened there. I know my memory warps things. To remember what really happened-the way it really happened would be pretty painful. Remembering Juno, and Aunt Rose and even Papa's drinking is easy, but the rest, what happened after I finally got through school, that takes guts.

If I really think about it, there was a hell of a lot of misery in that old neighborhood. Homeless people, gang wars, drugs, and the first drive-by shooting in the state. I forget those things, mostly because they hardly touched me. Even Sonia and Jess escaped most of it. The rough stuff went on under our noses, while we managed to slip through our teen years relatively unscathed. It wasn't because we were angels. But we were on the fringes, careful enough to stay clear of the worst, and dumb enough to get caught for petty stuff before the hard core crime of Back Streets caught up with us.

There's no denying that I got my share of the school paddle when principal Trenton labeled me 'recalcitrant'. Probably six, seven times in two years, I draped my body over the old fart's desk and let him whack my behind until he'd raised a nasty smart. These were routine trips. I think Trenton got his jollies taking pretty schoolgirls into his office for his 'disciplinary measures' as he called them.

He liked me especially-perhaps because I blossomed prematurely. He was always looking at my tits, which stuck out rather unseemly through my tight school sweaters. And there wasn't a day that went by, I didn't see him eyeing the long line of my slender legs beneath my plaid school skirt-he probably picked the short length for our uniforms, just so he could eye our thighs; and when we bent over, get a leering look at our ass ends. I know how the man thinks: if the school board wouldn't let him raise our skirts to spank us, let it happen naturally without his having to lay a finger on our bottoms. My junior year, Trenton lobbied for more severe punishment-bare bottomed paddlings for resistant girls like me. He was reminded-and I have this on good authority from the school secretary-that "resistant girls are sent to the reformatory, so his kind of intervention was unnecessary." I'm glad of that, there was no way I would take down my panties for Trenton, or anyone else for that matter.

After my Christmas Day spanking from Cousin Juno, I began to recall the punishments from Trenton: the weird excitement I got going down the hallway, my knees knocking, my stomach turning flip-flops, my head on a rollercoaster ride with fear. I don't know what I was thinking or feeling when I made those awful trips; but my body was certainly speeding toward something unexpected.

Was that sexual, too? Good lord, I hope not!

I managed to get through school with the usual punishments, reprimands and spankings dealt out to the rebellious girls of Back Streets. There were a few that got it harder than me, like Sonia who has a mouth bigger than mine; while a few, like Jess-who could weasel their way out of most anything bad with a big smile-had it a whole lot easier. I did just enough to keep my life from getting boring, and little enough to stay out of the high school girls' reformatory. Sonia was my only friend who had that fate.

She got two months for vandalizing the girls' bathroom with lipstick-something we must have done a hundred times. No one could tell me that this small crime was enough to throw her in that awful place. But since Sonia had a long list of petty crimes on her school record, she was tapped to pay, and pay dearly with her cute, plump behind. I'm not sure she was ever the same afterwards-I guess that was their plan-reformation. She came back from Latham Hall much more sober, and determined to get out of high school as fast as possible. She took the same slow route as the rest of us, but she made sure there were no return trips to Latham.

Sonia confessed very little about what happened there. It was all about corporal punishment and hard labor, but she was damn light on the specifics. Thinking back now, I wished she would have said more. The way things turned out two years later, I could have used the voice of experience to prevent my own incarceration in Latham's sister school-Brody Reformatory for Wayward Women.