Intimate Relations with Ketchup

I’m not a full blown celebrity like Tori Spelling, but I imagine that if I were, many people from all around the world would have one question for me. It’s the same question I hear from the guy packing up my meat at the grocery store, my mother, or even my catholic priest when I was applying for that internship. When was it that you knew you were gay and do you ever think you could just try to like women? Immediately I’m inclined to find the nearest easy button and push it as if it were the buzzer to that taboo game.  It would sound loud enough that people would fall to the ground, dazed and confused. Once they awoke to me drawing on their forehead with a sharpie they would see the world in a new light and decide to live their life without asking another stupid question for as long as they live. At this moment an easy button is at least 10 years away with this world’s limited technology, so for now I’ll just have to hope that a massive need to read my blog gets around to at least people in a 100 mile radius of Austin and anyone who decides to telephone me. 

                If you read that last paragraph then you’ll know I’m about to try to explain my first sexual encounter. Problem, I’m not sure what age I was in that tent with, we’ll call him “Ketchup;” which is very close to the time an encounter I had with a boy named Michael in first grade, either of these could have been my first encounter. The first skin to skin contact I ever experienced was with another male, sorry Mom. Ketchup was a thin Mexican boy about two years older than I am. I’m not sure, but I think we could have been related by marriage at some point, perhaps a distant cousin or something. My mother never actually married his Uncle, but if I ever refer to my hill-billy years, it would ultimately consist of ages six to eight or nine.

After my mother divorced my father she found an almost equally counter-productive man to drop trough with. He was a Hispanic man blessed with an abundance of children, a good majority of which he would question any validity of matching DNA. I believe Ketchup was either a previous step son or real son somewhere down the line. Regardless Ketchup was always around. We played a lot together when I would leave for the weekends to visit my mother. When I arrived I would run to the back of the trailer and climb an insanely tall club house built around an old telephone poll in the middle of the barren waste land they called a back yard. This is where Ketchup would always be waiting and we would kiss for what seemed like the whole weekend. Yes, there were risks involved but we were in love and so excited that we eventually decided to adopt imaginary children in the shape of hard molded plastic. Eventually the weekend would come to a close and I’d have to explain to my children that I’d be leaving on a very important business trip and wouldn’t be back for a while; Barbie always took this the hardest. We lost contact for a while and the last time I saw her she was living out of her red corvette and had cut all her hair off. I feel partly responsible for her death, a truly violent end with a pitt bull landed her in a hole she’d been digging herself into for quite some time. My only regret is that I couldn’t get her to see she was only reliving my past mistakes. Ketchup and I vowed to do better, and this time we’d try our best with our own “real” children.

                     My mom called my twin and I about a week after my ninth birthday to finally wish us a happy birthday and make it up to us by going camping. I was thrilled to spend time with my mother. She had cool things at her house like cereal out of a box and duck tales. At home we bought off brand cereal in bags and my dad never subscribed to the specific Disney channel you needed to get all the shows that would prepare you for Grey’s Anatomy. Josh wasn’t too excited because we would be sharing the weekend with all the other Hispanic kids. I figure he was jealous that these new kids where getting more attention from my mother than we were getting. I, on the other hand, was blinded with lust and imagined the weekend with Ketchup, my intentions patently for us to see each other naked.

We arrived late to the largest man-made mud pit in the in United States, more formally known as Clyde Lake. Ketchup was nowhere to be found so I immediately forgot about him and tried to learn how to swim. After a near death experience subsequent to losing my life jacket I was rushed to a land of warmth and smoores. Late that night all the Mexicans showed up, my mother’s fiancé apparently didn’t want to force his children into a life of swimming and crime. Ketchup appeared from the dark abis, it was the perfect end to the day, as that “I’ve got friends in low places” song came on the portable radio. We sneaked off to the tent by ourselves and I told Ketchup what had happened to me. He was passionate, like I had just returned from battle or if I had just saved his favorite teddy from the jaws of “Damnit,” his puppy. We flung our clothes off in a hurry then slowly decided what to do with our bodies. We both had no clue what women and men did together naked and an even vaguer idea as to what two men could do together sexually. We decided that he would lay directly on top of me, time past as if we were in an awkward time caspsle as we just lay there, not talking for what seemed like an hour but in actual time was only about 5 minutes. We put our clothes back on and went outside to play, I didn’t see much of Ketchup after that. Our parents broke up and he started to gain a lot of weight. Later in High School I found out that he had stolen a number of merchandise from homes and stores. He was sent to Juvenile detention and even now extreme boredom couldn’t bring me to wonder what has happened to him since.