A summer night in San Diego

That one incident that I can pinpoint as the moment when my mind shifted.

Nothing about me seemed different as a teen, although I was as unique as any teen. I played sports, did some activities, was not one of the popular kids, but the popular kids generally liked me.

But I also never went to parties, dated, went to dances. My only social activity was friday night football (and my father required me to sit with him instead of in the student section until my senior year). I actually spent most of my teenage years deeply depressed and extremely emotionally controlled. With a lot of free time and a lock down control, I was actually successful in every way a parent wants their child to succeed. It just occurred at the cost of most normal teen activities.

As I mentioned in my last post, my sexual development initially seemed just like any other teenage male. Nothing really different, but looking back now I realize the difference may have been in how I thought, not what I did. I learned to take delight in this minor deviance, and my first incident was very simple.

It was a warm moonless summer night in July. In our semi-rural wedge of inland San Diego County, a warm night in July meant high eighties at night. Once we hit August, daytime temperatures would soar well past 100 degrees. I was a perennial insomniac, and summer made it worse. I had cabin fever in the middle of summer. Other than the one or two weeks away at sports camp, I spent my entire summer at home. I never drove in high school and the nearest neighbor my age was over a quarter mile walk away. Our 1500' dead-end street only had nine houses on it.

This street wrapped up and over a steep hill, dropping several hundred feet from top to bottom. From its entrance, only two houses are visible. Once you reach the top of the hill, you could see the steep plunge down. To your right is a steep cactus and mustard flower filled ravine just feet from the road. The left is lined with seven houses. They were built in sequence down the road, with each house adding its own road extension as it was built. As a result, the road swooped down the hill into a series of terraces, each terminated by a small ridge that concealed the next twenty feet of road behind it until your car dove down into the next swoop. Coupled with its dead-end, it was an adrenaline junkie's bike ride, but a heck of a workout to get back up.

Insomnia had its hold on me that night. My mind is always difficult to shut down at night, and the heat made it no easier. Boredom turned to thoughts of sexual fantasies and masturbation games. Thinking different thoughts, trying different lengths of time, I could spend hours in my bed at night trying to see how many orgasms I could reach before I fell to sleep.

It was not working this night. Something needed to be different.

Even though my room was off in a converted garage, I still kept my underwear on at night to avoid the small risk of discovery. I decided to strip down, a very small risk. I got up out of bed and wandered around my room, experiencing my nudity. This really should not have been an interesting experience. I wrestled Olympic style wrestling; I had stripped down to my jock strap mat side in front of hundreds of people to switch my singlet color. Exhibitionism is no big deal to me, but nudity was.

And that is when I decided to go for a walk. I could exit out the window of my ex-garage room, slip quietly out the gate, and head down the driveway. It was the middle of the night and no one would have reason to drive down our road. At the same time, the only ones who would drive down it would be neighbors who would be sure to recognize me, though I did not really think about this. Out the window, down the driveway, and I began moving up the street with my clothes in my hands. We were the third house from the bottom, and I began to make my way up to the fourth.

Our neighbors house loomed two stories above the avocado grove that surrounded it. No lights were on anywhere along our hillside; most houses could even be seen from the street. Even if our neighbor was looking out their darkened windows, it was too dark to see me, wandering naked up the street.

I have no idea how fast I moved. I would like to think that I walked, but I might have sprinted. I think I actually moved at a crawl pace. Odd that for all my worries about being discovered at night in my bed with my underwear at my knees, I had no worries about my room being discovered empty. This was different. I felt excited and happy at the same time, because I was different.

I am very short; always one of the shortest people in school. This shortness was exacerbated by bowed-legs that made me walk funny. Inexhaustible acne plagued me as well, a symptom of my wrestling. I also had the face of a 10 year old for much of high school, even after I started to grow facial hair (but having the face of a teenager is a wonderful benefit today). This was I believed others saw me: the funny-walking fourth grader with bad skin. But I also had the body of an athlete. I could bench press three times my body weight and run a six minute mile. I had ignored that by the end of my freshman year I had morphed from a doughy 95 pound kid into a 120 pound 1.5% body mass of conditioned muscle who needed custom fit jackets and shirts.

As I cross the threshold to the fourth house driveway, I finally noticed my own body. I felt like a stalking animal in the night, different from others around me and unlocking my raw power. I could survey the valley below and know that, at that moment, I owned my own world. It was not the ordinary teenage surge of invincibility. It was that feeling that there was something different and it was good. I began the short walk up to the fifth house, a steep slide up the hill at a grade that roads should never be built at.

And then came panic. Half way up the next ascent, headlines flashed over the terrace ridge. The steepness of the walk hid the vehicle, and hid me from it. But I did not know where it was going. This time I did sprint, back down to the fourth driveway terrace below.

I had nowhere to go. The house to my right was fenced off. To my left was the ravine. If I tried to run back to my house, I would put my body up into those headlights and surely be seen. I hopped the ridge of the fourth driveway and pressed myself to the ground behind it. If that care was one of our last two neighbors, they would see me anyway. I could feel the warm asphalt underneath me as a clung to the ground. It never occurred to me to even attempt to put my clothes back on.

The lights turned off at the fifth driveway. I never saw the headlights themselves, so they never saw me. That meant they were home now though.  I heard their gate slide shut behind them. I had faced the fear of discovery and survived, crouched low behind a berm of asphalt. The rest was easy.

I continued my walk up to the fifth house, the sixth house, alongside the seventh house. Each was set far back from the road with no view of my expedition. I did not want to be seen; my mind almost always been clouded by the potential of shame.

But I wonder now, if anyone had, if they even would have thought twice about it? To some I might have just been a goofy teenage. To others I might have been an erotic phantom vision. Either way, I doubt anyone saw me.

I never placed the thoughts in my mind then as sexual. At the time, sexual meant orgasm. It meant physical stimulation of my genitals until I reached peak physical pleasure. Now I know that sexuality was stimulation of my mind. The intense joy I felt at the powerful unlocking of my body without guilt, coupled with the sensations of the night air and the adrenaline pulsing though my body. That was the intense link of mental and corporal that underscores true personal sexuality.

I was up to the eight house, the peak of the hill. Over that peak sat nearly a dozen more houses, as well as the arterial road that fed our street and numerous others. The risk of discovery would be much higher, though the risk of being recognized much lower. I had no real need to continue though. The risk was not the reward, and my goal was not to be discovered.

It was just a walk on a moonless summer night in San Diego.