chlorine

Recently I got back in touch with a friend of mine,R, whom I have know since I was a kid.He lived next door to the house that I spent my summers in here in Memphis.He is about that same age as I am and we were best friends every summer.He recently found me on facebook.He told me a couple of days ago that they guy,Joe, that lived on the other side of the house I spent my summers in had died that morning in a motorcycle accident.I have been trying ever since to figure out how I feel about it.

You see,Joe was about 4 or 5 years older than we were,but the kids in the neighborhood were mostly older than R and I,but we ran with them just the same.They just kept up with us,made sure we were alright,taught us all about climbing fences, what pools were good for breaking into, showed us horror movies,etc.Joe was always an ass to me,telling me I was too little for things, throwing me in the pool fully clothed.The summer that I turned thirteen he started being really nice to me and I was kind of suspicious.I found out later from a friend that he had walked up on me having sex with this guy Casey in one of the pools we were forever sneaking into.I don't remember seeing him,but apparently he saw plenty.Casey was about 18 and a total sleazeball,but I didn't really see anything wrong with it,being a very sexually confused (and experienced) young girl.Apparently after that Joe didn't see me as a little kid anymore,but something to get a piece of.

He started taking me for rides on his motorcycles,and was always trying to get me alone.When we would all watch horror movies,we watched them in the dark.He would invariably sit next to me,and put his hand up my skirt.I remember trying not to make any noise,so no one in the room would realize what was going on.It was like a game.But with my past being what it was,it was a game that had psychological repercussions.I let him do a lot of things to me over the course of that summer,but I flat out refused to actually have sex with him,because I had this bone deep dislike of him that I couldn't really get rid of.

When I went back home at the end of the summer,it's like I forgot it all.I hadn't thought about that summer in a really long time.Looking back on it I realize that they were WAAAAY to old to have been doing those things with me.But it was definitely part of my makeup whether I remembered it or not.That summer was when I realized that there was a certain power in withholding sex from someone,because the more I held out,only gave a little,the more in control I felt.....and that was a very precious commodity for me in those days.

So yeah,I have this huge ambivalence about what I feel about the fact that he died in a motorcycle accident a few days ago.I feel terrible for R,they had been friends practically their whole lives.I feel that he kind of deserved it on some level,because really,what kind of person preys on a girl so much younger,that they had watched grow up,just because they thought there was a chance that she would put out??Then there is some part of me that is thankful for that sense of control that he gave me when nothing else ever made me feel that way when I was at home during what I considered my "real" life.I don't know how to feel about it.It's been bothering me ever since R told me.

However,I did figure out something about myself since all these memories got brought up.It is a sense memory that I never really understood.Sometimes in the summer when am driving thru rich neighborhoods,I will get a whiff of a pool,the chlorine I think,and I get the sense of wet concrete,still hot from the sun,one my back and I get incredibly turned on for a second.I understand where it comes from now.