How I Broke My Hymen
The circus was in town and my brother and his friends were taking me and my friends downtown to the Memorial Gardens for the big top. I would have been about seven, which means he would have been about ten and his friends, Freddie and Eddie (seriously) a couple of years older.
Freddie went to the Catholic school and was a tough kid who used to scare us with stories about crazy nuns and priests who would just as soon pop you one as look at you. He also watched way too many cowboy movies with my brother (he was our next door neighbour) and years later my mom told us that once she'd overheard my brother telling Freddie that our grandmother was coming to live with us. Freddie, not taking his eyes off the movie, said, "I don't have a grandmother". So my brother, also not taking his eyes off the movie, asked, "Why not? What happened to her?" To which Freddie just shrugged and kept on staring straight ahead, "Somebody shot her, I guess."
My mom still tells that story, so if you're passing through the Sault and she insists on bending your ear with it, just go with the flow and don't let on that you've heard it already, okay?
He was a tickler, too, so you had to watch your back around him because once he had you pinned down and laughing he just wouldn't let up until you'd gone way past screaming in terror to playing dead. I learned to play dead early on because we lived on a street full of kids and it was pretty much Lord of the Flies every day after school and on weekends. Sometimes even on the way to school. I got punched in the face and ended up with a bloody nose one morning when a couple of truant brothers cornered me just past the corner store and demanded money or they'd punch me in the face. I told them I didn't have any money (I did, but, I sure as hell wasn't going to give it to them) and one of them punched me in the face and my nose started bleeding. Then Judy Hicks who should have been at school already (I was late for some reason) and who had been watching out her kitchen window came running out with a pair of scissors in her hand yelling that her mom was right behind her with a shotgun and they took off.
I think her mom was probably at work and Judy was taking a day off, but they didn't know that, and Judy was pretty crazy looking with those scissors in her hand. Their names are Mark and Kim Dietz so if you ever meet them, be sure to punch them in the face hello for me.
Anyway, Freddie was a bit of a nut (sort of like Judy Hicks, although she took it upon herself to be my bodyguard pretty much for the duration of elementary school after that incident) and if you didn't play dead it was quite possible he would tickle you to death, so I learned to close my eyes and go limp. Which, ironically, became a survival technique in my clown nightmare, too, when one night I figured out that I could wake myself up by closing my eyes in the nightmare and going limp just before the clown condemned me to death.
I don't know. My good ol' days came later in life, I guess.
Anyway, Eddie was a notch above Freddie because he'd been diagnosed with a learning disability and put in the Opportunity Class, which had calmed his rages so he wasn't a bully anymore. I suspect he may have been a bit medicated, too, because he smiled way too much for a twelve year old boy and his personality was pretty much the exact opposite of what it had been when he was failing grade three over and over and over.
My friends were the twins, Kelly and Frank Jr. And yes, you guessed right, it was all Kelly's fault that I broke my hymen that day at the circus. You also may be asking about parental supervision since Memorial Gardens was at least three miles from our house but that would only tell me that you are either under a certain age and believe what you saw in The Lion King or you're my age and still believe in the odds of two sets of super sleuth twins being born into one family. In my reality, parents actually thought circuses and carnivals and fairs were safe havens for children and not the paedophile heavens they actually were. But more on paedophiles in another story. The tales of my youth could fill a book and star a paedophile in every chapter.
Which kind of makes me wonder what happened to all the paedophiles of my youth because you just don't see them out and about the way I remember them being. Or is it that only kids can see paedophiles?
Anyway, as usual, the circus was nothing compared to the action in the stands and Kelly had managed to have half the crowd turn on us by the time the elephants had gone trunk to tail around the ring for the grand finale. (As an aside, I remember feeling so sad for the elephants even then that I stopped going to the circus when I was nine or ten, which was about the time my younger sister ended up on a mailing list for a Save the Whales campaign that had her so distraught we had to tell her the campaign had worked and the whales HAD been saved and she was just getting old leftover stuff in the mail for the next few years.) Then Kelly had the idea that we should head up back through the stands and hop seats down to the ground floor - just like circus people would do if they were in the audience instead of in the show.
So we headed up to the back row and began our hop down based on the assumption that everyone had left their seat down and that no one had been so anal as to put it up so that some little girl who was seat hoping at the end of the big top would land her winkie smack on the back of a seat with no seat to land her foot on and break her hymen - which is exactly what happened.
The pain I remember as excruciating and it hurt when I peed for a couple of days afterward but the blood was something else - AND we still had to walk about three miles to home. I was wearing light coloured peddle pushers, too, so the bright red blood showed up so alarmingly that everyone we passed thought to comment on it as we made our way home. By the time we got there my underwear was stuck to my winkie and I had to soak it off in the bathtub - which was the only break I got because it wasn't actually my bath night - and then, believe it or not, my grandmother made me sit in what she called a sitz bath but which smelled like rubbing alcohol and stung so bad it was like I'd just mis-hopped seats all over again.
Later, my sister explained the significance of what had happened, news I shared with Kelly the next day. He was suitably impressed that I was no longer a virgin, which was the significance of what had happened according to my sister who was the ultimate authority on all things significant, and since neither one of us knew what that meant, stayed impressed for quite some time.
Meanwhile, I grew up believing myself not to be a virgin, which I can honestly say is a good way to grow up because when I actually wasn't a virgin, after a particularly unmemorable encounter with a real estate salesman who lived in a trailer out near Searchmount ski hill, I felt much the same as I always had about my place in the world.
