I started playing sandlot football when I was ten. Every day after school, and most all day on the weekends, the neighborhood gang gathered at Barbara Spencer’s house. She had a large front yard. She owned a football.

The game was a continuing type. Kids came and went as they could. You broke for dinner, to streak to the bushes behind her house to pee, or when your parents came by, honked their horn and insisted that you get into the car. My dad was gone. We had no car. My mom hid in her room most of the time in a schizophrenic terror. I came and went as I pleased.

Barbara was two years my senior. She was a tall, long legged, freckle faced tomboy. She loved boys. She allowed no other girl on her "football field." Not even to watch.

At first, I was designated a sub, relegated to the sidelines to watch. I worked them for almost a year, following the players up and down the field. It was not so much the playing that interested me, but the body contact with Barbara. She always quarterbacked. For both sides. It took an eternity of wiggles and feelies to untangle the pile after the tackle.

Just the thought of being wrapped around her body kept my temp at least four degrees above normal.

Finally, when she learned I could snag any pass that came even close, she called me in occasionally. For six months I was content to play sub. I finally became fed up being smeared by bigger guys. I wanted to desperately to be the smearer, not the smearee. I wanted to cop a feel of that long legged tomboy’s body.

"Why," I finally asked her, "can’t I ever play on the line?"

"You’re just a squirt. You wouldn’t know what to do," she said with considerable scorn in her voice.

"I know how to tackle." I pleaded.

"Do you know how to roll in the hay?"

That answer completely dumfounded me.

Sometime later, I learned its meaning.

Barbara had a practice of choosing a player to meet her behind the house for a Royal Crown cola. It seemed to me that it took forever for them to drink it.

One day when she disappeared with one of the older boys, I asked Tom, my closest friend, whey it took so long for them to drink an RC.

He looked at me as if I were just out of the idiot bin.

"What?" I said.

"You don’t know?"

"Know what?"

"They aren’t drinking RC, dummy."

"What are they drinkin’?"

Tom grinned and shook his head. "You know that little hay shed behind her house?"

I shook my head yes.

"She takes guys in there for a roll in the hay."

"A roll in the hay?"

"She- " he made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and ran the forefinger of his right hand in and out of the circle.

"What?" I frowned, bewildered.

"Forget it dummy," he shook his head in disbelief.

A week or two later, determined to understand, I borrowed a pair of binoculars. The catholic church had started to build a hospital but had run out of money. The structure set there for several years, unfinished. It stood about a half a block behind Barbara’s house. I went up three flights of rough concrete steps in the structure. On my knees, I crawled to the edge. I focused my binoculars on the opening of the shed. After what seemed like hours, Barbara and Arnie, at fourteen the oldest boy to play in our sandlot games, approached the shed.

I strained to see what happened when the entered. Through the dim light, I made out the figure of Barbara laying down in a pile of hay. Then Arnie blocked my view.

He dropped his pants.

Suddenly I understood.

For at least half an hour, laying there with a profuse sweat at the thought of what was happening in the shed, I tried to penetrate the dim light. Finally legs asleep and hurting, I stood, and stumbled to the stairwell. The first step eluded me. I tumbled to the next floor. When I came to, I had a splitting headache and I was nauseous. A large knot protruded on my right arm nearly breaking the skin. In those days, learning about sex came hard.

The End