I met my first good friends who I'd end up knowing all my life, on the next block north, Adams Avenue. Jack and Ronnie Kline, their older brother Eddie and their parents were long time Canaveral residents and they were a very typically hospitable Florida family, and welcomed me as if I were an old friend. I took to them like they were my teachers, especially Jack, and in a way he really was. I learned a lot from Jack, from catching snakes to hunting ducks, how to skin a swamp rabbit and how to run through a sticker patch like the indians did many years earlier in these same boondocks. If you ran through light-footed you would only get a sticker or two in your bare feet, but if you tried to go through slowly, you'd pick up so many you'd be pulling them out for a half an hour. I liked Jack a lot, and he and I became good friends.
Anna, Michele (Mom), George, and Amaya
in Jamaica, New York
I used to hang around with a kid named Don-Don Applegate, a southern boy whose family lived right on the beach at the end of Adams Avenue. His dad owned a trailer park near Jetty Park, a ways north of us near the port (Port Canaveral). Don and I used to hang out at his folks place and just be goofy kids. He had an older brother named John who told all the younger guys about masturbation one day. I never did understand what the hell he was saying until I fugured it out on my own a year or so later, when I was eleven years old. It was the start of a sexual addiction that I never did heal from. Don had a Honda motorcycle and he used to give me rides to school. One day I was talking to Don and a couple of other kids and one of them told us about a house down on Jefferson Avenue (my street) about a block from the beach. He said that a bunch of the neighborhood kids had been going in this house and nobody lived there, but it was full of someones belongings. I told him that they were crazy, that someone could come home one day and they'd get in a bunch of trouble. He assured me that they'd been doing it for a long time, and nobody ever found out. A few days later, a big kid named Landy Taylor told me the same thing, and he was a big kid, well known for his football prowess at school, and all the little kids (like me) looked up to him. I then decided that if Landy said it was okay, it must be okay, but if I were going to do it, I wanted to be extra careful not to get caught. I knew in my mind that it just didn't sound right.
I went there the next day with a couple of the local kids, and we approached the house from the back yard, which was a totally unkempt sandy, weed covered yard, as if (indeed) nobody lived there. We snuck up to the jalosy windowed back door, slipped our hands into the slit between two panes that other kids had already widened for us, and entered the house. I was terrified, and expected a man to chase us immediately back out the door, so I stayed close to it, waiting for one of the other kids to get caught first. Nothing happened. We were in, and we were okay. I immediately felt better, and quickly began to look around at all the neat stuff there. Once we were sure that there really was nobody home, we became like wild animals, and we took over the entire house as if it belonged to us. We played army and used broom sticks or whatever we could find for guns. I took a kitchen knife, snuck up on the couch and leaped onto it from behind, stabbing the cushions as though they were Nazi soldiers. I'd been watching my favorite TV show, "Combat" and was acting like my favorite actor, "Cage", the Frenchman who fought with the Americans. It was so much fun. We found an endless stack of wooden Coke crates and would take wagon fulls of them to the corner market to cash them in every day for about a month. We always had candy, bubble gum, ice cream and comics to enjoy while we spent the day at "The House". It was even more enjoyable because we were actually pretty poor, and normally couldn't afford these luxuries, and besides our folks would surely disapprove if they knew we were ingesting so much sugar, not to mention how we got the money. I found a huge ceramic piggy bank filled with old silver dollars and half dollars, and a couple of really old coins. I dared to show one to my dad one day, and to my surprise he spanked me. I couldn't understand why, so I asked and he said that I had scratched out one of the letters and replaced it with a "U". I still didn't understand, so I asked again what he meant, and he showed me that the letter "E" in "CENT" had been replaced, rather crudely with a "U". Being eleven and not familiar with any dirty words, I still insisted that I didn't do it, and why would anyone do that. He asked suspiciously if I knew what the new word meant, and I replied a resounding "NO!", but he didn't believe me, and insisted that I did. I stood my ground, now asking him what the word "CUNT" really meant. He dropped the subject, didn't explain, but also never apologized for the spanking. I found out from a friend the next day.
I discovered the female nipple at that house, and it was very interesting. There was an eleven year old girl there with her nine year old brother, and in the tall, uncut grass out front she showed me her breast and rosy nipple. It was quite a stimulating moment, particularly because I did nothing to provoke the display of exhibitionism, and she allowed me to touch it, prompting it to stiffen and become a bit erect. This was my second sexual stimulation to date, the first happening in Baldwin, New York on Long Island. A couple of blonde neighbor girls were splashing around in their inflatable pool in their back yard and asked me to join them. Their mother approved, so in I went, spalshing and laughing along with them. I think I was five at the time, and had no concept of anything sexual in nature, but when the older sister took off her bottoms and lay bottom up in the pool I couldn't help but put my head on her bulbous wet bottom. It was so inviting and it glistened in the sun, begging me to use it like a pillow. I recall having my first erection then and there, but never really understood what caused it, or what I should do about it. Back at "The House", we were really getting into the fun, tossing dinner plates like Frisby's (long before Frisby's were invented) across the living room and crashing them into a wall. We use to climb the Australian pines out front and see who could go to the extreme top and stick their hand up above the highest and thinest branches at the apex of the tree. The branches were so thin there that you'd sway in the wind, and if you weren't very careful, you'd fall all the way down to the ground. I was a very slight young boy, so I managed quite nimbley. One day it was just the girl and her brother and myself, and we were playing war again, but this time I crashed my "gun" through a window to shoot at the "Krauts" inside. A neighbor lady heard the breaking glass and peeked through the bushes and saw us going through our destructive games and called the police. A while later I was at Jack's house and we were playing outside, when an unmarked car pulled up and a man and lady got out and she pointed at me. They took me home where I received my first belt whipping by my very angry father. I learned an important lesson then, to never get caught again. And that I was right to think that the whole "House" idea was just not right. There were about fourteen neighbor kids who used to go to that house, but only three who were caught. We had to go to Juvenile Court and my dad had to pay $50 for my part in the crime. I was ten years old then, and just learning about how to be a little rebel.
at the Tate Street house
1428 Tate Street, Cocoa 1958
Cape Canaveral 1966
