I have a horrific memory. For example, I don't remember the entire year of sixth grade except that my teacher had polio and was the meanest person I've ever met in my life. She was the first and only person I have ever met with Polio and I think about her almost daily. For some reason though from age 5 and up (sixth grade aside), I only have like one or two REALLY vivid memories from every year of childhood. So I thought it might be fun to go through them.
Let’s GOOOOOO
Six years old: When I was six I was living in Tianjin, China and my best friends at the time were Teruya and Arup, and this french girl named Gwen but I don’t remember anything about her only that she was french and her name was Gwen and she was cool as fuck but I don’t remember why. I was obsessed with Gwen and she probably didn’t even know I existed, which actually just makes her even more cool. Go Gwen! So Teruya was this little guy from Japan who LOVED to poop. He was always runnin around the school tryna find different bathrooms to poop in. And he LOVED pooping with the stall door open so anyone that walked by would see him and yell TERUYA!! And then he’d giggle and try to run away and then he’d get in trouble. He always cried but he kept doing it, big risk big reward I guess. And I don’t know about you guys, but in my kindergarten Class, the bathroom stalls were in the kindergarten classroom. So the teacher would be teaching us something, probably like how to draw a shape, and someone would get up to go to the bathroom only to find Teruya shitting with the stall WIDE open. So then the kid who found Teruya would laugh and all the kids would run to see what happened and Teruya would be sitting there smiling on the toilet, and we’d all scream TERUYA!!! Then my teacher would have to go get him and tell him to stop pooping with the door open, but Teruya didn’t listen, Teruya didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought, his only mission at school was to poop with the door open and he was going to do it god damnit! I loved Teruya, and I ALWAYS supported him. I would chant “LET HIM POOP” and get the entire class to join in, sending the teacher into an absolute spiral. The beautiful thing about Teruya is that besides his voyeuristic shits, he loved to laugh. The happiest little guy in the world, always smiling and hugging people and he didn’t know English that well so we actually didn’t talk much we just sat together and giggled all day and then he would go poop with the door open and I would keep an eye out for the teacher and I think that’s a beautiful friendship. Teruya if you’re reading this come back, I’m here for you.
Then there was Arup. Oh Arup. Arup was OBSESSED with my sisters friend Nadiya. He would follow her around the hallways, try to touch her hair, sometimes he would say dirty stuff to her. Nothing too bad, but it was definitely a surprise to hear a kindergartener telling a high schooler he wants to lick her tatas. You can’t blame him though, Arup was in love. But Nadiya was almost eight years older than us, and she hated Arup because he kept trying to hump her leg. I knew Arup was gonna get his tiny little heart shattered into a million pieces, and I felt a little responsible, it was MY sisters friend he was in love with, so, being a good friend I decided to go to his house to cheer him up. I remember being nervous to arrive cause Arup and I had never gotten together outside of school, and I was worried I would mess it up and he wouldn’t want to be my friend. But turns out that wasn’t possible, Arup was actually about to single handedly destroy my innocence that afternoon, as he was a sick little fuck with one thing on his mind: My sisters friend Nadiya. I got there and the place was loaded with the best snacks you could think of. Arup had amazing toys, his house was sick, it was a dream to be there honestly. His angelic mother put on Jurassic Park 3, (the one with Tea Leoni where she screams a lot but looks so gorgeous), and left us boys to enjoy the fun. I was having a blast so far, I loved his mom, I loved this movie, Arup wasn’t being weird so far, everything was going perfectly. But not a minute had gone by after his mom left before Arup started to sling out the dirtiest sentences I had ever heard. Mouthful after mouthful of the most twisted shit you could only ever read on a dark horny subreddit. I’m talking demented stuff, words even the dirtiest erotica writers wouldn’t go near. I don’t even want to repeat it on here, it was that brutal. Now obviously Arup had done some internet searches and found a whole new vocabulary of what he wanted to do with Nadiya, and now that he had company, he was kind of bouncing his ideas off me, hoping for a positive reaction. To which I just kind of….stared. How could I know what to say to the horniest kindergartener in existence, I was but a simple boy, no thoughts, just vibes. I was always disassociating so I thought, maybe I can just kinda zone this out, but no. No Arup had a commanding little presence and he forced me to hear his every little disgusting idea. I remember something he wanted to try was to take my sisters friend Nadiya skydiving naked but also he would have tentacles instead of…. Yeah…Arup my kindergarten friend had discovered both skydiving and tentacle porn at the ripe age of 6, and decided a sort of mash up was his ideal scenario. Now I was six with tentacle porn drifting around in my tiny little head, and I never asked for that, why would I want that? Anything that Arup said I simply nodded my head, gave a thumbs up, and continued to watch Tea Leoni scream at dinosaurs twice her size. Eventually his mom came in and asked how we were doing, I said I wasn’t feeling well and my dad picked me up. After driving in silence with my father, who definitely noticed something about me had changed, I went straight to the computer, looked around nervously, opened up google or whatever we had at the time, and began to type. Something stopped me though before I could press enter…Did I really want to end up like Arup? Humping a high schoolers leg and dreaming about flying naked with tentacles coming out of my front? Was I ready for that corruption? Arup had definitely spoiled a lot of my innocence in just over an hour (which honestly is quite a talent I wonder what he’s doing now, probably a CEO), but his twisted little words hadn’t visualized in my brain yet. I was one click away from changing everything, one click away from reverting back to a dirty animal. My finger lingered over the clicker on the mouse, half of me daring my brain to press down, the other half absolutely shaking from the sheer fear of knowing I would never be able to go back. I probably stayed like that for fifteen minutes. I’m sure my parents were watching from the kitchen like…what the fuck is that little nerd doing? In the end, I didn’t give in to Arup’s influence. Instead I opened Mavis Beacon typing game, and that was that. As far as I know that was the last of those thoughts until 5th grade, when I was confronted by my brother for a google search history of “Biggest penis ever?” “Big Penis is gay” and “Penis gay big now”, to which I immediately started crying and blamed the neighbor. My brother said “So you’re telling me that Jake broke into our house and searched “Penis gay big now” on our computer…and then left? I nodded, and he never brought it up again. Sorry Jake.
Eventually I left China and I never saw or spoke to Teruya or Arup ever again….but I hope they’re well, especially Arup I hope he’s not doing anything fucked up right now, he’s either incredibly successful or in jail for murder. I know Teruya is chillin, he’s probably got the biggest smile plastered on his face, shitting in a target bathroom in Japan with the door wide open. Love ya bud.
Seven years old: I was still in China at Seven, and I remember two things. I had a girlfriend named Heung Ann, and I used to read upside down. I had just learned to swim and read basically in the same month so it was a huge time of my life. Over Christmas break, my siblings had thrown me into a pool and I just kind of figured out how to swim, so I thought I would take the same approach for reading. So before we went back to school in January, I took some pictures books we had and tried to figure it out. I used to love setting up a pillow on the ground and then laying vertically against the wall with my head on the pillow.
For some reason it relaxed me, and I ended up learning how to read in this exact position. By the time I got back to school I was speed reading, but only upside down completely vertical against the wall. The first couple days I did it, my classmates went WILD, they were eating it up, they thought it was the craziest shit they’d ever seen. Now I didn’t learn this way for attention, but boy was it getting me some, I was like oh shit I gotta up my game, these kids are gonna LOVE me. The teacher was mostly confused as to what I was doing, but I wasn’t harming myself or others so she was like….okay I guess I’ll let that little weirdo do his thing. Until the next week when I came in and decided I’d up the ante. I was going to read while standing on my head. I told a couple of my classmates my plan, and they went nuts, everyone in the class knew except the teacher, so when reading time came around, there I was surrounded by my classmates, on my head trying to read, blood absolutely RUSHING all at once to my head. My eyes were getting blurry, my legs were flailin, there was no way I was gonna survive this, but I had to put on a good show for my classmates so I struggled through. At this point my tiny little body was close to blacking out, and just as my little eyes start to flutter and my brain starts to go dark, I hear “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” and feel her grab my legs and flip me right side up, and as the blood all drained from my face I looked around the room at the admiring faces of my classmates. I had done it. I read upside down, and they loved me. I was gonna be a star, the most famous 7 year old in China! Then my teacher called my mom and told her that I was doing crazy shit in class, and reading upside down was forever banned in the classroom. I had left my legacy.
The only thing I remember about my girlfriend Heung Ann was that she had the sweetest smile and that she was REALLY good at art. And she would always whisper to me, which I loved. There’s something so special about leaning in to hear musings that are just for you. Oh Heung Ann I hope you’ve found love, you really deserve it, you sweet sweet gem.
That’s it for now goodbye