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Show 28 I was going to find out what it was all about. Ricky and Duaine were fine, the best, but now it was Elizabeth Brown who skipped through my days swinging my heart like a May basket. Yet at the same time I deceived Elizabeth constantly and eagerly without a twitch of shame or remorse, almost every night in my presleep dreams. I was a grown man of sixteen riding through the Wild West with a girl who wore buckskin, threw a leg over a saddle, used guns and rode hell for leather, and nightly I saved her from hordes of villains, or better, from a fate worse than death, risking my life so that she could see the courage, the nobility of my soul. Afterwards we rode off together into a sexless sunset. Yet I deceived her too, deceived both Elizabeth and that bronco busting beauty without the slightest hesitation any chance I got, albeit with some shame, for this time my object was any photo of undraped female flesh I could get my eyes on. Picture shows like "Cleopatra" and "Hell's Angels" and "The Sign of the Cross" had vanished before I could properly appreciate them, replaced with dull decorous things, but one did come to the Egyptian which was all about the illicit love of a sculptor and his model, the ads pictured the nude statue he had made of her, and I fought with my mother, and won, and went. It seemed hours before they got around to the big scene when she first posed for the artist, all that dull moral writhing before she threw off her robe and stood naked before him. The camera was on her face and shoulders, very nice, pretty, but I thought it dwelt there overlong, and when it did move, it blacked out and went down for a close-up of her feet, rising slowly to a short distance above her kneecaps, not nearly high enough for Ricky and me, growing boys, and showing nothing in between. We'd been had. I preferred magazines, they teased harder and were everywhere, in soap ads, etc., everywhere the smooth sensual flesh of beautiful women. Thus I |