High Price

not much more than that. In my neighborhood, the girls set the pace: a cool cat would go with the flow. You didn’t want to seem desperate or pushy. A real man made the ladies desperate for him; he didn’t beg or take liberties. That was how the men I looked up to behaved.
    And when I was eleven, I distinctly remember walking down the street and overhearing two older girls talking about me. One of them said, “That boy’s going to break a lot of hearts someday,” and the other smiled and nodded in agreement. That stoked my pride and piqued my interest, of course, but I was too nervous to approach them. I didn’t want to undermine my cool image.
    By sixth grade, however, I had fooled around with a girl, whom I’ll call Vanessa, in a school closet. She was a year older than me; she’d told me to pull my pants down and showed me what she would let me do, all the while keeping an ear out for teachers and lunch ladies. But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I fully understood what it was all about.
    It was the summer of 1979. Five days a week, I participated in a summer camp program in the park for underprivileged kids, one of many such initiatives that would soon fall prey to Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts. They had hired some of the older neighborhood teens to run it, made a few young adults into supervisors, and offered organized sports and activities meant to keep us off the streets. Mostly, it did.
    That day, however, I had other plans. A very attractive girl, whom I’ll refer to as Monica, had invited me to her house: her mom wasn’t going to be home. We’d been talking on the phone and she told me to come by when I went to the park. That summer, everyone was listening to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” on their JVC boom boxes. Much to my chagrin, my mother had recently forced me to cut my Afro into a shag (something like a mullet for black people), an injury to my self-image for which I seriously resented her. But I wore some denim shorts, a football jersey, and Chuck Taylors, kicking it seventies-style.
    Monica was a brown-skinned athletic beauty. Her breasts were just starting to bud. Her muscular legs were slightly bowed, which gave her a sexy walk and stance that emphasized her hips. Her brown eyes were a shade lighter than mine. She had a small, delicate nose and wore her hair short, straightened. Monica wasn’t on any sports teams—but boy could she run. I’d watched her fly past many boys on the track in PE class. I knew her from school. She lived in a small bungalow on Eighteenth Street near the park. We started on the couch in the living room and then moved into her bedroom.
    Soon we were on her bed. We were grinding and kissing, touching all over. We both had our clothes on; it was summer so she must have been wearing cutoff shorts. I was definitely not at all sorry about missing that day’s basketball drills. Because suddenly, I had the most amazing feeling ever. It overwhelmed me, was completely beyond my control. Scoring a touchdown, making a clutch jump shot: nothing had ever felt like this. But then there was this sticky stuff in my jeans. For a moment, I freaked out. I had no idea what it was. Still, outwardly, I kept my composure; I didn’t want Monica to know about it. It seemed like I had wet my pants. What cool muthafucka wets his pants when he’s alone with a girl? I was mortified.
    Then I began to imagine all kinds of even more horrible possibilities. Trying to hide my embarrassment, I got up quickly and I’m sure rather abruptly, hoping she hadn’t noticed what was now a stain on my jeans. I muttered something about having to get back to my friends in the park. With rising anxiety, I went to find my cousin Anthony, who was sixteen. He would know what to do.
    While I kept my eye out for him, the more I thought about it, the more worried I became. By the time I found my older cousin, I was sure that I had some scary and probably incurable VD, which was the term I knew for such problems. Or maybe what I’d done was what got a girl pregnant? I just didn’t know.
    “Yo, Amp,” I said, using Anthony’s street name. I started anxiously trying to describe what had happened with Monica. I didn’t want to sound like a fool. He let me go on. I looked at him; I suspect my anxiety was visible, despite my efforts. And then with a big smile on his face, Amp proclaimed, “You ain’t got no damn disease.” Soon he was laughing uncontrollably. “You ain’t done shit,” he