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Oh! Victory triumph conquest. It happened at last. It happened the way it happened because Margaret had sadly departed family employ—the children were all of responsible size now—leaving free her maid’s quarters, the small bedroom beside the den, to be usurped by the wily denmaster himself. The move was logical and obvious. He would now control the entire lower level of the house on Grassfield Road, except for the laundry room. Downward, he lugged all prized possessions, installing his Howdy Doody puppet, his Willie the Clown doll, wrestling magazines and artifacts, chin-up bar, Fabian photos, Presleyana in vast array, congas, broken bongos, stacks of comic books, record collections ever growing, beatnik books, his own poetry and writings, and every oddity his grandparents had ever given him. Plus, now there was extra square footage for F Troop sleeping bags so as to allow for inevitable group crashovers. So—they found this girl on New Year’s Eve at Penn Station, a devastating hippie chick, smarter than her years, which were the same as theirs. Her name was Carol. Oh, a most beautiful redhead, very, um, liberal and forward sexually, an altogether new kind of chick, a city chick, to boot. Glenn fell in love with her first, serenaded her on harmonica, and they started doing it in no time. She came to Great Neck a lot and would decide—believing in free love and all—to arbitrarily get it on with each member of the troop. She had not yet completed her mission, since Andy was Andy and he was not easy to engage as such. On the night the world changed, she had been making out with most all of them down in the den until there was only Andy, whom she led into his new bedroom and suggested greater measures. Very very excited but—oh! He told her to wait and rushed out to his friends and said, “Um, okay, what should I do?” “He had zero idea,” said Gevins. They sat him down and mapped each movement for him. “We’re talking very graphic instructions, all about lubrication and insertion and licking and biting and stroking, step by step.” He kept having them repeat what they told him. One more time, from the top. His eyes bulged as he drank in the precious invaluable information. “Now, wait, so first I kiss her? How long do we do that?” After a half hour, he said, “Okay, I got it now.” The troop—all of whom had been convulsing throughout—rose up to pat his back encouragingly, told him, “Good luck! Go for it! You can do it!” At ten o’clock the following morning, they would all remember, he emerged from his bedroom with eyes resembling golf balls and he pronounced in an effusive tone they had not heard before, “Today I am a man!”

“In the eleventh grade,” he proudly told an interviewing person years later, “I lost my virginity and kissed a girl the same night!”

But he screwed everything up. He always did, every time he got a little too cocky. He noticed this pattern in himself and hated it. He actually came to believe that he was cursed in four-year cycles. “Every four years I’d be successful for a few months. Then that would blow away. [After losing his virginity] it was great. For the next few months, I got really high headed about it and I went out with a lot of girls. Then I got really stuck up … and I went too far.” He saw certain moments of the seventh and eleventh grades as high points and all periods that intervened or immediately followed were hopeless and dismal (and, um, fine). With this girl Carol, it was the same. They kind of dated and had sex and she openly adored his odd/awkward sweetness, sincerely urged him to be a better him, which she knew he was. She learned to slip down through his foliage-obscured subterranean bedroom window—as many would over time (just for the illicit thrill of it; the back door to the den was ever an option)—and showed him how to do things, which he liked very very extremely much. Other hippie girls sensed his newfound power and enticed him as well and what else could he do? After all, the other guys did it, too. But this Carol girl