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Her refusal to take part was in an odd way the most titillating thing about the whole experience. I adored and worshipped Mary O’Leary. I used to sit beside her on her sofa when she watched TV and secretly stare at her face. It was the most perfect thing I had ever seen—so soft, so clean, so ready to smile, so full of rosy light. And there was nothing more perfect and joyous in nature than that face in the micro-instant before she laughed.

In July of that summer, my family went to my grandparents’ house for the Fourth of July, where I had the usual dispiriting experience of watching Uncle Dee turning wholesome food into flying stucco. Worse still, my grandparents’ television was out of commission and waiting for a new part—the cheerfully moronic local television repairman was unable to see the logic of keeping a supply of spare vacuum tubes in stock, an oversight that earned him a carbonizing dose of ThunderVision needless to say—and so I had to spend the long weekend reading from my grandparents’ modest library, which consisted mostly of Reader’s Digest condensed books, some novels by Warwick Deeping, and a large cardboard box filled with Ladies’ Home Journals going back to 1942. It was a trying weekend.

When I returned, Buddy Doberman and Arthur Bergen were waiting by my house. They barely acknowledged my parents, so eager were they to get me around the corner to have a private word. There they breathlessly told me that in my absence Mary O’Leary had come into the tree house and taken her clothes off—every last stitch. She had done so freely, indeed with a kind of dreamy abandon.

“It was like she was in a trance,” said Arthur fondly.

“A happy trance,” added Buddy.

“It was really nice,” said Arthur, his stock of fond remembrance nowhere near exhausted.

Naturally I refused to believe a word of this. They had to swear to God a dozen times and hope for their mothers’ deaths on a stack of Bibles and much else in a grave vein before I was prepared to suspend my natural disbelief even slightly. Above all, they had to describe every moment of the occasion, something that Arthur was able to do with remarkable clarity. (He had, as he would boast in later years, a pornographic memory.)

“Well,” I said, keen as you would expect, “let’s get her and do it again.”

“Oh, no,” Buddy responded. “She said she wasn’t going to do it any more. We had to swear we’d never ask her again. That was the deal.”

“But,” I said, sputtering and appalled, “that’s not fair.”

“The funny thing is,” Arthur went on, “she said she’s been thinking about doing it for a long time, but waited until you weren’t there because she didn’t want to upset you.”

“Upset me? Upset me? Are you kidding? Upset me? Are you kidding? Are you kidding?”

You can still see the dent in the sidewalk where I beat my head against it for the next fourteen hours. True to her word, Mary O’Leary never came near the tree house again.

Shortly afterward, in an inspired moment, I took all the drawers out of my father’s closet chest to see what, if anything, they hid. I used to strip down his bedroom twice a year, in spring and autumn, when he went to spring training and the World Series, looking for lost cigarettes, stray money, and evidence that I was indeed from the Planet Electro—perhaps a letter from King Volton or the Electro Congress promising some munificent reward for raising me safely and making sure that my slightest whims were met.

On this occasion, because I had more time than usual on my hands, I took the drawers all the way out to see if anything was behind or beneath them, and so found his modest girlie stash, comprising two thin magazines, one called Dude, the other Nugget. They were extremely cheesy. The women in them looked like Pat Nixon or Mamie Eisenhower—the sort of women you would pay not to see naked. I was appalled and astonished, not because my father had men’s magazines—this was an entirely welcome development, of course; one to be encouraged by any means possible—but because he had