36 - Our Family Friends: An Afternoon of Revelations (What ‘f**k’ Means)

My enlightenment continued that same afternoon on a different level. In his untidy room, Billy, lying on his bed and leafing over one of his Asterix comic books, tossed a second unexpected question, one with a rather sardonic grin. “Do you know what 'fuck' means?” No, I did not know. All I knew was that it was a verb for an insult that was voiced, combined with a variety of unrelated object nouns, animate or inanimate (such as ‘fuss’, ‘trouble’, ‘cross’, body parts, persons, relatives, even divine persons)—in football stadiums, in the neighborhood amongst builders, in milder versions even by Father himself in moments of anger or irritation.

I understood that we were entering a taboo area. He explained rather tentatively to me with the same cunning and arrogant smile, the meaning of the word and what boys do to girls with their ‘dick’. It was as if Billy were revealing to me a universal secret, which Greek parents tend to conceal from their offspring for as long as they can, in the hope that somewhere, somehow, a third party will reveal its meaning, explain in some detail the pertinent act, and, thus, relieve them of the burden of a hidden and longed-for but for some reason discomfortable truth, which, nevertheless inevitably one day will be revealed in absentia in one way or another.

In the weekend that followed, Billy used the pictures in the porn magazine we found walking amongst the pine trees of the Panorama Forest, in our joint families outing to illustrate the subject matter and edify my ignorance on that important issue. Barely eleven years old, I was initiated in the Secrets of Birth and Life. I learned; my existence was illuminated by a bright light. In two random instances, I unknowingly climbed a large step on the ladder of life and emerged from the naivete and innocent of childhood into the terra incognita of manhood. It was a week in my tenth year of life, that I crossed the threshold into the dark and mysterious era of adolescence with whatever that entailed. And a libido was born.