I
had first met cousins Patti and Charlie as a toddler when my mother ran away with me to Tennessee. She and I spent that winter living with my Aunt Mildred, but I was far too young to remember her children. I had met them again briefly in 1962 at the family reunion, but I didn’t spend enough time with these cousins to form much of an impression of them. The summer of 1965 was my first opportunity to get to know them.

Charlie was one year my senior, and Patti a year older still. An outside observer would have seen them as simple country teenagers, but I saw my Tennessee cousins as quite sophisticated. I think my fascination stemmed mostly from the fact that they were both in high school already, and were steeped in popular culture. They may have talked with a decidedly Southern drawl, but they spoke with assurance about things I yearned to understand—dating, high school, popular movies…and, of course, sex. In my eyes, they could do no wrong, and I longed to make myself over in their image.

Charlie stood tall in a trendy Madras shirt, and even had a joke to go with it—a joke that had to be explained to me, as I had never heard of this colorful Indian material and its tendency to “bleed.” (How do you kill a Madras elephant? Pour hot water on it, and watch it bleed to death.) He was athletic, and was gearing up to try out for his high school football team the following semester.

In her horn-rimmed glasses, Patti seemed to typify “cool.” I was impressed with her piano playing skill, and a bit intimidated by her intelligence. She was interested in politics, and seemed to have retained every fact she ever read in a history textbook. My own approach to both history and current events in school was to memorize the names and dates for the written test, and then eject these facts from memory as quickly as possible. Patti, on the other hand, remembered what she learned, and this came out even in her casual conversations.

“Bay” was the password as we sat with her brother and my aunt, playing the home version of the popular TV quiz show. As her partner, I could have won the round by just saying this word, but the clue words Patti provided baffled me.

“Pigs” she cried, then “Kennedy” and “invasion.” I hadn’t a clue what she was driving at.

When the password was finally revealed, I don’t know if I was more amazed at her clues, or the fact she even knew about the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a recent historic event that had completely escaped my notice.

If I had been able to ask my cousins for advice about fitting in at school, and feeling less awkward with my peers, I imagine neither of them would have considered themselves to have any sort of insight about this. I doubt if either of them would have considered themselves popular. Still, it amazed me to see how easily they maneuvered in both their family setting and the wider social world of their high school friends. Having no siblings who might model these skills for me, I instinctively gravitated toward them. I idolized my cousins for the apparent poise with which they navigated the tides of peer pressure in which I was finding myself increasingly storm-tossed. The ease and self-assurance with which they went about their lives impressed me, and I wanted to be just like them.

I don’t remember when my cousins and I began trading smutty jokes. I had heard my share of bathroom humor in the locker room at school, and had accepted that this was a normal part of an adolescent boy’s life. I was very surprised, though, that my cousin Charlie thought nothing of telling such jokes in his sister’s presence, and I was frankly astonished when she countered with some of her own.

She laughed as she showed me a small card that one of her friends had given her, an obscene visual joke in which a skier continued down the slope, unaware that a close brush with a tree stump had divested him of his genitals. I was astonished that my female cousin had shared it with me.

Over the next two weeks, together with our mothers, we took several short trips to see local tourist attractions. We walked across the rope bridge at Rock City in Chattanooga. We toured the American Museum of Science and Energy at Oak Ridge. We took a day trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A neighbor, whose husband worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, took us out one night to the river to observe a barge make its way though the Fort Loudon Lock. Everywhere my cousins and I went, our raunchy banter came with us.

The vulgar genie was out of the bottle, and by the time we piled into my aunt’s car for the trip to Michigan, no conversation was safe from our irreverent observations and off-color humor. The drive to my Aunt Dorothy’s home in Ann Arbor would take us two days. My cousins and I filled the miles with our smutty jokes, and before long it seemed as though we were trying to outdo one another—a competition our mothers would have happily done without.

We thought our jokes were funny—replete with bathroom sounds, and steeped in sexual innuendo, with not much real cleverness or humor. An objective adult observer would probably have found them as boring and immature as most adolescent jokes. My mother, however, was anything but an objective observer, and truly seemed appalled at my behavior. It wasn’t that she was offended by the sexual humor per se, but she was astonished by her realization that, at least in my cousins’ presence, I could be quite vulgar.

My Aunt Mildred seemed surprisingly unaffected by our joke telling. Seeing how casually her own kids told these jokes in her presence, one might assume she had heard them all before. She probably thought that the quickest way to bring an end to the off-color humor and the limit testing was to ignore it.

After two days trapped in the car with us, my mother was relieved to reach the refuge of her sister Dorothy’s apartment. The three sisters quickly settled down to talk and share stories. By the next day, we kids were tired of listening to the family chatter, and we began looking for something to do.

“How about a movie?” Aunt Dorothy said.

“That’s a great idea,” my mother chimed in. She had been looking for an opportunity to talk in private with both her sisters about all our smutty jokes, and a movie seemed like a perfect way of getting us out of the apartment.

“I left the newspaper on the coffee table,” Aunt Dorothy said. “Why don’t you three check and see what’s playing?” My cousins and I walked to the living room and sat on the couch to scan the movie listings. Our mothers sat with Dorothy at the kitchen table, talking.

The plan to crash the adult movie was my cousins’ idea.

“Let’s see if we can get into ‘The Sandpiper,’” Charlie whispered.

“There’s no sex in that,” Patti countered in a hushed voice. “Richard Burton plays a priest.”

“Yeah, but Liz Taylor gets laid on the beach,” Charlie said.

“How do you know that?” she asked. “Have you seen it?”

“No but I heard Shalit talking about it on TV. Besides,” he said, shaking the newspaper at her, “there’s nothing good playing in this whole town.”

Ann Arbor, where our Aunt Dorothy taught public health, was considered a hotbed of the counterculture emerging all around us in the 1960s. If we had been a few years older, there’s no telling what sort of entertainment we might have found, but not one of us was old enough to drive, and we were dependent on our mothers for transportation.

“Your mother won’t let you go see that,” I said, “and mine won’t either.”

“They’re not going to know,” Charlie said. “Look, see this,” he said placing the newspaper back on the coffee table. He pointed to a list of show times for “Dr. No,” which was featured at one of the downtown theaters. “Just tell Aunt Bea we’re going to see a spy movie.”

I felt amazed and a little embarrassed by my cousins’ casual interest in cinematic sex. At age 12, I knew next to nothing about the facts of life, yet here were my cousins, only a couple of years older than me, mapping out a plan of action to sneak the three of us into a sexy movie. I felt clearly out of my league, but the fact that they included me in their plan made me feel strangely alive and tingly…and very grownup.

An hour later, the three of us climbed out of the back seat of my Aunt Mildred’s car in front of The Michigan Theater just in time for the matinee showing of “Dr. No.” My mother rolled down the window on the passenger side. “We’ll pick you up at 4:30,” she said.

“We’ll be right here,” Charlie called, waving from behind me. He was only a year my senior, but was several inches taller, and seemed far more worldly and street smart. He clearly knew how to play his mother, as did his sister Patti. Just listening to the way they bantered back and forth with their mother amazed me. They never quite crossed the boundary into rudeness, but they were fearless in pushing the envelope, and their topics never shied away from a healthy teenage interest in sex.

As my aunt’s car disappeared around the corner, my cousins quickly began to reconnoiter. “OK, ‘The Sandpiper’ is playing at the State Theater,” Charlie said, “I think it’s about two blocks over, that way.”

“Wait, I thought I saw the marquee down this street,” Patti said, pointing in the direction we had come. “I wish we had a city map.”

“Are you sure it’s back that way?” Charlie said. “I’m almost sure it’s over here. Maybe we should ask at the box office.”

“Oh, right,” Patti said, bristling. “You think the cashier at one theater is going to tell you how to get to another one to see a different movie? Think again!”

The three of us stood there on the sidewalk. While my cousins grappled with logistics, my own concern focused more on whether we would be allowed into the other movie. Not one of us was yet 18 years old.

At that moment, my aunt’s car sailed back around the block, and pulled up to the sidewalk directly in front of us. My mother rolled down the passenger window again, and my aunt called to us from the driver’s seat.

“We’ve decided we want to see the movie too,” she said. “You three go on inside. We’re going to find a place to park, and we’ll join you in a few minutes.” With that, she pulled away from the curb and drove off again, her car disappearing from sight around the same corner.

“We should just wait outside here for them,” I suggested.

“Are you kidding?” Patti retorted, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“They’re not coming back,” Charlie said. “They’re just trying to make sure we don’t slip over to that other movie house, that’s all.”

It was ironic that our mothers saw nothing provocative in this first of the James Bond films, but worried about “The Sandpiper.” “Dr. No” had far more scantily clad women and implied sex than the Burton/Taylor vehicle.

In the end, we decided not to take the chance. On my own, I would not have dared even to consider slipping into a movie house to see an adult film. Judging from my cousins’ banter, though, this sort of thing was apparently commonplace for them. That was part of my fascination with them, this air of adventurousness and transgression, always in the name of grownup pursuits—cinematic erotica, dating, alcohol, cigarettes and, most intoxicating of all, independence. Just spending time with them left me feeling heady, as though their budding adulthood might somehow rub off on me.