Walking around this afternoon seeing some parts of this neighborhood I've never wandered through, I walked in front of a deserted schoolyard and turned right back around.

Something in me still expects that my inferior basketball skills or my too-thick glasses or my gooney lunchbox will earn me an ass-kicking by a group of malcontent 5th graders.

Today, though, I forced myself to walk outside the schoolyard behind what I soon learned was a Christian School. It was raining and the place was empty, but I still imagined pockets of restless kids huddling in the shadows smoking cigarettes and cursing, waiting for someone to wander by so they could expel some artless kicks and punches.

This never happened to me. There were no ambushes during grade school or high school, and in fact during grade school I wandered around the campus of the Academy of the Holy Names like it was my own back yard.

I got to school quite early back then just so I could have the place to myself. The campus seemed enormous, and on the other side of the fence across from the soccer field was the Crosstown Expressway. The Crosstown was a toll-road, which at the time made me think you had to be wealthy to be able to use it.

From the other side of the fence I watched people drive to work. Eventually I recognized the cars. One long-haired, darkly tanned woman in a black vehicle wore shorts and smoked cigarettes in her car every morning; whoever she was, I think she inspired my first sexual dreams. There were other cars that I came to recognize in the daily parade but hers was the only one I wanted to be in.

On that spot where I stood waiting for her we killed a seagull. 7 or 8 of us throwing rocks at the birds, when finally someone nailed one. It seemed like a moment of accomplishment (wasn't this what we were trying to do?), but everyone got scared, and not just because the vice-principal of the school witnessed the event and came storming out onto the soccer field.

We panicked when hundreds of seagulls swarmed over the schoolyard, cawing and squawking and perhaps simply recognizing that one of theirs had fallen.

They cleared out quickly, and I imagined them to be back by Tampa Bay plotting a takeover of our school.

The guy who threw the stone got into big trouble, as I recall, though so many memories from those days are hard to be sure about. Maybe no one got into trouble, aside from some lectures about not being good Christians and not living up to the ideals of the Academy.

I thought of that seagull the next morning. It was a few weeks before school ended and we would all graduate, many of us never to meet or speak again even though we went to the same damn high school.

I thought of that seagull when 10 or 12 of us got in early and to our delight saw a couple of dogs fornicating wildly in the middle of the baseball field -- right on the pitcher's mound.

Because he was so aroused the male dog could not walk without stumbling, and when he chased the female dog he alternated between hind legs and put most of the effort on his front legs, so he could only stand on 3 legs at a time.

To be honest I'm not even sure I knew what the hell was going on out there, but when everyone whooped and belched and yelled for more I joined right in, oddly fascinated by the events outside. I kind of pitied the male dog, who looked really uncomfortable, even when he caught up with the female dog and they preposterously assumed the posture of vigorous copulation.

It was the first time I'd ever seen fucking of any kind. No one had ever explained it to me, and for a brief moment during this event I filled in the gaps of my knowledge about sex with misguided notions that human sexual relations somehow involved dogs. Hell, now I *know* it does for some people, but not for me, though I did go through an attention-getting phase in college when I told friends and strangers alike how much I'd love to fuck a cat. It was nonsense, but no one else was saying it at the time.

That afternoon, with the morning dog-sex event still fresh in our minds, I was running around by the ditch outside the baseball field when I found 5 unopened bottles of Budweiser. While I may have been confused at the sight of 2 animals copulating I was perfectly clear about what beer was.

I motioned for a friend to come over, we were both like "Holy shit, this is great! We gotta tell everyone!" and we headed back to the ball field announcing our big find. I held up 2 bottles and simply announced "UNOPENED! UNOPENED, GUYS!"

Someone had a bottle opener (a lot of people in that class had Swiss army knives) and the 12 or 13 of us passed the warm, filthy bottles around, taking maybe 2 or 3 sips each but promptly falling down "drunk" and pondering how in the world we were going to get through the rest of the day without some teacher noticing.

There were quick check-ins between afternoon classes, someone telling me "I don't feel anything any more," someone else saying "I still feel pretty drunk." But we never got caught, and in fact I doubt anyone, even an 8th grader, could have felt any lasting effects from that amount of Budweiser.

Or maybe I have no concept.

Someday, though, all these memories will come back to me and maybe then my head will be clear again. Maybe then I will stop being afraid of the schoolyard and the things that never happened to me.