It's All Relative

Okay:

So I'm on a roll with this embarrassing childhood memory bit. I've got a million of 'em.

And here goes another.

My cousins and I (there are five of us, all boys) were raised like brothers. All of our mothers were single, and there was only eight years difference between the oldest and the youngest. I fell right in the middle.

Our mothers are from a fairly large family in South Carolina. Throughout our childhood there was the occasional family reunion, several of which we attended. One of my aunts, a closet stage mother, decided it would be a great idea for us to choreograph a dance routine to perform for our relatives.

The first time we performed I believe was the summer of 1990. I don't have any cognizant memory of life before believing Michael Jackson was the coolest motherfucker on the planet. Then my father took me to see Purple Rain and old MJ all of a sudden had some competition. After all, Prince was getting pussy.

Then I discovered Kool Moe Dee, Run DMC, NWA and Slick Rick.

And then there was Bell Biv DeVoe. Me and my cousins were fairly certain that they were the best thing that ever happened to anybody.

We choreographed our routine to "Poison". The only song worth dancing to.

Choreographing might be a strong word. We did The Running Man, The Roger Rabbit, The Reebok, The Robocop, The MCM, etc. You get the picture now.

The grande finale? A simultaneous half-split.

And the crowd went wild!

The second year, I wrote raps for us all to perform. (Yes, I've been at this for a while!)

Then there were cookouts and wedding receptions. And although no one ever seemed to be requesting it, if there was room and time, my aunt made us dance. One time there was no music and we had to do the routine to hand claps.

There is a video floating around here somewhere.

But the dance is not the embarrassing part because I could never put into words exactly how embarrassing it was. You would have to see the video to feel my pain.

No, this is about something else.

The fourth or fifth family reunion came around when I was a freshman in high school. Before we left for Charleston, me and my cousins all agreed that under no circumstances whatsoever were we going to be doing "The Dance" as it had come to be known.

I had instead prepared a few raps to perform over an instrumental of Dr. Dre's "Smokin' On Blunts And Drankin' Tangueray". I would have been the highlight of the talent show had it not been for my blind Aunt's "Blind Granny Rap", complete with a call-and-response chorus from her four grandchildren.

The grande finale? She took out her dentures!

The crowd went wild!

Cheap! I thought. Bunch of bozos. Well fuck 'em if they go for that sort of thing.

Back at the hotel we all piled into one room, over a dozen of us. Cousins. Someone ordered some porn. There was food. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. But I, for one, could not take my eyes off of my sixteen-year-old cousin from Chicago with the flawless asymmetric. Let's call her Heather.

Heather was a serious cutie. And to be fair, we were very distant cousins. I don't even think we were blood relatives. But, dammit, it was a family reunion.

Through some strange course of events, we ended up in the bathroom alone.


Pause.


Now, like I said yesterday, I really did take Papa Smurf's advice to heart. I am a very impulsive man, and always have been. I generally don't wait for anyone to tell me its okay. I just do it.

Fuck it. I just do it.


And so, the next thing I knew, my tongue was halfway down her throat and we were doing some pretty serious making out in that bathroom while the rest of our cousins were watching porn in the next room, shockingly unawares. There were no words. We never spoke, and I never told anyone. Until today.

Say what you want.

Ewww.

Nasty.

Freak.

Pervert.


That shit was one of the hottest make-out sessions I have had to date! Period.

We maintained contact through letters (remember those?) but it didn't last long. Chicago seemed like it was a whole world away.

In retrospect, I was probably acting out some hostility toward my family. Like, This is how I feel about all this blood crap everyone's raving about. A little tender from having lost the talent show to a blind geriatric.

Perhaps I was a victim of over exposure. Or maybe it was like how sit com actors are rarely able to make the successful transition into film.

Michael J. Fox. Tom Hanks. Robin Williams. Everyone else tanked.

Maybe all they wanted to see me do was "The Dance".



So that's the story of how I came dangerously close to fucking my cousin.



Thanks for reading.


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GOBAMA!


Innocent Question: Ever had a crush on/fantasized about/kissed/made out with/fucked a blood relative?