Every year, while we lived in Mallorca, my mum and I would travel back to South Africa for a visit. I always looked forward to it—especially because it meant seeing Bruce again.
Bruce was older—thirteen to my ten-and-a-half—and for years, he’d been my partner in crime. Cowboys and Indians. Sneaking around the Barclays’ massive house at 72 Forest Road. Causing just enough mayhem to stay out of trouble, but never out of ideas. I had no reason to think this trip would be any different.
The moment I arrived, I was buzzing with plans—shooting pigeons at the Inanda Club, building forts, getting dirty and dangerous in the wild.
Bruce had other ideas.
“Let’s go to Sandton City,” he said.
A mall.
I blinked. “What for?”
“To meet chicks.”
It was like he’d started speaking Zulu. I stood there, ready to relive our feral childhood, and suddenly he was talking about girls like it was a mission from God.
But he wasn’t joking.
We headed out the old way, through the familiar hole in the fence into the Inanda Club. That part was still the same. Then, without a word, he veered toward a second hole—one that hadn’t been there before.
We crawled through, and there it was: Sandton City, glinting on the other side like a neon sign that read Welcome to Puberty. You’re Late.
Inside, Bruce was transformed. Laughing, flirting, talking to girls with the confidence of someone who’d done this a dozen times already. I stood nearby, awkward and invisible, wondering if I’d wandered into the wrong universe.
I mumbled something and left—overwhelmed, unsettled, and a little heartbroken.
That night, while we were changing for bed, the situation escalated.
Bruce dropped his trousers and—well, it was a horror show.
There it was. Fully developed. Surrounded by a patch of hair that looked like it paid rent. Like a man’s.
I looked down at myself—smooth, unimpressive, pink, and tragically unequipped. My stomach turned.
Bruce caught my expression and burst out laughing.
“Jesus, china! You’ve got nothing!”
I wanted to vanish.
“Do you pull wire?” he asked.
“Do I what?”
He might as well have asked if I filed my taxes.
He launched into a very enthusiastic, very graphic tutorial on masturbation, then pointed to the bathroom.
“Go do it. I’ll go after.”
So I sat in there, alone, freezing, staring at my anatomy like it might offer a walkthrough.
“Think of chicks!” Bruce called from the other side.
But I didn’t know any chicks.
My brain flailed—pigeons? Forts? No spark.
Then, faintly: Samantha. Carol. That kiss in the fort that made something weird happen down there.
Maybe, just maybe, I was onto something.
Not long after that trip, back in Mallorca, something strange happened.
By that point, I’d gathered that sex was a thing. It involved people doing things to each other that weren’t covered by handshakes or board games. I didn’t know the logistics or the etiquette, but I knew it was big. And Bruce’s transformation had confirmed that I was late to the party.
That’s probably what led to the experiment.
There was a friend—let’s leave him unnamed—who lived out in Calvià. We’d often do weekends at each other’s homes. This particular weekend, he was staying at mine. After a long lunch at one of my dad’s friend’s houses, we asked to leave early so we could go home and “play.”
On the walk back, the conversation turned into uncharted territory.
“What do you think sex actually is?” one of us asked.
We speculated. Guessed. Shared scraps we’d heard from older boys or half-overheard in adult whispers. It was all ridiculous, but it felt important. Like we were trying to solve a mystery with no map.
By the time we got back to Campo de Rosas, we’d decided the only way to understand was to try something ourselves.
So we did.
Back in my room, we stripped off and stood there—awkward, expectant, as if something might just… happen.
Nothing did.
Eventually, we edged closer and briefly—very briefly—touched the tips of our unimpressive, bald little willies together. Maybe the universe would send a sign.
It didn’t.
“…Wanna do something else?”
That was it. The experiment ended.
What’s remarkable isn’t what happened—but what didn’t. No shame. No panic. No whispered horror about what it “meant.” We hadn’t been told yet that sex was supposed to happen a certain way. There were no roles. No rules. Just curiosity.
Later, I’d know—without question—that I was straight. Nature had made the call; I was just catching up.
Apparently, my mum had sensed a few seismic shifts. Not long after, she handed me a hardback book called Love, Sex and Babies.
It was a revelation.
Diagrams. Explanations. Mechanics. Science. Emotions. Everything. No myths. No mystery. Just clarity.
For a while, it was enough.
Then I found my dad’s stash of Playboys.
If Love, Sex and Babies was the theory, Playboy was the lab component. And unlike the diagrams and polite commentary about emotional intimacy, Playboy was full-colour, high-octane, and unapologetically vivid.
This wasn’t a lucky find—I went looking. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I figured a man like my father—who’d been sleeping with Kirsten while my mother and I were still on another continent—wasn’t the type to have empty bedside drawers.
I was right. I found the motherlode in his study.
One look and I was hooked.
This was it. The real thing. No more guesswork. It was time to see if I could do what Bruce had described.
So, I took a magazine into the en-suite bathroom, locked the door, and got to work.
Mid-experiment, I heard my parents entering the bedroom.
My whole body seized up.
No time. I did the only thing I could: opened the window and dropped the magazine onto the terrace below.
Crisis averted.
Until I heard my mother’s voice outside:
“What’s one of your dirty magazines doing out here?”
My stomach detonated.
I sprinted out of the bathroom, through my bedroom, and onto the terrace—rubbing my eyes as if I’d just woken from the world’s deepest nap.
They stood there, magazine in hand. Mercifully unaware I’d been less than two feet away, mid-session.
My mum tried to shield me, scandalised.
I very nearly confessed. But didn’t.
Curiosity, sadly, has a long half-life.
For my second attempt, I chose a better location. The pine forest. Remote. Secluded. Foolproof.
I stole another magazine and rode out, determined to conduct my research in peace.
There was just one problem—Bruce had never mentioned lubrication.
In my enthusiasm, I’d overdone it, and by the time I was done, my poor little willy looked like it had been skinned.
It burned like hell, but I figured a swim might help.
So I biked over to Juan Carlos’s house and jumped into the pool, completely unaware that chlorine was about to give me a free preview of Dante’s Inferno: Genital Edition.
The pain was instant and biblical.
I didn’t scream, but I did make a hasty, deeply suspicious exit.
“You were only in the water for three seconds,” Juan Carlos said, baffled.
I mumbled something about hitting my head, biked home, climbed into bed, and curled into the fetal position.
It was the only place that made sense.