Sixty-two years ago, I left Davy Crockett for Marilyn Monroe

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Four days ago, I spent two minutes gazing at Marilyn Monroe in a restaurant bathroom in Guanajuato, Mexico.

You see the evidence in the photo.

It wasn’t our first tryst.

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Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 when I was 13.

In the year of her death, I had wedged a well-creased Life Magazine cover photo of her between my mattress and bed spring. In the open, on a table next to my bed in a bedroom I shared with my 11-year-old brother, Peter, sat a new, small, orange transistor radio with earphones.

I didn’t understand why I liked listening in private to the music played by local disc jockey Lou Guttenberger and why I wanted to look at Marilyn repeatedly.

Or why I only did either in the dark.

I recall my index finger and thumb placing the earbuds carefully in each ear, first the right and then the left, clicking the tiny vertical on-button, and then unfolding Marilyn.

Our weekly vocabulary word test in eighth grade at Sacred Heart School never included décolletage, cleavage, or puberty.

Two years earlier, I had slept with my fingers clasping the fake fur of my Davy Crocket coonskin cap.

I left Davy for Marilyn.

Two years later, I hid a Playboy in a nearby wooded ravine my friend Jim had stolen from his older brother John.

Under some brush, deep enough, my old paper route customer, Mrs. Coleman, who lived next door, could not see me. She knew my mom.

I left Marilyn for a centerfold with a staple in her belly button.

Could the false teach me about the real?

Magazines were all I had. I needed to know what I was missing.

Gazing was safe.

Touch, sound, smell, and taste would come later.

My school’s nuns and priests were no help. Nor were my parents or younger brothers. I had no sisters.

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Next, I slept with one of my mother’s discarded nylons as a stocking cap to try to straighten out my curly hair.

A friend told me girls liked guys with straight hair.

Lou, the DJ, still played songs that soothed my desperation.

The Lovin’ Spoonful asked if I believed in Magic.

I did and dreamed every night.

For a cure to acne.

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As I finished this story, one thought came to me unexpectedly. Looking back from a lifetime away, life was easier for that scared half-man me than it was for Marilyn Monroe. Or the Playboy Centerfold.

I’m sorry for my part in that.