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 home 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 got there, I was bursting 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 said 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 awkwardly nearby, 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… 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 saw the look on my face 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 proceeded to give me a very enthusiastic, very graphic tutorial on masturbation, then pointed to the bathroom.
“Go do it. I’ll go after.”
I sat in there, alone, freezing, staring at my confused anatomy like it might provide a tutorial of its own.
“Think of chicks!” Bruce called from the other side.
But I didn’t know any chicks.
My brain flailed—pigeons? Forts? No luck.
Then, faintly, a flicker: Samantha. Carol. That kiss in the fort that made something weird happen down there.
Maybe, just maybe, I was onto something.
It must’ve been not long after that trip, back in Mallorca, when something strange happened.
By that point, I’d gathered that sex was a thing, and that it involved people doing things to each other that weren’t strictly covered by handshakes or board games. I didn’t know the logistics, or the etiquette but I knew it involved two people and getting naked. I also understood that something big was looming on the horizon—and Bruce’s transformation had confirmed it.
That’s probably what led to the experiment.
There was a friend of mine—let’s leave him unnamed, for his sake and mine—who lived out in Calvià. We’d sometimes spend 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, our conversation took a turn neither of us had ever explored before.
“What do you think sex actually is?” one of us asked.
We speculated. Guessed. Swapped what little we’d heard from older boys or half-overheard in adult whispers. It was all absurd, but it felt important. Like we were trying to solve a mystery we weren’t yet qualified to investigate.
By the time we got back to Campo de Rosas, we had come to a conclusion: the only way to truly understand was to try something out for ourselves.
And so we did.
Back in my room, we stripped off and stood there, awkward and expectant, as if something magical might happen just from being naked in the same space.
Nothing happened.
After a long silence, we edged closer and briefly—very briefly—touched the tips of our unimpressive, bald little willies together. Maybe the universe would reward us with a clue.
It didn’t.
There was no sudden understanding. No lightning bolt of insight. Just two kids standing around with growing discomfort.
“…Wanna do something else?”
And that was that. The experiment ended.
But what’s remarkable isn’t what happened—it’s what didn’t.
There was no shame. No confusion. No panic about what it meant. We hadn’t been told yet that sex was “supposed” to happen a certain way, between certain people. There were no roles. No rules. Just curiosity, unburdened by expectation.
Later, I’d know, without a doubt, that I was straight. That wasn’t something I was taught—it was just there. Nature had already made the decision. I was just catching up.
Apparently, my mum had sensed something stirring, because soon after, she handed me a hardback book called Love, Sex and Babies.
That book was a revelation.
It had diagrams. It had explanations. Finally, I understood the mechanics of it all. Where things went. Why people did it. The emotional side. The science. The whole thing. No myths. No rumors. Just clear, clinical truth.
For a while, I was satisfied.
Then I found my dad’s stash of Playboy magazines.
If Love, Sex and Babies was my introduction to the theory of sex, then my dad’s stash of Playboy magazines was the practical component of the curriculum.
And unlike the book’s neat little diagrams with polite commentary about emotions, Playboy was full-colour, full-speed, no-seatbelt required. These were actual women, in actual poses, doing things that made my brain go sideways.
This wasn’t some lucky discovery—I went looking. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I must have suspected that a man like my father—the kind of man who’d been sleeping with Kirsten while my mother and I were still on another continent—was not likely to have an empty bedside drawer.
Sure enough, after a bit of strategic snooping, I found the motherlode hidden in his study.
The moment I laid eyes on those pages, I was hooked.
This was it. The real deal. No more diagrams. No more guesswork.
It was time to see if I could make my little willy do what Bruce had claimed was possible.
This was completely uncharted territory. I had no guidance. Bruce’s vague verbal instructions had long since faded. I was operating on nothing but enthusiasm and a complete lack of understanding.
So one day, I took a magazine into the en-suite bathroom, locked the door, and sat down for some very focused “research.”
I was mid-experiment, utterly engrossed, when I heard my parents enter the room.
My body locked up instantly.
No time to think. No time to clean up. No time for anything. I did the only thing I could think of: I opened the window and dropped the magazine onto the terrace below.
Crisis averted.
Or so I thought.
Moments later, I heard them step outside.
My mother’s voice cut through the air:
“What’s one of your dirty magazines doing out here?”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
I bolted out of the bathroom, down the hall, through my bedroom, and staggered out onto the terrace—rubbing my eyes as if I’d just awoken from a deep, innocent nap.
There they stood. Magazine in hand. Mercifully unaware that I had been two feet away from them, in the bathroom, mid-activity.
My mother, ever eager to preserve my imagined innocence, tried to shield me from the magazine and whisk it away before I could “see” it.
The irony was almost too much to bear. I very nearly confessed then and there.
But I didn’t. I kept quiet.
Attempt #1: aborted.
Curiosity, unfortunately, doesn’t die easily.
For Attempt #2, I decided I needed a better strategy. The bathroom was clearly too risky. So I stole another magazine and took it deep into the pine forest, where I could study in peace without fear of interruption.
There, hidden among the trees, I could finally give my full attention to the material at hand.
There was just one problem—Bruce had never mentioned anything about lubrication.
So, in my enthusiasm, I had overdone it—and by the time I was done, my poor little willy looked like it had been skinned alive.
It burned like hell, but I figured a quick dip in the pool would cool things down.
So I rode my bike to Juan Carlos’s house, suggested a swim, and jumped in—completely unaware that chlorinated water was about to introduce me to a new level of suffering.
The moment the chlorine made contact, my entire body spasmed in agony. It was like dipping an open wound into acid.
Through sheer force of will, I didn’t scream—but I did make a very rapid exit from the pool, mumbling something about hitting my head on the bottom.
Juan Carlos looked at me, confused.
“You were only in the water for three seconds.”
I didn’t answer. I just got on my bike, rode home, climbed into bed, and curled up in the fetal position.
It was the only place that made sense.