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Sheridy was the daughter of my mom's best friend. My mother and Sheridy's both seemed impossibly old to me, as I recall. But I was fascinated by the girl.

Coming of age on the coast of Maine in the early 1960's was difficult. All those strong urges and no outlets. Me, I did whatever I could to hide my confused but powerful feelings; any erotic antics I indulged in were saved for my clandestine collection of men's magazines and the privacy of my bedroom. Or the bathroom.

Sheridy was different, I came to learn.

She was tall, brunette, kind of skinny, and carried herself with an air of haughtiness. If I didn't know her from my mother's connection to Sheridy's family I'm sure I'd have been terrified to even speak to her at school, such was the impact of that strong persona, of being above-it-all, that she seemingly worked hard to project. Both of us being seniors and just turning 18 that year was about all we had in common.

Sheridy wasn't beautiful but she was pretty. A lot of it had to do with the time she spent making sure she looked just so. Her hair was done in Cher bangs before Cher thought to do it that way. Her clothes were Jane Asher before the British Invasion occurred. Things just worked out that way. Some people glide through life. She swished like a classy sex bomb down the school hallways, managing all the while to seem unaware of the effect she had on everyone.

She lived in the house down the street, the three story job with the tire swing lolling against a big old oak. The one that never seemed to need painting. Her folks weren't well-off but they seemed to do better than the rest of us on the street.

The first nudie mags I got to see were courtesy of Sheridy's father. Mr. Walker liked his beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon in the 16-ounce cans. I liked the way it smelled and how pleased he looked when taking a big old gulp. He had little hair by age thirty-five, but never seemed to mind. Good-natured sort, willing to talk to a young man without preaching.

I knew the Walker home practically as well as I knew my own. One weekday afternoon during winter school vacation I happened upon a Gent magazine in Sheridy's living room, its curled edge just peeping out from under a couch pillow. Maybe Mr. Walker had been sitting right there on that couch reading it when someone came in, causing him to stash it hurriedly. Or perhaps he'd passed out from the beer late one night and didn't know he was leaving it in such an obvious place. No matter.

Now, Gent is not exactly the classiest nudie rag in history. Even then the pictorials specialized in top-heavy women, no matter that from the neck up they might have the features of Ernest Borgnine. What they had was tits, pure and simple. To a young man who'd been making do with his own imagination, occasional naughtiness at the movies, and what little he could glean from newsstand covers, this was a small piece of the Holy Grail.

You need to understand that in that time a glimpse of forbidden female nudity was a lightning rod going right through the soul of any man. You would shake at the thought of it. That's hard to envision today, when one can see more exposed flesh in an afternoon's jaunt to the shopping mall than was evident to me in all my first eighteen years. Imagine it. Imagine jerking off to bra and panty ad line drawings in newspapers, 'cause that was all we had.

Anyway, I had that magazine under my shirt and into the cellar with me before you could think twice. The two moms were in the kitchen, so downstairs was better than sneaking past them to go upstairs.

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