Johnnie Walker and underaged girls don't mix

When he told me his name was Johnnie Walker, I believed him.

At 16, I didn't have much experience with whiskey bottles.

I also believed him when he said I looked like a model and he'd love to photograph me.

Never mind that I was under 5'7" and over 140 pounds. Never mind that this was Detroit, not Milan. Never mind that we met in a nondescript "party store," not Schwab's Drug Store, the hangout of old-time Hollywood starlets.

But none of that crossed my mind. I was what any non-street-smart high-schooler would be when a man I'd never met said I looked like a model ...

...Flattered!!!!!

His so-called studio was down the street from the library, where I shelved books after school. To his credit, he did own a camera. Maybe even some lights and backdrops.

But he was more interested in me "taking his picture" than he was in taking mine. "Taking somebody's picture" was what my grandparents called it when I sat with my legs gapped open. Girl, stop taking my picture! meant I needed to close my legs because I was being impolite and my underwear was showing.

But Johnnie Walker wanted me to take his picture, and that's exactly what I did, in a dingy Detroit storefront.

He taught me how to masturbate. He taught me how to go down on him.

And, oh yeah, we also took some photos that were much closer to Polaroid than portfolio.

I didn't think of it as molestation, even though he was a smelly, bummy, 45-year-old man that the grown ladies at the library eyed with a definite air of suspicion.

I thought of it as a new, naughty and exciting experience that had nothing to do with my humdrum life as a straight-A student from a dysfunctional home.

I found out that my own body could be a source of pleasure; I took even greater pleasure in imagining how pissed off my dad would be if he ever found out; and I took the greatest pleasure of all in recounting my exploits to my two best friends, who hadn't yet taken their first baby steps on the sexual wild side.

Ironically, my dad is what saved me from being raped, photographed in the nude, pimped or exploited.

One phone conversation with my dad – sight unseen – convinced Johnnie that he'd better watch his step. Johnnie never saw my dad's broad shoulders or his scraggly beard or his ever-present firearms. And as far as I knew, my dad never threatened to shoot Johnnie's balls off.

Just knowing that I had a dad terrified Johnnie. He'd ask questions about my dad and what he was like. He was nervous about my dad seeing the photos he'd taken of me in a bathing suit.

That didn't mean he didn't try to push things further along. He just didn't try very hard.

He had a great idea: we should take pictures of me in a bra and panties, you know like a paper doll that other girls could dress up. "No," I said flatly.

He backed down and backed off – undoubtedly haunted by the specter of my mean, black daddy – a daddy I lived with and could run crying to at any moment.

Johnnie Walker crept out of my life almost as quickly as he slunk in.

He didn't do any lasting damage, but he did leave me with a lasting impression:

• Kids are easily exploited.
• Kids can be complicitous in their own sexual exploitation. (In fact, Oprah Winfrey describes child molestation as a process of "seduction" designed to make the kid think s/he was a willing participant.)
• Doing well in school does not grant a kid immunity from making bad decisions.

I was a smart, naive, rebellious, curious, rule-breaking, unsupervised teenage girl who took a detour off the straight-and-narrow path. Only dumb luck and a crazy daddy saved me from falling crotch-first into the sewer of sexual exploitation.

The Nicest Boyfriend I Never Had

Long, long before I became a slut – in fact, when I was still a high-school virgin – a really, really nice boy was completely in love with me ... and I was absolutely, positively oblivious to the fact.

J. and I met at the University of Texas - Austin the summer before our senior year of high school. We were both in a "gifted and talented" program for minorities called LEAD.

Here are all the signs the boy loved everything about me, even my dirty drawers:

• He painted my toenails for me.
• He talked to me for hours.
• He bought me the 12" version of George Michael's "Monkey" single.
• He even flew from Philadelphia to see me after the program was over.

Here are all the reasons it never even occurred to me that J. was interested in me:

• Except for a different J. in kindergarten, who I used to smooch with in the coat closet, I had never had a boyfriend or been on a real date.
• Even though I was actually quite cute and sort of knew it when I looked at pictures of myself, I was convinced I was ugly. (In middle schools, the boys rated me and gave me Cs, Ds, Es and a Z – all except for C., who kindly granted me a B+.)
• I was jumpy around men. Probably due to one of my dad's methods of discipline: "bapping." Out of nowhere, BAP! He'd zing me or my siblings with a backhand slap to the forehead.
• J. never came right out and said, "I really, really like you. Do you wanna go with me?" (Yes, in the 80s, that's how we referred to dating: it was called "going together.") Years later, we reconnected by phone and he confirmed, "I was so completely in love with you. Why do you think I painted your toenails?"

But the truth is, I never knew J. cared about me, because it never even occurred to me that anyone could be attracted to me. I thought of him as a "friend," not because I wasn't attracted to him, but because it didn't occur to me that I should be attracted to him.

I had a blind spot when it came to nice, sweet, wholesome, smart, wonderful and not-at-all bad-looking boys who happened to be crazy about me. Unfortunately, that blind spot followed me well into my adult life.

Ooooh, God's really gonna hate me now

At the age of 8, I made an eternal pledge to God: if He would save me from the fires of hell, I would be a virgin until I got married.

I didn't really know what a virgin was.

I didn't really know what marriage was, either. My parents were married ... but I didn't think of them as a unit. Maybe because we lived with my mom in Detroit, while my dad worked in Minnesota. Until my dad drove us to Florida to live with his dad. Who drove us to Baton Rouge, LA to live with our dad's sister. Who took care of us until my mom took us to live with her parents in Opelousas, LA. Until she and my dad reconciled and moved us to Downingtown, PA. Until a few months later, when my dad broke his hand hitting my mom and drove us to Monroe, LA to live with his mother. Until several months later, when my dad came and drove us back to Detroit to live with him, without a mom.

Courtesy of my paternal grandmother, I was newly baptized and catechized. I was armed with a rosary and preparing for my First Communion. And being a voracious reader, I was on a quest to read the Bible all the way through.

To my eight-year-old mind, I think the Bible went something like this. Blah blah hellfire. Blah blah damnation. Blah blah God likes men better than women.

The only woman God seemed to like was the Virgin Mary. So maybe if I stayed a virgin, He would like me, too.

I certainly wanted to be on God's good side, seeing as how I was on the wrong side of everything else. Between my Southern accent, my second-hand clothes, my eccentric father (who had already come down to my school and threatened to shoot a couple of elementary-school bullies), my dearly loved and deeply missed mother (who still lived in Pennsylvania and had been in and out of mental hospitals since I was two), my high IQ and my propensity to cry at the drop of a hat, I was a third-grade pariah.

Best to get a head start on the afterlife. So I read the Bible and made my own secret deal with God:

I'll be a good girl. I'll be a virgin until I get married. Just please, God, please let me live with my mommy again and not go to hell when I die.

Breaking my secret chastity vow was actually the worst part of losing my virginity. I didn't just lose my hymen and a little blood that day, I lost the sense that I was a "good girl." I had joined the ranks of the sinners.