It was a warm mid-spring evening. The leaves on the trees were still a delicate lime-green. To me, this was the most beautiful part of the year. Always pleasantly calm, with no extremes of weather or temperature, it seems that life flourishes the most aggressively around this time.

Anyhow, Bradbury had come over to visit me at my parent's apartment on the seventeenth floor. The sun had just gone down and the windows were open to let in the fresh May air. I had a telescope back then, which I usually used to look at the moon. This night I decided to train my glass eye on the apartment building across the street. The building was close enough to see people in their homes, even without a telescope. And with the aide of artificial enlargement, we were able to gain an intimate and forbidden look into people's lives.

The lives of adults are boring. Whenever I feel like my life is abnormally dull, I just think back to that night with the telescope. We must have spied on dozens of people, most of whom we discovered sitting unmoving in front of their televisions for endless periods. Many of these same people ate in a repetitive and robotic manner while they sat fixated. Every now and then one of those monotonous people in the next building would shift in their seat, or grab another beer, or otherwise take a brief break from their occupation.

It was not only single men who wasted time watching television. It was couples as well. Most couples sat stone-faced in front of the tube, with its bluish hue blanketing their faces and painting their shadows on the wall behind them. We did find a few couples engaged in lively conversation, or actually eating dinner at a table in the proper civilized manner.

We had nearly given up on our search for telescopic adventure when my eye stumbled upon a dimly lighted bedroom. A woman was facing the window with her palms pressed against it. A man was standing behind her. He was jiggling or vibrating or doing something else that escaped my understanding. The woman had her head tossed back. Her neck was long and exposed. The man had a look of pain on his face.

I called Bradbury over to the telescope. "Look at this!"

He put his eye to the lens, took a look, and said, "Oh man!"

"What's happening?" I asked.

"They're having sex," Bradbury answered.

"Oh," I said, "What else?"

Bradbury peered more forcefully through the eyepiece, and said, "That's it."

"Let me see!" I hollered with excitement, forcing my way into view. They were still having sex. "Oh, that's gross!"

"What's happening?" Bradbury asked as he tried to see the action without telescopic assistance. "I can't see much."

"They're doing it," I said. "Her boobs are jiggling."

"Ewww," commented Bradbury.

"They stopped," I said. Bradbury pushed me out of the way and looked through.

What he saw close up, and what I barely saw, was the woman walking away, leaving the man standing naked behind the full-length window. "Holy shit!" he yelled. "That guy's dick is huge!"

"What?" I asked with confused excitement. I rushed to look. Through the telescope I saw something that, before then, I never knew existed on a man. It was impressive, powerful looking, and fucking huge. And it hung like a weapon, like King Arthur's Sword, or Luke Skywalker's light-saber, ready to be used at a moment's notice. It looked so breathtakingly imposing that whenever he used it he must have utterly degraded his victim.

I do not trust my memory very often, but I am sure that the man looked right at my telescope, smiled, winked, and swaggered triumphantly out of sight.

Bradbury asked if I wanted to see his birthmark.

I said, "No. Not today."

To children even small things are large. So it certainly was for us.