I am slightly too old, at sixty-three, to have known, loathed and dreaded them as a boy--but what "cooties" have represented (the vile, contagious creepiness of girls) to all subsequent generations of American boys, was something that I vividly and concretely understood, without the aid of metaphor, by the time I was ten years old. Since when there have been several defining moments in the evolution of my dislike and disdain of the Sex. Once when I was eleven, I came into my sixth-grade school home room, and found a girl cleaning my (admittedly filthy) school desk for me, all unsolicited and as a surprise and a "treat" for me: I went ballistic. "How dare you! Who do you think you are?," etc. I went on for some time ranting and screaming (Who taught me to scream with rage?), and before I was done, the imprudent, presumptuous girl had fled in tears. Then, after an awful silence, another girl spoke up in defence of the first, saying that she had "meant well, and was only trying to do you a favor." So I rounded on her furiously, sending her off in tears too. Then, happily, for the rest of the school year, and for the rest of our lives, I ignored the girls in my class, unless it were to mock and sneer at them. And so the twig was bent; I stll keep a most untidy desk.