Asking For Trouble

Lottie THE NEXT PERSON who tells me how great it must be to have five older brothers is going to feel my fist in his or her face. Because, believe me, being the youngest child--and the only one without a penis--in a big Italian Catholic family from Chicago, I can personally attest to the fact that it bites. I would have been better off being left as a baby on the doorstep of some nunnery in the mountains of Austria. At least I might have had a little action from a cute shepherd passing by with his herd once I grew up. I'm definitely hotter than a sheep. Lottie Santori, that's me, the hotter-than-a-sheep girl. Yes, before you ask, I'm one ofthoseSantoris--the big family who owns that great pizza joint on Taylor Avenue. If you haven't heard of it, I'm sure you've at least heard of my brothers. Either because of the way they plowed across the football field at St. Raphael's or the way they plowed through everygirlat St. Raphael's. Most of my friends included. And yes, before you ask thenextquestion, I have a dirty mind and a big mouth and I don't take much crap off anybody. My brothers, however, still haven't gotten that through their thick skulls. They've been ordering me around, trying to control who I talk to, where I go, what I do andwhoI do, for my entire life.Triedbeing the key word there. Wish I could say they'd failed completely. Unfortunately for me--and my sex life--they succeeded in keeping me about as celibate as a twenty-five-year-old grad student can be. Oh, sure, I've snuck in a few affairs, but there aren't many men I meet who don't know--or knowof--my family. And I swear, the big jerks are like bloodhounds. Because the minute Idofind some guy who is mercifully ignorant about the thousand pounds of male aggression acting as the defensive line on my virtue, one of them finds out and scares the crap out of him. I kid you not, when I started ninth grade, they put out the word that if their sister didn't graduate a virgin, they would ban every person from my high school from ever having another slice of my pop's famous deep dish pizza. Anyone from Chicago knows that's about as dire a threat as you can make. Can you believe it worked? They had allmyfriends making sure my legs stayed shut, and their friends, too. Which really sucked since a lot of those guys were really hot. I ask you, what is the point of having older brothers if you don't even have the benefit of having a built-in supply of potential boyfriends? Thank God I'd spent a college semester in an exchange program at New York University, where I'd met Chuck. And Dave. Then...umm...Will. Man, hadthatguy had staying power, especially in comparison to the other twenty-and twenty-one-year-olds I dated. I'd probably been thought of as the easiest exchange student NYU had ever known, but I knew I was potentially cramming a lifetime full of sex into those three months. Damned if I wasn't going to make the most of them. Of course, from what I've learned about sex since that time, I know I didn't scratch the surface of whatcanbe done. Big sigh, there. No, I didn't learn about it firsthand. But having come home a sex maniac, then being forced to peek longingly over my big brothers' shoulders at any nice piece of male ass-- nevergettingany of it--had left me a little frustrated. Frustrated enough to take things into my own hands. Literally. And since my imagination only went so far--pretty much meat and potatoes on the sex scale, me being the potatoes--I'd had to do some research. I like research. I'm good at it. Good enough that I'm doing it to pay the bills while I finish my masters degree in journalism. Solving puzzles and sticking my nose into other people's stories was something I'd excelled at since I was little and used to spy on my brothers and their girlfriends. What can I say? I love to know things.Kelly, Leslie is the author of 'Asking For Trouble', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373792849 and ISBN 0373792840.