Dill Harris was instantly hooked on the mystery surrounding Boo Radley; he couldn't leave it alone, he had to know, had to see Boo with his own eyes.
Some kids are like that. A mystery drives them nuts. I was such a child. I used to tear small holes in my Christmas gifts to see what was inside. Forget waiting or deferred gratification. To quote the infamous Reverend Ike, "I don't want pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, I want my pie right now with ice cream on top!"
My curiosity killed Santa Claus when I was eight years old. I'd already begun to ask myself questions like, "We don't have a fireplace. Does he come in through the heat grates in the floor?" In any case I sneaked around and discovered the stash of "Santa's gifts" and had to be told that the preposterous myth was a preposterous myth (self-inflicting who knows what degrees of psycho-trauma). Santa Claus: God with training wheels.
Death was also a mystery. I was, like many children in the South, taken along to funerals and "visitations" and the lame explanations for the smiling Grandmother lying in a big shiny box made not only no sense ("She's gone to be with Jesus in Heaven") but radiated a quality of evasion and uncertainty that I suspected would fit quite comfortably in the Santa Claus category. I used to conduct funerals for neighborhood pets and even considered being a funeral director when I grew up!
When a mystery was freighted with a moral injunction it significantly boosted the attraction-factor. Surely the finest example of this is the Garden of Eden allegory. Adam and Eve had it all--including hanging out with God Himself--and only had to obey one simple rule: lay off the fruit of a single tree. We all know what happened next. Clearly God didn't know much about child psychology.
For me sex became the ultimate mystery and my fire-and-brimstone Grandmother made sure I was well-versed in all the Southern Baptist strictures against engaging in any form of it--including nudity --and made me aware of the terrible consequences of succumbing to lust. Thus when I discovered that sex was deliciously pleasurable...
I wrote this in a song called Swimming With the Sharks:
They told me sex was dirty except unto a wife
They told me I was jerking off the best years of my life
But somehow I saw different
And guilt was worth the price
To all alone or with someone escape to paradise!
