I would find out later that those who had procured the beverages for my fourth birthday party that night gave my sweet heart a little something extra in her drink. While my small Upstate New York home where I grew up was being festooned with birthday accoutrements: A birthday cake loaded with four candles, balloons, and green paper frogs taped to the wall as if they were leaping around the living room, one of my play friends "polluted" the bowel of red punch in the corner. Twenty or so of my closest play friends had been in attendance, most of them rooting for my early deflower age to be the best birthday present I would receive that night. So after the cake was eaten, the wrapping from the birthday gifts lay about the floor, the last of the play friends having left with a smirk on his face and my mother and father falling fast asleep in their easy chairs early that evening from the youngsters rambunctious partying, me the four year old was left alone with a buxom brunet. At which point, under the influence of an unknown toxin she proclaimed those six magical words:

"I want you to fuck me."

You might think it wrong for her to engage in the sex act with someone so young. I found it nerve racking. My soon to be First Time went into the bathroom to wipe chocolate peanut butter cake (my favorite) away from her mouth and prepare herself for sex with a four year old. With great rapture and wanton lust I waited for her return to the bedroom. I was so nervous I would have dropped a hot deuce in the blanket if I wasn't already potty trained. What would it be like? What would I do? How does a four year old fill a woman with his seed? I am revolted from the thought of what could occur: Trembling with sweat I dare to unbutton her blouse and expose her heaving bosom, unknowingly jab in the dark in a vain attempt to enter her moist love mound as she laughs hysterically at my immature sexual incompetence. In frustration and pity she leaves me to sob over loosing a great play toy, her body.

But then hiding there in my cocoon of warmth beneath the sheets, waiting for my first love to return it hit me: At four years old the red throbbing nipple of my mothers teat was not so far in the recesses of my memory. Sex it seems, is not so different from breast feeding. There were boobies involved, this much I knew. The rest I was not so sure about. I would concentrate on sucking milk from my mothers tit in order to perform the function desired for my sweet heart! This oedipal moment was interrupted as she in question returned.

"Now little boy, I'll make you a man."

As she climbed in bed with me, removing her shirt and then her pants exposing, long, smooth, milky white legs and a full, round buttocks that reminded me of Big Birds friend Snuffalupaguss from Sesame Street I concentrated hard on being breast fed. I surveyed her luscious lust muffins, so eloquently displayed as she arched her back on my pillow, as if to scream 'stuff me with your four year old passion!' Thrust. Thrust. Nothing. Thrust. Thrust. Nothing. Her beautiful eyes looked up at me longingly, yet there was nothing I could do. She was a gorgeous site to behold yet it seems that even for a four year old, thinking of ones mother during sex isn't the right way to go about plumping ones penis. I tried to stop thinking about the nipple. But I just couldn't seem to get it out of my head. I tried thinking of anything but the motherly nipple: Bunnies. Nope- nipple. Horsies. Nope-nipple. Roses- roses are red, red is the color of a nipple. My mothers nipples are red. Damn it! After many tries my sweet heart gave up, disappointed only second to myself.

"Maybe we will try this another time," she sighed.

I spent the rest of my fourth birthday spooning next to her. After all, I was only four years old. She comforted me to sleep.

I was determined to have a better birthday the following year. I had heard that a good amount of alcohol is used in the baking of a Black Forest Cherry cake and so was interested in trying one. Needles to say the cake was backed and the liquor left over in the bottle was quietly taken from the kitchen by me for my consumption in the bathroom. I sniffed the bottle and found the alcoholic potency to be a little strong for a person of my young age. I forced myself to swallow one bite of the Black Forest Cherry cake and it put me over the edge. My happy birthday song was followed by an intense and steady stream of multi colored vomit, onto the cake, table and subsequent birthday party revelers. A look of horror crossed one of the guests face then to revulsion as the smell of the inside of my intestines hit his nose followed by an intense and steady stream of multi colored vomit onto the cake, table and birthday party revelers. This would not be the birthday party I was always dreaming of.

Chucky Cheese touched me inappropriately. When I was all of five years old, my birthday party ended in bloodshed. It wasn't my fault as you could imagine, rather that of a deviant little ruffian who had joined me with the others to celebrate my day of birth. I was playing in the balls. You know, that pit of multicolored, not so squishy balls that I could picture a little kid suffocating under a mountain of. When all of a sudden one of my party goers turns to me and proclaims: Ball fight!

A red ball bounced off my nose with a great sting... I could see stars. I looked down at my hand and I was bleeding. In retaliation I fired a green ball at my adversary. Soon a swarm of balls were flying in every direction. The party had erupted into Vietnam and I was the Vietcong.

All of a sudden a gray costumed hand reached in and pulled me out by the back of my pants, dripping with blood. The mouse lifted me to his shoulder where I got a swift whiff of hot stinky breath and sweaty swamp ass from beneath the mesh mouth where Chucky could see. The smell comforted me, reminding me of my own bowel movement indiscretions as we walked under the creepy jerky movements of the animatronic band. I could feel his felt paw sliding down my backside, at first I thought he was merely just trying to get a better grip on me as he hurriedly escorted my friends and I out of his Family Friendly restaurant. But as I was rushed by the other tomato faced five year olds, I could feel my sphincter clenching up as a rouge hair from the costume tickled my brown eye. 'Oh please God no!' I thought to myself, this would be it. All those horrible things my parents warned me about strangers. Well a grown man in a mouse suite was pretty fucking strange! Who knows what he would do to a five year old like me.....

"I want you damn kids out of here!" Mr. Cheese shouted once we were already outside and none of the other patrons could hear him.

My virgin ass was saved. But at five years old there isn't much you can do but cry when you are berated by your favorite large mouse who just goosed you in front of your friends. Oh well, I guess they have rules about a bunch of rowdy, drunken twenty year olds celebrating their friends fifth birthday.

On off years my birthday is a quick, painful premature ejaculation, not pleasing anyone. Most years I celebrate my birthday on March 1st – but I still tell people I was born in February. So one cold March night my friends and I stayed up till Midnight to celebrate my Un-Birthday during the fraction of a second that may or may not exist between February 28th and March 1st.

"Five, four, three, two, one! Happy Birthday!"

Just as it was said, it was over. Actually I think my birthday existed only during the 'Happy' or maybe it was just the 'Ha.' My cake was eaten quietly, while the group contemplated the existential existence of my birthday in a non Leap Year.

My children will be older than me.

People born on Leap Day are fucking weird. You see I always show up early for everything and so I was a preemie, born eight weeks to soon. This unfortunate birthing snafu lead to two things:

First, since a premature infant is born with low birth weight, the brain doesn’t have time to develop…. I have always been a little slow. Not in the way where you go “Man, I feel bad for that guy. Lets put him in a group home where he can lead a productive life.” But just enough where you go “Man, I feel bad for that guy. He is a real dumb ass.”

Secondly, my early arrival caused me to be born on February 29th, 1980 at precisely 10:55 AM EST. Sounds like a good day to pop out of your mamma and say hello to the world doesn’t it? But February 29th is Leap Year Day. It comes once every four years. It seems that some Roman asshole decided that to make an accurate calendar and properly measure the year February 29th would be delegated as the wacky-zany day! Yay! Let’s make a young child cry on a day of joy. That will be fun! ‘Guess what little boy?! Your birthday only comes once every four years! Congratulations! You’re a freak!’ Leap Year: It sounds like a good name for a B horror movie where some guy comes back from the dead every February 29th to reap revenge on the world that wronged him because he was born on Leap Year.

When I’m ten I’ll be having a Mid Life Crisis.

Every Leap Year Baby has one enormous fear: Some lug head checking our ID for admittance to either A. A drinking establishment, B. A Mexican border crossing or C. A Haitian brothel. When I was 5 ¼ it was time to go to hit the bars. I had been around 21 years and was damned if anyone wasn’t going to let me have a legal drink. However a damper was put on this celebration as my college buddies and I set out to toast my induction into manhood: The bouncer who had never heard of Leap Year tried to tare up my real drivers license.

“Everyone knows that February only has twenty-eight days.” The large, rather meat headed gentleman informed me. Obviously this guy wasn’t born on leap year and from the looks of him probably had a healthy birth weight, so what was his excuse?

“No, you don’t understand Leap- Year.” –I said it slow so it would have time to enter his thick brain. But it was no use, he wouldn’t believe me. Luckily I was able to snatch back my license after threatening to call the cops. But we were not to be drinking in this watering hole that night. Dear lord! Leap Year was ruining yet another birthday and it wasn’t even a Leap Year. I’m five- fucking- years old! Leave me alone!

I am going to be turning six this year and have gone into a deep, suicidal depression. Oh man! I have a real birthday this year! I'm going to run out to the store and by the biggest God damn cake the baker get muster. I'll have my apartment lined with Asian strippers bused in from Vegas to do all those nasty things to each other I learned about as a kid, two kegs of beer and a vat of ice cream. I'll have the party I never had as a kid! Yeah! I'll set up donkey rides and a Merry-Go-Round in my living room and invite over all the children in my neighborhood over to see the clowns, then we'll have a big sleep over.... Ahhh! It's no use. No one can compete with this pressure. The Olympics comes once every four years and look at the party they throw! Thankfully, I come a whole lot more then once every four years and have had some time to think this whole birthday thing over. You see one of the good things about being born on Leap Year is that you can get away with more because your parents want to overcompensate for your lack of a “normal” annual celebration of your expulsion from a vagina. When I turned two, it was a trip to Disney World, when I turned three it was a brand new bike. Now that I'm turning six this Leap Year all I want is my own funeral.

From about the time my contemporaries and myself could speak, the subject of my age was a source of many tears. To end it all now gracefully would be a blessing. To think of the look on their faces when my friends and family come over and get not a piece of birthday cake, but rather an eyeful of the blood splattered frog birthday cards they so lovingly sent. Those happy little birthday cards with a green frog symbolizing the Leap Year on them. As a kid my symbolic Frog made me happy. The quadrennial greetings came in the mail and my mother would decorate our home with them and her own festive amphibians. Even before the 29th came, I was filled with expectations of what it would be like to finally have a real birthday. The smoky smell of blown out candles, the taste of chocolate peanut butter cake with vanilla ice cream. My childhood friends sitting around the table adorned in paper hats, eager for me to open their gifts. This vision of an ideal birthday would never be mine. Instead Now the frog only reminds me of lost birthdays that never were. My Frog is dead. I killed him and buried him a long time ago and I wish I could go with him.

It all comes down to this. I’m poor and disenfranchised, I am not comfortable around other people, I wet my bed till I was nine and a girl told me she could never love a man who didn’t have a regular birthday every year. This February 29th I will vanquish myself of hate, rage and tyranny that Leap Year has brought me! Screw it. I wasn’t even supposed to be born on Leap Year to begin with. Happy Leap Year!