Coming Together Presents: Robert Buckley (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781451560732)

Bob Buckley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a hospital that doesn't exist anymore, but was a conveniently short ride over the Prison Point Bridge from the Charlestown housing projects, in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, where his family lived. He may even have passed Malcolm X, who was finishing up his time at the old state prison, when his parents took him home. When he was four they moved to a brand new project in Boston's Columbia Point, the site of a former WWII prison camp for Italian prisoners, and hard by the city dump. It's now the site of the JFK Library and the University of Massachusetts. So wherever he went he came in touch with history, or history in the making. Finally leaving the projects behind, he lived in a series of triple-decker houses in Boston's blue collar Irish-Polish neighborhoods where one identified oneself not by the neighborhood one lived in, but what parish. It was a boisterous place peopled by folks who were casually violent and racist, tribal, spiteful, gossip-ridden, intensely loyal and unconditionally loving. The parish church and the greater Apostolic Catholic Church held sway over all aspects of life, so it was a repressed place, but the stronger the repression, the more likely renegade ideas and-Oh, my heavens!-questions are spawned. Saturday afternoons one was obligated to confess not only actual sinful deeds, but also thoughts. Can you imagine how many times a day a young boy might visualize a naked girl? Never mind that he might have no foundation at all for his imaginings of what a girl might look like without her clothes on. He still had to tell the priest. Bob had his suspicions that the girls in Playboy were not precisely representative of real girls, so while he enjoyed sneaking peeks at the pictures, he noticed the short stories and fiction that surrounded those pictures. And that began his fascination with words in general, but especially erotic words. And it's a fascination he's maintained long since escaping the old neighborhood and finding out for himself what girls look like when they're naked. Today he still finds himself a stone's throw from history, living up the hill from the spot where they hanged the victims of the Salem Witch Hysteria. He enjoys using words to uncover the erotic in places you might never expect to find it-like everyday, mundane life. He especially enjoys writing about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary erotic situations.