THE INVENTION OF MASTURBATION
In our youth, sometimes we're left to struggle on our own. Sometimes we have a mentor.
Sex is a confounding mystery in our early teens. This is my true account of the grappling, fumbling and discovering I endured. I think that this written story is close to what many of you readers also experienced on your individual early journeys. Particularly in the age before the internet. Let me know.
College Bookstore
I step out of my 1970 Ford pickup into the dark of my parents' driveway and watch the street. I give it 4 minutes of me holding my breath, waiting in the dark, before entering the house.
Whew! The bearded man in the van hadn't followed me all the way home from the college bookstore.
But tonight here in my bed, it is not so much relief in giving the handsome man the slip as it is maybe regret in giving him the slip. He was damn good looking. Dark beard, straight dark hair, broad shoulders in a snap-up work shirt, and brown eyes. Eyes that were staring directly at me as I had turned away from the gay section of the magazine racks.
I got the impression when I turned and saw him (in the Guns-n-Ammo section of the magazines) that he had been watching me from behind for some time. He was casing the store just for this opportunity: a young college boy in the naughty part of the bookstore.
Except that I'm not a college boy. I'm a sixteen year-old high school boy in the forbidden section of the store.
For a Friday night at 8pm, the store was really busy. Lots of college kids, yes. The store was more than just books-- having albums, board games, herbal cigarettes, Zig-Zag rolling papers and more. It didn't close until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. It was bustling.
Already super self-conscious and embarrassed to be stepping up to the rack where magazine covers displayed near-naked men and titles like Honcho and Mandate and Colt, I knew that I would never have the courage to actually go up to a cashier and purchase such items. I'm just there to thumb through the mags. And to attempt to exert my will over the painful hard-on in my jeans.
I myself had held back in the Guns-n-Ammo magazines earlier, surveilling the blatant homosexual section, waiting for it to clear out before stepping into this zone. And anytime another person (I'm presuming male) joined me at the rack, I kept my head down in my dirty magazine, refusing to acknowledge their presence.
Maybe the handsome bearded man had even been one of the unseen men to peruse the section beside me. I don't know. I'd need to see his shoes/boots to be certain.
I didn't spend long there. Maybe thumbing quickly through 3 magazines at most. My heart was racing the entire time but I could sense the calm and nonchalance of the others next to me.
Then I fled the section. It was my first time to go into that part of the store. Twice before in weeks past, I had cased out the bad and naughty section, but had never braved stopping and handling the product. The gay magazines were along the wall, near the back of the store. If that section had been in a dead-end aisle, as some shelving was, I never would have found the courage to get closed in and trapped amongst the scary men and boys who liked what that part of the bookstore offered. Boys like me.
Lying in my bed now, I have to confess to myself: boys like me scare me. And certainly grown men taking an interest in me terrify me. I'm horny as fuck. But I'm frightened by this perverted desire within myself.
My intention had been, after leaving the gay porn magazines behind, to casually stroll through more of the bookstore, slowly making my way to the door. But upon seeing this burly, hunky man eyeballing me, I bee-lined it for the exit in a near panic.
Was he possibly a cop? Could I be arrested for the vile act I had just committed? I mean, after all, this is 1970s Texas. Queers (like me, I hate to admit) are criminals, right? Not to mention perverts and mentally sick and a menace to all children. Was it against the law for a 16 year-old to buy such contraband? Could I be arrested and hand-cuffed right there in the store if I had attempted to buy such smut? For even handling the merchandise?
Or was the man merely cruising me?
Could it be that he was doing what I had been doing just prior: waiting in a nearby section, waiting for the area to clear out? But the look on his face as he locked in on me made me think that wasn't it. Those dark eyes of his glared deeply into my eyes. A small grin curled up on one side of his mouth.
All of this raced through my mind as I zeroed in on the exit and made my escape. I jumped into my pickup and left the parking lot.
At the first traffic light, I became paranoid about the headlights directly behind me. It was a van, with possibly a bearded man driving. No. It couldn't be. The headlights stayed right on my tail-- even as I slowed, encouraging the vehicle to go around me on the four lane street. Nope, that didn't work.
I went over into the left lane. And the van came up on my right, window to window. Fuck, it was him! With that same half-grin and dark eyes on me. Only now, in the weird glare of the moving streetlights, he had transformed from handsome to sinister.
It was a company plumbing van with a cartoon man running on the side while carrying a wrench. That put a lump in my throat. Would I be knocked in the head with an over-sized tool?
The new possibility entered my mind. He regularly picked up guys from the filthy part of the bookstore, got them into his van, and kicked the shit out of the sick perverts. This man wanted to hurt me. To pummel my faggot ass. And yes, that too, maybe rape my ass first. Then toss me from his van onto the side of the street.
I did a quick left turn and sped down a side street of residential housing. Another left. More speed.
I live in a small town 35 minutes away from Lubbock. It took me awhile to make it back to my house. Where I stood behind my pickup in the dark, watching for any traffic that might come down my road. I was parked in alignment behind my dad's newer pickup. And the driveway was dark. Surely no passing driver could identify my pickup. My dog Bo waited with me.
Now here I am in bed. Horny. Frustrated. Scared.
And what if it is as simple as this: a lonely horny man seeks out an opportunity for sex in a bookstore? Nice consensual (but discreet) sex. How else do men find willing gay partners in this world? Gay men don't advertise their gayness. Gay men keep that shameful shit under tight wraps. Under a guise of deepened voices and a love of sports.
My parents don't know about my perversion; my friends don't know. My older sister (my closest confidant) doesn't suspect. My cousin hasn't pieced it together yet.
The boys in the locker room and the showers don't see through me. I'm an alien who can blend in to mimic them; fool them. I look and act just like them.
I'm too disgusting to be in my true form.
There are no gay boys in my Sophomore class. Or in my entire school. Not even in the entirety of my rural hometown -- population 2400 heterosexual souls.
Well. I've heard rumors. About David Rodgers in the 11th grade. Sissy David Rodgers, who has no friends because he is a sissy. And likely a fag.
I don't want to be a fag. I want to be an acceptable 16 year-old dude. Just maybe one that could someday exchange handjobs with my best friend Zach.
Not this current version of me. The one that beats off daily to the nasty thoughts of me being with a naked Jason Rice (Senior football quarterback) or of me sucking Assistant Coach Darnell's erect dick in the showers after everyone else has left the locker room. More like, Coach Darnell pushing me to my knees beneath the spray of water, taking me by my ears and giving me no choice but to ingest his hard veiny meat, as best as I can keep up with his merciless fucking of my face. Then me gagging on his overabundance of sperm.
It's rare in my dirty fantasies to have sensual and affectionate sex. Why does it always need to be brutal defilement of my innocent orifices by big men who take from me what they want?
And hey, why can't I just ever fantasize about boobs and pussies when I stroke my ever-hard 6 inches of pestering flesh?
It's not like I don't have a girlfriend. I do. Of course I do. Every athletic guy in my 10th grade class has a girlfriend.
And Liza is a knockout beauty. We've been going together for over a year now. Kissing and groping. Just no actual genital-to-genital contact. Every closeted gay boy should have himself a good Christian girlfriend who pushes his meandering hands away.
Fuck my life.
Fuck my high school life of A-string football and basketball, and a pretty girlfriend. In this fucking backwater Texas town. In this life of me being the only homosexual in this town and in this entire dusty dry county.
That was until... I quite accidentally stumbled across the oasis. A hidden gem tucked away. Inside the college bookstore.
Why would a bookstore sell smutty gay magazines? Unless there was a market for them.
Damn me and my shyness and my guilt and my self-loathing.
Here I am, always stuck alone, with my hand and my overly-active dirty mind.
Too cowardly to venture out and get laid.
After I erupt forth with every geyser of bursting semen from my full balls, I am always immediately flooded with shame and remorse. And I promise myself Never again.
Never again will I be weak and succumb to such (exciting but) vile thoughts. I will be clean. I will be straight. I will make the next advancement on my sweet innocent girlfriend.
No more hands on my pesky erection while I wonder what kind of scenario might have played out if I had smiled back at a handsome older man in a bookstore.
I promise myself this everytime... while I'm catching my breath and as my jizm cools on my abdomen and in my pubes. No more of this.
Please Lord. No more of this ugly self-abuse. I will learn to love boobs and pussy, the Good Lord willing. As it should be.
Late Bloomer
My cousin Gary lived about 3 hours away from me. Our families got together abouto2 to 3 times a year. We made every minute count.
When we were 12, my cousin and I compared our newly updated models of junk: lowering nut-sacs with heavier jewels, the lengthening of our dicks.
At age 13, it was patchy hair under our arms and over our privates. And the new thrill of boners. And wet dreams. Puzzling and a bit horrifying at first, we learned that nocturnal emissions are universal amongst growing boys, and so we learned to lean into the pleasure of them and we exchanged what occurred in said dreams; usually a urinating scene.
At 14, my cousin gifted me the amazing knowledge of self-abuse. Masturbation. Doing for yourself solo what we didn't yet have the opportunity to do with the mysterious opposite sex as of yet. Gary showed me by demonstration. In the dark behind my house.
First Squirt
I couldn't sleep because of this new sensation in my body that I didn't yet understand or have a word for. But it was keeping me awake. I was boney. I was mildly frustrated. I was restless with this new energy percolating within my groin area.
And I sensed that my cousin knew something that I didn't. That he was withholding a vital secret from me. Gary (although 8 months younger than me) was way ahead of me on the forbidden vices of the world. I had smoked my first Camel cigarette with him. Drank my first warm Schlitz beer and swigged my first swallow of burning Wild Turkey whiskey with him. Because of him. Gary knew of these things. He provided the stolen cigarettes and beer and whiskey. He held the unfair advantage: an older brother.
So on this summer night while sleeping out in the infamous shed -- our den of carnal education and iniquities -- The Doors were singing `Riders on the Storm' on my cheap radio/cassette player that required 4 D-cell batteries. I was pestering my cousin relentlessly for an explanation for my crazy new bodily shenanigans: uncontrollable erections, and wet dreams and strange longings that wouldn't go away. When he couldn't get through my thick skull the definition of horny or explain exactly what it meant to jack off, jerk off, beat off or even what sperm was as we lay there side by side in bed, he had us both pull on our sneakers and go behind The Shed. We went out by the horse barn and made the horses nervous. Wearing only our tighty-whities that glowed under a bright full moon, I had a pretty good view of his erection (nothing new to me, I had even touched it myself a few times) and I witnessed his comical motions and I sensed his deep trance into another realm. Then he grunted over and over again. I truly did not know my cousin, my twin, my best friend in those moments. He was a different and strange beast to me. Transformed before my very eyes into some feral animal. And then an unidentifiable white fluid squirted out of his dick. I was horrified and transfixed. And I was actually a little broken-hearted. After a lifetime of being one symbiotic creature, we were now two separate and different individuals. We were no longer alike. My cousin had morphed into a sexual being right before my eyes. Something I was not.
I took steps back. I was sorry I had ever asked and pestered my cousin to explain the mysteries of my universe.
Gary turned to me and said, okay now your turn, do what I just did. Nope. Nuh-uh.
I went back inside The Shed and crawled under the sheet of the pallet on the floor. I turned my back to him. Shit. Damn. What exactly was this thing called jacking off? What really was that stuff that shot out of my cousin's wiener that wasn't pee?
The very next night, yep, I joined in with my cousin as he beat his dick behind The Shed. I stroked to his stroke. He came up on his toes and did that weird animalistic groaning thing again. And again, his hard dick spat out a certain substance whose distinct odor had already imprinted itself into my impressionable brain.
I stopped. But there beneath the pull of the moon, shoulder-to-shoulder, I did actually realize that before me was an opportunity to reunite with my beloved cousin.
Under his patient encouragement, I recommenced my jacking. My jerking and my beating of self. I no longer cared how ridiculous I might look. I was on my journey back towards my 24-hour estranged brother. Back to being once again in his embryonic embrace. Into our new shared state of being. Into our new evolved selves.
The once generalized sensation in my nether regions began to take on a concentrated and focused energy. A new power was building up within my center. And my new center of existence was all now in my phallic region.
For a moment I felt that I might piss myself. That all this beating and jacking was leading up to me urinating uncontrollably.
But here I was, leaning back and groaning beneath a Werewolf Moon. I crested. I crossed over a threshold of no return. And I splattered -- not piss, but -- a never-before production from within my body, out into the wide world.
Sperm. Ejaculate. Semen. Seed.
My cousin was proud. Both of me and my new status in the world, but also of his teaching abilities... and of yet a new corruption he had introduced me to.
Me, I was also proud. And flabbergasted. And feeling like I was standing way up there on that full moon along with my twin cousin. Reunited. I felt so good.
And once we were back under the covers, I realized: that ever-present pesky energy inside my body had dissipated. Drained away. I was relaxed. Not the usual bundle of electrical energy snapping and crackling beneath my skin's surface. I was at peace.
I felt like a satiated fat wolf cub, ready to curl up next to my sibling and sleep a deep sleep.
I was late to the party. I was 14. My cousin had been self-abusing for almost a year and hadn't shared that with me. But in 1970s Texas, that wasn't so unusual.
Masturbation liberated me.
It also came to enslave me.
I became a drooling and happy slave... giving in to the incessant need to ejaculate my seed up from my ever-churning gonads and out into the free world.
A blessing and a curse it is. To be a bator-goon.
Now I'm sixteen. Still a virgin. Also not unusual for the times.
No internet and little access to pornography makes for many a clueless boy. But I am soon to discover just what a truly a late-bloomer I am.