"The Jack Off Book"
by
Timothy Stillman
The first porno book of any kind I read was a slim red covered white lettered "don't do it you know really" book entitled "What Every Boy Needs to Know." There was a companion volume entitled "What Every Girl Needs to Know." They were given to us--the boys in one room, the girls in another, in about seventh grade. Given with hushed tones from teacher. Given as though handing out the epiphany of life before we had lived yet, or knew what epiphany meant. It was dirty. It was sexual. There was laughter. That the teacher quelled with a stern word and a frown. This was no fun, get with it, guys. The male, natch, teacher said. I'm sure the female teacher who handed out the distaff volumes to the girls said the same thing, in the same way. Most of the boys wanted the girls' book. Most of the girls' wanted the boys' book. I was quite content with needing to know what boys wished to know and never sought out the girls' volume. I just needed to know what I needed to know. I didn't know before.
Though I imagine now I would find it equally hysterical and antiquated. Because all I had had up to that point for masturbatory fantasies was a line drawing in a children's biography of Sitting Bull. The drawing showed the full naked backside of the legendary Indian chief as a young boy diving off a cliff into the lake. I traced my finger round his willowy back and rounded sweet buttocks for a great time. A very long and satisfying time. Keep your "Geographics" in study hall. With the pictures of the naked from the waist up tribal women. This was for me.
But there were no words for me then that explained me. Not before this book. Which my mother read first and somehow approved of. Handing it to me like it was the holy grail. I had no father in the house. She told me I was entering manhood. She could not help me there. She sniffled. Said I was on my own. Scared the crap out of me. I studied that book. Boy god did I study that book.
There was no category I could find for myself before this treasure trove became my only guiding light. Only that at about age 10 or so, I discovered, while bathing, in that typical cliche Saturday night ritual, that my penis was erect. All the few inches of it then, and somehow my hand and washcloth and warm water seemed to be working a miracle on it. I know I had had erections before, but because I was brought up in a very repressed household, I can't say I ever noticed them. Or perhaps I had not had them at all. Certainly no wet dreams. It and I wouldn't have dared.
But that Saturday night, in the warm steam of the bathroom, while my aunt and grandmother were watching TV in the living room, always that damned Lawrence Welk, when I so desperately wanted to see "Get Smart" instead, I played with myself for the first time. I was a thin kid at that point, far too tall for my age. And I lived for comic books and movies and weekends. My stroking myself that night as I watched that little pink appendage standing straight up and making my balls tight was the first time I had ever noticed that I was a boy. Even then, not sure what that meant.
I discovered in that bath as I soaked my penis and my legs with hands full of warm sudsy water from the bubble bath lotion, I could make my penis jump, dance, without touching it. So I did my Carmen Miranda act with it and was quite impressed with myself. Dandling, dangling my little rod back and forth. Warm water and wash cloth and soap equaled to my first orgasm, only it had a painful lesson at the tip end of it. Soap inside the penis slit hurts like bloody hell. My mother would have approved, for the guilt I had been meant to feel for everything, from the strangest things to the most silly, I felt then. I did it like that for some time to come. The pain was my price for pleasure.;
The waves of cornucopia were running out of me. While the waves of soapy electric fire of a jealous God were rushing into me, hurting my dick and making my very balls sore. So. I tried to stop doing it. Tried to stop my penis from getting hard. But it was such a novel event. For I lived in a house full of women. Had no sisters but was in love with the girl on one side of my street and the boy on the other. And I didn't know anyone could do this kind of thing. I wasn't particularly sure that I wasn't the only boy who had a penis. I had never seen one on any boys in the shower room or in the pool locker room, for I always kept my head down in shame and dressed and undressed quickly, not sure why I felt shame. Only that I did.
It was a dark rambling house I lived in. Full of shadows and age even when my mother as a young girl grew up here in the house my grandparents had had constructed them when they were young newlyweds. I was alone. I was troubled. I needed a friend. I needed someone who did not hold me in trust, who did not counsel me in any way. For there were many of those. There were many freedoms that I saw cut off from the light, one layer at a time. For my good of course.
Except this thing I did with my penis. This thing that excited me and made me feel as though I was being held in a warm giant hand that would protect me and would somehow love me. It never occurred to me then and not for a long time to come that I should ask another person to join in with me. It just simply never occurred. Who would want to? Who would care to? Easy. No one. For I had been told in so many ways, including literally, that I was unlovable, unneeded, unwanted. So when I found the drawing of the young Indian boy with the flowing black hair diving into the lake, bare from the back, I was aroused.
When I went to see the movie "Pollyanna" at the Waldren Theatre, and saw the screen black at beginning and then, moving away from the camera, running away from the lens of it, which apparently had been pressed up against his butt (how many Christers have caught this one, in their zeal to destroy Disney? This one was when old Walt was quite alive) this young boy totally naked from the back off a diving board to the lake, I was mesmerized. I was in love. I was enthralled and happy. And sad to my core. But that was okay. It was just me. So it was okay.
Because it was my secret. It was sacrosanct. And it didn't matter that it was right or wrong, though I knew it was wrong, I had given up so much already in my young life. I had towed the line. Done as I was told. Went to church. Made the best marks, save in Math, that I could in school. I never saw the need for girls then. I was in love with Celesta but she was young like me and her chest was flat like mine, so it was okay to love her and not get into complicated areas about it.
This was me. My penis was mine. The little brown rings around the shaft, the tight little nut ball (the right one did not descend from its cavity until I was 11 or so, my mother having fits about that, the doctor telling her it was normal, and she not letting me ride a bike like the other kids did, kids I watched from my shade tree in the summer yard, as they went round the block and back again on their Schwinns, because she thought I might injure myself, the doctor said it was not so, but my mother just knew, just knew.)
So. "What Every Boy Needs to Know" was in my hands that school day. I looked through it nervously. Scared. Excited. Couldn't wait to get home with it. The teachers had already contacted the parents, had met with them, let them read the books and had been met with approval. Oddly in those repressive times, such a thing was agreed on and allowed when I doubt it would it would have been today.
I began reading it, in my attic bedroom. Rubbing myself through my jeans. Putting two and two together. Rubbing my penis and sex were tied together. I had not thought of it that way before. The unfolding, flowering feeling was akin to the crude sex jokes the other kids made at school lunch and recess. It didn't see right something that felt so good should be made so smutty and evil. Though the chapters on dating, petting, kissing, that boys and girls did, this boy did not do, so he skipped through that with only a cursory glance here and there.
I found words that I knew and didn't know at the same time. Found the question, "Dr., sometimes my penis gets stiff just before I'm called to the blackboard at school. What do I do? Will I go to hell?" This was my kind of book. And I imagined this wise doctor, because they seemed wise back then, much less so now, was gathered in the center of curious boys who were kneeling Indian style, the doctor sitting on a table maybe or a tall stool, looking down at them with kind eyes and soft smiles, and they could ask him anything they wanted and he wouldn't call them wicked. Wouldn't call me wicked. he told them that is called an erection and it is perfectly normal. "Normal" on my side, that word. Never before and seldom after has the word "normal" ever been on my side.
Though that book has been lost to time, I remember it as question and answer format, and imagine like David Ruben in his monumentally stupid "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex..." he just sat there at his typewriter, having a high old time, making up questions and then answering those questions. It was a kind book really. It said masturbation is not wrong, and there is that word again, it is "normal", but just try not to do it that much and if you can just not have that much fun, well have fun with it, of course, it is fun, but just try to keep things in line and remember the Scout oath and all of that. Doc was as hamstrung about all of this as I was. As all of us were I found out later. How could this be?
Which did me the honor of confusing me, and I'm sure confusing every other boy who read the thing, an honor I'm sure the writer (the same writer?, I don't know) of the book for the girls also bestowed on them. The book even discussed--homosexuality!! The word. It meant boys who like boys. And men who like men. God, there was a word for that!! I fit something kind of. It was great. Of course, the doctor wasn't too keen on it, but the idea of other boys my age and older asking the questions, asking is it wrong for me to get hard when I'm around my best friend who's also a boy and we don't do anything honest... This was incredibly sexy to me. To imagine that some other boy had those same questions and that he would admit it to this doctor--doctor smocter, who knows, the guy who wrote the book--could have been batting out porno novels on the side, and this was just another gig like the porn. Maybe he got a thrill out of talking to kids about sex, who knows?
The doctor who was wholesome as wholesome can be told the boy that boys of a certain age go through stages of development, and this reminds me of Harvey Fierstein saying that every boy under the age of ten is gay, period, end of discussion. It was a joke, okay? But I was gay then and I was in love with Jimmy Van Sickle, across the street, and Mickey Graham in my class, Mickey had this lovely funny face that could smile incandescently and he let me ride behind him on his motor scooter once, letting me hold tight to his tummy all the way. Jimmy was from the North and he had an accent I only had heard on TV. He was tall and muscular and he had eyes that were smart and a brain you could hear clicking behind their gray colors.
Every boy is, as Fat John Hagee, one of the most stupid evil sick hateful Nazi fuckers alive, says endlessly, a hormone on wheels. I jacked off every chance I got. I got off on looking at my naked in the mirror in the bathroom. When Christmas rolled around, I got off on posing naked in front of the living room mirror which was partially hidden by a fake silver Christmas tree. I sent the tree lights flowing, took off my glasses, and saw me through the almost vertical tree "branches". I masturbated in profile. I masturbated facing the mirror and seeing only segments of my body all in different festive holiday colors. I saw what I wanted to see. I was one of the packages under the tree. I counted for me at least. The song got it right. In my mind at least, "I was beautiful then." Later on when I grew my hair long and lost much weight, I pretended I was David Cassidy. And how I loved making love to myself in a mirror. Not conceited in any way. It was just I was the only boy and man that I knew who would let me go even this far back then. A boy's best friend is his mirror.
Because I was in love with words then, because words of print on a page of a book filled me with such awe because it was magic, getting ideas in your head from someone far off or someone long dead and still somehow alive, I used this book constantly to masturbate. Eyes came up from the page and looked at me and were not harsh and hoarse but gentle and understanding. I could just read the word "homosexual" in it, and hear a piping voice saying the words, asking the all important question and I would pop a nut almost there in my room in the attic on the hot wool rug, always having to be on the hear-out that my mother would not come up the stairs at the very wrong time. She caught me twice. She wept and wailed and shook and stumbled and all in all gave one helluva performance. I would have applauded, but I was far too frightened. And far too naked and trembling and ashamed.
I loved me naked back then. I had no one else to love. I was the only choice granted to me. And that, seemingly, grudgingly. I loved being a boy though it was a sad thing for me. I was not an exhibitionist and I wanted anyone to see me naked. So this book, this very worn and very crumple paged book of the doctor whose name I've long forgotten was my castle in which to put myself at night. In which to dress in my shortie pajamas after a Saturday night bath, and lie on the couch, while my grandmother and aunt were watching TV in their chairs to the side and the front of me, and whack off so quickly and so pleasingly, waves of warm ecstasy through me. Feeling like I belonged. Feeling like my body had tricked them all. My mother who said I would get cancer in it if I rubbed it--and I told her many of the times I did rub it--I know, I know, but you don't know the incredible guilt back then, not just for me, but pretty much for every boy I would imagine. My mother was extreme though not unique.
Whenever I masturbated, I felt limitlessly sad. There was nothing worse than coming, because during the rubbing, during the looking down at this wonderful little penis of mine which was growing as time passed and beginning to get a dusty covering of pubic hair behind it, though oddly enough I can't remember when I first noticed the hair, I could imagine Jimmy was with me, or Celesta, or Mickey, and they were doing something similar in kind of a vague blur I couldn't really imagine, sort of like a party was happening in my mind. My body rearing and bucking and losing control of that strictness I kept within me all the other times. Then it was over. The birds in the northern sky flew away at autumn hush. And I was alone. And no one, no one would do what I had done.
When I began to ejaculate, there was a problem the good doctor/porno book writer on the side that hadn't been mentioned, how was I to do it without touching it and how was I to do it without squirting. For somewhere back there, I had figured out that I would not burn in hell if I masturbated somehow without using my hands. I would not get cancer that way on it. I don't know when it came to me (memo to boys of the now--be glad you weren't me back then) that I could masturbate using the fuzzy bath mat for friction on my penis. So when I got home from school to the usually empty house (I ran, a total hard on instead of a total boy in those days, so horny) I would rush to the bathroom, lock the door, take my clothes off, spring my sprong, take the fuzzy bath mat, put it on the other side of the room, put the mirror next to it, and rub myself (as I called it then) on the mat and I would come and I would feel guilt, but not as much as before when I had used my hands.
I had no idea then that I was mimicking fucking while I was trying to be a good little boy and not do the dirty deed totally. No, I did actually more than wanking off. Accidentally I had found the devil there behind the stern God willing to let jacking off go cause I was just a kid--and there hoping down and up behind him was Good Time Eddie Filth getting me to practice fucking. I loved to see myself in profile, loved the see my butt moving up and down and how I liked to raise up on my hands and watch my little cylinder cock stroking the mat, and when I came it was totally me, it was my whole body, which was a complete part of the process of human. It was not me just unzipping my jeans, pulling my penis from the BVDs slit and having at it. This was far more--eloquent, far more caressing and serious and--essential, I guess.
But when I started coming (and I've no idea why this didn't scare me to death, this white froth coming out of my penis--I also don't remember the first time it happened, and if you were an inward turned boy like I was, you would think, landmined for guilt and cancer signs, this would have been noted by me.) Perhaps the good doctor mentioned sperm formation and how it too was "normal" (I had started to like that word) as he chuckled over his typewriter and wished he were Mickey Spillane instead racking up the girls and knocking the thugs over with slugs from his gat. So instead, this doctor, if he was one helped some kids out maybe. With that true blue berry pie wholesome do my duty to god and country, he was far more liberal than anyone else in the world I believe then. They passed out his books in school for god's sake! Was He in on the joke too? It was my first experience with contraband. This book everyone giggle over. And I'm sure the boys got the girls books and they got the boys and had fun with them. But this was serious stuff for me. This was finding a place that was safe, that didn't have to do what anybody ordered, just what my body wanted, though I was of course doing what I was ordered here as well.
Thus, if I was coming, and I was coming big great white globs of the stuff, then I was actually masturbating. I could not come on the bath mat because I did a few times. My mother saw it. And went into her Norma Desmond routine yet again. So, I had to touch my penis, to make my masturbation not real. I had to rub it on the mat. Then I had to, on point of erupting my little one, hold my fingers at its tip and not let the come out. If so, then it didn't count and I was safe from cancer and God and Jesus naked on the cross which was another turn on for me--not cancer and God, but Jesus naked on the cross, so I doubted if he would have given a damn whether or not I burned in hell either.
Thus, the strategy. Thus, the repenting of the sin if I didn't exactly commit the sin, therefore making me kind of muddled on what I had just done, what I thought about it, what I was, how I felt about the way I was, though I had no idea how I felt, because it was easier not bothering to figure out what I was in the first place. I was a cub scout and a boy scout and I newly fell in love with Judy Stone in my class but could not bear to look at her because she broke my heart in half. As did Jimmy and Mickey. But all of that was to the side of what I discovered concerning the holding the ejaculate in, in question--where does the stuff go? On that I've no idea, but I can tell you about the pain of it.
Of course in those days if I found the chance, I could jack off three or four times day, even Mr. Goody Two Shoes like me. And every time I did so, the testicle that had not descended till I was 10 or 1l or whatever, would have this big base conga drum inside it and Ricky Ricardo would be pounding "Babaloo" on it hard enough and throbbing enough to beat the band. It would go on for hours. And when the need of my hard on occurred again, even during the pain, I would jack off using the same tactics--though I was older by this time, I still used the same routine. I felt the pain was to take the place of my eventual burning in hell otherwise. It was a grinding, pulsating, vein tightening, sac squeezing twister of an agony that filled me with blood and made me bite my lip so I wouldn't scream out it hurt so much.
So because of "What Every Boy Needs to Know" I somehow survived all of that. In time, late teen years, I let the cum flow (and mercifully the pain stopped) because I was somewhat proud of it, this wonderful built in joy we have in our bodies, to feel good and to feel excited and to feel even in loneliness a gathering with the universe in times like that.
The only sex play I ever had back then was when I was in ninth grade. A woman who worked with my mother, Dore Wilson, had her sons, my age, invite me over for the weekend to their house. It was Friday night and I was excited because I had never slept with anyone other than me. Though I can't remember their names, one of her sons, the taller one, was the brain and would be and may very well be a computer whiz today. And yes, he wore a pocket protector in his shirt pocket stuffed with pens. He was tall and gangly and awkward and had been horn rimed glasses (of course). Kind of a smart ass. But on the whole nice. Kind of bloodless looking. His brother was shorter and more unruly and given to giggling at the table a lot.
I was so afraid I would do the wrong thing. That they would not ask me back. And they didn't, not because I did anything wrong, it was just I did not know how to be a child back then. My mother was 40 when I was born. I grew up with middle aged and older relatives. I spent my childhood going to funerals of relatives I had never laid eyes on before. I think that's what I hate the most about my melancholy lonely dusk childhood, not knowing how to be a child. Though in other respects, my childhood was a fairly good one. In spite of. Because of.
I got to sleep in the sleeping bag between the beds of the two boys. When lights were turned off, and they stopped making desultory conversation between themselves, still trying to include me, then finally giving up, I did this most daring thing. I thought basically what the hell? though I didn't think the word hell because I never cursed in those days. I threw back the top part of the sleeping bag, exposed myself, fearful, terrified, are they watching?, one?, or both?, oh please, yes, and I jacked off there with their sleep breathing keeping me company. I pointed my penis to one boy and then the other. I rubbed with fear. With a totally new kind of joy. I came just a bit and put my penis back in my pajamas, feeling the slippery sticky warmth keeping me company--it was okay that one time, not to obey my rules for masturbating. I didn't sleep at all that night. I wanted so much for one or both of them to come down to me, to join me. I wanted to not be alone as I always way, especially in this aspect of my life.
But they didn't. Not a word was said. I was so courageous at that moment. I was, believe me. So, in time the body grew up and the hair length also grew and I wore bell bottoms and tie dyed shirts and I pretended I was like everybody else but I wasn't. I went to college and not even close to the usual results one is supposed to find there. But all this time, every so often, when I jack off, though I don't hurt myself with it anymore, except the sad emotions of it which have become somewhat comforting in an odd sort of way over the years, I think of "What Every Boy Needs to Know." And how stupid people are. And how they hurt children by ostensibly trying to help them. The guilt, the shame, all of it. The good doctor or whatever he was, used guilt too, but he said it in a nice way. He said it the way a Sunday school kind of scoutmaster might say it over a campfire on a cool autumn night in the woods on a Saturday. Where the boys were sitting peaceably, eating their charred hamburgers, know each other and know they can talk freely, though no one can really talk that freely, now or then, no matter how much we might know each other. We haven't come as far as one might think. In some ways, we've regressed.
I guess this is a belated thank you to that man who wrote that book. He helped this woodchuck get if not a merit badge then at least not laughed at because he asked some other boy back then if they would like to. Because the message was gotten across in that kind way. Though I was born knowing it already. And the message said beware and be careful but have a good time too well sort of you know if you want to, but keep it kinda private and you know, but remember the boundaries and may the good lord take a likin' to you.
And to you as well. In these sad little days known as life. All of that back then seems wonderful compared to now. Quite wonderful. Even the pain of holding it in. Even that as well.
The End