30.13

it think it was when i was 12
maybe 11
when my dad offered me a job

even when i was 7, i think
dad had me cutting the lawn and helping him on work projects
when we moved into the new house
it was more like
Building rooms in the barn
boxes for the chickens (now there were many)
and the rabbit
and building the decks on the house!
my dad was really into weird work projects that always seemed unnecessary
and he had his dad come down to work with us

it was a nightmare — they were both so cruel
sure, i learned how to hold a hammer, square and level
and measure properly
but only with tons of harsh criticism and degradation
everything felt like trudging
suffering
the long purgatory of youth
there was no joy in it.

every weekend i had to carry a fucking gass powered weed wacker around the 9 acres of land to edge around the trunks of 277 trees
over the years a few died off

it was fucking insane

i got a $2 a week for allowance
until, like i said
11 or 12
-my dad offered me a job at his Lab
– i haven’t mentioned.

maybe by the time i turned 7 (see?)
my dad bought his own lab and was working for himself!
he and his friend Keith
they bought it together
Lab: i mean the place they made Teeth
dentures and implants

Zo… i worked at night after [mostly] everyone had gone home
backing up the company’s data onto tape drives

the big servers all ran Unix
so i learned to play strange text based games on them

i’d hang out in the front office
and i remember, after being so neurotic about Ted taking so long to cum
rather, me cuming so quickly
i felt the voices of angels when i saw a book one of the secretaries left lying around about natural healing
— i looked in the index and it had enteries for “PreMature Ejaculation”

it was some excersize about clenching the muscle one uses when stopping the flow of urine. . .
clench clench clench
i started doing it obsessively
it made my dick much harder
but i still came much quicker than he did

Oh
i leave out all the details, don’t i?

when i was 7
no, when i was 10
i started giving my mother massages (how could i have forgotten that? maybe i didn’t)

she was always very stressed out, i think i mentioned that before
and definately by the time we’d moved into the new house
she’d had a hysterectomy
so was thrown into early Menopause

started having hot flashes and taking her clothes off at random times
crazy mood swings
that sort of thing, you know

one day she asked me if i could massage her neck

another
her hands

another
her feet

another
her back. . .

i would do it until my hands cramped up
i would touch her and feel the pain in her body
my neck would tense
my feet would ache
my back would be so tight
and i’d work on her until i felt better in my body

but my hands always hurt so much afterwards…

then i started offering it to her when i saw her stressed out
so
would regularly give her twenty minutes of massage

also, oddly, when i was 11 i bought my mother some chinese medicine balls through the Sharper Image catalogue (i think it was $25 for enamel dragon balls)
she was complaining about arthritis in her hands
and i read that it would help her

she never used them
but i started using them:
it said they wer also good for people who used computers
played piano or violin
and though i didn’t have piano or violin
i’d always wanted one. . .

by age 13
i was giving massages to anyone i was around who was stressed out

my friends (oh, i had some now, i’ll tell you about it in a minute)

but back to work. . .

there was this maintenance man who was usually in the building when i was
we’d sit around and talk

i pretended to be a grown up with him
i thought he was in his 40’s…
he told me he was 26
— i’ve always been a terrible guess of age… and naive.

i started offering him massage
i thought it was so cool to touch a full grown man
he was the maintenance man
so he had some muscles
tight shoulders, from changing light bulbs and stuff…

he had one deformed finger, his pinky…

One day. . .
he asked me if i smoked pot
“of course, all the time”
i said
but i never had

“i thought you probably did: do you smoke with your dad? i found a bunch of roaches in his office, so i figured…”

i thought “ew… gross… there are cockroaches in dad’s office? i’ve never even seen a cockroach in real life…”

so we went out to one of the back decks
and he told me to blow out all my air
– he took a hit off a little metal pipe
then he put the mouthpiece in my mouth
and blew into the bowl, motioning for me to start inhaling…

“shotgunning” he told me

i held deeply for a while
then blew it out

what was i supposed to feel?

i didn’t get it.

i felt a little dry
and everything looked clearer than usual. . .
slightly more real
crisper somehow

but, anyway…

then he said
Hey, let me give you a massage
let’s go into your dad’s office

my dad had a very messy desk
but also a couch. . .
a table and TV and his own bathroom

he sat on the couch and told me to sit in front of him, also on the couch

he only made the vaguest motions of massaging my back for about a minute
before he started pulling me back against him and sliding his hand under my shirt over my belly
i was feeling very dreamy
i spoke up
“you don’t have to act like you’re not doing what you’re doing, my friend Ted and i do this all the time. . .”
“yeah?” he said, ” i’m not gay or anything, but guys like to be with guys, there are just some things that guys do better than wives”
“yeah?”
he unbuttoned my fly and pulled my very hard prick out

then he did something that totally surprised me:
he bent over and put it in his mouth

i came instantly in body-wracking spasms

WOAH!
Ted’s never done that!

he gave me a little time to recuperate
then asked if i’d do him

somehow
we ended up going downstairs into the stacks…
this far off room of file-cabinets on rollers
we pushed open the middle and went to the end
he took out his dick
which seemed as big as my arm
no
Bigger
and curved to the side
the smell…

i remember a musky smell i’d never encountered before
a bit like the forest floor
kinda like a dog
and the taste
somehow salty
somehow sweet… meaty…

but my mouth wasn’t big enough
i kept choking
my eyes were watering
i was trying so hard
but i think i was biting him
we stopped without him cuming

maybe he sobered up

i don’t remember the rest of the night
and we never did anything again
no matter how many times i tried
( he never let me massage him again and barely spoke to me )
but the next time i saw Ted i had something great to show him…

But let me get back to my Birthday

somehow
i met
a boy named Daniel
and, as i remember it, tricked him to coming over to my house
he was also an outcast kid
but different:
he wasn’t a loser
he was very intelligent
and acted like he was better than everyone else
i knew he was the next step on the path i was taking

that summer between 7th and 8th grade, right after i turned 13
Daniel introduced me to his friend TJ
who was a kid i’d seen around school
who’d just moved into our system from a further country school system
he was very weird
but i wanted to be friends with him

with him came a whole posse:
Sheri, Dustin, Ryan, PJ and a few minor characters

when 8th grade started i was a new person
i was taking advanced classes
i eventually stopped Tae Kwon Do
because i wanted to do Acting
and Wrestling

my father had given up on me as a athelete
because i’d failed so miserably at every sport
but i’d never tried Wrestling
and i liked how it wasn’t so much a Team Sport
more One on One

our coach was amazing
looking back
he was the biggest fucking queen
with a fae voice
hysterically telling us to “mount and ride” our opponents

my neck got bigger
i started doing a lot of pushups, crunches, backbends and arches

Sensei had taught us to do pushups on our knuckles
because we were young
and our wrists weren’t fully developed

now i was doing all sorts of strange muscle building activities
but was still terribly bad at winning
it was more fascinating to use my body like this than competition anyway

Acting was also great
i think that year i was in Our Town… TJ was too: it really helped cement our friendship
and it let me experiment with different people i could be

also, i forgot to mention
when i was 7, or something, i started playing Tuba
i’m pretty sure i’d tried to stop playing it in 8th grade
because i wanted to take Art classes
and there was a conflict
but i was the only tuba player
(Ted used to be one, but he dropped to baritone, then dropped out)
so every day in art class
the vice principle would come in and ask if i was missing Band
and wouldn’t i like to come back to Band?
until i evetually did
coz i got so fucking sick of him. . .

somewhere in that year, before wrestling
and before i quit Tae Kwon Do
i was in the locker room
and Neil, always the Janus
started picking on me in front of all the other foot-ball players (he was becoming a star quarter back… for middle school)
i’d just learned this really cool ai-keido move
so, adopting a stronger character, i said
“fuck you, fucker, i’m sick of this. i’m going to make you kiss the fucking floor”
he was shocked i stood up for myself and told me i’d be the one kissing the floor
i tapped my chest and said
“Try Me. just give me a good push right here and we’re on”

he did
i caught his hand
twisted it behind his back
and jacked it up

he doubled over and screamed
and said “let go of me you little shit, i’m going to kick your ass!”
i lifted his arm higher and said “no… you’re not: you’re going to kiss this cement floor”

the jocks and the losers gathered round
“fuck you”
he said
“no,” i said ” Fuck you. kiss the floor or i’m going to break your arm”

he tried resisting again and i pushed him a little more to show him i could do it

he did
he kneeled and kissed the floor

and i let him go and stood up

“thank you”

i looked around and made eye contact with everyone while he was down there

didn’t say anything more

just turned around and started putting the rest of my clothes on

and never got picked on again.

later that year
some of the kids turned one of the other loser kids on me, Joe (i would later become friends with his sister… but he was another stutter and i had no respect for him… i didn’t hate him though and i was not about to become a bully)
so he was in my face yelling at me about something i supposedly said and he was crying and his face was all red and he was spitting and stuttering and told me i had to fight him
i told him No
i was terrified being faced with the insecurities i had so recently passed. . .
and desperately didn’t want to become the oppressor i had feared and hated so long..
i tried to explain what these idiots were doing
they wanted to see me kick his ass
but he threw a very weak punch at me that broke against my chest
i slapped his face
and grabbed his shoulders and said
NO, Joe, stop.
and just looked at him
he cried

but that was it.

The year before
we got a computer in the house
i remember it was an 8088
with a turbo button
CGA monitor
and a 500MB hard drive

… and a MoDem.

Ted and i would call eachother and type-chat for hours
it was so cool

when i was 13
i discovered BBS servers
and would, late at night, dial up and chat with Adults

i even tricked my mom into leaving me for a few hours at the Half-Priced Books store where there was a meeting of these BBS people
i was by far the youngest
but it was so cool to meet these random strangers that were happy to meet SnipLipTer (my first on-line handle)

Ted and i saw less and less of eachother
as i started doing more with TJ, Dan and Sheri
by proxi, Ryan and Dustin
and their older siblings

but Ted and i would give eachother blow jobs now and again
— i didn’t like the taste of Ted’s dick: pissy and sweaty
and the head he gave wasn’t so good as that guy at the office

i asked Ted if he’d ever had butt sex
he said “once” but refused to tell me who…
his brother? his dad? i wondered…

he and i got jobs washing dishes at various restaurants
so we could go to the mall and walk the halls for hours
our mothers would drop us off and we’d hang out there all day
watching movies
looking through all the crap we couldn’t buy. . .

but that held less and less appeal for me as the school year came to an end
and with it
the approach of High School

as i moved away from Ted
and spent more time with TJ
i went do the mall less
and started spending my money on Role Playing Games that i was getting into with TJ and Daniel (and my brother, again)
the dice…

what about the korean kid?
and Brock?
and Souleman?
hmmm, ethnicity.

Ted was a part of Boy Scouts
it was 12 or 13 when i joined it with him
so we could go on a two week summer trip through Tennessee and north carolina
right?
there was so much sexual tension in all those kids
i remember Shaving together…
and bad food

but i remember
just once
at one of the meetings
was the first American Black Boy i’d ever met
Brock
my father had always taught me to fear and hate niggers
but here was this black boy with a funny name and amazing tall spongy hair
and he was just the nicest kid
i was magnatized to him
and we spent the entire three hours talking

but i never saw him again

the only black boy i’d talked with other than him was this boy Souleman
who some Zionsville family had supported through some famine program
and sent him to come live with them for a few months
he was from a small African village
and was stricken with polio when he was quite young
so his legs didn’t work

in Africa
he drug himself around the village with his arms
(i remember as a child picturing him dragging himself through the dusty dirt … or mud?)

he had Very Strong Arms

in America
they’d given him special crutches so he could stand up. . .
he always looked amazed and exstatic
and spoke very little english
but his eyes were always ablaze with love and wonder

and in 5th grade
for just one year
there was a Korean kid named Jay McClelland (yeah, right?)
who was in our school system (where’d he go?, korean family have trouble in White Zionsville?)

i talked with him as much as i could
i remember us discussing “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”
i’d not read it yet
but had seen the book reports the 6th graders had done
the big brain was like Metroid
and i wanted to read it so badly…
he said it was a great book
and we were silent together. . .

i remember telling my father that he’d made a terrible mistake raising me out in rural indiana:
i was born to him so i could grow up in Detroit
where there was plenty of diversity and racial strife
in order to prepare me for who i needed to be in this life

he told me i didn’t know shit.