The Memories of Boys

This is a true story. It’s funny how the people we most despise can also be the ones we most desire.

Gym class. Eighth grade. Forget the horror of facing thrice-weekly rounds of bombardment. Forget picking the ball up on the soccer field thinking it’s out-of-bounds and hearing the jeers of teammates. Forget even the anxiety produced while waiting to be chosen last for basketball teams. Or for any teams.

No, the real horror came after the final merciful bell rang and those things were already-fading memories. It came in the locker room, while rushing to get dressed and safely away before an army of naked boys could appear, their skins a rosy pink as they emerged from the scrim of steam produced by the communal showers, their hair wet and glistening like the fur of seals.

That was the dangerous time, the time when the placement of eyes was of utmost importance. The time when one too-long look at an exposed crotch or a passing pale ass could mean the difference between just another horrible adolescent memory and something much worse. And it was gotten through by holding the breath and praying until the suffocating heat of hot water and adolescent need was replaced by the cool safety of the hallway and the comforting sound of footsteps echoing along the corridor as I hurried away, willing my eyes to forget.

These are the moments I remember most from those years—the times spent in escape, in running not from others so much as from myself. The stings of “queer,” spat like acid as it was so often, have faded to dull throbs. The days of not belonging have faded into one vague stretch of gray. But even now I remember the running.

The one who carried the most danger for me was John Dobbins, wearing it like a second skin that fit him more comfortably than his own. Tall, with the muscles of the farm boy he was, he was closer to manhood than the rest of us, as though at birth he’d been dealt a right to take up more space and had ignored even that generous offering. Adopted—I don’t know how I knew this—he was a mystery, his dark hair and blue eyes so dissimilar to those of the red-haired, fair-skinned family that chose him, like the most rambunctious puppy, from the rest of the litter.

What I remember now, in addition to the blueness of his eyes, are his teeth, crooked and sharp in his mouth. And, of course, the cock, for that is what made John famous in the locker room of Cold Falls Central School. The cock was huge, hanging thickly between John’s legs like a full-grown man’s before he’d even reached the age of thirteen. Besides its size, John’s dick was, for some reason, uncut. Ostensibly, this is why the other boys felt they could remark upon it without fear of crossing the line into queerdom. Difference was a safe topic of conversation; size was certainly not, although that didn’t stop some imaginative redneck from nicknaming John “Horse.”

It was John’s cock that I feared, and not so much John himself, although he and I had a history of animosity since once, in fifth grade, he had threatened to kill me for calling him an asshole on the playground. It says something about the both of us that I waited for the next six years for him to carry out this promise, and that he never did.

But in fifth grade I had not yet seen John’s cock. When I did, it changed something between us, even though I’m sure he could never recall the exact moment it happened as I still can even twenty years later. I have only to think back and see vividly the gray skins of the lockers, reserved for the high-school boys and seemingly sacred, and feel the smoothness of the tile floor as though I’d just walked through the door of that room. I remember, too, the wooden bench, and John bent over it, his balls hanging down between his legs. He turns, and I see his cock, the wrinkled skin folded over the head, the black hair around it still wet from the shower.

The actual event was hardly momentous, a fleeting glimpse of his prick as he turned to say something to a friend and I darted out the door to the safety of English class, where I could move words around the page as skillfully as John moved the ball around the basketball court, not that it saved me from the curse of being the school fag. Afterward, though, there was a subtle shift in the way John made his way through my world. Where before I avoided him in the halls out of general fear, now I did so for far different reasons. I feared what he made me feel, despite my hatred of him and him of me. I hated that sometimes at night, my cock hard from thoughts that came seemingly out of nowhere, I recalled the sight of his dick as I stroked myself into a wadded-up tissue. When one day I was kneeling on the gym floor tying my shoe and John, passing by, said, “Hey, faggot, while you’re down there why don’t you give me a blow job?” the words hung before me, ripe with hatred. But despite their bitterness, I wanted nothing more than to swallow them down.

I never saw John’s cock again. And after a hurried departure from high school three years later, I never saw John himself again. Yet sometimes I see a similar face, or perhaps a similar hatred reflected in the eyes of a man on the street or on the subway, and I am reminded of him. And still sometimes I close my eyes and imagine sucking a cock, long and thick. Its owner’s hands hold my head, not in love but in hate, as he fucks my mouth. It is an act of need, pure and simple. And inevitably, when I open my eyes and look up, I am in a junior-high locker room, and it is John’s cold blue eyes looking down as he releases his load into my throat and, happily, I swallow.