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ONE OF THE BENEFITS of having the reputation of being a quiet, intelligent student was that I could have gotten away with a lot mischief and my teachers never would have suspected me. The rest of the group I used to hang out with were not so lucky: they were often caught, blamed, spoken harshly to or punished. By the time I was a senior in high school I had mastered the art of communicating with my peers yet remaining unseen by my teachers, but my friends were always caught when they talked or laughed in response.
As a secondary school teacher I was familiar with all the tricks in the students’ handbook – Pranks and Other Mischief for High School Students: How Not to Get Caught – which made my job of apprehending offending students so much easier. My skill was legendary when it came to seeing things with my head turned in the opposite direction, seeing the color of chewing gum in students’ mouths when they should not have been chewing at all, and for knowing what was being whispered across a classroom when it seemed like I was not even paying attention. I had also mastered the art of magically appearing before a student who was more interested in what was in his hand under his desk – usually a cellular phone or note – and was famous for intercepting notes just before they fell into the hands of the intended recipient.
Usually students just giggled at being caught in Powers’ web so it was surprising one afternoon, the first period after the lunch break, when one of the senior boys hand-wrestled me for a cell phone that I was trying to confiscate. The rest of the class sat in dismay as I put the prize in my shirt pocket and continued with the lesson as if nothing had happened. It was only after the class had settled into an unstable equilibrium that I took the cell phone out of my pocket.
Oh my god, I gulped. The class looked at me, transfixed. I looked at them as if to check the validity of what I was seeing, and they looked back as if to say, “Yes, sir, it is true.” There before me was a junior female student whom I did not teach but did recognize, sucking on the giant dick of an indistinguishable male creature.
How did he get his dick to be so large? I wondered. He must have been using some enhancements. As a black man I considered it a personal failure if my dick was not up there with the largest of them – not that I had done any empirical studies. I had to live up to the belief whether it was myth or truth. I quickly got over my inferiority complex and the adult in me kicked aside the pouting child. This was an offence that I had to take to the dean of discipline. The child was in some serious trouble.
I was surprised that that kind of sexual promiscuity was still taking place in our school. Two years prior to that incident a group of junior girls had a brainwave and came up with an ingenious game: they would “abduct” unsuspecting boys who were on their merry way to their class or the cafeteria and drag their captives to the girls’ bathroom. Once there, they would give them a blow job and dismiss the happy male victims to continue on their way – if they could ever find their way again. And the prize for the girls: points. They gave themselves points according to how hot the guy was: ten for the rugged footballers and one for the Joe Schmoes.
Of course news of the game spread among the student population and boys found that the shortest distance to anywhere in the school entailed passing in front of the girls’ bathroom in the hope of being taken captive.
The girls were busted when one young man, a footballer and one of my students, apparently was too eager and could not wait until the crowds had thinned after the dismissal bell. Something went awry. One of the girls appointed to stand guard had lapsed in her duty and some juniors wandered into the bathroom. Shortly afterwards they ran back out screaming. The squealers were threatened but they defied the bullies and reported the incident to the principal anyway. The matter was investigated, the parents were called in, students were suspended and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
“What I don’t understand is how these girls could suck on a guy when he’s hot and sweaty after a day of activities.” I knew from personal experience that south of the belly button did not usually smell all that great at the end of the day. “How could they tolerate that smell?” I was thinking about the bacteria. I couldn’t remember at what age I had become germ phobic.
“Sir, would it have been better for him to shower first?” a cheeky senior said to me as I discussed the episode with my class. I enjoyed their maturity and my rapport with my students was probably the only thing that made my job bearable these days.
“Seriously, guys,” I said when their laughter had died down. “There are diseases that can be transmitted through oral sex. People are only talking about AIDS but there are more out there.”
I gave them a lecture on sexually transmitted infections.
“Sir, did you ever do anything like that when you were our age?” a precocious young lady asked.
I pretended to think but I already knew the answer. I could not have told them the truth for I knew that, apart from being embarrassed if the story got around the school, the kids would have used my personal failure as an excuse to repeat the same foolishness.
“No way,” I lied. “The pressure you guys face now is greater than what I had growing up.”
As I drove home that afternoon, the story that I had kept from my students replayed in my mind.
It was during the school vacation and my mother was at work as usual. The children from the neighborhood who often played together were playing a game of Monopoly on my front porch and I was the first to be eliminated. I was glad to get away as I had to shower before my mother returned home. The morning had been spent playing with marbles in the yard and climbing mango trees for the ripe fruit which dripped their juices all over us as we consumed them.
My mother hated to see us dirty. We did not have indoor plumbing back then and so I used the outdoor bathroom by the water tank in the backyard. I was in the middle of my soap routine when Hyacinth popped her head over the short structure that was made of galvanized tin sheets.
“I got eliminated, too.”
“Yeah,” I said, conscious of my nakedness and my awakening penis. But I pretended that a girl popping in at bath time was the norm.
“You ever had oral sex?” she asked.
I had no idea what that was. “I don’t care for it.”
“Bet you I could make you.”
In a flash she burst through the door and was kneeling in front of me, brusquely parting my legs with her hands. Her face moved in to my penis and I got scared. What was she doing? Was she going to bite me? The warmth of her mouth on my hard penis calmed me. I had never felt anything like it and I wanted more. I held her head in my hands just in case she changed her mind, squatted so that I would feel more comfortable, tilted my head back and closed my eyes to luxuriate in the moment. But the bliss was short-lived as I heard a cannon blast in my ear.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?” My mother had returned from work unexpectedly. Hyacinth bolted. “ANSWER ME, BOY!”
All the children had now come out of the house. “I – she – nothing.”
She grabbed my ear, pulled me out of the bathroom and called to one of the other children to bring her the leather belt from inside. They were all too eager to comply. The beating I got that afternoon made me swear to myself that I was never in my life ever going to do anything so careless even if I lived to be a thousand.
I chuckled to myself as I drove home that afternoon, thinking about that occurrence. It was an innocent enough incident, performed by misguided children who were merely mimicking what they had heard or seen adults doing. The matter involving my students on the other hand was not so innocent; it was criminal, simply because times had changed and laws had changed to protect our children. Information was more accessible so ignorance could not be an excuse anymore.
By the time I entered the front door of my home I was burdened with guilt. Another memory had surfaced, and turning up the music on the radio in my car did nothing to banish it back to its grave. It was the one thing I regretted most in life, the one thing that made me feel like a criminal. I threw myself on my bed and allowed the accusing darkness to fall on me.
It was the eve of my seventeenth birthday and school had been dismissed early in preparation for Divali, the Hindu festival of lights, the next day. One of my friends, Roger, came to me.
“Hey, Clay, Lara has never been to the Basin so I’m taking her. Want to come?” The Basin was what we called Blue Basin – a waterfall of about sixty feet high which emptied into a main pool that looked very much like a basin.
“All right.” We headed up there, just the three of us, and since it was the day before a holiday there was a sprinkling of people, mostly teenagers, about. So, we decided to climb the hill to a higher point where there was another pool that we called Coffin Hole – because of its shape and because it was rumored that some unfortunate souls had lost their lives in the deep dark waters.
Both Lara and Roger were fishes in the water, but I had to remain on the water’s edge watching them frolic. I had not learned to swim as yet.
“You know what?” Roger asked. “I always wanted to go skinny dipping.” I grinned. Then he peeled off his underwear and flung it in my direction. I had to duck to avoid it hitting me in the face. He swam across to Lara, unfastened her bra and threw it at me, its small cups narrowly missing my face. His arms reached down but I heard her say, “Let me take that off myself.” She took off her panties.
At this point my heart was thumping. Part of me longed to plug Lara’s socket – any girl’s socket really – because in the boys’ bathroom at school I had heard so many stories of other boys’ conquests. But another part of me, the responsible, mature side was telling me that this was wrong and there could be consequences, the least of which was pregnancy. Images of the suffering Pompous Jackass were quick to rise up in my mind.
I looked at the two of them embracing in the middle of the pool, sucking greedily on each other’s tongue. I turned away. Lara was one of the girls in a group who swore that she was going to remain a virgin until marriage. But the other girls in the group had given it up: one had already had an abortion, there were stories of repeated incidents of unprotected sex between another one and a taxi driver, and the fourth member of that group was in an abusive relationship with an older man.
The pair swam across to me. “You want a cut?” Roger asked and without waiting for a response he went to retrieve something from his pants pocket.
It was awkward to look Lara in the eye: I had known her since we were kids and I knew her family well. Her mother liked and respected me. More than that, she trusted me. So while Lara sat between my legs, her back to me, I fingered her. She was tense. I was not enjoying this.
Roger relieved me of my discomfort when he returned with a condom covering his short thick black dick and he led Lara to a rock. With practiced ease, she lay down and Roger went to work. I looked away and wished I could have disappeared when I heard Lara moaning.
“What happen, Clay? You coming?” Roger had ejaculated and was emptying the semen-filled rubber. I sauntered across to Lara who was lying on the rock, her arms open to receive me. I climbed on and as I looked her in the eyes, I rolled off. I just could not do it.
“Sorry,” I said. “This isn’t right.”
As we made our way down the hill, Lara insisted that we keep the afternoon’s escapade a secret. She especially did not want Paul to know about it since she had a crush on him and she did not want him to think that she was easy. We promised to keep our mouths shut. But we should have made Lara promise too because by the next day she told all her friends about our shenanigans.
Juicy stories like that do not remain a secret among teenagers for long and the news spread like measles among the student population. Soon it got to my form teacher whom I could tell was very disappointed in me.
“Tell me what happened, Clay.”
“Sir, you already know.”
“I want to hear it from you.” I said nothing. “I’m not judging you, son. I just want to help you out of this mess.”
But I was deaf to his pleading.
Lara, now realizing that she was looking like a whore in everybody’s eyes, changed her story and said that it was rape. But I could tell by the incredulity on the principal’s face and in his voice that a girl who would go skinny-dipping in a pool up in the bushes with two boys and not encourage them to have sex with her was a liar. Our parents were called in and when I got home that evening, my father, though not an active presence in my life, used me as a punching bag. I did not defend myself. I felt like I deserved it. And it reinforced my desire to keep my underwear on.
The beating I had gotten as a teenager served to smarten me up and helped to steer me on the straight and narrow path. Maybe the student whose picture I had seen earlier in the day would be set right by her mother after the incident.
I lay in bed, paralyzed. I was surprised that I was so greatly shaken up. I felt sorry for the girl in the picture, imagining that it would be difficult for her to exorcise her demons when she was older. Should I say something to her? Could I help her change her behavior because we met at a common point, a point of primal desire and a generous helping of stupidity mixed with irresponsibility?
I believe that we must all go through difficult times in order to grow. It’s like the story I read where a little girl was trying to ease the suffering of a butterfly that was struggling to emerge from its chrysalis. What the child didn’t know was that the butterfly had to push against the walls of its prison in order to strengthen its wings.
I decided to let the girl get stronger wings. I was not going to intervene. I did not intervene when her mother slapped her right there in the presence of her teachers in the staff room, nor when she bawled as if someone were branding her with a hot iron.
“I’m fed up of you!” the mother wailed.
The girl shrieked too as she managed to extricate herself from her mother’s clutches. I returned to my work on the computer as the mother threw herself on a sofa and wept until she was comforted by a compassionate female colleague of mine. The child also sought refuge in the arms of another teacher and at the end of the day they were dispatched for professional help.
The girl did not give up the name of the man in the picture so the matter was never reported to the police.
