About the time I was 12, I began to feel some funny feelings in my body. One night I dreamed I was lying face down, and a sensation in my lower body spread out that seemed to trascend my slim body itself, starting in my groin, and the more I rubbed myself on the mattress, the more it spread. Circles of burning pleasure. It was as if I were melting. I was tingling in a very specific, delicious way. I woke up with a stinging delicious burn I could not pin-point or explain. I could only lie there in ecstacy, not wanting to move, not wanting the feeling to end.
Just after school ended that year, 1948, I had just completed the seventh grade in Mrs. Leslie Correll's room at the new Coltrane Grammer School, which had been renamed Web School. Conway, my neighbor who had been my best friend and playmate since the second grade, and I celebrated the summer's freedom with a camp-out in an army surplus tent in the Black's back yard. The Blacks provided the best equipment, basket-ball court, play swings and trapeze, ball field in the neighborhood. We kids used the premise as our own. My two brothers 6 and 7 years younger, Sammy Black, their age, with older sisters Judy and Andrea. Andrea was busy in high school, and about 3 years older than I, and Judy was about three years younger. Across the street was the Lyerly house. Tommy was younger than Chal, had pale blond hair and glasses. His younger brother Richard was a cutie from the start, and their baby sister later played the trumpet. Her name I think was Susie. The first girl I knew to play it! And behind me lived Conway.
Conway, whose real name was James Conway Sanders, who lived in
a rental cottage in what was called Sears' Alley, directly behind
our garden, and the Cook's field. Old Lady Sears,
whose own cottage was on Depot Street, was one of the many old
gals trying to make the most of their property. (Beside
"Cook's Tourist Home") The country was still pulling out of the Depression when the War started. Their cottage had no indoor
plumbing. The only source of water was from a pipe
that came up on the back porch of the L-shaped house. There
was a tub on a shelf for a sink, a hole and pipe for a drain.
The two front rooms with a front porch, led to another bed room
and finally the kitchen, with a wood cook stove. Cooking
went on constantly, it seemed. Conway's father, James Partee,
worked first shift at Penn-Carol Mills, several blocks to the
west, near the railroad station. His wife, Frieda, and
daughter, Dolly May, cooked up a storm, sending hot
biscuits and corn bread with tough ham and Swiss steaks, beans
and okra and corn and string beans to Partee at the mill in a
bucket. They ate well. The smell of those hot biscuits
coming out of that oven!!! They were from German stock,
from a farm near Thunder-struckt Bridge, and their church remainded
Thunder-struct Baptist Church. I went to their home-coming
observance one year. Their was a grand feast after
Church like I never experienced it!!! The preacher ranted
and raved, sinners were definitely going to hell.
I don't remember the music, I don't think there was an organ,
maybe a pump reed one, but quit unlike the glorius Aolean Skinner
at our First Pres!
The pews in the back of the
old church had initials carved into them of the "JR + PM"-with-a-heart
type, right into the backs of the oak benches.
I could not imagine doing that to anything that belonged in the
house of God! I was shocked.
Partee and Conway were excellent mechanics. I guess Conway could change a spark-plug or install a water pump before he could walk. That '39 Chevy of theirs was torn down and put back together every week end. Conway knew how the combustion engine worked and how to make a wooden car with a usable steering wheel at the age of 7! He had plans for my tinker-toy wind up motor. Told me how to put a concentric gear mechanism and brakes and drives that I would only learn about in science, years later, and never learning how to use this knowledge!!! It amazes me that this dumb hick was the holder of such advanced technical knowledge at such a young age. Conway was my superior in every way. I lived in a big 10 room house, had indoor plumbing, my family had won the Civil War for the South, to hear them tell it, and were the most important people on the planet, and Conway was working poor, do it yourself, move the out-house when the shit hole got full, one pipe water tap......... My better half. The best roll model I could want. Yet, I could not be anything but his play pal.
Conway was over sexed, I guess. That is what he talked about constantly. I was so naive. He had to teach me everything. Even in the second grade, after the first day, we sat in the little house he had built in the back yard out of some scraps of wood, he drew the female sexual anatomy on the wall and told me that girls don't have peters. (I think I knew this, because Mason Morris had to squat to pee, while Billy, her brother, and I just pulled it out and wet the stone in the boxwood maze out at the Morris' farm. We laughed. Mason was humiliated. They were almost cousins, and my oldest playmates. Their mom was my Mom's good friend, and the sister of Aunt Craig, Uncle Jacks wife.) Conway said that babies were made with the peter and the "pussy", he gave me a new definition of a familiar word. We examined our peters. It never dawned on us (me, at least) that there might be such a thing in the future as an erection! He said he had seen Dolly May's pussy and it had hair around it! I had seen daddy's peter, or pee-pee, as he told me to call it, and there was hair around it! Daddy had hair on his chest, too. Conway said that we could hide under Dolly's bed and watch her put her step-ins on! We did but I could not get close to the edge, because Conway was in the way, and when he started laughing, well........ we were pulled out and promptly expelled from the premise! One thing I could not understand was how the peter in its floppy instability could be forced into that tight slit, the "pussy". Also, I could not envision my parents doing such a vulgar, dirty act.
But, the night in question, the beginning of summer 1948, Conway and I were lying in our underwear on the army cot in Sammy Black's tent. We were talking about pussy, I am pretty sure. "Hey, my peter is getting bigger", he said. "Feel it". I did and all of a sudden, my peter got bigger! We started playing and rubbing each others. To my delight, things felt better and better. What he did to me, I did to him. Pretty soon we were jerking each other off! It felt so good, I could not believe it. Then, just like in my dream, that feeling came: a tingle, a burn that was so grand and glorious, it made everything else go away: all thoughts, the tent, the sky, the stars, the universe. I just got reduced to a quivering string of orgasmic ecstacy. We kept doing it. I came again!! It was too great to talk about. Finally sated, we went to sleep. The next morning, we went our separate ways, and still did not say anything about the experience for a while. Of course, I had to try it by myself the first chance I got in a closet and then in the basement. It worked and worked. The meaning of life became a lot clearer. In a few weeks, a hair started to grow above my little thing. Soon, a whole bunch of hair sprouted. I thought that the jerking made it grow out, and I was ashamed when Dad saw it. Damn it, it was my little brother that called attention to it. Dad made us all strip and get into the big downstairs bath tub. "Hey look", Maury said. "Some hairs"!!!! "Lets see if we have some!" He examined his groin and that of our younger brother, Chal. Dad made me show him. My little thing was growing too. I started sprouting hair under my arms!!! Now Daddy knows my shameful secret.
HAIR. Now I remember seeing Clyde Scott's pubic hair at the swimming
pool showers that summer. This was some time back and he was
the first boy my age that I knew that had blosomed a beautiful
little thatch. I stared with awe and admiration and surprise,
and now, I was growing some!!! Conway started growing
some too, and we continued to get together from time to time.
Then Conway spurted some white stuff one night up in Boo's upstairs
bed room, in the big bed with the light that hung down and banged
against the massive head board until someone put the thing on
the floor. It had a long, long cord. Conway
told me the white sticky stuff was called come or cum and
that what we were doing was called jacking off. He
tried to get some cum out of my peter, but I did not have any
yet. Then he would sing the chorus of the hymn "Little
Brown Church in the Wildwood": the incantation worked,
because the next time we did it, I spurted some of that white
stuff, also: that come or cum. Proud and happy, I
got Conway as messy as he was getting me. Whenever he wanted
to do it, he would wink at me and ask me if I wanted my play-pretty.
If I was in the mood, as I always was, we went up to Boo's and
did it. It would make me mad the way he said it, though,
like I was his bitch, and he was waving his thing at me.
He would ride me on his bike and sing and whisper "Come,
Come, Come......." or "Do you want your play-pretty?"
and laugh a bit wickedly. But Conway moved to the country
that summer.
That was as far as we went in our sex practice. He moved away, back to the country, and into a different county school. The next time we met, a few years later, I wanted to initialize some sex play. He seemed to have forgotten about what we used to do. Or he did not need or want it anymore. We were on the garage roof somehow, under those greasy pecan trees blowing in the summer breeze. I said I wished he were a girl, and felt him up to see if my wish came true. It did not. By that time, I had some other partners in sex play. I don't think we wanked that night. If we did, it was over quite soon. That may have been the last time I saw him.
Boy Scouts Camp
Then, later that summer of '48, my Boy Scout Troop, Troop 44, went to summer camp for a week. Over in the sand hill region of the state, near Ellerby. I was one of the youngest member, and I was all excited. My tent mates were Buford Swearingen and Roland Cress. The Cresses were protean. I did not know Roland, but I knew his sister, Vina Faye, and wondered why they went to different schools. He went to another school, but I had been in classes with Buford for several years. I took him as a dork and a bit of a bufoon. Roland, though, was good looking in a dark way, pretty eyes, better looking than Vina Fay, even, and in a mature way, and had hair above his dick, to boot. It was thick and dark. I started calling it a "dick", like the other boys. Roland would parade naked. I was curious and jealous, I guess. I was ashamed to show my thing when we played strip black-jack. He withheld his too, but Buford, who had no hair and looked like a kid still, did all the parading. I did not dare suggest that we do what Conway and I did. Some other boys were doing it, I am pretty sure. The alpha-male stud, who had shared a tent with the leaders of the boys, was always talking about sex. Don Perkins was well develped, about 15 or 16 at the time. He peroxided his pubes. He was bad. The boy with the biggest dick in the troop was named Tyrome, he was very pretty, he and Don showered together once, I was there by myself when they came in. They kind of ignored me and washed each other, spending a lot of time washing their bottoms. I left them to it, wondering what they would do by themselves. I was a little too intimadated to be aroused. Older boys were not my thing. Back at my tent, Roland was jacking off as casually as anything. Buford was there, paying no attention. He was not doing it right, sitting on his cot, his pants hardly down at all. I wanted real bad to give him a hand. He did shoot a stream of cum or come. Lester, our scout master, was rumored to be queer by the boys, but I did not see any evidence. He was not handsome, and I heard gossip about the way he treated his girl friends. I liked all that stuff about the boy scouts, but I think Daddy wanted me there because he saw I was becoming too effeminate. He thought the scouts would "cure" me. Far from it. I stopped going since I was still a Tenderfoot after about a year. I could not pass the fire-building test to become a Second Class Scout. One match. That was all we could use. I never got the fire going. If at first you don't succeed, quit. That was my motto. I think the last whipping I got from the old man was for refusing to go to a meeting. I left the house in tears, then too ashamed to show up red-eyed from crying. I walked the streets in shame. I was not good at the things they wanted us to do. I loved being out-doors, always. I loved camping. But their was just something missing in my appreciation of that scene that made me an allien. Later, much later, in fact, I came to terms with real outdoors and camping and backpacking, the favorite parts of my life today.
Coming Soon: The Hammets and the Baucombs
Bubba
Ken
