It was soon after that I met my two best friends - guys I still know to this day, who have stuck with me through all the crap that's happened since I met them at a church softball game when we were fourteen. They were already friends when I spotted them - I was on-deck behind the backstop, and Dylan and Eric were smacking each other around and laughing at something on the field. Instead of swinging my two on-deck bats, I walked over to them to hear what they were saying.
"Jesus- save me from sin," Eric blurted out as I approached, and then cackled when Dylan punched him in the arm. Dylan looked at me nonplussed and raised his eyebrows.
"He's obsessed with Lindsay Hollinger," Dylan reported.
I nodded, smiled, and the three of us looked up at the fielding team's shortstop, Lindsay Hollinger. She was a small girl with a pinched face and a clean, tight ponytail. Hunched over with her hands on her knees, she stared at the batter and waited for the next pitch.
"He's going to go home and wack-off and think about her," Dylan added.
All at once, Eric pulled a straight face.
"Freakin liar," he deadpanned, and then started to crack up again, "Jesus save me from sin."
Dylan shook his head.
"Whatever."
This leads me to a pivotal scene in my medical history. I'm nervous about this. It's not something to be proud of, and being honest about it on this blog will certainly be the most difficult writing exercise I've ever undertaken. While I reflect on this incident with instinctual shame, I'm comforted and inspired by the realization that it represents a place that God took me to for a reason; without these tests yesterday, I wouldn't be doing the lord's will today.
Like many sinful adolescent experiences, mine happened while I was all alone. I was in the bath; my only co-conspirators were a washcloth and a shrunken bar of ivory soap. I had been thinking about what Eric and Dylan had said; in some way,
their discussion of it - at least their mention of it - took some of the curse away from intrepid exploration.
I looked down at myself protruding above the bathwater, slumped over the still waterlevel that rested halfway up the tub. I thought of what Dylan had said about Lindsay. I thought of Lindsay herself - she was gorgeous - but it didn't light a spark. I tried to force myself to concentrate, to conjure her beauty, but even her vivid image left me flat.
My thoughts wandered back to Eric's antics, and then I felt a
twitch, and saw it inch forward like a turtle poking out of its shell. I thought about him some more, realizing that somewhere, he could possibly be touching himself at the same time that I was. I thought of the way Eric looked at Lindsay, and of Dylan's disdain, and then I felt it stiffen and start to rise.
I shifted in the water and lay back against the warm porcelain, my butt resting against the suction-cupped underside of an upside-down bathmat. I looked at myself, at the waterlevel stopping just at my thighs, at my stuff emerging into the
cool air like the tip of an iceberg. I was exposed and my exposure felt good, and it was enlarged, and soon I was touching myself. I felt myself hard in my hand, and my thoughts turned to Davis the Bully, and Davis’ skateboard, and what it was like when Davis touched himself, and where he did it, and what he looked like when he was doing it. I thought of the palms of my hands on him and on his pants-tent, and of the bulge in his pants when it was hard, and of it pressing straight out into his underpants and making the pants-tent, and I felt how hard I was in my own hand, with ivory soap lathered onto myself, and I grabbed myself and thought of what it could be like to get on my knees in front of the tent, and to pull his waistband tight and wide, peel it down over the length of his erection and replace the starchy cover of his underpants with the hot softness of my mouth, and to grab a hold of his behind and push him back against my tongue and down into my throat. And all at once I shot it high into the air, and throbbed into my hand, toes curled, spasming into the tightness of my guilty palm.
And soon after the chemicals were released into the water, my desire and excitement were replaced by overwhelming senses of shame and of contempt. I knew instinctively that what I had done was wrong, but at that point, I was yet to learn the actual severity of what had just occurred.
The very next Sunday, I found out.
