Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 13:17:52 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Jack Off Book (masturbation)

			    "The Jack Off Book"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 The first porno book of any kind I read was a slim red
covered white lettered "don't do it you know really" book entitled
"What Every Boy Needs to Know." There was a companion
volume entitled "What Every Girl Needs to Know." They were
given to us--the boys in one room, the girls in another, in about
seventh grade. Given with hushed tones from teacher. Given as
though handing out the epiphany of life before we had lived yet,
or knew what epiphany meant. It was dirty. It was sexual. There
was laughter. That the teacher quelled with a stern word and a
frown. This was no fun, get with it, guys. The male, natch, teacher
said. I'm sure the female teacher who handed out the distaff
volumes to the girls said the same thing, in the same way. Most of
the boys wanted the girls' book. Most of the girls' wanted the
boys' book. I was quite content with needing to know what boys
wished to know and never sought out the girls' volume. I just
needed to know what I needed to know. I didn't know before.

 Though I imagine now I would find it equally hysterical
and antiquated. Because all I had had up to that point for
masturbatory fantasies was a line drawing in a children's
biography of Sitting Bull. The drawing showed the full naked
backside of the legendary Indian chief as a young boy diving off a
cliff into the lake. I traced my finger round his willowy back and
rounded sweet buttocks for a great time. A very long and
satisfying time.  Keep your "Geographics" in study hall. With the
pictures of the naked from the waist up tribal women. This was
for me.

 But there were no words for me then that explained me.
Not before this book. Which my mother read first and somehow
approved of. Handing it to me like it was the holy grail. I had no
father in the house. She told me I was entering manhood. She
could not help me there. She sniffled. Said I was on my own.
Scared the crap out of me. I studied that book. Boy god did I study
that book.

 There was no category I could find for myself before this
treasure trove became my only guiding light. Only that at about
age 10 or so, I discovered, while bathing, in that typical cliche
Saturday night ritual, that my penis was erect. All the few inches
of it then, and somehow my hand and washcloth and warm water
seemed to be working a miracle on it. I know I had had erections
before, but because I was brought up in a very repressed
household, I can't say I ever noticed them. Or perhaps I had not
had them at all. Certainly no wet dreams. It and I wouldn't have
dared.

 But that Saturday night, in the warm steam of the
bathroom, while my aunt and grandmother were watching TV in
the living room, always that damned Lawrence Welk, when I so
desperately wanted to see "Get Smart" instead, I played with
myself for the first time. I was a thin kid at that point, far too tall
for my age. And I lived for comic books and movies and
weekends. My stroking myself that night as I watched that little
pink appendage standing straight up and making my balls tight
was the first time I had ever noticed that I was a boy. Even then,
not sure what that meant.

 I discovered in that bath as I soaked my penis and my legs
with hands full of warm sudsy water from the bubble bath lotion,
I could make my penis jump, dance, without touching it. So I did
my Carmen Miranda act with it and was quite impressed with
myself.  Dandling, dangling my little rod back and forth. Warm
water and wash cloth and soap equaled to my first orgasm, only it
had a painful lesson at the tip end of it. Soap inside the penis slit
hurts like bloody hell. My mother would have approved, for the
guilt I had been meant to feel for everything, from the strangest
things to the most silly, I felt then. I did it like that for some time
to come. The pain was my price for pleasure.;

 The waves of cornucopia were running out of me. While
the waves of  soapy electric fire of a jealous God were rushing
into me, hurting my dick and making my very balls sore. So. I
tried to stop doing it. Tried to stop my penis from getting hard.
But it was such a novel event. For I lived in a house full of
women. Had no sisters but was in love with the girl on one side of
my street and the boy on the other. And I didn't know anyone
could do this kind of thing. I wasn't particularly sure that I wasn't
the only boy who had a penis. I had never seen one on any boys in
the shower room or in the pool locker room, for I always kept my
head down in shame and dressed and undressed quickly, not sure
why I felt shame. Only that I did.

 It was a dark rambling house I lived in. Full of shadows
and age even when my mother as a young girl grew up here in the
house my grandparents had had constructed them when they were
young newlyweds. I was alone. I was troubled. I needed a friend. I
needed someone who did not hold me in trust, who did not
counsel me in any way. For there were many of those. There were
many freedoms that I saw cut off from the light, one layer at a
time. For my good of course.

 Except this thing I did with my penis. This thing that
excited me and made me feel as though I was being held in a
warm giant hand that would protect me and would somehow love
me. It never occurred to me then and not for a long time to come
that I should ask another person to join in with me. It just simply
never occurred. Who would want to? Who would care to? Easy.
No one. For I had been told in so many ways, including literally,
that I was unlovable, unneeded, unwanted. So when I found the
drawing of the young Indian boy with the flowing black hair
diving into the lake, bare from the back, I was aroused.

 When I went to see the movie "Pollyanna" at the Waldren
Theatre, and saw the screen black at beginning and then, moving
away from the camera, running away from the lens of it, which
apparently had been pressed up against his butt (how many
Christers have caught this one, in their zeal to destroy Disney?
This one was when old Walt was quite alive) this young boy
totally naked from the back off a diving board to the lake, I was
mesmerized. I was in love. I was enthralled and happy. And sad to
my core. But that was okay. It was just me. So it was okay.

 Because it was my secret. It was sacrosanct. And it didn't
matter that it was right or wrong, though I knew it was wrong, I
had given up so much already in my young life. I had towed the
line. Done as I was told. Went to church. Made the best marks,
save in Math, that I could in school. I never saw the need for girls
then. I was in love with Celesta but she was young like me and
her chest was flat like mine, so it was okay to love her and not get
into complicated areas about it.

 This was me. My penis was mine. The little brown rings
around the shaft, the tight little nut ball (the right one did not
descend from its cavity until I was 11 or so, my mother having fits
about that, the doctor telling her it was normal, and she not letting
me ride a bike like the other kids did, kids I watched from my
shade tree in the summer yard, as they went round the block and
back again on their Schwinns, because she thought I might injure
myself, the doctor said it was not so, but my mother just knew,
just knew.)

 So. "What Every Boy Needs to Know" was in my hands
that school day. I looked through it nervously. Scared. Excited.
Couldn't wait to get home with it. The teachers had already
contacted the parents, had met with them, let them read the books
and had been met with approval. Oddly in those repressive times,
such a thing was agreed on and allowed when I doubt it would it
would have been today.

 I began reading it, in my attic bedroom. Rubbing myself
through my jeans. Putting two and two together. Rubbing my
penis and sex were tied together. I had not thought of it that way
before. The unfolding, flowering feeling was akin to the crude sex
jokes the other kids made at school lunch and recess. It didn't see
right something that felt so good should be made so smutty and
evil. Though the chapters on dating, petting, kissing, that boys and
girls did, this boy did not do, so he skipped through that with only
a cursory glance here and there.

 I found words that I knew and didn't know at the same
time. Found the question, "Dr., sometimes my penis gets stiff just
before I'm called to the blackboard at school. What do I do? Will
I go to hell?" This was my kind of book. And I imagined this wise
doctor, because they seemed wise back then, much less so now,
was gathered in the center of curious boys who were kneeling
Indian style, the doctor sitting on a table maybe or a tall stool,
looking down at them with kind eyes and soft smiles, and they
could ask him anything they wanted and he wouldn't call them
wicked. Wouldn't call me wicked. he told them that is called an
erection and it is perfectly normal. "Normal" on my side, that
word. Never before and seldom after has the word "normal" ever
been on my side.

 Though that book has been lost to time, I remember it as
question and answer format, and imagine like David Ruben in his
monumentally stupid "Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Sex..." he just sat there at his typewriter, having a high old
time, making up questions and then answering those questions. It
was a kind book really. It said masturbation is not wrong, and
there is that word again, it is "normal", but just try not to do it that
much and if you can just not have that much fun, well have fun
with it, of course, it is fun, but just try to keep things in line and
remember the Scout oath and all of that.  Doc was as hamstrung
about all of this as I was. As all of us were I found out later. How
could this be?

 Which did me the honor of confusing me, and I'm sure
confusing every other boy who read the thing, an honor I'm sure
the writer (the same writer?, I don't know) of the book for the
girls also bestowed on them. The book even
discussed--homosexuality!! The word. It meant boys who like
boys. And men who like men. God, there was a word for that!! I
fit something kind of. It was great. Of course, the doctor wasn't
too keen on it, but the idea of other boys my age and older asking
the questions, asking is it wrong for me to get hard when I'm
around my best friend who's also a boy and we don't do anything
honest... This was incredibly sexy to me. To imagine that some
other boy had those same questions and that he would admit it to
this doctor--doctor smocter, who knows, the guy who wrote the
book--could have been batting out porno novels on the side, and
this was just another gig like the porn. Maybe he got a thrill out of
talking to kids about sex, who knows?

 The doctor who was wholesome as wholesome can be told
the boy that boys of a certain age go through stages of
development, and this reminds me of Harvey Fierstein saying that
every boy under the age of ten is gay, period, end of discussion. It
was a joke, okay? But I was gay then and I was in love with
Jimmy Van Sickle, across the street, and Mickey Graham in my
class, Mickey had this lovely funny face that could smile
incandescently and he let me ride behind him on his motor
scooter once, letting me hold tight to his tummy all the way.
Jimmy was from the North and he had an accent I only had heard
on TV. He was tall and muscular and he had eyes that were smart
and a brain you could hear clicking behind their gray colors.

 Every boy is, as Fat John Hagee, one of the most stupid
evil sick hateful Nazi fuckers alive, says endlessly, a hormone on
wheels. I jacked off every chance I got. I got off on looking at my
naked in the mirror in the bathroom. When Christmas rolled
around, I got off on posing naked in front of the living room
mirror which was partially hidden by a fake silver Christmas tree.
I sent the tree lights flowing, took off my glasses, and saw me
through the almost vertical tree "branches". I masturbated in
profile. I masturbated facing the mirror and seeing only segments
of my body all in different festive holiday colors. I saw what I
wanted to see. I was one of the packages under the tree. I counted
for me at least.  The song got it right. In my mind at least, "I was
beautiful then." Later on when I grew my hair long and lost much
weight, I pretended I was David Cassidy. And how I loved
making love to myself in a mirror. Not conceited in any way. It
was just I was the only boy and man that I knew who would let
me go even this far back then. A boy's best friend is his mirror.

 Because I was in love with words then, because words of
print on a page of a book filled me with such awe because it was
magic, getting ideas in your head from someone far off or
someone long dead and still somehow alive, I used this book
constantly to masturbate. Eyes came up from the page and looked
at me and were not harsh and hoarse but gentle and
understanding. I could just read the word "homosexual" in it, and
hear a piping voice saying the words, asking the all important
question and I would pop a nut almost there in my room in the
attic on the hot wool rug, always having to be on the hear-out that
my mother would not come up the stairs at the very wrong time.
She caught me twice. She wept and wailed and shook and
stumbled and all in all gave one helluva performance. I would
have applauded, but I was far too frightened. And far too naked
and trembling and ashamed.

 I loved me naked back then. I had no one else to love. I
was the only choice granted to me. And that, seemingly,
grudgingly. I loved being a boy though it was a sad thing for me. I
was not an exhibitionist and I wanted anyone to see me naked. So
this book, this very worn and very crumple paged book of the
doctor whose name I've long forgotten was my castle in which to
put myself at night. In which to dress in my shortie pajamas after
a Saturday night bath, and lie on the couch, while my
grandmother and aunt were watching TV in their chairs to the
side and the front of me, and whack off so quickly and so
pleasingly, waves of warm ecstasy through me. Feeling like I
belonged. Feeling like my body had tricked them all. My mother
who said I would get cancer in it if I rubbed it--and I told her
many of the times I did rub it--I know, I know, but you don't
know the incredible guilt back then, not just for me, but pretty
much for every boy I would imagine. My mother was extreme
though not unique.

 Whenever I masturbated, I felt limitlessly sad. There was
nothing worse than coming, because during the rubbing, during
the looking down at this wonderful little penis of mine which was
growing as time passed and beginning to get a dusty covering of
pubic hair behind it, though oddly enough I can't remember when
I first noticed the hair, I could imagine Jimmy was with me, or
Celesta, or Mickey, and they were doing something similar in
kind of a vague blur I couldn't really imagine, sort of like a party
was happening in my mind. My body rearing and bucking and
losing control of that strictness I kept within me all the other
times. Then it was over.  The birds in the northern sky flew away
at autumn hush. And I was alone. And no one, no one would do
what I had done.

 When I began to ejaculate, there was a problem the good
doctor/porno book writer on the side that hadn't been mentioned,
how was I to do it without touching it and how was I to do it
without squirting. For somewhere back there, I had figured out
that I would not burn in hell if I masturbated somehow without
using my hands. I would not get cancer that way on it. I don't
know when it came to me (memo to boys of the now--be glad you
weren't me back then) that I could masturbate using the fuzzy
bath mat for friction on my penis. So when I got home from
school to the usually empty house (I ran, a total hard on instead of
a total boy in those days, so horny) I would rush to the bathroom,
lock the door, take my clothes off, spring my sprong, take the
fuzzy bath mat, put it on the other side of the room, put the mirror
next to it, and rub myself (as I called it then) on the mat and I
would come and I would feel guilt, but not as much as before
when I had used my hands.

 I had no idea then that I was mimicking fucking while I
was trying to be a good little boy and not do the dirty deed totally.
No, I did actually more than wanking off. Accidentally I had
found the devil there behind the stern God willing to let jacking
off go cause I was just a kid--and there hoping down and up
behind him was Good Time Eddie Filth getting me to practice
fucking. I loved to see myself in profile, loved the see my butt
moving up and down and how I liked to raise up on my hands and
watch my little cylinder cock stroking the mat, and when I came it
was totally me, it was my whole body, which was a complete part
of the process of human. It was not me just unzipping my jeans,
pulling my penis from the BVDs slit and having at it. This was far
more--eloquent, far more caressing and serious and--essential, I
guess.

 But when I started coming (and I've no idea why this
didn't scare me to death, this white froth coming out of my
penis--I also don't remember the first time it happened, and if you
were an inward turned boy like I was, you would think,
landmined for guilt and cancer signs, this would have been noted
by me.) Perhaps the good doctor mentioned sperm formation and
how it too was "normal" (I had started to like that word) as he
chuckled over his typewriter and wished he were Mickey Spillane
instead racking up the girls and knocking the thugs over with
slugs from his gat. So instead, this doctor, if he was one helped
some kids out maybe. With that true blue berry pie wholesome do
my duty to god and country, he was far more liberal than anyone
else in the world I believe then. They passed out his books in
school for god's sake! Was He in on the joke too? It was my first
experience with contraband. This book everyone giggle over. And
I'm sure the boys got the girls books and they got the boys and
had fun with them. But this was serious stuff for me. This was
finding a place that was safe, that didn't have to do what anybody
ordered, just what my body wanted, though I was of course doing
what I was ordered here as well.

 Thus, if I was coming, and I was coming big great white
globs of the stuff, then I was actually masturbating. I could not
come on the bath mat because I did a few times. My mother saw
it. And went into her Norma Desmond routine yet again. So, I had
to touch my penis, to make my masturbation not real. I had to rub
it on the mat. Then I had to, on point of erupting my little one,
hold my fingers at its tip and not let the come out. If so, then it
didn't count and I was safe from cancer and God and Jesus naked
on the cross which was another turn on for me--not cancer and
God, but Jesus naked on the cross, so I doubted if he would have
given a damn whether or not I burned in hell either.

 Thus, the strategy. Thus, the repenting of the sin if I didn't
exactly commit the sin, therefore making me kind of muddled on
what I had just done, what I thought about it, what I was, how I
felt about the way I was, though I had no idea how I felt, because
it was easier not bothering to figure out what I was in the first
place. I was a cub scout and a boy scout and I newly fell in love
with Judy Stone in my class but could not bear to look at her
because she broke my heart in half. As did Jimmy and Mickey.
But all of that was to the side of what I discovered concerning the
holding the ejaculate in, in question--where does the stuff go? On
that I've no idea, but I can tell you about the pain of it.

 Of course in those days if I found the chance, I could jack
off three or four times day, even Mr. Goody Two Shoes like me.
And every time I did so, the testicle that had not descended till I
was 10 or 1l or whatever, would have this big base conga drum
inside it and Ricky Ricardo would be pounding "Babaloo" on it
hard enough and throbbing enough to beat the band. It would go
on for hours. And when the need of my hard on occurred again,
even during the pain, I would jack off using the same
tactics--though I was older by this time, I still used the same
routine. I felt the pain was to take the place of my eventual
burning in hell otherwise. It was a grinding, pulsating, vein
tightening, sac squeezing twister of an agony that filled me with
blood and made me bite my lip so I wouldn't scream out it hurt so
much.

 So because of "What Every Boy Needs to Know" I
somehow survived all of that. In time, late teen years, I let the
cum flow (and mercifully the pain stopped) because I was
somewhat proud of it, this wonderful built in joy we have in our
bodies, to feel good and to feel excited and to feel even in
loneliness a gathering with the universe in times like that.

 The only sex play I ever had back then was when I was in
ninth grade. A woman who worked with my mother, Dore
Wilson, had her sons, my age, invite me over for the weekend to
their house. It was Friday night and I was excited because I had
never slept with anyone other than me. Though I can't remember
their names, one of her sons, the taller one, was the brain and
would be and may very well be a computer whiz today.
And yes, he wore a pocket protector in his shirt pocket stuffed
with pens. He was tall and gangly and awkward and had been
horn rimed glasses (of course). Kind of a smart ass. But on the
whole nice. Kind of bloodless looking. His brother was shorter
and more unruly and given to giggling at the table a lot.

 I was so afraid I would do the wrong thing. That they
would not ask me back. And they didn't, not because I did
anything wrong, it was just I did not know how to be a child back
then. My mother was 40 when I was born. I grew up with middle
aged and older relatives. I spent my childhood going to funerals of
relatives I had never laid eyes on before. I think that's what I hate
the most about my melancholy lonely dusk childhood, not
knowing how to be a child. Though in other respects, my
childhood was a fairly good one. In spite of.  Because of.

 I got to sleep in the sleeping bag between the beds of the
two boys. When lights were turned off, and they stopped making
desultory conversation between themselves, still trying to include
me, then finally giving up, I did this most daring thing. I thought
basically what the hell? though I didn't think the word hell
because I never cursed in those days. I threw back the top part of
the sleeping bag, exposed myself, fearful, terrified, are they
watching?, one?, or both?, oh please, yes, and I jacked off there
with their sleep breathing keeping me company. I pointed my
penis to one boy and then the other. I rubbed with fear. With a
totally new kind of joy. I came just a bit and put my penis back in
my pajamas, feeling the slippery sticky warmth keeping me
company--it was okay that one time, not to obey my rules for
masturbating. I didn't sleep at all that night. I wanted so much for
one or both of them to come down to me, to join me. I wanted to
not be alone as I always way, especially in this aspect of my life.

 But they didn't. Not a word was said. I was so courageous
at that moment. I was, believe me. So, in time the body grew up
and the hair length also grew and I wore bell bottoms and tie dyed
shirts and I pretended I was like everybody else but I wasn't. I
went to college and not even close to the usual results one is
supposed to find there. But all this time, every so often, when I
jack off, though I don't hurt myself with it anymore, except the
sad emotions of it which have become somewhat comforting in
an odd sort of way over the years, I think of "What Every Boy
Needs to Know." And how stupid people are. And how they hurt
children by ostensibly trying to help them. The guilt, the shame,
all of it. The good doctor or whatever he was, used guilt too, but
he said it in a nice way. He said it the way a Sunday school kind
of scoutmaster might say it over a campfire on a cool autumn
night in the woods on a Saturday. Where the boys were sitting
peaceably, eating their charred hamburgers, know each other and
know they can talk freely, though no one can really talk that
freely, now or then, no matter how much we might know each
other. We haven't come as far as one might think. In some ways,
we've regressed.

 I guess this is a belated thank you to that man who wrote
that book. He helped this woodchuck get if not a merit badge then
at least not laughed at because he asked some other boy back then
if they would like to. Because the message was gotten across in
that kind way. Though I was born knowing it already. And the
message said beware and be careful but have a good time too well
sort of you know if you want to, but keep it kinda private and you
know, but remember the boundaries and may the good lord take a
likin' to you.

 And to you as well. In these sad little days known as life.
All of that back then seems wonderful compared to now. Quite
wonderful. Even the pain of holding it in. Even that as well.

				  The End