Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

At eleven, I’m the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lock­ers in the oth­er­wise empty men’s locker room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp I am attend­ing takes us every other day. Nor­mally, I’d be chang­ing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thir­teen. I turn my back to them to hide the erec­tion that has taken hold of my body and which I am hav­ing dif­fi­culty fit­ting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain incon­spic­u­ous, how­ever, my move­ments attract the other boys’ atten­tion and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoul­der. “Hey!” his voice  rings out metal­li­cally, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

The rest of the boys sur­round me in a tight cir­cle. I stand there unable to move, my body point­ing me into the air above the mid­dle of the room, wish­ing I could van­ish, that it would van­ish, but no mat­ter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts con­tinue for what seems like hours, though it is prob­a­bly only a few min­utes, and then the head coun­selor comes in and ush­ers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were say­ing, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely look­ing at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that evening, while I’m get­ting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mir­ror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not try­ing to imag­ine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the pos­si­bil­ity of a body that does not have erections.

///

The first time the old man who lived at the top of the stair­case said hello to me, he stopped for a moment as we passed in the court­yard and looked at me as if he’d known me my whole life. I stood there, tak­ing in the warmth of his gaze, wish­ing as he walked away that I’d said some­thing to make him stay so I could tell him who I was. I was thir­teen years old.

Over the next cou­ple of months, a rit­ual of greet­ing grew between us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then a long silent moment would pass while he looked at me and I stood there, too hap­pily embar­rassed to move.

Then, one late summer’s day, after our usual exchange was over, the old man did not keep walk­ing. “When am I going to see you?” he asked.

“Soon!” I answered, fig­ur­ing he was lonely, like Mrs. Schecht­man had been when she lived in the apart­ment next to his and I used to go sit with her once in a while just to keep her company.

Not too long after­wards, as I was going out to play with my friends, the old man met me at the bot­tom of the stair­case lead­ing to the front door of our build­ing. It’s pos­si­ble that he’d planned it this way, but I don’t think so; there was no way he could’ve known when I stepped out of my apart­ment. He was prob­a­bly just on his way out at the same time I was, and when I reached to turn the knob, he was stand­ing right behind me, hold­ing the door shut with his left fore­arm. With his right, he maneu­vered me face first into the cor­ner near the mail­boxes where the door frame met the wall. Cov­er­ing my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, cupped at my crotch, and all the time, over and over again, he kept ask­ing me that same ques­tion, whis­per­ing hoarsely into my ear, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing to me, no train­ing such as young chil­dren get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was fin­ished. Then I ran. I don’t remem­ber how far or how long or even in which direc­tion, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if run­ning would turn me into another per­son. When I finally stopped run­ning, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, where my friends and I some­times hung out at night, I sat a long time with the knowl­edge that my run­ning had undone noth­ing, that my body was still the body he’d touched, and I knew that he would want to touch me again.

I told no one what had hap­pened, and when the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, pre­tend­ing not to notice the ironic and con­spir­a­to­r­ial twist he added to his smile. A few weeks later, he saw me sit­ting with my friends in front of our build­ing and asked me to help him upstairs with some pack­ages he had with him. I wanted to say no, but I didn’t know how, not with­out risk­ing that my refusal would some­how lead my friends to the truth of what he’d done to me. So I took the pack­age he pointed at from his shop­ping cart – to make it eas­ier, he said, for him to get the cart up the stairs – and fol­lowed him to his apartment.

As soon as he’d shut the door of his place behind us, he pushed the cart to the side, took the bag I was hold­ing and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bot­tom of the bag landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment.

Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt – all I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped mov­ing – and then he unzipped my pants and pushed them down so they fell around my ankles. Then he took me gen­tly by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall, where he sat down. Look­ing up at me with a wide smile – I have the dis­tinct mem­ory that he’d taken out his two front teeth – his eyes, at what I imag­ine must have been the fear in mine, grew ten­der, almost fatherly, “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with con­cern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he took my penis in his hands – I remem­ber think­ing that his fin­gers were like a cage – and he told me how good my penis was, how beau­ti­ful and big, and then his own pants were down, I was sit­ting on the couch, and his own penis, large and pur­ple, hung in front of my face, and his voice came from some­where above me, urg­ing me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remem­ber if I did, but I do remem­ber his hand on the back of my neck, and then I see myself walk­ing word­lessly to his front door, unlock­ing it, clos­ing it behind me, and then I am in my bed, curled in the fetal posi­tion, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, he saw me stand­ing by myself in front of our build­ing and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised,would be dif­fer­ent. He would move more slowly, be more gen­tle, but some­thing in me rebelled. I said no, ignor­ing his fur­ther please until he walked away.

He never spoke to me again, and he even­tu­ally moved away, and I have no doubt there are other men in this world who had with him when they were boys an expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar to mine. I remem­ber only once try­ing to tell some­one what he’d done to me. I was sit­ting out­side with my friend Kim when he passed by. He ignored me and nod­ded hello to her; she nod­ded in return. When I knew he was out of earshot, I turned to her, tried to fill my voice with every­thing she’d need to under­stand what I really meant, and said, “He’s a faggot!”

Kim looked at me in hon­est con­fu­sion, “So what if he’s gay? So what?”

The blank stare I answered her with was as uncom­pre­hend­ing as the silence in which she waited for me to explain myself. I don’t remem­ber being explic­itly, actively, homo­pho­bic, but every­one knew – or at least I thought every­one knew – that it was only homo­sex­ual men who preyed on young boys. Now, of course, I know dif­fer­ently, but to have said any­thing else at the time would have risked my telling Kim the whole story, and that’s some­thing I would not be ready to do for some time.

Cross-posted on Alas.