I lay sweating, face down on the loose sand. Small weeds, crushed against me, pushed through my light clothing and made me itch all over. But I couldn't scratch, couldn't even move, because I knew the Japanese attack was going to come at us from over the hill at any second. I pressed hard into the warm grit and listened to my heart thud, tightening my trigger finger on my Thompson. I looked to my right and left. All of the guys were ready, coiled like fine-tension wire.
And then it came, wild shrieks from the enemy, charging over the crest, right at us.
"Yankee dogs, you die! Yankee dogs, you die!"
"Banzaiiii! Banzaiiiiiii!"
Just listening to it sent chills deep into my gut. We stayed cool and held our fire until they were only about twenty feet away. Then, standing up in plain sight, I threw a grenade and opened fire, yelling, "Take that, you dirty Jap bastards!" With quick expulsions of air from the side of my mouth, I made the Thompson come alive, letting it jump in my hands.
But I should have fired from cover. I was stupid. Suddenly there was a thud on my chest, and with the utmost majesty and grace I spiraled down to the sand, face up to the sun, dead.
"Hey, Joey! You cheated! That's not a grenade, it's just a hunk of old ice plant!" yelled Donnie.
"Yeah!" It was Louie's voice. "Only the heart of the ice plant can be a grenade. We all said so!"
I became undead and got up, dusting off sand from the vacant lot. "What's the matter?"
"Joey's tryin' to kill us all with ice plant. He's not doin' it right," came the cry.
Colonel Carlson's raid on Makin Island stopped in mid-battle while we argued about the merits of ice plant leaves versus ice plant hearts. I was for the heart, because a leaf didn't even look like a grenade. Besides, if it was too gushy when it hit you your mom would give you hell.
Our raider battalion, some twenty strong, was usually at half strength because we could never find any other neighborhood kids to play the Japs, and so we had to split ourselves up. I was mad because I had done such a beautiful job of dying and nobody had even noticed. I was a master at it, a real master. Everybody said so.
We argued until five o'clock, when it was time to go home and get Captain Midnight's secret message on our decoders, received after forcing clown about two tons of Ovaltine and sending in the labels. Then it would be time for Jack Armstrong, Sky King, and Superman, with the Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, and the Cisco Kid on after dinner, followed by the San Francisco Seals baseball game.
We decided to put off World War II so that we could don our leather flight helmets and find out what would happen in the next episode of Captain Midnight a full day before the poor kids whose mothers made them drink plain old cocoa.
Later in the evening, safe behind my locked bedroom door, I would practice my favorite secret pastime. I was still normal then, and my sex life started just as the sex life of most eleven-year-old boys starts, by jacking off. I had become expert at it, sometimes shooting four times a day.
This was 1945, and eleven-year-old boys were not supposed to know much about sex. It was still a decade before the beginning of the age of enlightenment, with its sex education in school and casual mention in the media. Sex was still regarded as "dirty" and even polite conversations on the subject were taboo.
My father had -never mentioned the word bird to me, much less bee. What information I did pick up was in the form of dirty jokes from my friends, and they in turn received their information from me, who knew nothing.
For instance, I was fascinated by knockers. Although bulging sweaters and blouses gave me an immediate erection, I still wasn't sure just what a naked knocker looked like. Some knockers seemed to be very pointed and others were more round; some seemed to stick straight out, while others seemed to hang a bit. It was all most confusing to a curious young boy. To make matters worse, I was the son of a very modest lady, no part of whom other than face, arms, and legs had I ever seen bare. Not knowing the intricacies of the brassiere, I concluded that breasts were shaped just like the bra that held them, which at the time seemed reasonable. But if I was confused about knockers, the issue of cunts was still worse.
Of course, I had heard about them, all of the guys talked about -them. Nobody I knew even had a baby sister, since most of our fathers were in the service, so not one of us had actually ever seen one. Some of the guys thought that the navel became the cunt, and that this was where you were supposed to stick it in. I may have been naive, but I was not that far gone. I knew that girls had hair "down there," and after much laborious research, including all the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and ancient sex books I could find, I decided that the cunt was a round hole surrounded by a round patch of hair, located in the middle of the pubis bone.
This conclusion was not correct, but it led me to some delightful fantasies. At this age I still more or less hated girls, so my fantasies revolved around pictures of girls. This somehow detached them from the realm of womanhood enough to be desirable to a kid who still played guns and sent for Captain Midnight secret decoders.
This was before the age of Playboy and similar publications; pictures to masturbate by were hard to find. I was fortunate enough to come into proud ownership of a Varga calendar, which served my purpose remarkably well. I would retire behind the locked door of my bedroom, crawl under the covers with my Varga girl-of-the-month for 1945 (Miss June was a knockout, I used her much more than the others) and contemplate the impossibly high line of her knockers and the deep thigh lines diving between an over raised pubic area, which excited me greatly. I imagined the round hole in the middle, surrounded by hair. Inserting my swollen penis into that seemed like it might be a little uncomfortable. My erections were so straight up that the head of my penis touched my belly, and it was hard to think how you could keep it sticking straight out at a ninety-degree angle in order to get into that hole. I would rub against the sheets as I studied the calendar. I knew about kissing and sometimes lay with my chest and belly on a pillow to give the feeling that there was really a body under me. I would imagine kissing and holding the girl as I worked in her cunt. Not knowing much about girls, and not really thinking of them as human, it never occurred to me that they too had feelings. The thought that a girl might experience pleasure, or lack of it, from me never entered my head. I had never heard that girls too could come. After a couple of minutes of this erotica I would ejaculate, put the calendar back into my desk drawer, and remake my bed to cover the wet spot. Then, before going to sleep, I might repeat the whole thing, just using a mental image of the Varga girl, and again on awakening in the morning.
Only in retrospect do I realize how wise a woman was my mother. She changed my sheets once a week. Some weeks there might have been twenty or more little light brown spots on the sheets, plus a smell which she could not have failed to notice. Yet she never said a word to me. I never had visions of warts, or of my penis falling off, or of blindness. But I did feel a vague guilt, probably due to the seemingly forbidden nature of the whole thing, and I did worry that jacking off so much might wear me out by the time I was thirteen or fourteen.
I much preferred rubbing on the sheets to jacking off by hand. For one thing, it was easier and seemed more natural lying down; for another, the feeling of rubbing against the sheets, and the orgasm I attained by doing so, seemed to be much more intense than when I used my hand. Hand jack offs weren't bad, but they would sometimes cause a sore on the delicate skin of my penis from excessive friction. The one disadvantage of doing it on the sheets was that in a few minutes the pool of sperm I was lying on became cold and sticky. However, it seemed to dry quickly, and I, being drowsy from my orgasm, would usually drift right off to sleep.
After a while the Varga pictures bored me and I became more inventive. The best answer came in the Sunday funny papers. I had a real thing on Aleta, from the Prince Valiant comic strip. Also, some of the girls in the comic-section ads were pretty good. I especially liked the ski-sloped sweaters of the Doublemint Twins, and for a while they augmented my sperm-filled reveries.
It was at about this time that I discovered a foolproof method to avoid staining my sheets, the guilt from which was beginning to bother me considerably. I started using white wool sweat socks. I would take one and double it in on itself, pulling the toe up to the neck of the sock. It was soft enough to feel just great and thick enough not to let anything leak through. I was in heaven; I could give Aleta or one of the Doublemint Twins a good screw, and then just go blissfully to sleep. My penis would shrink and pull itself out of the sock and there would be no telltale yellow stains. In the morning I would hide the sock under my mattress and nobody would be the wiser. The only problem was that after several accumulations of sperm had dried in the wool it would become quite stiff, and when I entered it, it would hurt the hell out of me. Also, the sweetish smell became noticeable after several days. I began throwing the socks in the clothes hamper more often and the problem was solved.
Then one day I came into my first real information on cunts. By this time I had convinced most of my friends that a cunt was indeed a round hole in the middle of the pubis bone, so we all were probably masturbating to the same satisfying, if inaccurate, fantasies; that is, until George, one of our sex-maniac compatriots, came running up full of excitement. "Hey, guys! I saw one! I saw a real one! So help me!"
"What did you see, George?" we asked, feeling his exhilaration.
"A cunt! I saw a real cunt! And it don't look anything like we thought."
We all crowded around, everybody asking questions at once. Finally George got the story out. "I had to go to the John, so I went to the upstairs bathroom and opened the door. And guess what?"
"What?" we all whispered hoarsely.
"There was my mom, squatting over the toilet, right in the middle of a piss." He giggled. "And guess what?"
"What?" The tension was unbearable.
"It isn't a hole at all! It's a goddamn crack!"
"A crack?" We were incredulous.
"No shit, a crack. I goes from about here to about here, and the piss comes out about here." He drew a line with his finger on his own jeans.
"No shit?" we said.
"No shit!" he said.
This new bit of information threw me into a real tizzy of confusion. "Well, if it's a crack and not a hole, then where are you supposed to put your prick?" I asked.
"I'm goddamned if I know," George answered, shrugging helplessly. "All I know is what I saw, and I saw a real cunt."
He then filled us in on where the hair was and restated that he had gotten a damn good look, because his mother couldn't move to hide herself with the urine still coming out of her, and because he was too shocked to move or close the door.
Old George's burst of knowledge played hell with my fantasies. Instead of picturing a nice, neat hole, I had to imagine a rather nefarious crack that I wasn't sure what to do with. Also, the idea of mothers having cunts seemed strange to me. I had never thought of them as being equipped with such paraphernalia. It all was most unsettling.
The question of knockers also still remained unanswered. In my fantasies they were usually murky images, standing straight out like Egyptian pyramids. I never thought about things like nipples, and don't think I was even aware that girls had them.
Then came the moment of glorious revelation. I was selling Cub Scout raffle tickets to a nice middle-aged lady who wore a dressing gown. We were in the kitchen and she bent down to get some money out of her purse, which was on the floor. As she leaned over, the miracle happened, her left breast fell out. All of it. Right there in front of me, great big brownish nipple and all. Of course, she was embarrassed and tossed it right back in, but too late. I had seen everything.
When I told the guys the following day, I was a hero, held in awe by my less enlightened contemporaries because I had seen a real, live knocker.
Several weeks later an event occurred which, in my wildest fantasies, I would not have dared to hope for. My cousin Bernie, after a game of penny-pitch, had come into possession of a pornographic novel-, illustrated. Bernie often came over with his parents to visit, and occasionally stayed overnight. The instant we got to my room he told me to lock the door, which I did. He then produced from beneath his shirt what appeared to be a small, beaten-up magazine.
Bernie, who was my age, could scarcely contain his excitement. With a flourish he showed me the cover, which in faded print said, Slave Master. In the book were seven or eight photos of a man and a woman in various stages of copulation. Although they were blurred photos, they left no doubt as to what either a cunt or a knocker looked like, or where you were supposed to stick it, or how.
This was such heavy stuff that neither of us said much. We just sat on my bed, our hard-ons straining against our pants, and lusted over the pictures. Then we turned back to the first page and read the book thoroughly, giggling self-consciously when the sexual passages got very explicit. The book was written in the old porno style, and contained passages like, "He shoved his hot, throbbing tool deep into her clasping, juicy pussy and drowned her with torrents of his burning, evil cum." I mean, it was really pretty hot.
Later, after we had both gone to the John, for obvious reasons, Bernie told me that his mom often searched his room, and asked me if I would mind keeping Slave Master in my room. Mind? Was he crazy? I was ecstatic. Forgotten were Varga girls and Prince Valiant's sexy wife. I had pictures of a real cunt and knockers to use anytime I wanted, except when Bernie was around.
During the next few weeks I must have spilled ten gallons of ejaculate over that damn book. However, I was still a little puzzled because I couldn't figure out how that guy got his round prick into that straight crack. There was too much hair and the pictures weren't clear enough.
The book did have one good effect, though. After my initial infatuation with the pictures, I began transferring my mental images to real girls for the first time. And for the first time I thought about what it would be like to screw girls who I knew. Almost overnight, girls became attractive to me.
In the sixth grade, some had already developed large breasts, others had two little points sticking out of their blouses, and many others were still flat.
By the time I entered junior high I had become an expert in the art of mentally undressing girls. Under my intent gaze, dresses, blouses, and sweaters would disappear; bras would peel off and panties would drop. I would examine the vagina, the pubic hair, the ass, and the breasts. I spent so much time hard that my Levi's were developing a permanent bulge in front. Sitting in class, I would pick a girl, usually Jackie, who had an awful face but a great body, with large, pointy breasts. While supposedly studying the lessons of the day, I would slouch down in my desk chair and slip my hand into my pocket. Then I would mentally fuck Jackie, or whoever, until I had stroked myself to a quiet orgasm in my pants, knowing that the dark, heavy material of the Levi's would not show a stain. The wet even felt good in my underpants, and I didn't mind the smell.
Where we lived, in the Richmond district of San Francisco, the houses were built right against one another, with the garage on the ground floor and the living quarters upstairs. Because of the long garages, many people built rooms at the back and rented them out, all illegal, since it was usually done without benefit of a building permit from the city. Our backyard touched the backyard of the house on the next block and from my rear bedroom window I could look at the bedroom windows of that house. The people who owned the house had built a room downstairs, which they rented to two young working girls, and had put Venetian blinds on the windows.
Quite by accident one night I discovered that from the second floor of my house I could look right down the slats of their closed Venetian blinds and into the room itself. It was quite an experience for an impressionable young boy, now twelve years old, not because I was able to see the girls undress and walk around naked, which alone was good enough, but because they were lesbians and I had never seen or heard of such things.
I had a pretty good view of their bed, and my dad's binoculars made it much better. I watched them make love with the fascination of a scientist discovering a new life process under the microscope. One girl was kind of fat, but they both had pretty faces. I watched them sucking each other off (which seemed nauseating to me at the time), kissing and rubbing against each other with a wild abandon that I couldn't then understand. It gave a new stimulus to my fantasies as I pictured myself with them, positive in my knowledge that they would rather have me than each other.
It was great while it lasted, which wasn't very long. After about a month they moved out and the people who owned the house turned the room into a storeroom. I never forgave them.
Then I developed what I thought was a major problem. I began to grow tits. Being very narcissistic, I looked at myself often in the bedroom mirror, growing a tremendous hard-on and examining it from every angle. I borrowed my mother's tape measure and measured it carefully from top and bottom, not yet knowing that the time was coming when I would be considered "hung." I'd let it get half hard and curve down in a graceful arc; then I'd work it up again. It was all such fun.
Of course, I'd make muscles and imitate he-man poses, too. It was in the course of doing this that I noticed my breasts enlarging. My god, I thought, I'm growing tits, just like a girl. From that point on I would examine myself several times a day, and, to my horror, they seemed to be growing larger. I began to imagine all kinds of grotesque things. I would have to buy a bra. Everybody would laugh at me as some kind of freak. I wore loose-fitting shirts and walked hunched over, a condition which my mother blamed on my age. I worried constantly, and when I stripped for gym I put my sweatshirt on as quickly as possible to cover the awful evidence. I began thinking of how I could see my doctor about this embarrassment without my parents finding out.
And then the inevitable happened, I got sick and Dr. Hoffman was called to the house. He sat on the edge of my bed, felt the lymph nodes in my neck, and examined my eyes, ears, nose, and throat. Finally it came. "Open your pajamas," he said, taking out his stethoscope.
"What?" I said, feigning deafness.
"Open your pajamas," he repeated, his thick German accent showing impatience. The jig was up and I knew it. After all, I had only been thinking about seeing him. Now that he was actually on my bed, I had turned a quick chickenshit.
"Mine Gott!" he would say "You've got tits!" And he would probably say that I had some unpronounceable fatal disease. I got the pajamas open, and, cringing in fear, waited for the worst.
He took his stethoscope and put it on my left tit. Right on my left tit. "Breathe deeply," he said.
I breathed deeply, waiting for some sign of astonishment on his face as he noticed my deformity. There was none. He did my right tit, and then banged both tits a bit with his fingers. All he said was that I had a sore tin-oat, gave my mother some medicine for me, and left without so much as a word about my tits.
From that day on I went back to bare chest in gym class and elsewhere. Only years later did I learn that this was a common mental aberration among boys my age. With breast worry behind me, I went back to concentrating on the biggest problem at hand. Getting laid.