The Best Little Boy in the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

("You ought, to see me on the short strokes. It was so grand, I used my hand," sung to the tune of "Finiculi, Finicula") and through snatches of conversation, I began to learn the word and its synonyms. I would hear thirteen-year-olds bragging about how they could do it in ten strokes—but I never really knew for sure what it meant.
    High school was much the same: I was respected, I had some friends, but evenings I was home writing extra-credit reports to keep me on my throne and get-me-into-the-college-of-my-choice, and weekends I was up in Brewster, no longer bored, writing extra-credit reports.
    I heard enough to know that everybody did it; I couldn't risk asking anyone what or how. That couldn't be the way you find out, anyway, for crying out loud! You don't get hair to grow down there by asking someone how—it just happens. It is part of adolescence and puberty. Can you imagine the ridicule if I admitted that masturbation hadn't happened to me yet? WHAT ARE YOU, ANYWAY, SOME KIND OF HO-MO?
    So I didn't ask any of my friends in high school either. I just kept wishing it would happen, yet knowing deep down that things were out of kilter down there—the big left side, and all....
    There was one instance that might have been taken as an encouraging sign, around the age of thirteen, that, had it not been for one integral aspect, might have buoyed my self-confidence markedly. At home on the East Side one night, I had a wet dream. Not that I knew the term for it or made any connections.
    I remember that it took me some time to decide for a certainty that... well, that there was a difference, that there was nothing to be embarrassed about, that this was one of the things I had been waiting for. Nor did I tell anyone about it. Actually, my wet dream left me quite upset. So upset that—zoologists Guinness, Ripley take note—it is the last one I had.
    I had apparently repressed all future wet dreams, though I didn't know it at the time. I just began to assume, when there were no repeat performances, that things were rotting away down there—and under the circumstances, I felt that was maybe all for the best.
    I'll tell you this, though: I was one energetic teen-ager. Talk about repressed sexual energy! I swam a mile before classes, won all the academic honors, swam miles after classes, ran cross country, wrestled, played soccer, did untold millions of sit-ups, headed the lab assistants, wrote for the yearbook, edited the newspaper (respected, mind you, not loved like the class president), and wrote extra-credit reports until they were coming out of every teacher's ears. One such in the eighth grade had the unimposing title "A History of the Balance of Power in Europe, 476 A.D . to 1053 A.D .," which I managed to cover in about fifty pages, plus maps.
    And then I got to Yale and shared a room with Roger Ritter, a young man not unlike Tommy Roth, who, though not necessarily destined to graduate with high honors, really knew where it was at. Roger had fallen in and out of love a hundred times. He spent the first week, while I was reading the orientation materials, driving around to Vassar and Barnard and Wheaton. He was forever asking me to excuse him and his date for a few hours while they used the room; and those evenings when he hadn't used the room, he would wiggle his toes against the sheets, ever so softly, the way my brother used to do.
    Only he must have had a slightly different technique, as every morning when I woke up, there would be a Kleenex next to his bed. By Thanksgiving of our freshman year I had made a remarkable deduction.
    I was confirmed in my suspicion when Roger started asking me why there was never any Kleenex at the foot of my bed in the morning—particularly, I suppose, because I never asked him to let me borrow the room. Well, I was just your typical attractive but-shy Yale freshman, perfectly healthy, just a little naïve.
    Luckily, I remembered hearing one of the counselors in camp state that wet