The Best Little Boy in the World Read Online Free PDF

dreams were by far the more mature alternative to beating off. So, by the age of seventeen, having begun to debug many of the flaws in my defense department computer program, I simply answered that I did beat off a couple of times a week, that I preferred to do it on evenings when he had not yet come in or was already asleep, that I didn't happen to use the same Kleenex-by-the-side-of-the-bed choreography, and—the clincher—that actually, I preferred to have wet dreams. He was impressed, and I avoided yet another chance to learn how to beat off.
    Though I had bluffed Roger, his prodding had been enough to get me to make an all-out effort for normality. I forced myself to remember clues from an awful story I had heard in camp:
     
    The way it works, see, you get a dozen guys in a cabin for a round-pound, see, with the lights off, see, and you offer a banana split to the guy who shoots first, right? Well, you let everybody but Joey in on it. Then you turn off the lights, see, and start slapping your wrist with the first two fingers of your other hand, like this—thap, thap, thap—and pretty soon Joey starts panting and shouts that he's won, see, so you turn on the lights, see, and you're all dressed, going thap, thap, thap against your wrist, and he's sitting there all messy, looking like an idiot!
    And one night, in private of course, and halfheartedly, I guess you'd say, and certainly not fantasizing anything sexy—just waiting for it to happen, but not really expecting that it would—I started thap, thap, thapping down there, Kleenex at the ready just in case. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty thaps, and nothing had happened. I remembered my fellow campers bragging about how it only took them ten strokes, so after a few more, rotting away down there for sure, just as I had suspected, and simply not wanting to think about it, I quit and went to sleep, feeling sorry for myself.
    When I say feeling sorry for myself, I do not mean depressed. That was entirely another feeling. I enjoyed being depressed. I would spend hours being depressed, walking around thinking cosmic martyr thoughts about the great burden I was carrying and the sheer irony of the best little boy in the world being so bad, after all—but, as only the best little boy in the world could, hearing all the pain himself and sparing his loving parents. And so on.
    I did spend hours like this, wondering whatever would become of me, how I would cope—fantasizing stunning confessionals that would shock the New York Times into omitting the Sunday edition and causing me to be sanctified in my own lifetime, or maybe only after being burned at the camp totem pole—pondering suicide—all these juicy thoughts which even I realized were not really so terribly painful. I would never have admitted it, I suppose, but being a martyr was kind of fun....
    But when I really got down to brass tacks—when I was in the shower and I looked down at that thing or thought I saw others looking; when my group was assigned to baseball for the afternoon; when form demanded that I get a date for the senior prom or Dr. Whatshisface wondered why I hadn't told anybody about this—then I felt real pain, I felt sick inside, I desperately wanted help I couldn't ask for—and I felt sorry for myself.
    Anyway, my freshman roommate reminded me that every kid in the world did it, but he didn't show me how.
    Imagine my surprise, therefore, my ecstasy, my relief, that evening of my sophomore year in college, in a room all to myself, part of a three-man suite—a room so small that I had suspended my bed like Brooklyn Bridge between a six-foot wardrobe closet on the left and a six-foot bookcase on the right—when squirming around on my stomach and thinking thoughts I doubt I can bring myself to describe, and squirming some more, and then beginning to feel almost as though I could not stop squirming even if I had wanted to, and wanting to stop squirming, but fantasizing madly, and squirming, and trying to