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

hold it back just as I had repressed my wet dreams, trying desperately to hold it back, because it was so bad, and squirming so noisily on Brooklyn Bridge that my defense department computer was sending desperate signals through my fantasies that one of my roommates might be attracted by the noise, so YOU'D BETTER STOP, you idiot, HOLD IT BACK, you.... Ahh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....
     
    That great event occurred shortly before we went on Christmas vacation. I was bursting to tell someone. I had begun to develop some close friends—friends I felt I could even trust, to a point. But to tell this would have been too much. It would have completely wrecked my image as a fairly "with it," impressive young man. However I phrased it, the listeners would have heard: "Last night I learned to do for the first time what everyone in the world has been doing from the age of eleven." And if they asked me—not out of cruelty, it's just the logical question—WHAT TOOK SO LONG? (read: What's wrong with you? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?)....
    Then we came back from vacation, and I was in talking with my roommate and closest friend, Hank, who I admired no end, who was so cool, who knew just what to do at all times, who was so good-looking, who could play baseball, for crying out loud—and Hank told me: "I saw a lot of my friends from high school when I was home and—well, you just wouldn't believe what they're doing now. Do you know what they're doing?" He asked this with a mixture of incredulity and disgust. I didn't know for sure, but I made a sickeningly good mental guess. "They're masturbating," he said.
    My ego ideal was so disgusted by the whole idea, he went on to l HI me—as easily and unself-consciously as if he had been talking about the crummy food in the dining hall—that he had never masturbated. (How could he admit that? The door wasn't even closed!) Hank said he thought it was gross and perverted. He said real sex or wet dreams were far more healthy.
    "Masturbating?" I echoed him. "Oh, that's disgusting." Indeed, I was as amazed and sickened by his revelation as he was, only for different reasons.
    Thank God I hadn't told him! Or anyone! Apparently, I realized, a few degenerates at camp did it (you know about those summer camps); my freshman roommate did it (he had indeed, I recalled, spent several years in a summer camp). But that was about it. Nobody cool did it. Nobody decent did it. The lights were on, and I was the messy idiot.
     
    And one final thing. I can't put if off any longer. I should really have mentioned it several pages back where I was talking about how that isolated wet dream was, well, a mixed blessing, never repeated. My wet dream was about Tommy Roth.
     

 

     
    All right, so you had a wet dream about another boy. Is that what knotted up your adolescence so badly? Look. The famous statistic is that one out of three males reaches orgasm with another male at least once in his lifetime. That's from Kinsey. So relax. You didn't even have physical sex with him, did you? You just dreamed about him, right?
    RIGHT! Oh, RIGHT! I swear to you that I am desperately trying to keep this wicker-weave throne, to live up to the image all the authority figures have of me. RIGHT! Even if I had wanted to play out my—wait, strike that—even though I wanted to play out my fantasies—even though I longed to play out my fantasies—I would never, never have done so. And as a result, no one will ever find out that I have such fantasies. I'm clean, Officer. You've got nothing on me.
    But now that we are on the subject, Officer, I can tell you a thing or two. I happen to know that some of the kids at camp were doing more than just fantasizing. Please don't say I told you, but there was a lot of experimenting going on. And with some of the counselors, I think they weren't just experimenting even, if you know what I mean.
    Yes, I was only vaguely aware of it as I became an older camper—like the time Tommy and that counselor