Playing with myself? God, that’s at least two horror stories in themselves. To zip thru the early childhood story: I’d always have the wild urge to dig into my britches. My mom always slapped my wrist and said, “Don’t play with that thing, dear….it isn’t a toy.” The old man, he’d always threaten to pull a Lorena Bobbitt on me.
Teen and puberty years….even worse nightmare. My mother was bound and determined that I wouldn’t mature physically, and insisted on delaying puberty and new sexual urges until I was sixteen; to hell with such things as nature. My first jack-off was a month before I was thirteen, and jeez did I ever get it from her. (It didn’t help that I forgot to clean my load off the bathroom rug, or that I got a terrible dizzy spell that gave me away.) I still jacked off about every day for the next six months—usually in the tub—but never to the point of orgasm. I finally resolved to keep my hands away from myself.
The next three years, I had many, many wet dreams. Mercifully, my parents never raised a fuss about this, never bugged me about staining the sheets or even my briefs (insult to injury, right?). But they’d always chosen to deny my sexuality, ignoring my burgeoning interest for girls; when I was “old enough to date” (age 16), they didn’t give a shit when a girl first accepted me.
During the same school year, I read a magazine article on masturbation, authored by a psychology professor who interviewed several married men who still did it (including one minister). The article also related a story on Charles Manson’s adolescence and how he and his bunkmates (Manson was an orphan raised in several boys’ homes) avoided staining the sheets by jacking off into a Kleenex. I finally found a solution, along with the courage to start masturbating again.
I soon found good, judicious moments to masturbate—usually in the bathroom, or in bed late at night. My family thought nothing of entering my room without knocking, so I was very fortunate. Skip forward to before high school graduation and my getting an ache in my penis after ejaculation. I couldn’t in a jillion years tell this to my family. After much thought, I told three people about it: our family-living/sex-ed teacher; a classmate who was about to enter med school; and a nurse at the free clinic. None of them knew. So, after graduation, I made the appointment and drove to our regular clinic; when my parents asked why, I vaguely told them I was having problems with my male organs. The doc had me drop my drawers, then he examined my testicles, telling me I had varicoceles there (another little pain I’d been having which I was too afraid to talk about—this one bugging me for two years). Doc told me, “Leave ‘em alone [my balls, that is] and the pain’ll go away,” so he sent me on my way, never really finding out my penis’s discomfort.
Later that summer, I was able to discover for myself that pain was from stuffing my penis in my pants immediately after ejaculating, not quite waiting for the hard-on to be completely gone. All very good. But Jesus, that whole ordeal and worrying cast a shadow over my high school grarduation.