The problem with M, he eventually told me - M being my first "love" - was that although he enjoyed the fireworks that occurred as a result of our exploration of each other's bodies in late adolescence, and although he appreciated the deep intimacy that emerged from a friendship formed before we even knew what it meant to be sexual beings, there was always, in the back of his mind, a knowledge of and a longing for something more. And, rightly or wrongly, that longing was shaped by the hazing that went on with his experience very early on as a hockey player.
He wasn't entirely sure why it went on, this particular form of hazing, but speculated that it had something to do with the surging testosterone of the group of over eighteen but under twenty year old males in a combative sport. Spend a couple hours with male team mates chasing a puck up and down the ice, sweating, smashing into your competitors, elbowing, yelling, then enjoying a mutual surge of adrenaline when a goal was scored, and the bond that the team formed, the rush of hormones from the flight or fight response, easily translated into more than a slap on the back and a "Good going, guys" finale when all was said and done.
"Let's face it," he explained to me, "you take this locker room full of fit guys who have just been pulling together to beat a common enemy, strip them down, throw them in a steamy hot communal shower and you are likely to get a group of guys who "pull together" in another way, if you know what I mean." I think, knowing M as I do, he would have chuckled at his own pun, but the pained, confused expression on his face told me that even now he hadn't quite reconciled the lack of control he had over what had happened, with who he had become.
There wasn't, M went on to explain, really anywhere to hide, if that had been an acceptable thing to do, in the post game locker room.
"We sweat, we stank," he elaborated, "so we stripped, and we stood in that communal shower cheek to cheek, as it were, steam billowing up in clouds, still on the high from a win or celebrating at least the bond of being teammates who had fought a good fight if we lost and doesn't surprise me at all that sometimes 'swords' crossed. " He looked pensive, of course, caught up in memories of those days and in trying to understand his own proclivities.
"But it wasn't so much the 'sword' play, because sometimes that happened in that communal shower, a guy would grab playfully at another's dick, or someone would open their legs a bit to soap up in behind their balls and another would grab at them, or, of course, there was butt slapping with a hand that sometimes lingered a little too long, or nipple twisting, that, even in its agonizing pinch somehow shot an electric current right to the dick . . ." his thoughts trailed off, the he glanced up and looked me in the eye, "it was the deliberate, calculated hazing that, I think, got me going, in more ways than one." And then he glanced away from me again, and out the window without really seeing anything, lost, as he was in deep memory.
"It was the end of the practices, the real season was about to start, and guys had been cut, sent home to their little mini arenas, and we were 'it',"M reiterated, "but, as things were about to get real, and even within a team there are hierarchies, levels of dominance, guys you had to look up to, or, at least, thought you had to look up to them, it was important, in some sort of sociological way, I guess, to ritualize that 'pecking order." M did like his puns and a slight grin crossed his face.
"I had the misfortune, I think, to be a pretty boy." And he was right, even as an adult, M was pretty. His dirty blonde hair was slightly wavy, and he could pull off the tousled, uncombed look with style. His jawline was chiseled and the symmetry of his cheekbones, combined with, yes, you've got it, blue eyes revealed the roots of this Canadian boy's Scandinavian heritage. Add in a daily workout body and just shy of 6 feet in height and I know he caused many hearts to flutter, both male and female.
"I knew hazings happened," M went on, "and still do despite the tamping down leagues have attempted, I just didn't know they were so . . ." he hesitated, "so . . . sexual." M's long fingers, inadvertently perhaps, stroked the stem of his wine glass. We were at my place when all this came tumbling out. Tumbling out as a response to us finally talking about our early sexual encounters with each other and why, although we had remained very good friends, we gradually drifted away from each other bodily.
"The team captain, of course, set it up, arranged for the benches to be stacked just so, arranged for the props to be present, and arranged for his 'henchmen' to grab me, once the team members were mostly all - including me - stripped and in the shower, and before I knew it, I was strapped down face up on top of a stack of benches, at about waist level, cock level, to the guys who were standing around me, all naked, and all smiling, rather lasciviously, if I recall."
"All right, O," the captain always called us by our last names, on and off the ice, "let's see if you are man enough to play with the big boys, eh!"
