There are times and there are people that constitute the pivot-points in life, sudden and dramatic tectonic shifts the course of the rivers of our lives from everything that comes after.
I am not unlike you. I'm a queer of a certain age, but I forget that when I am not forced to look in a mirror. When I wake in the night I am the same as I have always been, young and lean, and with that chestnut brown hair with the bangs that flip up at the end.
Blue eyes like a mountain lake. Not rheumy and ringed with a pale yellow. A nice, solid cock, thick around and cut so the tip is proud and prominent, and it can spit fierce man-cum five times in an encounter.
I forget that I am now in late middle age when I rise and hobble the first few steps from the bed toward the bathroom. I don't wear my glasses when I am in front of the mirror. Sometimes it takes a while to remember to put them on. Only when I have to read something do I remember that I have to wear glasses at all.
But I am lucky to be alive, and that is where Joe comes in. His deep-set eyes and rich lashes began the tremors of what became a torrent in my life. Only later did I know how pivotal he was.
Joe was the first boy I had a crush on. He was in my band class. He was slight and a little dreamy. He wore straight-legged corduroy pants and tie-shoes, which was an epithet in those days. It meant that your parents would not trust you to dress yourself, or they were afraid you would grow pigeon-toes. He had fine sandy hair and he wore glasses with thick frames, but I could see the fine dark lashes that made his gaze sweeter than any of the girls.
He was shy and diffident and he held himself gracefully with his thin shoulders back. He usually wore a cardigan sweater, even when it was warm outside. It made me think that he was wearing it as sort of armor, sheltering himself from something.
Of course, I couldn't tell him I had a crush on him. That would have been a social disaster in the middle school environment of 1966. The whole thing confused me no end, my body writhing in hormonal storms. Our classmates were just starting to pair off and date. We did that then, rather than what the kids do now, which is to run in a pack and hook-up when necessary.
We were much more linear in those days. I went on a couple dates because that is what we were supposed to do. I remember the new couples sneaking off to the furnace room to neck by the machinery at the first boy-girl parties, and I remember my first kiss from a girl.
It was exotic, that first brush with passion, that fumbling around. But what confused me was what I thought about when I masturbated in my bed at night. I tried to think of the girls at school naked, or of the Playboy women in the magazines we stole from the store because that is what was expected of us.
But I found myself thinking of little Joe, and what his cock might look like, and if it was as long and elegant as the fingers I saw him run up the neck of his clarinet in band class.
They said that Joe's Dad had played professional football, that he was as rough and tough as they came. I heard that he came down to watch us practice on the football field in the fall, and I heard once that he made a comment about my aggressive moves to cut to the head of the line in the hitting drills, and hit the opposing linemen again and again. I don't know where that came from, except that maybe it was my way of shielding myself, too.
In any event, I never knew precisely what Joe's Dad looked like, and I never could put a face to him.
I could not imagine that Joe's fair skin and delicate features came from a man that had played in the trenches at Soldier Field on a Sunday afternoon in front of tens of thousands of screaming drunken fans.
The kids then were not kind to kids who were different, not that they are now. But it was harder and more savage. They called Joe a sissy, and a homo, and other cruel things. Sometimes I thought I should defend him, but I could never figure out how to say it in a way that wouldn't have my big rough friends call me the same thing.
I could imagine it clearly: "Oh, so you like the little faggot? You a homo, too, Robert?"
I thought about a lot of things when I jerked off. But I always thought about Joe, one way or another in those while days I waited to get my drivers license and start the road to being a grown-up.
I used to have a fantasy that I would consider as I waited for the drum parts to begin in band class. I would be watching his fingers dance up the neck of his thick black liquorish stick of an instrument, and I imagined my cock being massaged by those talented fingers. It would get me hard in class, but I didn't care, since my snare drum blocked my crotch from view.
I wondered if I could write him an anonymous note, say that 'someone who cared about him' would be wearing some unique piece of clothing, maybe a tie or a particular colored sweater. Then I would see him the next day in school, in the hall perhaps, and he would imagine me looking at him from the back of the band, or in the math class we shared.
And it would not be until the end of the day that he would ask if it was me who sent the note. Sometimes in my fantasy I told him, and sometimes I was cruel and denied it.
The fantasy I liked best was that I nodded and smiled and told him I thought he was handsome and would he like to walk home from school with me. When I was really hard, and ready to spew all over myself, I imagined what it would be like if we went to his house and it was empty and we could kiss and take our clothes off and rub our cocks together.
But I could never figure out how it got beyond that, or how I could live in the world I had to live in and be a part of his at the same time.
Reality in 1966 was a lot different than it is now.
I played football, hung around with my idiot buddies who joked about what I secretly desired. I would see Joe at the big high school where we went after middle school, but I dropped out of band and only saw him occasionally in the crowded halls and in my masturbatory imagination.
I got decent enough grades to get into IU and as it turned out, the summer before college was the time I finally found a man like me, and became what I knew I was already, a practicing fucking homo. It was supposed to be a big deal, but I didn't look at it that way. It was just part of me I had to protect. I couldn't wait to get clear of all that suburban bullshit and be a free man on campus.
Men on the Moon
It was going to be a wasted summer. It had somehow become 1969, the height of the crazy decade of sex, drugs and rock and roll that didn't actually end until the big Oil Crunch in 1973. I'll never forget the night the whole party ended, and just as a matter of personal bookmarks, it was when Tricky Dick Nixon came on the tube and told us to drive 55 miles-an-hour to save fuel.
I almost got killed the next morning trying to do it, run down by angry white guys in big cars on the Dan Ryan Expressway the next morning. "I can't drive 55" became a mantra, even though they tried to make us do it, self-righteous assholes that they were.
There were music festivals, and dope, and loud music and I was going to be off to college soon. I was interested in the concepts of the Age of Aquarius, though I hadn't seen much of it in the suburban town in which I was stuck.
It was a great time to be alive, but my toes were tapping. I wanted to get on with life.
