I keep saying I’m an adult, and I am. I mean, I don’t say that because I’m trying to convince myself. That would be stupid. I’m saying it because it’s fact. I am an adult. So now that that’s established, I need to say something. An adult should be able to talk about things and not be embarrassed. Normal things, I mean. Everything I read tells me that all men like me jack off, and it’s normal. So, talking about it shouldn’t bother me, if everyone does it. I’m an adult male, and I jack off. No big deal.
Except I can’t even write that without turning twelve shades of red and wanting to delete it all. Can you imagine if my mother would ever read this? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Anyway, I’m not planning to delete it. I’m not going to! I’m going to leave it there, to prove I can! Unless it isn’t here when you read this; that’ll mean I chickened out, but you won’t know because you won’t be reading it. Hah!
Anyway, the really, really embarrassing part was, for the past week, I’d been thinking about Kevin when I was doing it. And this pissed me off, because I wasn’t gay or anything like that. In all that reading I’d done, I’d found out that at one point or another, most guys think about other guys at some time during their lives when they are doing that thing I said I did. I somehow got the impression they thought about those guys when they were 12 or 13, not 16, but the stuff I read wasn’t clear on that, and so I felt okay about it.
I didn’t think about this much. I thought about Kevin when I was doing it lately, but I didn’t try to. It just happened. When something like that just happened, you couldn’t blame it on me, so I didn’t think much about it. But if I’m going to write this, I ought to be honest, or what’s the point of writing it?
I felt nervous walking to school the next day. Nervous and sore. Dragging this damn glockenspiel around all the time was about as much fun as that Sisyphus guy my dad told me about had had playing around with his boulder, and it was getting old. I thought maybe it made me look like a dork, too, and I hated looking like a dork. At least no one had said anything yet. They’d better not!
But I was nervous because I assumed at some point I’d run into Kevin, and the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that he’d be pissed about me going to see his mother. I didn’t know how I was going to handle that. And I was feeling a little guilty, because maybe I shouldn’t have done that, even though it was my mom’s fault and not mine.
But telling Kevin that would make me look like more of a dork than carrying this damned glockenspiel, and I didn’t want him to think that about me. Telling him it was my mother who made me do it would be about the worst thing I could do. It would be like I was ten, and no way did I want him thinking that about me.
When I considered that a little more, knowing I had to take the responsibility myself but still trying to figure out how maybe I could blame her and not sound so dweebish when I did so, it came to me that yes, my mother made me go see his mother, but she wasn’t the one that made me do what I did when I was there. I ended up forcing Kevin into accepting what I wanted, and promising to call his mother and tell on him every day. How would I feel if some kid did that to me? Of course Kevin was going to be pissed. Anyone would. In fact, if he wasn’t such a little kid and didn’t have the broken wrist and all, he might even be mad enough to try to hit me. He tried to hit old Ralph, for crying out loud. Maybe he’d try to hit me even though he did have the broken wrist.
I was worrying about all this as I reached the school. Not about him taking a swing at me, about how silly I’d look if he did. I decided to try to avoid him.
First thing when I got inside, I took the glockenspiel to the band room. I heard a couple comments on the way, things like, “Hey, Matt, that your girlfriend? Better start feeding her better; I can see her ribs,” and, “you get hit by a car this morning, Matt? I think you’re supposed to leave the grill there.” Stuff like that. I decided I’d practiced enough and would just leave the thing in the band room after this.
I went to my locker, and there he was. Kevin.
“You son of a bitch!”
“Uh, hi, Kevin.”
“You bastard! What the hell is your problem?”
Well, I’d thought he might be pissed. He looked a little hotter than that. Furious, maybe. I wished I’d been able to decide, with all the thinking I’d done, just how to handle him. I hadn’t, and now here he was.
“Kevin, hey guy, I’m sorry. My mother made me go talk to your mother. Then when you came in, your big act surprised me, and I didn’t know what to say. It all got out of hand. Look, I’ll just call your mother after school today and tell her you got along fine, maybe I’d been wrong in everything I’d said, I’d probably overreacted, and unless I saw you were having problems, I probably wouldn’t be calling her again. How about that?”
He glared at me. His face was red. He was really upset. I couldn’t blame him, really, but I didn’t like to see him that way. It had never been my intention to piss him off. Really, I only had wanted to help. Really.
He never did answer me. He just stared at me some more, and I tried my best to look back at him a little sheepishly and with some compassion, hoping he’d see in my eyes that I was on his side, that I was a good guy and all. He kept glaring, however, and it didn’t look like he was getting that message. Eventually, he just said, “Stay away from me, you asshole,” turned and walked away.
I watched him go on down the corridor, and I thought to myself, hey, you know, this isn’t all that bad. One of the things I wanted was to get him out of his funk. He had been so lifeless, so depressed, and now he was showing some life again. So what I was doing seemed to be working. I should feel good about that. Thinking that, I did feel a little better, and also realized I’d faced him after worrying about that, and was past that now. All in all, things seemed to be working out.
In the cafeteria later, I waited for him at the end of the serving line. I knew he’d need help with his tray again, and I was there to do it. I was sure, after getting everything straightened out this morning, he’d have no problem letting me help him this time. Hey, maybe I’d even sit with him, help him cut his food, and we could talk.
Most of the kids buying food had already gone through the line by the time Kevin came in. I saw him walk into the cafeteria, walking by himself again. When he came to the serving area, he didn’t grab a tray. Instead, he just walked by all the food to the end, where he grabbed a carton of milk. Then I saw he had a lunch bag sitting in his sling.
He saw me standing there. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and his tone of voice wasn’t the slightest bit friendly.
“Hi, Kevin. I was waiting for you. I thought you’d need help with your tray. I guess you won’t today.”
“Get away from me, asshole! I told you that. I thought you were deaf. I guess you’re just stupid. Leave me alone. Next time, I’m going to the principal. I’ll tell him you’re stalking me. He told me to come to him if I had any problems. Well, you’re a problem. Leave me alone. For the last time.”
He’d gotten red in the face, and his voice had risen. Some kids had turned to look at us.
He got his card punched, then just turned away from me and walked off into the room towards the outside door. I watched him go, feeling really, really funny inside.
I walked outside to my table and slumped into my chair. I’d bought lunch and had left it there while I went to wait for Kevin. Now, I had no appetite for it at all. I just looked at it, then pushed the tray aside.
I had told myself this morning after meeting him by my locker that Kevin was getting better, getting his spirit back. I’d told myself I’d done some good. But I knew now I’d simply wanted to believe that. I’d wanted to think he was his old self again, feisty and cocky. He wasn’t. He was simply angry. He didn’t have the sparkle in his eyes, the mischievous grin, the devil-may-care attitude. He was just mad. He was mad at me, and that wasn’t any fun at all.
And I had no idea how to make it better.
I was stewing over this, when something suddenly occurred to me. I popped my head up and looked over to where Kevin was sitting. He was sitting by himself again. I didn’t have time to think about that. Instead, I got up and walked over to him. He saw me at the last moment, and jumped out of his chair, standing to face me.
I held my hands up, like you see guys doing in movies when someone points a gun at them, hoping he’d see I was harmless. “Kevin, stop. Don’t yell at me. Listen. I’m supposed to call your mother. After school. What do you want me to say to her? I don’t want to keep causing you trouble, and I seem to always do that. What do you want me to say?”
His eyes flashed with his anger. “I don’t want you to call her. Don’t. Don’t ever call her again. Got that, you stupid asshole?”
“Kevin—”
“Now get away from me!”
“Kevin, I just wanted to help. School can be hard for a freshman anyway. I know. It was for me. I just wanted to help you.”
Kevin sat back down while I was speaking, no longer looking at me, dismissing me. I didn’t even think he heard what I said. I stood there for a moment, then tried to simply walk back to my place looking like nothing was wrong, but I knew my shoulders had slumped a little.
◊ ◊
I was in a lousy mood, and had to get Kevin off my mind. This was Friday, which meant tonight we had a halftime show to put on. I went home after school, moped around in my bedroom till dinner, didn’t talk much to my parents, which earned me a bunch of quizzical looks from my mother and a few questions I was able to blow off from my father, and then it was time to change into my uniform.
I could have taken it to school and changed there, most kids did that; but I’d heard that the changing room was full of guys pulling off their clothes and getting into their uniforms and it was always a madhouse and I really wasn’t in the mood to do that for the first time tonight. So I changed in my room. Then I had to ask one of my parents to drive me to the school, as I wasn’t about to walk a couple miles to school on a Friday night by myself wearing my band uniform. Talk about being a dork! I think that would have sealed the deal.
Dad agreed to drive me. He wasn’t the football coach, but he did go to all the games and helped out on the sidelines. He dropped me off in the parking lot and I had to walk into the school, but most people were walking from the parking lot to the stadium, not away from the parking lot to the school, so I didn’t meet that many people.
The band room was chaos, everybody wearing their crimson and white unis with black accent striping. I thought they looked really sharp, but most kids groaned about them, so I did too. We had hats that looked like military dress hats, and when I got there they were passing out plumes we had to fasten on the front. White hats, crimson plumes. Pretty sharp. I just didn’t say it out loud.
I got into my harness, then when it was time to go outside, I set the glockenspiel into the cup on the front of it. I’d practiced with the instrument resting on a chair at home and with it in the stand at school. This was the first time I was actually going to carry it in my harness and play it.
Mr. Tollini was the director, but we had band officers who were in charge of us when we assembled to march out onto the field. I was actually a band officer, but not in the marching band, which I wasn’t even supposed to be a member of. Mr. Tollini only conducted from an elevated podium on the side of the field, and let the band officers control everything else.
The band captain, who was a senior and also the solo trumpet player, told us all to go outside and get in our standard marching formation. There were other officers, too, usually one in each section of instruments, and they worked together to keep the band organized and straighten out strays, usually freshmen, who often forgot where they were supposed to be, both in our marching formation and out on the field. We had 120 kids in our marching band, usually, but for a number of reasons, that number had dropped recently, and we only had 96 members now. Our block marching formation was twelve eight-man rows. The percussion were right in the middle; we made up row six and part of seven. I was in row six, between the bass drum player, Ross, and one of the cymbals players. The rest of our row was snare drummers.
We all left the band room and assembled outside when the captain gave us the word. We did it without a lot of fuss because they’d drilled this a lot. I was new to it all, but Ross had just told me to do what he did, stay near him, stay in step with him and I’d be fine. We didn’t do fancy coordinated marching like some bands. We were more interested in music than marching drills, and Mr. Tollini choreographed easy formations like our block formation, and then for various songs, we broke up and reformed into pictures of things that coordinated with the music we were playing. Tonight’s show was built around TV Westerns and their theme songs. After marching onto the field in our block formation, and the PA guy made some initial speech telling everyone what tonight’s show was all about, we began playing tonight’s overall theme song, the title number from Maverick, and then broke up out of formation and all scurried helter-skelter to our assigned places on the field for the first design while the snare drummers rapped out a snazzy, upbeat tempo with lots of riffs and flares.
I’d gone to games and watched this, and from the stands it was kind of funny, seeing a whole lot of kids running around like crazy, and then coming together and you could actually figure out what the shapes were they’d reformed themselves into.
Our first design tonight was a six-gun. We quickly got into that formation when the time came, and then played the theme song from Have Gun, Will Travel. First we played it, then we all sang the first verse, the one that goes, “Have gun, will travel, reads the card of the man, a man without honor in a savage land.” The scoreboard showed the words as we sang them. I was one of four kids who made up the trigger.
Then Mr. Tollini blew his whistle and we all broke out of the revolver formation and reformed ourselves into a rifle. When we got into position, we played the theme from The Rifleman. There weren’t any words to that, so we didn’t have to sing.
Changing from the six gun to the rifle had been easy. All the kids had run around, getting into their new positions, but a lot of it was just moving farther apart. For me, I didn’t have to move at all. I was part of the trigger again.
Then we reformed as a huge star, which was supposed to represent a marshal’s badge, and we played the song from Gunsmoke.
We did this with a few more songs and formations. The crowd loved it because it was familiar music, the parents because they’d watched the shows as kids, the kids because they probably all had Nick at Night, and everything we played was really catchy. A lot of the old shows on TV had really good music, and especially the Westerns.
Then we were done and it was time to reassemble into our block formation and march back to the band room.
Although I’d only had one day to practice on the field, I’d learned where to stand in all the formations, which was always next to or in front of or behind Ross, so all I had had to do was see where he was going, and then go with him. It was easy. Mostly it was kind of fun. The whole performance tonight had been fun. There was just this one thing.
As I said earlier, I’d never really marched wearing the harness before. And I quickly learned, I should have tried doing that. Because I found, as soon as I started marching, there was a problem. When I was put the glockenspiel in the cup on the harness, then began walking, I noticed immediately that, well, there’s only one way to say this: the cup of the harness rested against my dick. I hadn’t known it would do that. As soon as I was standing in the middle of the band, beginning the formation march from the band room to the stadium a couple hundred yards away, I discovered the problem, but there was nothing I could do about it. The glockenspiel bounced against my dick with every step I took. And when I stopped, it stopped bouncing, but it was still right there. Resting on my dick.
That wasn’t too bad, when we were standing still. But when we marched, the whole weight of the instrument bounced back and forth against my dick. With every step. And we had to march all the way out to the field, then march onto it, then hurry into each of the formations. That’s a good deal of marching. And a little bit of scurrying. And a lot of dick-related bouncing.
You of course know what happens to any 16-year-old man when something is moving around pressing on his dick. That’s what happened to me. It started about five steps from the school door. And kept up, if I can use that term, all the way through the entire show we put on, and all the way back to the band room afterwards.
No one could see it. The cup was large enough that, even as it was stimulating me, it was also hiding what it was pressing down on. And it was doing that, pressing it into place. The uniform trousers were roomy, and I’d worn boxers, so I didn’t have a problem other that just the fact I was hard as hell for about twenty minutes, except that hard part wanted to stand up and the weight of the glockenspiel was forcing it down.
I was really looking forward to getting that damn glockenspiel off of me. The problem was, of course, my boner wasn’t going to go away immediately, and once I took the glockenspiel off, and the harness, there’d be nothing to keep it from tenting my pants.
I figured, maybe the harness cup would do that. I could put the glockenspiel in the stand, and no one would see my problem, and I didn’t have to take the harness off immediately, so could wait till everything was copasetic again. That’s what I decided to do.
There were a lot of kids in the band room, milling around, putting away instruments, laughing and talking to each other, the way things usually were after a concert or football marching performance. No one was paying any attention to me. I was sort of lost in the crowd, me and my boner. I wanted us to stay that way. I was okay as long as I had the glockenspiel in the harness. But I had to take it out and put it back on its stand. It would look strange if I didn’t take my first opportunity to do that. Wandering around the room talking with other kids still carrying my glockenspiel would be really weird, and someone would notice.
I walked to the top riser where the stand was. Ross was there, unhooking himself from his own harness, but his back was to me. The snare drums and cymbals were kept in cupboards along the walls, so those kids were down there, getting everything stored away. No one was looking my way. Ross set his bass drum into its cradle and began climbing down the risers to the floor.
I was lifting my glockenspiel out of the harness when I heard, “Hey, you sounded great tonight, Matt.” I looked around, and there was Becky Spargas. I already had the glockenspiel about halfway out of the cup of the harness. I couldn’t drop it back in. It wouldn’t be a normal thing to do.
I took the glockenspiel all the way out of the harness cup and set it in the stand. When I did, the cup pushed up and out.
I looked at Becky. She was staring at the cup, and her eyes got large.
Talk about embarrassed. What should I do? It was obvious what the problem was. I had to say something. Just letting her stare and me not saying anything would be too much. What made it more difficult is I barely knew her at all.
“Uh, Becky, this just sort of happened. It was the glockenspiel. It was sort of riding on, uh, I mean, it was pressing into me, and, uh, this happened. It’s no biggie. Oops, I mean it’s no big deal, er, I mean it’s natural, and it happens, and, uh. . . .” That was as far as I could go. I sat down in a nearby chair, which I was hoping would disguise the problem, but it only pushed the cup higher. I stood back up.
Becky looked into my eyes, and laughed.
I said, “You know, we guys get like this. You had sex ed, you know about it, I guess. Nothing strange here.”
She still had a broad smile, and her eyes were flashing. She said, “Yeah, sex ed, and my ex-boyfriend. We were together for a few months, so I know all about that.” She pointed with her eyes at me again. Then she asked me, “You’re talking about it very matter of factly. Doesn’t this embarrass you?”
“Becky, I’m grown-up. I don’t get embarrassed by stuff like this. This is just the way things work for us men. You rub something against us, we get a boner. No big deal. I’m mature enough to handle it, er, I mean, to not let it bother me.”
She laughed again. “Then why are you blushing so hard?”
The bitch.
She kept looking at my face, then down to the pup tent I had erected, then back at my face, which perfectly matched the crimson of our uniforms. Then she said, “Turn around.”
I was happy to do that. I turned so I was facing the back wall. She started working on the buckles on the harness. “Matt, it’s supposed to ride a little higher on you. The last guy who wore this harness was a few inches taller than you are. The glockenspiel’s supposed to press against your pubic bone. Not against your, uh, not down there.” She laughed again, then asked, “How tall are you, five foot eight?”
“No, I’m about six feet.”
“Matt! I’m five six, and you can’t be any more than two inches taller than I am. Maybe not even that.”
“Oh. Well, I’m growing fast. I’m thinking I’ll be six feet soon. So I just sort of think of myself that way.”
“I guess that won’t hurt anything, but if anyone else asks, you’re five eight. Maybe.”
By then she’d finished shortening the harness and stopped fiddling with the buckles. She patted me on the back and told me to turn around again.
By now, the embarrassment and having her behind me, and my nervousness over talking to her, had allowed my boner to wilt. When I turned, she looked at my face, which was still red, I was sure, but didn’t look like a brilliant sunrise any longer, then glanced down at my crotch. It was flat. She did a mock sigh of regret, giggled at me, and said, softly, “You shouldn’t be embarrassed, Matt. I sort of enjoyed it.” Then she squeezed my arm, probably checking how big my biceps were. I flexed them so they’d be bigger, but by then she’d already let go. She smiled at me, said, “See you in rehearsal,” and left me standing there.
I found Dad and we rode home together. He said a lot of nice things about how good the band looked, and complimented me for my playing and for looking good marching with such little practice. I was in a funny mood, with what had gone down with Kevin earlier, and then my deal with Becky. Dad talking to me like that, telling me how well I’d done, helped settle me a little.
In bed that night, I thought of Becky. Lying there I made the incident in the band room change as I thought about it. I turned it into the sort of thoughts young men like me sometimes have, well, often have, lying in bed at night before falling asleep. This time, when Becky spoke to me, when the cup on the harness rose as I was placing the glockenspiel into its stand, Becky didn’t simply grin. She sort of gasped, then reached out and touched me, then put her hand around it. Then she slipped her hand inside my pants and felt it. I tried to make these thoughts as erotic as I could. I imagined it with having me, then both of us, naked during the whole episode. I imagined having her stroke me. It was fun, and I enjoyed it, but I never got off. In fact, I didn’t get as hard thinking about it as I had marching with that damned glockenspiel bumping against my dick.
That bothered me a little, but I figured it had been a long day, and the marching had tired me out, and I put it down to that.