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little trophy
I was third in line the first time I ever actually "did it." This was 1970. I was fifteen. The girl involved was a plump, freckled nursing student named Sharon Schmidlap. a ponytailed barber's daughter who lived with her parents three blocks from the small-town boarding school to which I'd been shipped and who had, apparently, been of special service to a select few of my schoolmates for a season or two. before my own arrival in eleventh grade. "Who's the Nervous Nellie?" young Sharon giggled, gaping up at me through gapped teeth while Number Two in line, a carbuncled southern boy named Tennie Toad-- on account of his Tennessee roots and his bumpy epidermis-- humped away and turned his sizable head to wink repeatedly in my direction.
Number one was a boy named Farwell whose father'd been ambassador to Turkey until his mother found him hanging from a chandelier in the embassy banquet room. Rumor had it Daddy Farwell checked out in stockings and heels, and his mother'd slapped the body in a tux before the guards came. His son hadn't said one way or another.
On account of he'd only just come back from Ankara, where he met his bereaved Mom and waggled smelling salts at her nose on a State Department jet, Farwell got the leadoff slot with freckled Sharon. This seemed like the least we could do. It took no more than a minute for him to do his job, and he didn't take his khakis off.
As it happens, we were all of us fatherless sons. My father had stepped in front of a streetcar the previous spring, and Tennie died in a boating mishap when he was nine and a half. "Before we could grab him, the sharks ate his calves," the toothy Memphis boyliked to say. "He was six-three in life, and five-two in the coffin. The bastard thought he was John Wayne, but we buried him like Mickey Rooney...."
When Tennie was done, or when I thought he was done, he hopped onto his knees, reached under Sharon's ample hips and kind of flipped her onto her stomach on the wall-to-wall shag that covered the rec room floor (a shade of purple, incidentally, that matched the nubby aureoles around her nipples, and the much chewed-upon, fruity gloss of her lips). This is what she laks," he giggled, in that half-screechy, half-cackling way he had, like Alfalfa from the Little Rascals, but grown up and nasty. "My gal laks a bit of spanking, donchu honeybutt?"
Before I knew what to make of that, Sharon gave a little coo. She adjusted her pillow-sized nether-globes upward for maximum impact, and Tennie let rip with a meaty thwack to her left buttock. I was amazed, horrified, nervous, and sort of in love. Sharon kept whipping her head from side to side. Her chocolate brown eyes rolled back, so that the whites showed down to the bottom, reminding me of pictures I'd seen of horses in barn fires. She looked scared. She looked like she liked it. I thought my brain would leak out of my ears. Even Farwell, sullen and bummed while the three of us slipped past the Schmidlaps chained-up schnauzer and down the outside steps to their basement, perked up and raised his brows from his spot on the green-and-pink plaid sofa.
By the time Tennie rolled off of Sharon and onto the shag, her whole body had sprung a sheen, a glistening coat of sweat that made me think of supermarket chickens. Skinless and boneless.
Id become so transfixed, when it was my turn I all but forgot I had to mount the girl myself.
Sharon wrapped a strand of mousy hair around her finger and ran it between her incisors, teasing. "Whatsa matter, Hercules, your pants glued on?"
I never even liked undressing in gym class, and now I had to de-pants in front of two older guys and a girl who looked like she could eat me on toast. But I had to do it. I had to!
Copyright ) 1999 by Jerry Stahl
