In the dark

In high school, my friends were the geeky kids. Or should I say, the other geeky kids. There were a group of four of us who got together at lunchtime to discuss science fiction. We started off pretty much with The Lord of the Rings and The Foundation Trilogy, but my interests in science fiction were soon veering off into other directions. I was reading Dangerous Visions.


What was it about these stories that so appealed to my teenage eyes? The literary language? The experiments with narrative form? No. They dealt with sex. Sex in every form. Straight. Gay. Kinky stuff. Incest. Aliens.

One day we were discussing something less exotic. In this story, people on an overpopulated Earth had been conditioned to sublimate their sex drives into masturbation. Joel didn't get it. What was this word that kept coming up in the story? What was masturbation?

Bob was the school photographer. He went to all the games and photographed the athletes. He had access to the to the school darkroom. And that's where we went, since the lunchroom really wasn't the place to discuss masturbation.

So the four of us, Joel, Bob, Chris, and I were in the darkroom. The lights were on, but no one ever puts strong lights in darkrooms. In the gloom, in hushed tones, we explained to Joel what we already knew.

"Masturbation is when you stroke you penis to induce pleasure," I explained. We offered the various slang terms for it. Beating off. Jacking off. Jerking off.

He still didn't get it. Bob grabbed a ruler and put it between his legs as if it were an erect cock. "And you rub your hand up and down it." He didn't demonstrate.

We were on the verge. I thought of suggesting that we demonstrate. Drop trou, pull 'em out, get 'em hard. I lost my nerve. It's not like I had other friends to fall back on. We kept it purely theoretical. Joel remained skeptical.

When we next met for lunch, I wanted to ask "did you try it?" I wasn't that bold. I think he did, though.