Hand jive

When I was growing up, in the early 1960s, no one talked about masturbation — at least not that I was aware of. I had no older brothers, older cousins, or even older friends to put me wise. I attended a small country school, where unless you were a jock you did not even participate in the kind of athletics that required daily showers at school. So I was isolated from "man talk." No wonder I didn't learn to stroke it until I was about 14.

Although I wasn't clued in on the power of the palm, I had been interested in sex since 1st grade. I can still remember that all of my best buddies down through the years got around to fooling around with me. We would find a secluded place, get naked, and get erections — but that's all we knew.

Even books were of little help back in those archaic days. I remember looking up "masturbation" and finding a definition that referred to self-stimulation, but that didn't tell me how it was done. Science and anatomy books told me my penis was capable of electric things, but they never told me the secret of turning on the juice. By 8th grade, I honestly don't think any of my friends knew hand jive.

Erection was my constant companion from age 6. I never had any trouble getting it up. It would pop up in the morning before breakfast, in the evening before homework, even in class during spelling. I just didn't know what it was called — or that it was calling for the friction of my hand.

I did know erections were something to keep secret — it was just instinctive. Today, movies are full of scenes where an adolescent guy gets a boner that's noticed immediately by every girl within 10 miles, plus the boy's mother, his grandmother, and the mayor's wife. Not so in reality — at least, not for me. I never had any problem camouflaging my erections. And I never once felt guilty about them.

I did worry that I would get an erection when I went for my physical exam. ("Oh, my gosh," says my physician to his horrified nurse, "this boy has a stiffy right here in my office! Call his mother! Call the FBI! Put it in his permanent file, and be sure he doesn't get admitted to college!") But my physician was the same doctor who delivered me, who circumcised me, and who took out my tonsils. Apparently he never thought it necessary to check for hardness, and I sweated through his physical exam without so much as dropping my pants. Phew. Thank goodness I grew up in a time when doctors cared less about turning your head and coughing.

About the time I started spending a lot of time in the bathroom combing my hair, I also started spending a lot of time in the shower. You see, strangely enough, I discovered a fascinating pastime that was also weird and twisted. Telling about it here presupposes that you, the reader, will never tell anyone else. I discovered that the water streaming from the showerhead, when directed to the my penis shaft, felt wonderful. You have to remember that I was too stupid to experiment and find out that a pumping hand could do the same thing, even in a drier environment.

Eventually, I would lie down in the shower and let the water do its magic. It was in the shower, almost waterlogged, that I had my first dry orgasm. The only trouble was it took forever for the stream of water to excite my penis. And then, when it did, and the explosion was near, my penis would tighten, strain upward, move from underneath the tickling stream, and plop back against my stomach, and the process would have to start over again. I didn't really mind, but my penis was developing muscles of steel from plopping up and down, and my parents were wondering what in the world I was doing in the shower so long.

My first ejaculation was out in the open, on a freezing day, behind my grandfather's abandoned dairy barn. Bored by having to visit my relatives, I was enjoying the seclusion of the outbuildings, and like many other times, I took the opportunity to get partially naked and fool around. I had been erect a long time (the visit was particularly long and grueling), and suddenly I began to feel things in my penis that were even better than a shower massage. They started in the head, went into that little valley behind the head, and then took over my entire shaft. With the greatest ecstasy I had ever known, my penis pulsated to its largest mass ever and emitted a single drop of something milky.

I'd had only a second of the greatest feeling I had ever had when I saw that drop of fluid, and it scared me to death. My erection deflated, I got rid of the evidence with my handkerchief, zipped up, and rushed off to sit in the car until my parents finally came out to go home, completely unaware I had broken something inside that would surely kill me.

I don't remember the next few days. I must have convinced myself it was a fluke and that as long as I didn't fool around with it again (at least in icy weather), it would repair itself. The next thing I do remember, weeks later, is chatting privately with my best bud about biceps and voices that crack and talking to girls. Somewhere we got on the subject of making "it" feel good. "Nah," he said, in his most mature, world-wise voice. "You put your hand around it and go up and down until it shoots. Man, it's the greatest."

Duh.

I decided to try this most unusual way of playing with myself. No water needed. To understate it, I have participated in mastirbation a lot of times since then. I recommend it. And I often regret the fact that I could have had several years more fun if someone had just told me how to handle it.