Chapter 1

It's a Boy's World

Truth be told I always had a thing for boys ever since elementary school.  No, not like that. 
It was part of making friends.  You have to like your friends, right?  So that was that.  But before the end of my middle school years, I had developed a boy crush, although I didn’t recognize that as such at the time.  I just figured if I found a boy to be attractive then I wanted to be his friend, or perhaps I wanted to be him.  I hadn’t quite figured it out yet.

My first crush was Joey in eighth grade.  I was not friends with Joey, so to him I was just another guy he didn’t know in a couple of his classes.  He was popular and cute and I wasn’t the only one to notice.  Girls used to go out of their way to walk to class with him.  I’d sometimes see three girls jockeying for position as they walked down the hall with him.  The scene reminded me of those pop stars who would have girls screaming and chasing them.  Only here there was no screaming and running because he was not a star and the girls weren’t quite sure what it was they were feeling.  They just knew he was cute and a bit of a jokester, so they were hooked.  Sex was still a couple of years or more away for these girls.  But the seedlings were being sown in earnest in our middle school hallways, and Joey was the culprit.

I would be discretely walking maybe eight feet or so behind watching the routine unfolding before me.  Although come to think of it, a lot of the time my eyes were glued to his butt.  He
had a love of slim-cut Levis, of course he was a slim boy so nothing odd there.  But the way those Levis fit in the back is burned into my memory forever.  I’d watch each "V" on the back pockets as they pulsed up and down rhythmically when he walked.  He enjoyed his slim-cut Levis and so did I.

Occasionally, he would be walking a hallway solo, except for me and my eyes locked in, yet keeping the requisite distance.  If you added it all up, I probably spent more days following Joey than any of those girls walking with him.  So in my mind, I was his most ardent, if not covert, admirer.

In eighth grade we were made to take swimming for 6 weeks in Phys Ed.  Knowing how to swim is an important thing to learn, maybe THE most important thing to learn before reaching high school.  It was a good idea in theory.  We were bussed across town to the school that had a pool, would change into our swim trunks, shower, have a swimming lesson, shower, change back into our street clothes, and bus back all within 45 minutes.  Seems a bit tight, but we managed to get it in, although we’d usually be a few minutes late for English.

“Don’t look at us.  We were on the bus waiting for the girls,” we’d say. 
And the girls would respond, “We have to wash our hair.” 
“We have hair too,” we’d shoot back.  “Yeah, but not as much as we do,” they’d reply.

Joey happened to be in my PE class as well as some other classes.  We were required to shower before and after swimming, but we did all the showering with our swim trunks on.  The only chance for me to see Joey naked was going to be during the change into and out of the swim trunks.  The lockers were against three walls forming a big U.  Unfortunately, he was changing over with his popular friends and I was across with everyone else.  I did turn around to get a flash of his bare butt a few times, until one of his friends caught me and I quickly looked away, thankfully before it was noticed.

But one thing I did notice was that the bare butt I saw in the locker room was not what I had imagined was in his jeans.  Not that there was anything wrong with it, but it looked so small and nondescript outside those jeans.  Which just goes to show you, sometimes the frame goes a long way in helping the painting.  To my dismay, I never did get to see the holy grail in front.  But sometimes the fantasy of what you can’t see is better than reality, so maybe it was better left unseen.

Joey mysteriously disappeared in high school after Grade 9.  I heard later that his family moved across town, so he had to change high schools.  I considered him the best-looking boy in the whole school, so when he was gone, no other boy elicited a crush in me. There was just some unexplainable effect that Joey had on me. 

Of course, since there were more students in high school than middle school, there were more boys who were worth discretely checking out; either from behind or with a sideways glance from the front. But occasionally you’d catch a boy with a tootsie roll in his pants.  I don’t mean a full-on boner (that would put it out of tootsie roll range for most boys), but perhaps as a high school textbook might describe it:  “A temporary mispositioning causing a more defined outline than is perhaps intended.”

I was horny so often in my high school years, I was sometimes masturbating two to three times a day.  I figured I’d really have to get a girlfriend if I’m ever going to get any real sex.  At first I was not so comfortable with girls, they seemed a little odd.  I mean, I was always playing sports with boys and hanging out with my buds at school, so I felt very comfortable in that environment.  But by senior year I did begin to like girls.  Plus I wanted to have sex and this was the only accepted avenue, so I was following protocol.  And I went on in life dating girls and successfully moving past the boy thing right up into college.  That was until Parker appeared and popped that balloon.  But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.



© 2014 Rip Skor