Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

I lay sweating, face down on the loose sand. Small weeds, crushed against me, pushed through my light clothing and made me itch all over. But I couldn't scratch, couldn't even move, because I knew the Japanese attack was going to come at us from over the hill at any second. I pressed hard into the warm grit and listened to my heart thud, tightening my trigger finger on my Thompson. I looked to my right and left. All of the guys were ready, coiled like fine-tension wire.

And then it came, wild shrieks from the enemy, charging over the crest, right at us.

"Yankee dogs, you die! Yankee dogs, you die!"

"Banzaiiii! Banzaiiiiiii!"

Just listening to it sent chills deep into my gut. We stayed cool and held our fire until they were only about twenty feet away. Then, standing up in plain sight, I threw a grenade and opened fire, yelling, "Take that, you dirty Jap bastards!" With quick expulsions of air from the side of my mouth, I made the Thompson come alive, letting it jump in my hands.

But I should have fired from cover. I was stupid. Suddenly there was a thud on my chest, and with the utmost majesty and grace I spiraled down to the sand, face up to the sun, dead.

"Hey, Joey! You cheated! That's not a grenade, it's just a hunk of old ice plant!" yelled Donnie.

"Yeah!" It was Louie's voice. "Only the heart of the ice plant can be a grenade. We all said so!"

I became undead and got up, dusting off sand from the vacant lot. "What's the matter?"

"Joey's tryin' to kill us all with ice plant. He's not doin' it right," came the cry.

Colonel Carlson's raid on Makin Island stopped in mid-battle while we argued about the merits of ice plant leaves versus ice plant hearts. I was for the heart, because a leaf didn't even look like a grenade. Besides, if it was too gushy when it hit you your mom would give you hell.

Our raider battalion, some twenty strong, was usually at half strength because we could never find any other neighborhood kids to play the Japs, and so we had to split ourselves up. I was mad because I had done such a beautiful job of dying and nobody had even noticed. I was a master at it, a real master. Everybody said so.

We argued until five o'clock, when it was time to go home and get Captain Midnight's secret message on our decoders, received after forcing clown about two tons of Ovaltine and sending in the labels. Then it would be time for Jack Armstrong, Sky King, and Superman, with the Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, and the Cisco Kid on after dinner, followed by the San Francisco Seals baseball game.

We decided to put off World War II so that we could don our leather flight helmets and find out what would happen in the next episode of Captain Midnight a full day before the poor kids whose mothers made them drink plain old cocoa.

Later in the evening, safe behind my locked bedroom door, I would practice my favorite secret pastime. I was still normal then, and my sex life started just as the sex life of most eleven-year-old boys starts, by jacking off. I had become expert at it, sometimes shooting four times a day.

This was 1945, and eleven-year-old boys were not supposed to know much about sex. It was still a decade before the beginning of the age of enlightenment, with its sex education in school and casual mention in the media. Sex was still regarded as "dirty" and even polite conversations on the subject were taboo.

My father had -never mentioned the word bird to me, much less bee. What information I did pick up was in the form of dirty jokes from my friends, and they in turn received their information from me, who knew nothing.

For instance, I was fascinated by knockers. Although bulging sweaters and blouses gave me an immediate erection, I still wasn't sure just what a naked knocker looked like. Some knockers seemed to be very pointed and others were more round; some seemed to stick straight out, while others seemed to hang a bit. It was all most confusing to a curious young boy. To make matters worse, I was the son of a very modest lady, no part of whom other than face, arms, and legs had I ever seen bare. Not knowing the intricacies of the brassiere, I concluded that breasts were shaped just like the bra that held them, which at the time seemed reasonable. But if I was confused about knockers, the issue of cunts was still worse.

Of course, I had heard about them, all of the guys talked about -them. Nobody I knew even had a baby sister, since most of our fathers were in the service, so not one of us had actually ever seen one. Some of the guys thought that the navel became the cunt, and that this was where you were supposed to stick it in. I may have been naive, but I was not that far gone. I knew that girls had hair "down there," and after much laborious research, including all the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and ancient sex books I could find, I decided that the cunt was a round hole surrounded by a round patch of hair, located in the middle of the pubis bone.

This conclusion was not correct, but it led me to some delightful fantasies. At this age I still more or less hated girls, so my fantasies revolved around pictures of girls. This somehow detached them from the realm of womanhood enough to be desirable to a kid who still played guns and sent for Captain Midnight secret decoders.

This was before the age of Playboy and similar publications; pictures to masturbate by were hard to find. I was fortunate enough to come into proud ownership of a Varga calendar, which served my purpose remarkably well. I would retire behind the locked door of my bedroom, crawl under the covers with my Varga girl-of-the-month for 1945 (Miss June was a knockout, I used her much more than the others) and contemplate the impossibly high line of her knockers and the deep thigh lines diving between an over raised pubic area, which excited me greatly. I imagined the round hole in the middle, surrounded by hair. Inserting my swollen penis into that seemed like it might be a little uncomfortable. My erections were so straight up that the head of my penis touched my belly, and it was hard to think how you could keep it sticking straight out at a ninety-degree angle in order to get into that hole. I would rub against the sheets as I studied the calendar. I knew about kissing and sometimes lay with my chest and belly on a pillow to give the feeling that there was really a body under me. I would imagine kissing and holding the girl as I worked in her cunt. Not knowing much about girls, and not really thinking of them as human, it never occurred to me that they too had feelings. The thought that a girl might experience pleasure, or lack of it, from me never entered my head. I had never heard that girls too could come. After a couple of minutes of this erotica I would ejaculate, put the calendar back into my desk drawer, and remake my bed to cover the wet spot. Then, before going to sleep, I might repeat the whole thing, just using a mental image of the Varga girl, and again on awakening in the morning.

Only in retrospect do I realize how wise a woman was my mother. She changed my sheets once a week. Some weeks there might have been twenty or more little light brown spots on the sheets, plus a smell which she could not have failed to notice. Yet she never said a word to me. I never had visions of warts, or of my penis falling off, or of blindness. But I did feel a vague guilt, probably due to the seemingly forbidden nature of the whole thing, and I did worry that jacking off so much might wear me out by the time I was thirteen or fourteen.

I much preferred rubbing on the sheets to jacking off by hand. For one thing, it was easier and seemed more natural lying down; for another, the feeling of rubbing against the sheets, and the orgasm I attained by doing so, seemed to be much more intense than when I used my hand. Hand jack offs weren't bad, but they would sometimes cause a sore on the delicate skin of my penis from excessive friction. The one disadvantage of doing it on the sheets was that in a few minutes the pool of sperm I was lying on became cold and sticky. However, it seemed to dry quickly, and I, being drowsy from my orgasm, would usually drift right off to sleep.