If there is one thing that the internet has stolen from this generation of kids it's a sense of innocence about sex. Looking back now there was so much about sex that I didn't understand and there's a large part of me that wishes to go back to that time. Not knowing now all the things I didn't know then would be nothing short of magical.
His name was Mark and he was one of the cool boys. He wrestled and as a sophomore that allowed entry into that small but very visible club. When we saw him walking down the hill that separated Coolville from Nerdland we didn't know what to make of it. I think we expected to get beat up. We couldn't think of a reason why we'd earned a beating but it was the only plausible explanation.
It was the three of us playing football behind Ryan's house. Me, Ryan and Dave. Dave was a Hispanic kid of questionable ethnicity. His parents had adopted him when they thought they couldn't have kids and then a year after his appearance his mom got pregnant so from that time forward Dave was an orphan again. To make matters worse, his little “brother” was a little snitch who everyone hated.
Ryan was a fat kid. The funny thing was is that a year later he turned into a buff football player and then, a few years after that, he turned fat again. Sort of like that movie Awakenings except that instead of suffering from some rare Parkinson's-type disease he suffered from fatness. At least he got a few good years; the dorkalitis geekspazica that kept me socially catatonic never relented.
He made his way down the hill and asked if he could play with us. To us it was as if Lemmy had asked if he could sit in with a garage band.
We played two on two and kept changing the teams so that Mark didn't get tired of trampling the same person into the grass. I remember to this day the feeling of exultation of having him trip over me and almost fall over before recovering and completing his four hundredth touchdown run.
“Nice try,” was all he'd said but it was if confetti was raining down on me.
Later, when the three of us were sufficiently battered and no longer able to walk under our own power, we sat together and he told us that he'd just gotten a blow job.
On cue our faces scrunched up and squinted and made it clear to Mark that we had no idea what he was talking about.
He explained what a blow job entailed. My two friends gasped and nodded and I tried my best to unsquint my face.
To give you an understanding of what kind of cool-kid-worshipping was going on that day, it was only upon deciding to write this story that it hit me why Mark had come down to play football with us in the first place; to tell us about getting a blow job! For years it never occurred to me that he must have been bursting at the seams to tell everybody he could about it. Even the dipshits. At the time, I assumed that cool kids wrestled and went to parties and got blow jobs like it was no big deal. This whole time I was completely oblivious to the fact that Mark was just like I was ... just not as a big a wheeze.
My face slowly lost the look of an inquisitive child and took on the demeanor of a seasoned gigolo. I didn't want Mark, for even a second, to suspect that I wasn't a veteran of the whole putting-your-penis-in-the-mouth-of-a-girl thing. Truth was, of course, that I was the last boy in our grade to hit puberty so not only was I unfamiliar with the act but I was completely unclear as to why anyone would want to engage in it the first place and what would transpire after the requisite number of “blows” transpired.
Why a girl would subject herself to this remains a mystery to me.
Eventually conversation dried up and Mark walked back up the hill to where the rest of his kind lived and he never again came down to play with us. I saw him in school but it never crossed my mind to nod or acknowledge him in any way. I never felt insulted that it was if the whole thing had never happened; it was just the way things were.
What it did open my eyes to was the fact that once I got my equipment there were blow jobs to be had. I would watch Mark's girlfriend and imagine that, sick of having a large, hairy, functioning penis in her mouth, it was mine she wanted. Though without the ability to climax and wrap up the proceedings, the daydream would often fizzle out and end awkwardly.
I bet kids these days don't have to go through that.
Poor bastards.