Mirrors of Narcissus (13 page)

“Well, it makes me feel different. I know most guys are circumcised, so I guess I have a complex about it.”

“You shouldn’t. I mean, it seems so foolish to let something like that—” I was thinking: so that’s why he always hid himself when he came out of the shower.

“You don’t know what it’s like. You’re circumcised, aren’t you, Guy?”

“Yes.” When had he seen me?

“So you’re in the majority. You have no way of knowing the feelings of inferiority and envy that an uncircumcised boy lives with, seeing the cleaner-looking penises of his friends. For the longest time I felt like a freak and an outsider. Circumcised penises were normal, uncircumcised ones were not. To me, my dick looked sickly and unhealthy compared to my friends’.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“No. But it’s something I’ve felt ever since the first time I saw my friends’ dicks. That was when we were about ten years old, undressing in my room to change into swim trunks. It was a real shock to me to see that I was different from them. And later, in junior high school PE class, when we undressed for the showers, I saw that almost every kid in class was circumcised.”

“Well, at that age, everyone feels like a freak.”

“Guy, what did you think of guys who were uncircumcised?”

I shrugged. In junior high school, I, too, was curious—for different reasons—about other boys’ dicks. There’d been one boy whose dick was capped with a brown-skinned prepuce. The hood-like foreskin had completely covered the glans, coming to a puckered tip in front. Another boy had a dick which was half-covered; I recalled thinking the glans looked like a turtle’s head peeping out of its shell. In truth, the dicks which I’d found most sexy were those with a clean, round, pink glans exposed. But the idea that Scott was uncut—”blemished”—somehow gave him a slight flaw that made him even more endearing in my eyes. If only he knew how little it mattered!

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just a minor difference. Like some guys have straight red hair, others have curly black hair. What does it matter?”

“For you, maybe. But try being the guy who’s different. It’s something you can brood about your whole life.”

I could understand, though. Most of the things which bother us so much about ourselves usually mean nothing to a stranger. Still, it was hard to believe that he could feel so much anguish over a piece of skin covering his glans.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “why do we get circumcised, anyway? It’s something I’ve never thought about.”

“It’s been around so long—more than 4,000 years—that it’s become tradition in many cultures all over the world. For certain people—the Muslims and the Jews, for instance—circumcision was a religious injunction; for others, it was a rite of passage, marking adulthood. And in the U.S.—”

“But why did it start in the first place? I mean, there had to be a reason for it.”

“That’s right. It probably originated from sanitary reasons. You see, because the skin covers the head, sometimes dirt and gunk can get trapped inside. And there’s a secretion called smegma which is secreted by the inside of the foreskin as a natural lubricant. Some forms of bacteria feed on the smegma. Back in the days when people didn’t take regular baths, I imagine these things sometimes led to infections. So ancient people started cutting off the foreskin, making it easier to clean. It might have been crucial to survival back then, but with today’s sanitary conditions, many doctors feel there’s no real need for circumcision.”

“Then why is it done? I don’t remember asking to be circumcised.”

“It’s a standard procedure here in the U.S. now. When little boys are born, most parents sign a routine consent form as part of the whole birth process, giving the doctor permission to perform the operation.”

“The baby boy has no say in the matter, really.”

“Right. Some doctors feel that circumcision at birth causes trauma in the child. After all, it is a painful operation—and anesthetics aren’t used for newborn babies, as it’s too risky.”

“But they keep performing it because—that’s the way it’s always been done. Right?”

He nodded. “Sometimes there are medical reasons for it, though, to prevent infection and so on. And sometimes it’s even necessary for grown men to have the operation.”

“Why?”

“Apparently, with some men, the glans remains covered even when they’re fully erect. Ejaculation is painful, and conception is difficult. So the excess skin is cut off so they can ejaculate normally.”

“How about you?” I asked, feeling as if I were stepping to the edge of a cliff. “Do you have trouble ejaculating?”

He didn’t seem bothered by the question. “No. As I get hard, the foreskin slips off, leaving the glans completely uncovered. When I was a kid, I didn’t know I had a normal glans like the others. It wasn’t until I was about 16 that the foreskin could retract all the way, and I discovered I had a normal glans under there. It was a gradual process: at first it didn’t slip off all the way, and was painful to move. But when I finally managed to slip it all the way back, you can imagine how happy I was.”

A vivid picture of his erection flashed into my mind. “So what’s the problem?”

“I still feel that girls will think an uncircumcised cock is ugly. They’re used to seeing something different, after all. And that’s why I’m so inhibited, I guess.”

I laughed. “You’re creating your own barrier, Scott. Don’t worry. If a girl likes you, she won’t care one way or the other whether you’re circumcised or not.”

“I don’t know….”

“You have to get over that feeling of shame about your body, because until that changes, nothing will.”

He sat thinking for a while. Then he looked up. “Guy, you seem so confident around girls. I suppose with your looks, you don’t have to worry very much about the possibility of rejection, do you?”

“Looks have nothing to do with it. I had to work on my confidence just like everyone else. And anyway,” I went on, seeing his expression of disbelief, “what makes you think you’re not attractive, Scott?”

“Come on….”

“No, I’m serious. In fact, if you want me to be really blunt about it, you’re quite a good-looking guy. I happen to know that girls find you attractive.”

“Get out of here,” he said with an embarrassed laugh.

“No, seriously.”

“Like who, for instance?”

“Well…Christine, for one.”

“Did she really say that?”

“Sure. If she wasn’t going with me, she’d be after you.”

“No way.”

“Of course she would. If I was her, I would be, too.”

“Come on….”

“I’m serious.”

He shook his head with such a comical look of despondency that I had to laugh. Then I said, only half-jokingly: “If Christine had a twin sister, we’d be all set up.”

“Right.” He ran his fingers through his hair and looked thoughtful for a moment. “How did you meet her, anyway?”

“At a friend’s party. We hit it off right away—I think, because she was so different from most other girls I’d met. That’s probably why I like her so much. A normal girl wouldn’t interest me at all.”

“Did you have many girlfriends before her?”

“A lot. Too many, maybe. I think, in a way, it’s deadened my feeling for girls. I tend to look down on a lot of them.”

“It must be nice to have that problem.”

“But I’m serious. When they’re so easily accessible, you really start not caring so much for them; you even come to despise them. Sometimes I think it might be better if it was all more difficult.”

“I suppose it must be true, then, that the more out of reach something is, the more you desire it.”

I looked at him in some surprise. “Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

He seemed a little alarmed at the intensity of my reaction, and at the serious turn our discussion had taken. I decided to ease up a bit.

“We’re starting to sound like a couple of philosophy students at an all-night bull session.”

He smiled weakly. “I’ve never been this drunk before in my life.”

A loud burst of laughter from down the hall was followed by what sounded like the bookshelves crashing down.

“Sounds like those guys are even drunker.”

2

It was late at night and I was on my way home to the dorm. I’d been studying at the library together with Scott, but when he’d told me he intended to stay until closing time, I decided to go home first ahead of him. My route took me by the arts building, then up the bicycle path along the football field. As I crossed over the tiny bridge leading to the bicycle path, a lone jogger passed me from behind, then turned off into the woods. I gazed after him thinking of my excursion into Nightworld a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t been back there since then.

I felt a sudden excitement thrill through my nerves at the memory of the secret I’d uncovered then. My steps slowed and I found myself looking around. There was no one else about. Probably because it was just before the midterms, a silence pervaded the campus. There was no moon out.

I told myself I should head straight back to the dorm without giving it any further thought. Nightworld was not for me; merely to know it was out here should be enough to satisfy me. There was no need to involve myself in its existence. If I were to go there again tonight, it would be like stepping irreversibly into that netherworld. Did I want to be like those hungry nocturnal shadows homing in like shameless predators upon coyly waiting game? It wasn’t worth the risk.

Yet even as I told myself all this, I knew I would be unable to resist its seductive pull; to know it was out there in the night was more than I could stand. Just to go there, to reconfirm its existence, what was wrong with that? After all, I would only be watching it as an interested observer, as a scientist observes the mating habits of a lower species.

I turned my steps toward the darkness.

As before, I headed toward the restroom just behind the grandstand. The way was now familiar to me; I’d come here several times during the day to enjoy the contrast it provided with what I knew went on at night. As I approached the restroom now, I peered cautiously about, surveying the whole surrounding area, the shadows under the trees. There seemed to be no one out here tonight. In the darkness of the bushes behind the restroom, I noticed the bench was empty. I walked over to it and casually sat down.

My heart was thudding in my chest. I told myself there was nothing suspicious in my sitting here on this bench at this time of night. In fact, I willed myself into believing that I was an innocent student who had studied a little too hard and had just stepped out for a breath of fresh air before going back to his books. Who was to say I had the faintest idea that this place was a homosexual cruising ground at night? After all, so very few people did.

I wished I had something to do with my hands, a cigarette, perhaps. But it appeared I was all alone here tonight. I began to relax.

More time passed and the quiet nighttime sounds all around me came to seem less sinister. Indeed, there was something rather comforting about the dark. Perhaps this was my natural element. Ever since boyhood, it had always been the dark that I’d been drawn to, the sinister, the criminal and the forbidden. I’d longed to be a creature of the night—able to see where others are unable—and to have a secret power over others.

When I was about seven, there was a weekly adventure series on television called the Black Avenger. For reasons which I forget, the hero, who had another identity during the day—an ordinary banker or something—transformed himself at night into a sort of one-man vigilante, clothing himself all in black from head to foot and going about seeking evil-doers to punish. What gave his situation an unbearable pathos for me was the fact that society in general, and the newspapers and police in particular, were under the mistaken assumption that he was the main criminal responsible for a number of evil deeds. Indeed, all the evidence did seem to point that way. It was only us, the sympathetic audience, who were privy to the real nature of the Black Avenger. It gave me such a feeling of helpless anger—and a feeling of superiority over the bumbling, blind authorities—to watch as the Avenger just managed to foil some criminal’s attempted crime, only to be discovered by a reporter or someone with the incriminating evidence in his hands—the jewels which he’d just snatched from the hands of the thief, and was about to return to the safe.

The Black Avenger had never been very popular among my friends, but I’d always worshipped him with a secret feeling of collusion. Like him, and like all those creatures which only come out at night, and for whom night is the natural habitat, I knew I was a fundamentally different being. Perhaps the Black Avenger was still the secret idol of my heart, and continued to influence me in subtle ways. For it was darkness which had cloaked his true identity, and which had nurtured his heroic apartness.

I gave a start. Someone had come up from behind me so suddenly that for a second I thought I’d been ambushed. But he just sat down next to me on the bench. It was the jogger I’d seen earlier.

I was too scared to say a word, and for a long time just sat there in silence, gazing straight ahead. I was too nervous to look at him. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me.

From the corner of my eye I could see he was wearing a dark-colored sweatshirt and running shorts. His feet were clad in white sneakers. His proximity was making me nervous and I was thinking of walking away.

Then, without a word, he dropped his hand gently onto my crotch. So sudden had it been that I just sat there. I tried to act calm, peering into the darkness all around, everywhere but at him. I wondered if I should reciprocate. It felt silly just sitting there with his hand on me, as if I were a junior high school girl too scared to react when her boyfriend first puts his hand on her breast.

As casually as I could, I shifted my hand onto his crotch. He was wearing nothing underneath his running shorts, and I could clearly feel his erection straining upward. He had a big dick, perhaps eight or nine inches long.

For the first time I turned my head to look at him. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark, and had no idea how old he was, but he was well built, probably an athlete. His hair was cropped short and he wore glasses.

I began stroking his dick over his shorts as his hand dropped away from my crotch. My nervousness had seemed to magically evaporate with my first touch of his dick, as if I’d been energized by the contact. Indeed, I became quite aggressive; my hand felt a need which my mind tried vainly to deny.

Suddenly he got up. I wondered if he was going away. He stepped a few paces away and stopped, looked back at me. Was this an invitation to follow him? Looking around and confirming that we were all alone, I got up and took a couple of steps in his direction. He began walking away.

Again, I wondered if he was leaving. As I continued to watch him, he stopped about twenty feet away and looked back at me. I took several more steps in his direction, and when I came close to him, he again moved off. We continued this stop and go ritual as he led me farther and farther away from the bench.

Finally when we were in the darkest part of the woods he let me catch up with him. Looking around, he leaned back against a tree. I moved next to him and reached my hand down to stroke him. For a few minutes I reveled in the feel of the hardness beneath his shorts. But my partner didn’t seem to be relaxed enough to enjoy it; he kept peering around in the darkness.

Abruptly he moved away and I followed.

We were moving into the area south of the football field. I saw that there was a wire fence surrounding the field at this point and just alongside it, a hedge. On the other side of the hedge was a building which I believed was a shower room, or an athletic equipment storage place. The football field was brightly lit, and the contrast between the lights on the field and the darkness of the encircling hedge threw the narrow space between fence and hedge into the utmost blackness.

My partner stood for a moment at the entrance to this narrow space and looked back at me. It was clear that he had led me here on purpose—no doubt this was familiar territory to him.

He stepped between the fence and hedge and disappeared into the darkness there. I slipped in after him. After cautiously feeling my way in the darkness, I came upon him leaning back against the hedge. Here, no one could see us; we were completely shielded from the eyes of the world.

I went up to him and dropped my hand onto his crotch. His dick was still poking straight up, bigger than ever, almost comically distending his shorts. I stroked it, as before, over the shorts, but then, unable to stand it anymore, pulled away the elastic waistband so I could touch actual flesh, feel its warmth.

He grunted softly at the contact. I could smell his sweat in the dark and something else—a strong whiff of semen.

All this time he never looked me in the face but was constantly peering around, jerking his head this way and that. I wished he would relax more, while feeling the wildest excitement myself. I slipped my other hand up under his sweatshirt and rubbed his chest. The muscle tone was firm and elastic. I liked what I felt. He was definitely an athlete, perhaps had played on the very football field so clearly visible just beyond the wire fence. Beneath my fingers I felt his heart pounding.

It seemed as if we were all alone in the world. This complete stranger and I were accomplices in an act of uttermost intimacy, right here in the middle of the campus. Until a few minutes ago, we had had no idea of each other’s existence. I felt a surge of power, a giddy drunkenness which made my head swim. In this dark, I was freed for the first time from the burden of being looked at and admired, from the pressure of having to be the beautiful one. Here, I was just another shadow in the night, another boy looking for surreptitious thrills. I was almost overwhelmed by this strange new freedom. Anything goes, I thought. Anything. And no one knows anything about this. What’s to stop me?

I pulled his shorts down to his thighs, freeing his dick, and immediately the sexy fragrance of sweat and semen became even more pungent. I stroked him with greater freedom, occasionally strumming his balls lightly with my fingers. I knew he was feeling good, he had to be feeling good. He’d thrown back his head and his eyes were closed. He was no longer concerned about being seen; he had given himself up completely to receiving his pleasure.

I dropped to my knees, and though it was almost too dark to see it, his dick came alive with a pungent immediacy. I could feel its moist heat inches from my face. Kneeling there on the soft earth, I could smell the moldy odor of his tennis shoes, and the sweet perfume of the crushed blades of grass beneath me. I ran my palms up and down his thighs, feeling the wiry hairs there as I lowered my face to his crotch. With trembling fingers I pulled the upright shaft of his dick a little away from its tight cling to his stomach and parted my lips. The moist, meaty warmth of the glans slid into my mouth and I was in a dream.

This can’t be happening to me, I told myself. This isn’t happening.

I played my tongue up and down the length of the shaft and paused to squeeze the glans softly between my lips. It seemed to swell up inside my mouth like a hot plum as I ran my tongue around it. I pulled my face away and returned to tickle with the pointed tip of my tongue the underside of the glans where it is most sensitive. The whole dick twitched with each contact, straining up harder against the stomach, reaching for the stars. And each twitch of the dick brought a soft cry of pleasure from my partner.

I kissed the crown of the glans and let its blunt moist warmth play along my cheek, sliding it along my upper lip and all around my mouth without putting it in. I wished this could last forever. For the first time in my life I was indulging in one of my most cherished boyhood fantasies. But I could feel my partner was being pushed to the edge of his endurance by my teasing.

I gripped the shaft again and sank it into my mouth as far as it would go, until I almost gagged, then pulled my face back until it was only halfway in. Keeping my head still, I began stroking the lower, exposed part of the dick, leaving the rest buried in my mouth.

Within seconds I heard a stuttered gasp and my mouth instantly filled with warmth, almost gagging me by its suddenness. For the briefest moment, I felt a twinge of panic at what I’d done. And then I concentrated on enjoying the sensation of what was in my mouth, savoring the salty metal taste of it, its gluey texture, before swallowing it down. The essence of cum seemed to permeate my mouth, my entire being. It was a taste I knew well from boyhood, having often naughtily tried the flavor of my own ejaculate. But having it warm and fresh from another boy gave it an added deliciousness. I continued sucking him as if urging on a further effusion. His dick in my mouth continued to twitch, even as its rock-like rigidity began softening into flesh. It was still twitching a little as he withdrew it from my mouth, from my universe.

Then I felt him gently push my head away. As soon as I was disengaged he slipped his shorts back up.

I got to my feet and ran my hands over his hard buttocks.

I tried to look him in the face but he was once again peering furtively around into the darkness. He wouldn’t say a word.

Still peering around, he began walking away, back the way we’d come. I followed. When he reached the entrance to the narrow space we were in, he stepped out into the open and did three or four squats. Then, without a word or a backward look, he continued his interrupted jog. I watched him running down the bicycle path, his silhouette fading, fading, then blending with the greater shadow of Nightworld.

He never turned around.