Under the Rainbow: Chapter One

[Under the Rainbow cover]

An Excerpt From Chapter One

Under the Rainbow

I began my forays into adolescent sexual experimentation just before I was thirteen. Like most boys that age, I started playing around with my friends. It started with after-school visits. Just school chums horsing around and all that. I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours. "Boys can see boys" (a motto of the public urinal). How about a little strip poker? Want to see my mother's diaphragm? How about my father's jockstrap? Let me see your dirty pictures (half a deck of straight porno playing cards). Why don't we try this position out? I proffered half the invitations and accepted the other half. But I hadn't yet had my first orgasm, and watching a friend masturbate was an illumination of the first order. The "white pee-pee" my mother had told me about hadn't prepared me for the beauty of a seemingly endless fountain of pearly semen spurting from the head of his cock. There was something sacred about it. It was only a matter of weeks until I could produce my own, and as soon as I learned what it felt like to come, I was hooked. I came whenever I could.

One afternoon I had a friend over, and we had the house to ourselves. We started out doing homework together, and it wasn't long before we were touching and looking interested in each other. Of course, just making love was out of the questions, since we were all-American Jewish boys, so we had to find an excuse.

"Want to wrestle?" he challenged. Now that was a new angle.

"Sure, " I murmured.

"What'll we wrestle for?"

"What do you mean, 'for'?" I was willing to yield to his strength with a minimum of struggle.

"There has to be a prize for the winner."

I was beginning to catch on. The prize was each other. "Suppose we do it like strip poker. The loser has to take something off after each round," I suggested, wanting to increase the skin contact as much as possible.

We wrestled match after match, yielding and overcoming with ease, first one then the other, and with each match a shoe or a shirt or a pair of pants was quickly discarded until we were in our underwear, and soon out of it and trying out the delights of "69" without knowing they had a name, and having a frighteningly wonderful time, even if it was forbidden, lost in pleasure, until I heard the sound of the key turning in the lock. My mother was home!

"Arnold?" she called.

In the minute it took for her to cross the apartment from the front door to the door to my room, we hastily abandoned our passion and scrambled into our pants. We were just zipping up when she appeared in the doorway, a look of stark horror painted on her face.

"What are you two doing?" she sputtered.

"Hi, Mom. Oh, we were just wrestling," I lied guiltily.

She wasn't buying. "I think you'd better go home now," she told my friend. "It's suppertime...and I don't think you should visit Arnold anymore." He collected himself and fled. Then came the inquisition.

"Arnold, what were you doing with him?"

"I told you, Mom, just wrestling."

"Now remember, just tell me the truth, and you won't be punished. What do you mean, 'wrestling'?"

"You know, wrestling," I insisted, my voice quavering with guilt.

"Did you touch each other?" She filled the word with obscenity.

"Of course we touched each other. We were wrestling. I told you." My voice was sinking to a whisper. I was starting to sweat.

"Did you touch each other anywhere you shouldn't? Your private parts?"

Evasion was no longer possible. "Just a feel," I said as casually as I could, to minimize the indictment.

"Just a feel," she echoed. Her voice dripped with doom. She knew! Would she tell? Would she tell my father? The school? The police?

But nothing happened. Nothing for a week. I thought it was over, until one morning when she told me to take a bath and put on clean underwear.

"What for?" I asked, groaning.

"You're going to the doctor."

"But I'm not sick," I protested.

"We'll see about that," she warned. "Now hurry up and get washed." I knew what it was about then.

We traveled all the way to Lakewood, where her sister knew a good physician. She couldn't bring this disgrace to our own family doctor. Doom hovered above my head. I felt like Norma Shearer in a wooden cart being scorned all the way to the guillotine. The heroine within me quaked.

The doctor asked lots of questions as he weighed and measured me and did the usual prodding and pinching and poking. I told him everything, determined to make a clean breast of it and be cured, contrite before my confessor even if I wasn't Catholic, desperate to regain my mother's respect, so I could reenter the lists and joust for her love. Finally he called her in and delivered this verdict: "Your son is normal," he said. "He's just been experimenting in the ways boys his age all do. And don't worry about the other symptoms you told me about." I threw her a sidelong glance. I knew what symptoms he meant: my walk, my talk, my laugh. He finished, "Do you want him to be a street-corner hooligan? He's sensitive and intelligent. All boys aren't ruffians."

I wanted to kiss that doctor, but that would have deflated my new image as a heterosexual aesthete. Escapes can be just so narrow, and I was going to let this sleeping dog lie even if it took a sledgehammer.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said. There was a note of tentative relief in her voice, perhaps a willingness to accept what she knew wasn't true, even if it meant lying to herself. My mother could use her fancy as well as she could rationalize. Who was she to question medical science? Her son was a heterosexual.

As soon as we got to the curb, she turned to me and asked, "Did he measure your penis to see if it was normal?"

It took a lot of years before I got around to surveying other guys' hard-ons to find out that mine is normal. I spent those years trying my damndest to be straight.

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