By Chris Carr
Copyright © May, 2003
It’s but a memory now but still lingers. I was fourteen, I believe, and it was during that year’s summer vacation things took shape. Some years before, my parents, gingerly climbing the social ladder, had moved from Compton, an already decaying urban enclave, to a middle class section of L.A. With that move we’d acquired a three bedroom house, a two car garage and a pool. That’s right, our very own swimming pool, smack dab in the middle of our own back yard!
Many a day were spent, whiling away the hours in that pool, me and a younger cousin, who I don’t remember exactly why was staying with us that summer. As the days grew warmer, our time in the water extended until, by the end of that first month, we were in there almost all day.
Belly flops from the sides of the circular pond were rampant along with cannon balls and an increasing skill at awkward dives. Water fights and contests, and holding our breath beneath the water also ensued, the summer days passing all too quickly.
But the one thing about a backyard pool we hadn’t counted on was its incredible drawing power. It started innocently with our next door neighbors, Alex and Randy. Alex, the oldest was closer in age to me while Randy was closer in age to my cousin, Lyle. Funny thing is, Lyle and Alex were closer, their tastes running more towards smashing bugs and spitting while Randy and I considered ourselves the intellectuals, choosing rather to study the bugs and holding our spit.
On those days the sun rose high and bore down hard, we’d get an early start in the pool, jumping in not long after breakfast. Alex and Randy would conveniently show up on those days, idly commenting on our antics in the pool while they hung around in their street clothes with forlorn looks on their faces. At first, it didn’t occur to us they wanted to join in, our contentment and absorption so deep. But then it became obvious when Alex squatted beside the pool and played his hand back and forth.
"Wanna get in?" I asked.
His eyes brightened and in a flash he’d darted over the fence to ask his mom if they could. And that’s the way our trek into the neighborhood politics of pool rights began. It wasn’t long before word spread and more kids showed up, some close friends, some distant acquaintances.
"Can we swim in your pool?" They’d inquire, swimming attire tucked under their arms.
Who to let in the club and who to deny rights, suddenly became our duty. Obviously, we couldn’t let everybody in the pool, it just wasn’t that big. Besides, some of those clowns wouldn’t have given us the time of day, had we not had a pool. Thank God my mother proved an excellent escape in numerous cases.
"My mother says she doesn’t want us having a lot of people over," I’d say, or "My mother says she has to meet your mother." That always ruled out the ruffians, but still, the numbers were steady and soon, we were playing hosts to different boys, almost daily.
It was getting to where, the pool wasn’t ours anymore and our fun diminished proportionately to the number of boys we allowed over. One day, there were approximately seven boys, not counting me and my cousin, in the water, jumping off the edge and making huge splashes, screaming and chasing each other and just taking over our festivities. But then a funny thing developed and suddenly, it didn’t matter how many boys were trying to come over.
I’d noted it for some time but thought it a bit difficult to do anything more than just observe, until Lyle commented, "Everet got a dinky one, huh?" one evening. We were sitting around watching TV and during an idle moment he’d dropped his bomb. I stared at him surprised that, at eleven, he even noticed things like that, my mind whirring. Did Lyle like looking at dicks too? Was he as frustrated as I was when the boys would dart into the bathroom to change or turn their backs as they dropped their pants?
"You seen it?" I queried. He nodded his head, idly tossing his baseball into his baseball mitt. I snickered, and he joined in and a silent knowing, passed between us.
Following many sleepless nights, I devised a plan, working out the details to the best of my limited ability eventually settling on my first target. Though we’d seen a lot of boys that summer, I couldn’t get that brief flash of boy-dick Michael had given us some weeks before out of my head. He hadn’t been over in a long time and, on a day Lyle was away with his mother, I invited him back over.
Like before, I coaxed him into changing in front of me, and, like before, we stood gawking at each other for a minute before one of us moved and the moment was lost. Exiting to a bright, exceptionally warm, summer day, we jumped into the pool, the cool water refreshing. As I’ve already stated, Michael was a beautiful bronze-brown boy with soft, attractive features and chipmunk cheeks that almost glowed when he smiled. He was just rounding the corner of pubescence, his body a confusion of developing manhood and tender boyishness.
We laughed and played in the water, dunking each other under for extended periods and splashing the other with jets of cupped water. But all along, there was this undercurrent of unspoken understanding that this was a just a precursor. That we were somehow… stalling. And it came out in our play. In the way we’d bump up against each other or how we held each other. Until, finally, we could stall no more and, whether it was Michael who made the first move or me, I don’t remember, we headed back inside.
I closed the door, as before, but this time, I locked it. We were still wet, I remember, because my mother, her head ducked inside the dryer, had threatened to kill us if we’d got anything on her carpet. Water shimmered on us in the lazy afternoon sunlight but neither of us were getting undressed. Michael stood idly by his pile of clothes, goose bumps raising on his skin as the cool air blew across his wet body. I stood likewise, water pooling at my feet, then, I stooped and picked up a towel. Walking towards Michael, I extended it towards his shivering body and gingerly swiped a path of dryness across his torso. He made no protest so I continued drying him.
The moment terribly awkward, Michael looked down, rather than face me, until, the tension getting to him, he stooped down and scooped up my towel and started drying me off. The sensation was incredible his motions amplified by the texture of the absorbent towel on my skin. I’d watch him for a minute, then he’d watch me.
After some time, and long after we’d wiped every drop of water from our bodies, I looked up at him and croaked, "Wanna measure them?" Once again, Michael proved the perfect candidate for this first endeavor, his face demonstrating he completely understood what I meant.
As we held our towels idly aloft in our left hands, we somehow managed to tuck our trunks beneath our burgeoning balls with our right hands, equally exposing our dual, boy, posts. The whole time we’d been drying each other off, they’d developed beneath our trunks and there was no missing them, once we’d both become dry. Michael’s shot from his still maturing groin like an upraised cannon, the head all shiny and smooth, while mine equally tilted upward, towards the ceiling, aimed to blast. We literally had to pull them back down to line them up.
Toe to toe we stood, heads down as we moved our groins towards each other, each of us holding our throbbing spears down so that we could align them, next to each other. I watched with excitement as Michael’s swollen head edged closer and closer….