Dad or Mom?

"We can see your balls!"

"God, he must be embarrassed!"

Suddenly Mom was at the door.

Furious.

She, too, with one glance could see my secrets. I gave up the search and returned my hands to tugging down the shirt front and protecting myself from their gaze, too late.

"What is going on here?"

"Oh," said Willa. "For some reason he insisted the paddle is on the top of the cupboard when all the time it's over here!"

She pranced across to her bed and lifted the pillow and produced Grandmom's paddle: faded vanish, hard wood, terrible history in respect of young male backsides. Nude backsides.

Mom whisked it off Willa and reached up and pinched me by the ear and hauled me down.

"Well, he's gonna feel it. Now."

She seated herself on the bed and pulled me across the room. Stood me in front of her.

"You don't like it, do you? Being naked. With your sisters and cousins looking. About to get the spanking of your life. Well, you will have to start thinking. In future, if you wilfully...deliberately...neglect...your studies this is how I will punish you..."

And she delivered the awful verdict.

"...yes, punish you. Just like your Grandmom punished your father when he was young!"

There was an intake of breath from the girls.

"So...

"...right now...

...hand over that T shirt!"

Hell!

"But Mom!"

"Right now! Off with it!"

The girls were almost dancing with excitement. And why wouldn't they?

I slowly took the hem of the shirt...and pulled it up...up and...over my shoulders...and off...

I was stark naked. And, as it happened, throbbingly erect.

They were all looking.

I handed the T shirt across to Mom.

A whisper from my cousin Karina, "Look, he's in his...birthday suit!"

The disgrace of that always comic description wilted me to the core. "Birthday suit."

"Yes, he's nude all right,"said Mom. "Just like his Dad at the same age. Being punished by his mother. They hate it, males. Just hate it."

I felt their eyes all over me, that is, all over my genitals. My erection. My burst of hair. My dangling, low hanging testicles. The shape of the balls that had intrigued them earlier. Yes, Mom and the sisters and cousins were taking it all in.

And jostling my feelings of humiliation arose one fervent thought: if only my Dad were here to protect me.

Dad, my pal, where are you?

"Lie down on your sister's bed."

I obeyed, pressing my nose into the girl smells.

"Now the paddle is going to hurt. Before you cry and wriggle, just think of how you've got to improve at school. And be brave, like your Dad."

Later, with all the shame and humiliation, I was to remember that failure most of all. How I was not brave, not remotely, and how my tears and struggles would have appalled my father. I cried loud at the first savage assault. SPLAT! Twisted sideways at the second. SPLAT! Burst into tears as Mom pursued her circuit- SPLAT! SPLAT!- from upper thigh on the right leg to lower right glute, then to the middle of the right glute and then once more for good measure on the same searing spot and with the fifth stroke the left. Twice. SPLAT! SPLAT!

In fact that was when she instructed the girls to hold me and I found them pressing down on my shoulders and upper back with their hands and, from the end of the bed, pulling my legs tight so that kicking was no longer an option.

And so the circuit continued.

My tears rose from the bottom of my lungs and heaved out, and through them I lapsed into infantilism.

"OH NO! MOMMY! NO, MOMMY!"

When she stopped- after three violent circuits with many repetitions on a suffering spot (my upper thighs, where my eggs joined my bottom, seemed a favorite) I was choking and howling and sobbing.

Unable to move.

The girls were silent.

Awed, I guessed. Later I thought, they had been hypnotised by the lubricious wonder of it: their full nude brother being roundly paddled, on the bed before them, his bottom displayed and turning scarlet.

There was silence apart from my diminishing sobs.

"So...what was it your Grandmom did next?" My mother seemed to be pondering while I was stretching back and rubbing.

Willa was quick with her answer.

"She made them stand...with their sisters there. Remember, she thought that was part of the punishment? And Dad said she kept them that way, naked, for as long as she liked afterward. After the paddling. Remember, Dad said he hated it?"

Mom agreed.

"Tommy, get up. Old fashioned punishment. Maybe it'll work. Maybe you'll change. You are in a clothes-free state for the rest of the evening. Showing off your red bottom.

"Into the living room, where we will all watch some TV, and you will stand against the wall..."

Which meant me getting up and in their company showing off my now-limp, mottled penis and now even lower hanging balls, walking out and to the living room, rubbing my bottom all the way while the girls jostled and smirked. But...

...if I imagined I was going to be standing facing the wall...

...I was kidding myself.

Mom had other thoughts. In fact she was going to be true to my Grandmom's vision.

"That's right, stand. In the corner. But facing out. Hands behind your back, like a soldier on sentry duty."

The girls were guffawing.

I positioned myself. Back to the corner. Facing out. From this position I could see them and the TV. And they could see me, stark naked standing there. They could switch between my naked state standing there and Leave it to Beaver. A story about American boyhood, with a handsome Dad, Ward Cleaver, my favorite character.

But if I thought my humiliation was at an end...again, I was mistaken.

There was a lot of whispering. A reference to "balls." Giggles. A reference to how low they hung. Some pointing. More giggles.

Mom silenced them with a stern look.

Meanwhile Beaver Cleaver and his brother Wally were up to their cute tricks.

I stood, looking ahead, avoiding the eyes of the six girls.

The pain began to recede, just slightly. A warmth spread around my middle. Blood flowed, arteries pumped.

In the half dark, in the flickering blue light of the TV, I became aware that my prick was inflating once again.

A thickening.

A lengthening.

A stretching.

Jesus, I thought! It was jerking upwards, lifting from the balls, always the point of no return.

Jerk!

Stretch!

Jerk!

I was pointing, parallel to the floor, and even in the dim TV light they could not miss it: I was erect.

There were giggles.

I screwed my eyes shut.

With two more jerks my penis jolted upwards to point up and out in the classic position.

Karina was collapsing in guffaws. Willa was rolling her eyes.

"Mom..?"

It was sister Sally.

It was clear what she was going to ask.

"Yes," Mom snapped back. She had a drink in her hand. "Tommy's got an erection. An erection- that's what it's called. It is when their penis stands up. Pathetic. Something you'd expect in a 13 year old. He should be able to control himself at his age but he can't. Along with all his other problems he is shockingly immature. Bad at school. No dating. No social life. And unable to control his dirty little boy's instincts. Just ignore him because he's going to be there for the rest of the evening."

At this moment her contempt for her naked son became something else: a contempt for the whole male species. And it said something, I sensed, about her relationship with Dad.

Nothing was said to him about his son's punishments when he was away on his trips. Always when he was away- no punishment was visited on me by the females when he was around. Mom and the girls had obviously resolved to keep my punishments secret. For my part I could not bear to share my humiliation with him.

So I compensated by swimming at the Y and working out in the body building class and, on every other day, training with weights on my own, straining and pumping away in the damp and rust of its old industrial-style gym. Each day I raided Dad's body building cuisine- like the chopped liver he stored in the fridge or his untreated almonds and pistachios. Every morning I was up early grilling my own New York cuts to take for school lunch and wolfing down six eggs at breakfast. Whenever I could I would break two eggs into a brimming glass of full cream Minnesota milk and swallow it in a few big gulps.

"Hey, bud, you're gettin' big!"

The voice was Eric Boone's, also 18 and from my school, always at the Y. He had floppy brown hair and wore glasses with transparent, plastic frames. Broad shouldered, lean and tall he was on the way to sculpting a Greek god build. For no apparent reason he had adopted me as a weights' room partner. Perhaps with the serene confidence that comes from being so good looking. Of having no insecurities. Sometimes he spoke about his ambition: to become a champion lumberjack.

At these moments he would also strike me as a little stupid. But it was an honor to luxuriate in his attention.

We stood in the old gym which smelt of sweat, rusty metal, liniment, damp old masonry.

"Look at those pecs..."

And he punched me playfully on the chest

"You piled on an extra pound or two there alone. Big chest!"

"Gotta long way to go, I reckon."

I was bashful whenever any male talked about my body. "You're getting a V shape," said an old gym regular and gestured with his two hands to sketch my new torso, wide at the top and tapering to a tiny waist. It immediately gave me an erection, especially when the remarks came from a tall, good looking fella like Eric clearly above and beyond my league.

We exercised bare-chested and in our bare-feet. The only light streamed in from dim windows high on the walls. The shadows meant our muscles were accentuated in the full-length mirrors around the room. We were captivated by the mirrors, which highlighted our triceps and lats, and allowed us to admire our traps and quads especially on occasions like this when there were only two of us there.

My prick jutted in my cotton shorts as Eric continued.

"That's where I reckon it all is: the chest. That's the key. You got definition there, you gotta be a body builder. Get it from the bench press, the best press of all. You can pick it when you see a guy in the showers or at the lake. I mean there's only one way a fella gets a bunch of muscle on his chest. I go up to a guy and say, 'Hi, bud, like your pecs, you must do weights.' They always like to hear it, like that someone noticed. We're like a secret society. That's what coach Compton tells us. A lot of fellas won't admit they go to the gym. Sounds a little queer or something but what's wrong with wanting a good body. Better than being a 60 pound weakling..."

And bending to pick up a 40 pound barbell he continued.

"I tell ya, boxers have the best physiques of all the sportsmen..."

He could talk for long stretches about the male physique. His gym bag burst with body builder magazines, food supplements, bottles of full cream milk, bags of natural nuts and dried fruit along with a skipping rope, rubber bands and "posing straps." I may have caught a glimpse of something else: a worn copy of Physique Pictorial. My shocked gaze caught his attention. In flash he had zipped his bag shut, started talking about a new routine for developing a muscle called Adonis belt.

In the same single heretical thought I wanted to believe what I thought I had seen...and wanted to fling the possibility from my mind.

Eric and Physique Pictorial.

This was too...complicated.

He said being a lumberjack would be the best career because swinging an axe developed arms, shoulders and abs in one movement. He asked me to go on camping trips where we could live like "lumber guys" and pitch a tent under the stars. Step out of the tent at daybreak and stride straight into the lake. Nobody else around.

I was too shy to accept.

What would happen out there, him and me? He promised lots of sun and swimming. There was a heavy, hanging implication we would swim nude, as we did in the Y. But in the forest there would be just the two of us.

"Reckon boxers have the best physiques..."

As soon as I got home I locked myself in my room and rifled in my Popular Mechanics for my purloined physique magazines, overstimulated by this exposure to Eric. Funny, they weren't there. Nor in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Did I place them elsewhere and forget? Not likely. Had Mom found them? She was too drunk most of the time to mount a search and I would have heard about it instantly in an explosion of anger.

It was a mystery.

I parked it. The girls? Dad? I did not want to dwell on the possibilities.

Sometimes at home after a workout, I would face the high chance of a punishment - that is, if Dad were away on a trip. It might be a bad reference from a teacher, ignominious failure in a end-of-week test, even a bad teacher comment for an essay.

Mom would march me into the sister's room to undress in front of them, the females watching avidly and then steer me to the bed, to offer up my bottom. The shame of this was always acute and always the same, lying under their gaze. After the first few paddles the sisters and cousins- on several occasions, visiting friends of my sisters- would be instructed to hold me down and stretch my legs. Always my response would be cowardly: moans, howls, sobs and pleas for mercy. Every time I would slip into the same shameful infantilism. They would wait for it and when the girls heard me sob, "Mommy...Mommy!" they would snort with derision and mimic my desperate, broken voice.

Then the march out of the bedroom to be positioned somewhere in the house, often with no account taken of possible visitors- friends of my Mom's, bridge parties, drifting teenage girls who had heard there was a sight to be seen with Tommy Gilles punished nude and being forced to stand nude in the hallway or sunroom "with his back to the wall!"

Then one day I was being paddled. Flat on my tummy on my sister's bed. Shoulders pressed down, legs tugged back. I was howling, sobbing. I was begging tearfully for "Mommy" to stop. The girls were laughing.

Dad walked in, home early.

"What's this?"

His masterly baritone asserted itself.

Mom froze, paddle in the air. The girls were wide-mouthed, speechless. That one of my sisters' friends was present- she was holding an ankle- made things look even more cruel and nasty.

I was liberated and allowed to scramble back to my room, T shirt clutched to my midriff, ass reddened, tears on my cheeks.

Later I was to overhear an argument in angry whispers coming from my parents' room.

I was shocked, shamed. At what Dad had seen of my crying. Sobbing about "Mommy." I went to bed, lying on my tummy as always after savage attention from the paddle.

It must have been 10 PM, an owl hooting outside, the house locked down.

My bedroom door suddenly opened.

I stiffened.

It closed again.

I smelt the cologne, warm body odour, hair oil and shoe polish that meant my father.

I sensed he stood over me. In my shame I did not look.

Then he knelt. I heard the creak of his brogues.

He rolled my blanket down.

"Hey, fella. Slip those pyjamas off...atta boy, lemme help you roll 'em down..."

I lifted my bottom, let him take hold of the pyjama waist band.

I felt the night air on my bottom.

I heard him unscrewing a jar.

"Tommy, what happened just now, leeme tell you as your ole Dad, won't happen again. Ever. When you're bad and need it...and there will be times..."

Here I heard him scoop something from the jar.

I felt the mattress sink and creak as he leant into it.

"...you will be spanked by one person..."

I then felt his hand smoothing cold cream on my bottom cheeks.

I came close to fainting with joy.

And love.

"...and Tommy, you know who that person will be?"

I took a long deep breath.

His hands were smoothing the cold cream into my upper thighs where legs met the curve of my bottom. It was deeply, lasciviously beautiful.

"Know who that will be, Tommy?"

My insides had melted into warm, sticky toffee.

"You...

"...Dad."

"That's right, young fella. Your Dad. And I'll do it properly, man-to-man. Know what I mean?"

"Yep."

And I think I did, vaguely.

"Think you'll like that?"

My reply was instant.

"Yes."

He must have massaged my upper thighs and bottom for another 20 minutes, slowly, tenderly. As he smoothed my left bun his thick thumb separated from the rest of his hand...and lodged in my crack. His thumb! It found my hole. Slowly pressed at the entrance. While the rest of his hand moved his thumb lodged there- I could feel his nail pressed into my sphincter.

The hand moved, massaging; the thumb stayed lodged...in my crack; the nail pressed at the hole.

My erection pulsed and throbbed. I had entered a dreamlike state.

Without a whimper or shudder, I luxuriously ejaculated into the sheet. A full, flowing emission. I felt the wetness spread. I feared he would smell it.

He rose and leaving my bottom exposed, rolled back the sheet and blanket.

"You can sleep nude if you like. Fellas sometimes like that."

As he parted he said over his shoulder, "Left the cold cream for you...and some new editions, there on your desk. Might see you at the Y tomorrow. With your buddy Eric. Nice fella, him."

I lay, unable to lift myself.

Then curiosity stirred. I switched on the lamp. Gee! Dad had left a gift. There on the table was the bottle of cold cream and...

I rose from the bed.

Letters?

Photos?

Magazines!

I picked them up. Stared at the covers. Fellas my age. Gym trained or just slim.

A brand new edition of Physique Pictorial.

A fresh Young Adonis.

A mint-new Grecian Guild.

Purchased on his trip from newsstands in some city or other.

Young heroes in black and white, in G-strings or, even better, seen from behind, stark naked, ready to step into my imagination. And obey my directions.

What can a fella amount to, without his Dad?

Only after the darkest valleys can we appreciate the view from the highest peak.