Title: "That Was Then, But This?" part 5. Subtitle: "Mark--The Early Years. Date: October 19, 2000 Contact: Ritch Christopher at ballmusic69@hotmail.com
I had so much e-mail response to "That Was Then", people asked me to write "more" of the story. So with your indulgence I will start at the "very beginning, a very good place to start".
This is a gay youth story containing explicit language and graphic sex. If you are under 18 or offended by such, please exit now.
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THE EARLY, EARLY YEARS:
You can say I'm crazy, but I can recall being a baby. We were too poor to have a baby bed. I was sometimes laid in a wooden tomato basket, you know, the kind with the curved handle that you get at the farmer's market? I was cramped and didn't quite fit. My head would get sore from the soft wooden outer rim. I had to be a baby to remember this. How else would I have known about the snugness of this make-shift crib?
My mother was 16 when she quit high school to run off to Memphis and marry my dad, who was 11 years older than she. They were both wild for their years My dad was a great dancer and was popular with all the girls. My mother thought she had won the prize off the top shelf, when she was the "lucky" one to marry him. She lived in a two bedroom old, A-frame, with a brother, two years younger, a sister, four years younger and her mother and father.
Her mother wound bobbins in a hosiery mill and her father washed produce in a small grocery store. There wasn't much money, but they were all happy. If you never had anything, you never missed what you didn't have. Mother was smart...should have finished high school, but when she had the chance to make the break with my dad who was making good money at an oil refinery in Memphis. He set one ground rule for her before he married her...absolutely, NO CHILDREN. She didn't want any either, so the terms were accepted.
They frolicked in marital bliss for four years, before my mother missed her period. Doug, my father, had a quick temper, and had been known to "knock" people around. I'm told when he found out my mother was pregnant, he beat her in the face, in a rage. So she went back to Atlanta, to live with her mom and dad, until I was born. She was now 20 years old, still liked to party, and thought if and when she had her baby, she could dump him off with her parents and go back to the good times with Doug. But something happened, as is so typical in lower-class Southern families. Mother got religion, or rather, she had found God. When I was born, so I'm told, she laid me on the altar of the Baptist church and dedicated my life to God's service, thanking HIM, for letting me be born healthy and normal.
The magnetism she felt from Doug, was greater than the allure of the Almighty, because, sure enough, she left me with her mom and dad to return to Memphis. My grandparents soon became my parents until I was three years old. My grandmother loved to sew. She would take orders for dresses from the neighbors, to make extra money. She would design aprons and pinafores to sell at the local thrift shop. And with the remnants of material, she would make little girls' clothes and would some time dress me in a pinafore. She even bought a pair of little Mary Jane black shoes, with a buckled strap, and to complete my ensemble, little yellow and pink rayon panties. Not only was I the only grandson, I was fast becoming the only granddaughter.
When mother came home, she wasn't at all shocked. She thought I looked adorable in my Shirley Temple outfits. I mean, no harm could possibly being done, because I was living my life for God.
My grandmother would play hymns, by ear, on the old Story & Clark upright piano. My aunt, who wanted to be an opera singer, would sing popular songs to me. The first song she taught me to sing, at the age of two was, "Iddy Biddy Fishes" and later I would sing, "Boos in the Night, Mama". I could even pick the tune out on the piano with one finger. By age three, I could play "chords". It was then, that it was decided I should take piano lessons from Mrs. Gaither, the preacher's wife, for fifty cents for a half hour. So I took my first lesson when I was three. By the time I was six, I was playing Chopin Etudes. Yes, God's Favorite was a musical child prodigy.
With all my sense of recall, I don't remember ever seeing my dad until I was five years old. I could feel he didn't like me. I remember on his first visit, not knowing anything about kids, especially his own, he took me down to the Western Auto Store toy department and bough t me a wind-up toy...a small metal upright piano with L'il Abner moving as if he were playing it. Daisy Mae would dance. And Mammy and Pappy Yokum would sway side to side sitting on top of the upright.
We brought the toy home and I was sitting on the sidewalk with my wondrous gift. My mother, her sister and her boyfriend had on bathing suits and had turned the old garden hose on, to have a water fight. I, was sprayed by the hose accidentally and had to be taken inside immediately for dry clothes. After all, what would the neighbors think of my sitting outside in wet clothing. All dry now, I returned outside to play with my mechanical "L'il Abner". I turned the key, round and round, until I heard "click". It broke. I had wound it too tight! I started crying. At about the same time, Doug came toward me and asked. "What's wrong?"
He picked up the toy to examine it. He knew it was broken and I had committed something unforgivable.
"You careless little bastard", he yelled.
With one svelte-swoop, he swung and slapped me hard, across the right cheek of my face. I had never even been punished before, let alone, spanked. My mother screamed at him, while at the same time, my grandparents rushed out of the house to scoop me up and run to safety.
"Doug, what are you doing? He's just a child, a five-year old child!" she hollered.
He turned around quickly, to face her, back-handing her across the face. A battle erupted. They were all screaming and fighting. I sat on the top concrete step in disbelief. It almost made me forget the fiery sting I was feeling from his slap. This was the first time I was ever hit by my dad. E Pluribus Unum...it was the first on many I would get from him until I was fifteen years old. I had no idea, what life had in store for me.
I could enumerate the beatings. One each Sunday...EVERY Sunday, never, really understanding the reasons. When his mother, my Jehovah's Witness, "Watchtower", toting grandmother, whom I think, never bathed, would come by for a visit, it was always, "Come on, Mark, play your new piece on the piano for grandma." I shrunk. He was trying to "show me off"? The son, he resented, and loved to take his violence upon??
On Sundays, he would sit me on the piano bench, not facing the upright, and say, "Now, just sit there!". For what? I didn't know. I would look at him in a puzzled, little face, not saying a word. Then, he would turn and shout, "Don't sass me!!"
"I didn't sass you, daddy, I haven't said a word."
On that he would say, "All right, that does it!!", and began to remover the belt from his trousers. The blows were sharp and swift, striking me, all over my body...not just my buttocks, but the arms, face, head...everywhere. I knew what would follow...I would be rescued by my mother, aunt, or grandparents. There would be a big war...scream ing, shouting, hitting. I remember his rage was so great, one time in the middle of a battle, he reached for the fire poker leaning up against the grate, and was going to kill my grandfather. I, also, remember when threw a softball and hit me in the face. And then, the Sunday, when he kicked me across the room, landing underneath the dining room table, resulting in a kidney infection and a coma, I would lie in for six weeks . At least, I wouldn't be beaten in a deep sleep, I presume, I never kne w. Sometimes, the police would come, but charges were never filed. My mother didn't want to lose her "prince".
In spite of this "wonderful" home life. My escape was my music, my school, and my 12 year old cousin, Teddy, who lived two streets, over. Teddy, taught me how to play "Army", "Doctor", and finally, "Army Doctor ".
He had an old canvas tent, pitched in his back yard, where we would play. He was usually the one who got "shot" and I was the doctor to "take out the bullet" and perform "surgery". That meant, he would hav e to take off all his clothes to deter "infection". He loved getting nak ed in front of me. He had over-matured for a 12-year old. He had a mass of chest hair and a big black bush, embracing an almost 6 inch erection.
"Where did they get you?"
Always in the same place...
"In the stomach, just below the navel. You better operate, quick!"
I would dig into the doctor bag and retrieve the necessary, "bullet-moving" implements and bandages....Lots and lots of guaze and bandages.
His cock was big and lying across his belly.
"you'll have to move that, to get to the wound", he moaned.
I would take a minimum number of fingers to touch and move it. I kne w that God's Favorite would be punished for this sin, he was about to commit. I would put two fingers around his excited pee-pee and it would jump out of my hand. I didn't know they could move by themselves. Every time I would slide it over to get to the "gunshot", it would plop back o ver, in the original position. The more I moved it, the harder it got. I was eight, he was almost thirteen. I didn't know what I was doing. Ted dy's was the only penis, I had ever really seen. I had seen my grandfath er peeing, from time to time, but then, that's what they were there, for , to pee with. But Teddy's was different. It was magical and could do tr icks. It could stand straight up, jump, move from side to side, all by itself.
"Go ahead, play with it. I do."
"No, my mother will get mad, it I do."
"No, she won't. Here, let me show you what to do."
With that, he reached down, grabbed it in one hand and began, and up and down motion. It was hot in the tent and he had sweat pouring out of all pores of his body. He continued until I heard, "Watch!". He had started to pee on his stomach, not yellow, but white...and the pee was thick. It landed in little splotches all over his chest and belly.
"Gosh, what did you just do?"
I had to get the poisonous infection out of my body, before the bull et killed me.
"Boy, you sure know how to play for real. I could never do that." That was the only time he ever came in our play sessions. I would never go that far again. I mean, what would my mother say, if she knew? Was th is a sin? Would God punish me? I would file this deep in my memory bank and forget about it until I experienced my first orgasm six years later. By then, I was so thrilled by my "private" moment, I didn't even remembe r what Teddy had showed me, years before.
Then when I was 10, there was Danny, a thirteen year old "hero" of m ine, who lived across the street from me. He loved to play with toy cars and used his whole side yard for a thoroughfare. He had pulled up grass and made tiny highways to turn and twist for miles and miles. By 13, Dan ny was now interested in girls. He had strange things happening to his body. His penis would now get erect, and he too, liked to show me what he was hiding under his white, Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs. One day, he was giving me an exhibition, he reached over and pulled down my shorts and briefs and walked me into a corner and pressed his hard-on into my tiny crotch. He would grind and grind until I would get my tiny erection, I always got in the movie houses, looking at John Derek, or Sabu. He pulled me close, still pressing and writhing and said, "Gosh, it you were only a girl."
I thought about that a lot, for a long, long, time. I recalled the ruffled pinafores and rayon panties, I, at one time, had been forced to wear."If I were only a girl"? Why did this strike me? Why had this, an experience with a 13-year-old BOY, feel so good. Why did the pretty men in the movies get my tiny penis hard? Someday, this pieces of this puzzl e will all fit together, but not now.
I went through grammar school with straight A's. My, grandfather, who m I loved more than life, died from leukemia (whatever that was) when I was eight. This left a void of men in my life. I couldn't look up to Dou g, the monster, for a male role model, and Andy, mother's brother had jo ined the army, making his "escape" and was stationed somewhere, "over there" in Germany. I assumed that that was one the other side of McClellan's Ridge. My piano studies were going great! I had auditioned with the symphony and won first place and the opportunity to play, Gershwin's, "Rhapsody In Blue" with full orchestra, when I was 14, my last year in junior high school. I was invited to study with the great, Marie Barnard Ward, at the Conservatory, since I now had surpassed all that Mrs. Gaither could teach me.
Studying with Ms. Ward was a tremendous honor, but beyond that, the student who had the lesson in front of me was the most beautiful guy I had ever seen. His name was Jeff. He was three years older, and almost played piano as well as I. Later, I will tell you how Jeff introduced me to jazz and to a not-to-be-believed, love affair.
Lance had become my life, by the time we graduated from junior high. He was always the one I could run to, to get away from my over-loving mother and my dad, who had continued his beatings throughout the years. I had never told anyone about the conditions at home, not even Lance. No one outside my family knew. My Aunt Sue, mother's sister, had continu ed her music and was now studying opera, also at the conservatory. She h ad helped me out with "extra" money and have hidden me several times, so that Doug couldn't find me. I made straight A's through junior high, win ning top honors in scholastics and music. I managed to survive gym class , coming up with the greatest lies why I couldn't or shouldn't take a shower with the boys. However, I did want to see Walter Briggs, naked... and David Crabtree, Jerry Duke,...all of them I guess.
But no, my thoughts always returned to my best friend since the firs t grade, Lance, which brings up to the point where this story stared in Part one.
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Jumping forward, after the high school trauma with Lance. I spent mo re and more time with Dan Halpern, my TV star and his friends, but I was about to get to know Jeff.
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(to be continued)