seventh and eighth grade, as our female classmates were starting to “develop” and male hormones were also raging, schoolboys often had wet dreams in bed at night and inflated pants in school during the day.
One time I was called to the blackboard in Spanish class while aroused. I walked bent over at the waist to avoid revealing my erection and then practically buried my dick in the wall at the front of the room.
I suppose in the 21st century, teenage boys are proud to wave their flagpoles in the classroom, but back then we were advised to wear jockstraps every day, to take a lot of cold showers and to stop thinking about breasts. It’s impossible for heterosexual teenage boys not to think about breasts. (See chapter 67.)
Summer times were great for breast watching. At our beach club, the 14-year-old boys in Titty Club would float in the deep end of the pool with diving masks and snorkels, facing the diving board, ogling females who’d dive off the board. When they’d plunge down to the bottom of the pool and quickly reverse direction to swim up to the surface, sometimes their bathing suit tops would pull back and we’d actually spot a NIPPLE.
A few times we got really lucky. Some girls had not tied their bikini tops tight enough before diving and they lost them in the water, and we got to see TWO COMPLETE BREASTS. Our diving masks made them look even bigger.
For a change of pace, the horny divers would swim around the pool to try to spot pubic hairs popping out from teenage girls’ bathing suits, or head for the shower shows.
There were undetectable peepholes under the benches in the individual shower rooms. Whenever a hot female went into a shower room, one of us would go into the adjacent room. Sometimes our view was blocked by a towel, but we saw a lot.
Like anthropologists studying apes in Africa, we gave our subjects nicknames based on their physical characteristics. A woman with oversize areolas came to be known as “Helmet Nipples” and was one of our favorites. So was her young teenage daughter, “Helmet Nipples Junior.” Years earlier, I had played doctor with HNJ and we got naked and wrapped each other with gauze. Later I was her first date.
WRONG “PLAY”
ADOLESCENT MALE SECRET REVEALED
Chapter 16
Not the phonophonopheneloscope
The S.O.B. caught one unfortunate girl chewing gum in school and commanded her to wear the sticky wad on her nose.
Before a much-needed winter vacation in 1959 or 1960, Dolan gave us an assignment to write reports on the phonophonopheneloscope, due on the first school day in January.
About 140 miserable children missed sledding, skating and family trips, and spent their vacations pestering librarians with consistently negative results.
Back at school after New Years, Dolan announced, “I’m sorry kids. I made a mistake. It’s not the phonophoNopheneloscope, it’s the phonophoTopheneloscope.”
We wanted to lynch the bastard!
One student, it must be noted, surmised Dolan’s error and reported on the proper device.
Phyllis later skipped a grade, earned a PhD degree at Harvard, and became a professor at Yale.
Chapter 17
Irreparable typing, irremediable reading, and an offer I couldn’t refuse
Inherent to the decision-making process was exposure to basic training in three directions.
To try out a life in house-building, factory-working or car-fixing, we (boys only, of course) had brief courses in mechanical drawing, printing and woodworking. Our white-collar life sample was a short “Language Exploratory” course in an arbitrarily selected foreign language. After studying Spanish, French or Latin for five months, we were supposed to know if we wanted to go to college. For the other five months of the school year, all eighth-graders had typing class, to prepare for a career in an office or beauty salon or maybe the military. It was confusing.
I had started sort-of typing around age ten, on a very old Remington with sticky keys that my father had brought home from his office. Like most beginners, I began with the basic index-finger hunt-and-peck method, and had advanced to pretty quick two-fingered typing when I was given my very own Royal portable at age 13.
By the time we started “Business Exploratory” (a.k.a. typing), I was a very fast six-fingered typist. I didn’t always use the same fingers for the same keys, and had no idea where the “home position” was or why it existed, but I typed well, and seldom peeked at the keys.
My teacher (a nice lady whose name is lost to history) was faced with a major dilemma. Even though I did everything the wrong way, on the first day of class I was already typing faster and more accurately than my class was expected to type after five months of instruction.
To make it worse, the teacher knew that if she tried to force me to type correctly, I would inevitably type more slowly, make more errors and maybe sprain a wrist. Maybe even two wrists.
Since she recognized that I was heading for college, not a career in business or hairdressing, and would probably never need to touch a keyboard after eighth grade (HAH!), my enlightened teacher gave me an easy “A,” and let me sit and read a book propped up on the typewriter until the course ended.
Four years later, in my senior year in high school, I was again misplaced. But unfortunately this time the teacher was not nearly so enlightened.
Despite my superstar reading status, in September of 1963 I inexplicably found myself in a special education remedial reading class surrounded by kids who could be charitably described as “slow learners.”
Less charitably, their intellectual superiors called
