My brother is a biker. Not a very good one. Bikers should have names like Max or Butch. My brother's name is Reggie. He is the kind of Reggie you expect to see hunched over books at the library:thin, awkward, hopelessly myopic. I always wondered why the Hell's Punishers accepted him as one of their gang. Not that they were the most ferocious of motorcycle gangs. Most of them were just average guys, with average jobs, who thought they could relive their wild youth by tearing up dirt roads on their Harleys over the weekends. Come Monday, they were once again drawing up contracts, pulling teeth, selling weedeaters, or whatever else it was that had taken the place of their youthful passions.
I'm the one who should be riding a Harley. I'd look good with my
ass stretched tight on the leather seat;with a black
leather vest to show off my triceps and my tattoo. Admittedly, it's a
small tattoo. You'd have to get really close to see what it says,
close enough for me to feel your breath on my shoulder. Small as it
is, though, Dad nearly fainted when he saw it last spring, when I
peeled off my shirt to check out the rays in the back yard. "Boy," he
said, in a way that made it clear he had a lot more to say. I was
feeling _c_o_c_k_y at the time, having just brought home a good report
card from high school, and interupted him by saying, "That's what it
says all right!"
"Go to your room."
"But Dad!"
"Now."
When I'd waited an hour for Dad to appear at my bedroom door, I knew I was in for it. He was very systematic about these things. The weekly chores that Reg and I were assigned to do were charted on graph paper and magnetically pasted to the refrigerator door. Our possessions were as well organized as our chores. Everything had its place. Our names were attached, via the magic of sticky name plates, to everything we used in the house:toothbrushes, combs, coffee mugs. We even had our own coat hangers in the front hall closet. In Dad's highly ordered world, an hour of waiting for punishment meant only one thing:the strap. Had he appeared after I'd been in my room only fifty-nine minutes, I could count on a thorough hand spanking. Anything less than thirty minutes would mean a lecture.
As I waited, my eyes shot from my bedside clock (mine because my name was taped over the top) to my strap and back to my clock. Then back again. My strap hung from a hook screwed into my bedroom door. Well-oiled thick black leather. Dad had bought it at an auction. A belt originally, it had been designed to hold up the trousers of some fat general in the Second World War. Dad had folded it over and glued the two halves together, leaving the buckle at one end as a means of hanging it from a hook. One of my chores the previous week had been to oil my strap and polish its buckle. Now, as the sun shone through the window upon it, the buckle glinted as though it were winking at me.
I shuddered and
glanced back at my clock. An hour and twenty-five minutes had
passed. If he waited another five minutes, it would mean I'd be
strapped, then grounded for the rest of the week. Four minutes
passed. Then the door opened. In he strode, six feet of welt-raising
hell. As he shut the door and took down my strap, I thought, "If it's
my strap, what gives him the right to touch it?" But I didn't say
this, of course. I said, "I'm sorry, Dad."
He said nothing. He
just stood there, glaring at me, slapping the strap lightly on his
hand, as though he hadn't yet decided what shade of red he was going
to paint my ass.
Then he did something completely wrong,
totally unexpected, not by-the-book. He should have replied, "And for
what are you sorry, young man?"
Then I would have stood before him
and recited a detailed description of my bad behavior, sincerely
apologized, and promised never to repeat my mistakes. I had had almost
an hour and a half to rehearse my speech, and it was one of my finest,
ending with the standard, "I'm sorry I sassed you, Dad, and I'm sorry
Idid something(substitute 'got a tattoo') without your
permission. It won't ever happen again, sir." This last bit was his
cue to tell me to remove my clothes. From force of habit, my hands
were already poised on my shirt buttons before I had even begun my
speech. But instead of following the system, he surprised me by
tossing my strap onto my bed and walking back out the door.
He strode across the hall and into Reggie's room, reached around the door, and returned with Reggie's strap. I didn't see Reggie, but I knew he was in his room, studying. He certainly would have stuck his nose deeply into his book's crack when he saw Dad take down his strap. My brother is two years older than me and two years ahead of me in everything. I'm in grade ten, he's in grade twelve. The year he graduated to the wooden spoon, I still had two years of hand spanking before me. I inherited the wooden spoon when he went on to hair brush. We had already outgrown a succession of paddles, when Reggie was introduced to the strap. Last year, on the day before his birthday, he had received a new strap from Dad. (Not being a heartless man, Dad would never have given it to him on his birthday. One day early was still close enough to be in keeping with a systematic upbringing.) Reggie had graduated to a triple-ply leather, wood-handled punishment strap. It made my strap look puny, like a dinky toy beside his Harley.
"Since you are old enough to
get a tattoo," Dad was saying, "You are old enough to suffer a mature
punishment."
I tried to focus on my speech. "I'm really s..."
"And we'll dispense with your prepared speech, too," he shot
back. "Strip."
My clothes were discarded instantly - a world's
record in speed-stripping. I almost flung my desk chair to the middle
of the room, hoping that my eagerness to obey might afford me some
clemency. I would have licked his shoes, if I thought it meant one
less lick from the strap. I bent over the back of the chair, spread my
legs and pushed my butt out, a repentent sinner showing his
willingness to take his punishment.
My hopes for an easing of my
sentence were dashed, however, when he said, "This is going to hurt me
more than it's going to hurt you, son." I knew all too well what that
meant:he was going to whip the hell out of
me. Before I could stop it, a moan escaped from my tight throat. That
was a mistake.
"I'll give you something to moan about!" he
growled.
Reggie's strap landed, engulfing me with searing pain,
and I yelled, "I'm sorry, Dad!"
"Not as sorry as you're going to
be, young man."
Reggie's first session with his new strap had taken place about a month after his birthday. From my bedroom, I had heard his squeals and sobs, piercing our two thick doors as loudly as if he had been bent over beside me. I knew Reggie had a high tolerance for the strap. During the years in which my strap bore his name (my strap was a hand-me-down, like most of my things), I had heard him yelp only a couple of times out of the dozens of strappings he had received at Dad's hands. It was, therefore, with some amazement that I listened to his terrified squawking under the sting of his new strap. Try as I might, I couldn't imagine anything that stung worse than my own strap in Dad's hands.
Now, as Reggie's new strap tore into my ass, I had no need for imagination. It hurt. It stung, burned, bit, throbbed, ached. For a moment, it even itched. Dad tore a strip off me like I was a piece of furniture that needed refinishing. I wailed, hopped, and begged for mercy. Dad was having none of that, though. He continued, full force, until I was sure he had taken off at least one layer of skin, if not the meat itself.
Then he stopped. I slumped over the chair, sobbing almost more
from the relief of knowing it was over than from the pain. But it
wasn't over. I yelped as his hand grabbed a stinging cheek and pulled
it to the side. He had aparently seen a white patch of unblistered
skin between my cheeks, and he whipped the strap into the crack of my
ass in a frenzy of fast, furious licks. Then he moved to the other
side, stretched that cheek away from it's partner, and whipped at my
hole as if he were an expressionist painter tossing vermilion onto a
canvas. Then it was over. I barely heard him over the roar of my own
blubbering as he said, "Now stand up."
I turned to face him, but
somehow couldn't get my eyes to lift any higher than his chest.
He
pried my chin up with the end of the strap, saying, "Look at me when
I'm talking to you, boy."
I forced my eyes up to his, and saw him
as though through a glass of 7-up. "Yes, sir."
"I want you to
remember this, son. This strap will one day be yours." He tapped my
tattoo with the strap. "Before you pull another stunt like this again,
I want you to think about that."
I nodded, sobbing afresh, unable
to speak. He wrapped his arms around me and let me cry it out against
his chest. When my bawling had eased to sporadic shuddering gasps, he
told me to get to bed. He would be back in precisely one hour to rub
ointment on my butt.
I lay face down on my bed and listened, as he replaced my strap on its hook and left the room. As soon as the door had shut, I reached for my cheeks. They were brazier-hot and as stiff as old leather;their usual smooth contour had swollen to a lumpy mass, as though they had been carved from driftwood. I worried that they might never be the same again.
After a while, the door opened. I lifted my face
from my pillow and saw Reggie sneak into the room. He sat on my bed,
gazed at my ass, and let out a low whistle. "You sure got it bad," he
said. He sounded sincere. Usually, when one of us got the strap, the
other would leap at the first opportunity to snigger. "I'm sorry," he
added.
I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that, so I replied,
"It's not your fault."
"Well, it was my strap."
"I guess
so."
He ran his hand lightly over my welts. I suppose when I
sighed, he took it as a sign of encouragement, and began stroking my
ass. Normally, I would have slugged him for touching my property, but
it felt good, and I excused myself by reasoning that my ass didn't
really belong to me because it didn't have my little label on it. At
the moment, it was signed with the marks of his strap, so he probably
had a right to carress it all he liked.
"Are you grounded?" he
asked.
"No."
"Listen...if you like..." He was using the tone
of recompense, like he was about to make amends. I was all ears. "I've
been talking to the guys in the motorcycle club. They said it's okay
if I bring you along with me this Saturday. Would you like that?"
Would I? As much as I'd like to win the lottery, or get chosen to man
the first shuttle to mars!
"Maybe," I said, hoping I hadn't
overdone the poutiness in my voice.
"Oh, come on! You'll have
fun."
I thought, "Yes! The lovely sound of wheedling." Out loud I
said, "Well...okay."
"Great!" he exclaimed, slapping me on the
ass. I hissed from the searing sting. "Oh! Sorry," he said. "I wasn't
thinking."
"You'd better get out of here before Dad comes back," I
said, my voice hushed and breathy, reeking of warm concern for his
safety, my mind worrying that if he stayed too long we might argue
about something, and he'd take back the offer.
"Okay," he
replied. "Hope you can sit on a bike by Saturday."
I smiled at
him. "Don't worry. I'll sit on it."
After he left, I felt my bum again. Five days to heal. When Dad entered with the bottle of ointment, sat by me on the bed and slathered a handful into the crack of my ass, I thought, "This stuff better work fast!"