I was the last kid in my neighborhood to learn to ride a bike. All the other kids had them, and I never even got the chance to try one out
One humid summer day when I was seven years old, I wandered around the block looking for something to do, or someone to play with. Roger and Skippy were away somewhere. I heard the the hideous sound of leather striking flesh accompanied by heart rending screams when I walked by Robbie's bedroom window. I knew he wasn't going to come out and play for awhile.
Then, I saw Rogers bike lying on my own frount lawn. He must have left iot there from the day before.
I walked over to it, picked it up, jumped onto the seat and rode off. It was great, no training wheels, no falling down, just pedal and go. Since it was a hot summer day, I was wearing an old bathing suit and nothing else. The air felt cool and windy against my flesh. Life was good, but then the rain began to fall, only a few drops at first, but more and more.
I was a very conscienscious child, and it occurred to me that the rain might be harmful on the bicycle, so I rode it back to Roger's house and parked it in the carport.
Red White, Roger's adoptive father, stuck his head out the kitchen door. This man was even stranger than his name. He was always looking at us boys and smiling, almost never speaking, just grinning at us all the time. This day was a rare exception for him. He spoke to me.
"What are you up to there, trying to steal a bicycle?"
"No. I'm just bringin' it back 'cause it's about to rain."
"Why do you care if it rains? You're dressed for it."
"But the bike isn't. It'll get all rusty."
"Don't worry about the bicycle. It's painted. It won't rust. Would you like to come in the house and play for a little while?"
"Are Roger and Skippy home?"
"No. They'll be gone for the whole weekend, but Cookie and I are home. You can play with us."
"No. I gotta get home before it starts to rain hard."
"Are you afraid Cookie will give you a whipping?"
"No. I just gotta get home. That's all."
"Your afraid of Cookie's strap, you little scaredy cat. Go ahead and run home to your mommy and see what she says. She'll only send you straight back here."
It would be a full length book in itself to try to explain why I had no notion of what this crazy man was talking about. In fact, I was considered a real strange boy in the community, because it was well known that I could be stripped and whipped to blisters, but ten minutes later I would have no memory of the event at all. People thought I was crazy. People thought I had the world's greatest ability to deny reality to myself. They thought I was autistic or something. The truth was, the pain screaming and crying would cause me to have a seizure, and the fit would destroy my memory of events immediately before and after the crisis. Forty years later, lying in a Marseille hospital being treated for epilepsy, hundreds of these terrible memories came flooding back to me, overwhelming me with this life of serious abuse that I never knew I had.
The weird thing about it all, was it made each whipping I ever received, the first and only one I ever experienced in my life, and I experienced every painful second of it, since the seizure rarely began until the beating was over.
Getting back to the story, The rain began to fall pretty hard, and I was wet by the time I reached my house. I entered by the kitchen door, and found my mother waiting for me. She had just gotten off the telephone and looked at me with a strange expression, scolding, loving, sympathetic. I never really did understand her position in all of this abuse I went through except that she had gone through an old English up-bringing and knew what a cane on the buttocks felt like. She believed that discipline would do me good, even cure my autism.
"Did you take Roger's bicycle without permission?"
"No."
"What do you mean 'no'? Red saw you returning it."
"Yeah, I rode it, but Roger musta left it here yesterday, 'cause it was in our yard." ,p>"Don't you know that it's stealing to take something without permission? Now, you march right back over to Cookie's house. She's going to give you a good whipping for this."
"But it's rainin' out. I'll get all wet."
"I don't care. You march right back over there, right now. Besides you're wearing a bathing suit. The rain isn't going to hurt you. It's the whipping you should worry about."
I walked back out into the downpour still more concerned about the water hitting me in the face and blinding my eyes than I was about what lay ahead. Nobody ever whipped me, I thought. I'd kinda like to find out what it feels like.
When I arrived at Cookie's for something like the fiftieth whipping I was given there, I had to sit on the step inside the kitchen door and take my sneakers and socks off, while Cookie went to fetch a towel. When she came back, she put my footwear into the dryer and turned it on. Then she sat down in a kitchen chair.
"Come here hon. Let aunt Cookie dry you off."
I walked over and llet her rub my body and legs with the towel, but I started to complain when she began to peal my bathings suit off.
"Now hon, I'm not going to let you into my house with a wet bathing suit on. Besides, you know I need to have your bottom bare before I use the strap.
Again, I was a little bit amazed by all of this, because I didn't know anything about the strap at all, but Cookie massaged my bottom, stroked my seven year old penis a little bit and calmed me down.
When I was dry, she took me by the hand and led me into the living room where Red was lounging in an easy chair. We were walking right by him heading toward the bedrooms when he asked us to stop a minute.
"Let me have a look at him. Hold up his arms so I can see. Now turn him around and let me see his little white bottom." Then he reached over and pinched my whole left cheek between his heavy fingers and said, "I told you Cookie was going to give you a good whipping didn't I?" Then he punctuated his statement with a hard slap on my full bottom.
"Do you want to hold him while I give him the strap," Cookie asked.
"No. Just let me see him again when you're finished."
Cookie led me by the hand into Roger and Skippy's bedroom, made me lie on the bed with a pillow under my little penis. Placing the pillow gave her a chance to feel the schoolboy flesh that came erect from time to time, though I was still a decade away from understanding why it did.
Once positioned, she let the leather fly without the slightest concern for my pleading, my screaming or my hot tears that blinded me worse than any rain storm ever could. I don't have any idea of how many times I was smacked. I don't remember anything more until I was brought out to stand before Red again, to be fondled by a man this time.
"Cookie gave you a real good whipping today didn't she."
"She did not."
How did I ever explain to myself why I was standing in the middle of a neighbor's house without a thread of clothing on and numb with shock and pain if what Red was saying wasn't true? I don't know, but a seizure had clearly come and gone, and I scarcely had any idea of where I was.
"It wasn't good enough for you, ha. Well I'll just have to give you some more then."
He pulled me into his lap and started slapping my bottom with his bare hand, and the pain sent me into confusion again, so much confusion in fact that later I felt warm and and cozy in my newly dried and warm sneakers and socks. But when I pulled my bathing suit up around my dreadful bruise, I began to cry.
"Does the waiste band hurt your bottom, hon?"
"No."
"Then what are you crying about?"
"My bathing suit's still wet."