These are a boy's milestones: turning sixteen, being allowed on a date, being circumcised, being spanked by his father. In the year that I was to be eighteen, I had celebrated three of these four. But not one to sit on my laurels, I had added another milestone to the list - getting spanked by my oldest stepbrother.
My First Brother Mishka came home, worldly-wise and fabulously tanned, after a long stint away on business, and knew he had walked into a domestic crisis.
I should have been ecstatic to see him, but instead I heard the unmistakable death knell. However, the pain I was feeling all over my body was the more regnant and soon relegated the former to background noise. I extended my arms out to my oldest stepbrother, shamelessly trying to elicit sympathy from him. First Brother took me in his arms immediately, sinking to his knees where I was sitting on my haunches. He quietly hugged me for a long time while I balled out my eyes. First Brother had almost always taken my side in any conflict.
"What's going on?" he turned to implore my nurse.
I eyed Nurse through a miasma of hopelessness. Just as I had thought she would, she gladly betrayed my best-kept secret to my best-loved stepbrother. She held up the bottle of morphine in her hand.
"This!" she squeaked. "He's been at arms with me all morning for this!"
First Brother gently pulled away from me and took the bottle from Nurse. He examined the label for a while.
"What's this, Han?" he asked me now. He appeared to be fuming.
"I need it," I bawled, feeling ashamed of myself. I had arched myself onto the floor, sobbing into the carpet. The fibers soon formed a layer of furze on my tongue.
"He's going to become a hard-core addict," Nurse warned, "if he continues this way."
"How much does the doctor say is his daily dosage?" First Brother queried Nurse.
"He's not supposed to be taking it any longer," came the banshee reply. "He's not in pain anymore. It's been three months since the accident. Han's fully recovered."
"I'm not! I'm not!" I heard myself protesting. "What do you know?"
For indeed, what did Nurse, or anybody else, know? She wasn't the one who had been asleep in the bus and thrown out its exit when it collided into a trailer, and then to wake up in hospital after a three-week coma. She wasn't the one who had had to re-live the ordeal every time she closed her eyes to sleep.
But this is the prosaic of tragic soap operas, and I do not like to be tiresomely complaining.
My stepbrother asked me now how much morphine I had taken today. I answered honestly that I didn't know. How could I know? I didn't even know what day today was, I said.
First Brother dashed the pernicious bottle against the wall, startling me. It fell to the floor with a thud and rolled into a corner. I wanted to run after and retrieve it.
"I devote my entire life," First Brother scolded me, "trying to get our streets cleaned of ....this, and I come home to find my own baby brother ...."
My usually articulate stepbrother left his statements trailing and his voice was shaking, a sign that he must be losing control. But I understood his accusation. I also understood the hurt in his face.
I felt my arms suddenly held up and I was yanked to my feet. First Brother said we were going to pay our Cousin Johan a visit immediately.
I protested all the way to the hospital.
My stepbrother played Devil's Advocate by informing Cousin Johan that I was in need of detoxification. I was put on the examination table and stripped of my outer garments. Very soon, Johan had my knickers rolled down to my knees to continue his examination. Having ascertained that I was near overdose Johan tore off my knickers completely and suddenly there was a flurry of activity around me. Embarrassed to be exposed to my cousin and his nurses, I turned over to my side and curled myself up. I covered my genitals with my palms. No one had seen it appropriate to cover me with a gown when for half an hour I heard machines and apparatuses on casters being wheeled about the waxed floor.
I was already in the right posture for a stomach pump. I felt Johan lubricate my anus lightly and the enema nozzle inserted up my hole. I felt the liquid rush inside me, and the pure sensation of the discomfort its deeply cleansing my bowels gave me. Johan had also inserted a tube down my esophagus and so I was ejaculating from both my throat and anus. I wanted to die.
Later, when we were back at home, First Brother put me to bed in tears. I could not believe my stepbrother who loved me most in the family would subject me to such public humiliation and shame, and now he had chosen to keep me almost naked except for my white boy-knickers.
"It's going to be cold turkey, baby brother," he explained, "and it's going to be _f_u_c_k_ing painful, worse than what you were put through at the hospital. But if you cooperate, in less than a week, you won't want to touch the stuff again. It's a good thing you haven't started mainlining yet. But if you choose to be difficult, you'll just be prolonging the suffering for yourself. Should you try anything, escape this chamber, and I do mean stray even an inch from the perimeters of this chamber, or touch a single drug, I'll have your underwear pulled down to your ankles for the spanking of your life."
Now that was a sobering thought. I stopped my puerile wailing and argued insolently: "You're a lousy locum tenens for Father, Mishka. You can't spank me. You have no right. You aren't even here much ...."
That proved to be my first mistake. My knickers disappeared from my hips before I was allowed to finish my disrespectful demurral, and I was left exposed to my stepbrother once more.
First Brother turned me over his laps, my nude bottom pinioned beneath his hands.
"In Father's absence, I am the master of the house. I am in charge," he spelled out slowly, reminding me of his rank and birthright.
Following that, he went on to administer to my naked bottom a taste of what he meant to be in charge of me now.
WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!
First Brother swatted my bottom with his bare hand turning my meaty undersides, where my creases separated my cheeks from my thighs, into a flaming hot plate. I succumbed to tears quickly but still oscitant and debilitated by my enema, I submitted to my longing for sleep just as quickly.
I didn't know how long I had been sleeping but I woke up surrounded by the blind darkness. I was desperate and disoriented. I had no location bearings or neoteric memory. All I had was a desperate need for a quick fix. I hollered from fear of the dark and the pain I was feeling.
Lights suddenly flooded my little chamber. I was on the floor slithering to the bathroom. I was barely conscious of the halogen light or of First Brother towering over me, watching me. I reached the bathroom and found the medicine cabinet, but my hands were shaking on the knob. I could not get the door to open. I pounded my fists on the door when I realized the treachery of its being sealed to me.
"No!" I cried, sinking to my knees. "No."
First Brother picked me up and restored me to my bed. I felt his arms wrapped around me while I shook and trembled, and cold sweat spewed out of all my pores. I fell asleep wishing once more that death would just embrace me kindly.
When I was awake feeling abstemious and intemperate the next day, First Brother confiscated the bed from me. I was confused as to why he did that. He stood me in my knickers, sweaty and sticking to my crotch and bottom uncomfortably, before him. He studied me and then informed me of my escapade in the night. I had an archaeological flashback when the death knell sounded again to signal my fate and then I lost my knickers for the second time in my stepbrother's hands.
First Brother stood up and secured one heavy foot on the edge of my bed. He made me climb over his singular raised knee via the bed as springboard. With my body balanced like a teeter-totter on the fulcrum of his one knee, my hands dangling and my feet finding no foothold, I felt very dizzy. Mishka anchored my body with an arm around my shoulder blades and then began the assault.
SWAT! SWAT! SWAT! SWAT! SWAT! SWAT! SWAT!
At the end of the fifty swats, I slid off First Brother's knee and landed safely on the bed. He let me bawl into the sheets while he went away to run the bath.
In the next hour, First Brother bathed me in the tub. I was in heaven. I had missed him so much. My stepbrother had his work and his own personal affairs now. I had stopped being the center of his universe since he made his societal debut and discovered the milieu of _s_e_x_ual opportunities offered to him by the scores of handsome men and women of the village. But he was here now, on a mercy errand to ease my transition out of moral turpitude.
The philanthropic soul now projected his tender emotions through lovingly scrubbing my knees and elbows. He sponged my back and the V of my groin attentively. This was such a treat that I was made all the more aware of its transience. My bath was indeed sadly all over too soon when First Brother gave me a final gentle rinse of my anus and genitals with a wash cloth he had soaked with Lactacyd.
Afterwards, First Brother handed me clean knickers to wear. I was putting them on about the same time that my nurse was delivering us a lunch tray. First Brother simultaneously fed me and himself, but I threw up almost every bite. It was not on purpose so I was spared a spanking this time.
In the coming two nights, I went through the withdrawal symptoms that were necessary for my rehabilitation. My body would shiver badly and so First Brother would transform it into a warm hearth with a swaddling of blankets. But I would start to perspire so violently that I would inadvertently kick away the coarse canopies that had me mummified.
It was on the second night that I saw tongues of fire. I awoke screaming and then bolted fearfully from the bed, forging through the flaming tongues to reach the door. I found it barricaded.
"_d_a_m_n_ you, Mishka," I sobbed, and lunged my body at my stepbrother. I vented my fear and rage on his chest, _d_a_m_n_ing him and his superlative surveillance of me over and over again.
For this, I lost my knickers once again. First Brother had me stretched out across his knees on the floor. He left my knickers around my knees to stymie my kicking legs.
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
My stepbrother delivered fifty blows to my bottom, keeping desultory time with my screams.
"It hurts, Mishka!" I sobbed. "It hurts!"
"It's supposed to," First Brother replied. "Then you'll remember to cooperate. I warned you before."
But First Brother had not understood that I was talking about the fiery tongues that were lapping at my body all night. I fell asleep feverish and frustrated with my stepbrother.
On the third night, my sub-conscious longing percolated my sleep with dreams of Papa, Mishka and myself in a Matisse-blue crystal palace. We were all naked but that didn't matter. We were completely at ease and tangibly yoked to one another with umbilical cords that could not be severed. Some time that night, I must have crawled onto the floor because I woke up on my warm-weather palliasse the next day. I got myself up, surprised to find that my legs were not buckling as much as before. In fact, I was able to rise on fairly steady ankles. But my bed had been laid bare.
"Mishka?" I called out in a panic as the bared bed re-instated me to a tumultuous time in my boyhood when all I felt was utter shame of my body.
"They're being washed," First Brother said, carrying clean sheets. "They were soaked through. It's like you had started to wet the bed again just as you used to when you were small. No, no, silly, don't look so upset. You hadn't. It's sweat, that's all. You perspired a lot last night but that's good."
I helped First Brother make the bed but all the time, I felt my bottom smarting. I had to find out why. My reddened buttocks reflected in the mirror reminded me of First Brother's having spanked me naked three times with his own hands. I wanted to die for the third time in as many days. For this was the man I fell in love with when I was still in diapers and had been in love with since. I hated that he had seen me in my morphine-impaired condition.
So why was I nursing an erection?
"We've always been able to be honest with each other," First Brother said, poking his head at the door of the bathroom. I desperately tucked my erection into my knickers. "I want you to be honest with me now - why?"
I scowled up at my stepbrother.
But because he was prodding me so relentlessly, I finally let spill all the reasons that had led me to surrender to temptation. I bared my soul like a bulletin board. It had started out quite innocently. I had needed the painkiller after my accident but later it became a convenient agent to forget my other problems. I had found my escape through the morphine.
"It's bad enough that I'm scared to be losing Papa and you," I complained, trying my best to play down the Gothic melodrama, "but you and Papa don't even seem to remember. No one cares I'll be gone in three weeks. Papa's even chosen this time to make his annual pilgrimage to the temple, and you've been gone so long."
I was, of course, referring to my leaving home to study in the United States of America. It was all finalized. Father had enrolled me in a Fine Arts college in California and I was going to be there for about four years.
"Are you kidding me, little milksop?" First Brother laughed just a little cautiously. "Of course Papa and I care. Why do you think I'm here? I came back just to be with you. And have you checked Papa's chamber lately?"
I shook my head in reply. Sighing in his exaggerated but endearing way, First Brother took my hand in his. He was going to take us to our father's private boudoir but I was struggling against him.
"Wait!" I cried. "Let me put on some clothes first."
"What are you ashamed of?" First Brother chided. "Isn't this your home? We've all seen you naked often enough. Although, I must say it is very becoming that you can still feel shame. Which reminds me, you're in punishment, aren't you? And according to house rules, you must remain naked for twenty-four hours thereafter. So ...."
Having been reminded of Father's rules, First Brother took hold of the top of my knickers and yanked them down, for the fourth time I might add, to my ankles. He forced me to step out of them, and then resumed us on our mission towards Father's chamber.
"I'm cold, _d_a_m_n_ it!" I swore along the corridor. Nurse grinned.
"See these?" First Brother said to me now. "Papa's obviously put a lot of thought into preparing you for a wonderful trip."
I stared at the three open portmanteaux scattered about Father's grandiose chamber that was usually worth a king's ransom, but was now topsy-turvy because of additions there that didn't fit the scheme. I was urged towards the portmanteaux and kneeling before them, I inventoried the new clothes in their deeply hollowed domes. They had been neatly folded and systemically organized according to type, color and occasion of wear.
"Papa and your Momma got these for you because you were in convalescence. And you know why Papa's making his pilgrimage to the temple at this time?" First Brother said. "It's to intercede for you so that God may protect you all the time you're going to be away. It's the highest symbol of his love for you, milksop, the best parting gift he could hand to you."
I fingered the brand new parkas done in newfangled acetate and leather while I absorbed First Brother's words as he continued: "You're the first of Papa's children to leave home so young. He's always had his entire brood with him. I can only imagine how it must tear him apart to let go of you. Don't expect him to know how to deal with this situation. It's a first for him."
Then he left me to my thoughts.
Later that day, First Brother forced me to sit down with my other older siblings for lunch. I was the only one conspicuously naked and blushing.
Re-inventing himself as the big brother of Orwell's future, my stepbrother monitored my every movement, particularly the amount of food I ate. Each time I spat out something that he had fed into my mouth, for I was still nauseated by the sight and smell of food, he gently put me over his laps and spanked my bottom. Not even our venerable father ever did that to us. My other siblings were treated to this scrumptious fanfare four times.
But to be fair to First Brother, for he was not an unreasonable despot, whenever I did succeed to swallow even a tiny morsel of food, he rewarded me with a warm hug.
First Brother was not a bad locum tenens for Father.
THE END