(AUTHOR'S NOTES: This story, originally written as therapy, was posted a year ago but I have since revised it. It's still dedicated to my friend David H.)
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They say that children are cruel. I say that hyperactive teenage boys are more so. My fondest memory of adolescent cruelty was of the season my friends and I targeted for some fun a young man who was known to us only as 'Skin'.
Skin's sobriquet came about precisely because of a problem he had with his skin. Except for his folks and dermatologists, no one else had seen him, so none of us knew his real name. We could only be certain that he existed for, growing up, we had heard stories of a boy who was kept naked in the house day and night because of an affliction by a rare skin condition that rendered him allergic to all types of fabric and later to pollen, dust particles and a horde of microbes invisible to the human eye. We had heard that he never went to school or to the shops or played out in the fields. In fact, he never went anywhere because he was 'indecent'.
Through time stories of our phantom boy proliferated in strength and absurd proportions. Rumors were built upon implausible rumors about what he looked like and what he did in the house. Skin was to become the Boo Radley of my neighborhood.
We were reading Harper Lee's 'To Kill A Mockingbird' in our eleventh grade English class and that was when by some stroke of imaginative genius (we thought), we got the idea of making Skin come out. We spent a month plucking up enough courage for this event for which each of us tried hard to justify. "He needs to have a friend", "It's our mission to get to the truth of the rumors", "It must be lonely to stay cooped up in the house", were all trumpeted.
I tried to eschew involvement in the vacuous scheme. I imagined a simulacrum of a vampire with excised skin going for my jugular and sucking up my lifeblood. I was sure things were bound to go awry. As Harper Lee would say, heaven had a way of making sure of this when children were misbehaving. But peer pressure was stronger than my superstition.
We could not have wished for better weather when the day came for us to bring to fruition our madly-conceived mission. I half regretted this. I was still in a dithering mood about the adventure ahead of me. But we were already here, just yards from the shanty that had been keeping Skin holed up like a prisoner for the past twenty years since discovering at age five that he had an ailment.
"He's alone, all right," Ern, our leader, whispered looking about him. The tractors and the family's pick-up were nowhere in sight.
While my intrepid friends proceeded to plant the bait that would be used to lure out Skin, I was sent to the house to be alert to Skin's possible passage. I was already crouching under an open shutter, so out of curiosity I raised myself up to take a peek through it. Besides, I had heard the sound of coughing from within and it seemed bad.
I stood up on tiptoe. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw him. Skin, I gasped.
But he was beautiful. And I was enrapt by his beauty.
He was absolutely nothing at all like in the rumors. Not a phantom, not a hideous cretin grotesquely disfigured by pus, boils and tumors, but a regular-looking guy with a better looking physique than I had seen on most men his age. The only truth to the rumors was that he was naked. He was ensconced on a wicker chair reading a thick book under a crepuscular bulb and exercising his biceps with a small iron dumbbell. His skin was smooth, but very, very pale - a corpse-like pallor, it was - and he was coughing awfully. His physique belied the truth of his condition. This man was sick, very, very sick.
I had to stop what we had come here to do. It would be so wrong. But I was too late.
The exploding Molotov _c_o_c_k_tail sent seismic-sized ripples through the farm so suddenly that it not only alarmed all the fowls that were sent fluttering about pell-mell and shedding their plumes in terror but also alerted Skin's family who were seen rising up from the distant sunburned ploughing fields and were now hastening towards the house.
My four friends had been so apparently stunned that they simply stood rooted to the tremoring earth. I was to discover why immediately. Ern was pointing a finger behind me.
I turned back and found myself about an inch from staring into Skin's face. So startled was I that I leaked into my pants.
We were all rounded up and confined to the barn while we waited for our fathers to come for us. But knowing my father, I was sure he was not going to just come for me. There was going to be a price to pay for my derringdo. In fact, all our fathers, when they finally arrived, deemed it judicious that we paid for our idiocy immediately.
Each of us stood fearfully by our own fathers while they stripped us of our school uniforms until we were completely naked. It was just as well for me. I was feeling much distress from having to wear my urine-soaked trousers. Father inspected my soiled pants and underwear in even greater consternation.
"What were you thinking?" Father asked me, his voice acerbic. He stretched me across his knees as did the other fathers their sons. "This is a disgrace. Did I raise you to persecute others less fortunate than yourself?"
I shook my head. I was weeping already from the remorse of my having been party to this senseless misadventure, and from the humiliation of having wet my pants and now having to expose my naked bottom to all my friends and their fathers and all of Skin's family.
Our spanking went on for an eternal time. First it was over our fathers' laps for fifty painful swats with their bare hands. In between each swat, which was timed at twenty seconds before the next was delivered, we had to promise never again to persecute another human being, man, woman or child. Our fathers spanked our bottoms with all the convictions of a nun, so determined to exorcise the libertinous demon in us that when they were through, all four boys were screaming and clutching their blistering bottoms to soothe out the pain. I just stood sobbing. I had been taught that clutching my bottom would lead to a repeat spanking.
After that, we were lined up, hands on our heads, to receive a spanking over each of Skin's parents' lap. But before that, we were made to go round the barn to each of Skin's nine family members who were seated on stools in a semi-circle, stand before them in our nakedness and with our hands on our heads, and apologize to them for the trouble we had caused.
My head sank a notch with each apology I made to the family. By the time I got to Skin's youngest brother and sister, my chin was probably scraping the floor of the barn. I was dolorously mortified to be thus naked in front of these two whom I recognized as being in the lower forms at my school.
Skin's father spanked me in the same way my father did but I was the last boy over his lap, being as I was the youngest among my friends, so I had it rather easy. He must have already expended all his stamina on my friends' reddening bottoms. He spanked me a total of fifty times to the discordant polyphony of my friends' wails.
My turn over Skin's mother's lap was even more embarrassing than over the father's. I had never before been spanked by a woman and I rather believed women beat much harder than most men did. It was as if they had something to prove. Still, I survived the menace of her calloused hand with some mettle before I succumbed to more tears in my father's arms. I bawled but was glad to be in familiar hands again. Father pushed me away and inspected my buttocks. He seemed in some solicitude about reneging on an old promise made to my mother to forbid anyone else to spank me.
However, this did not see the end of our humiliation.
For the rest of the afternoon, we were abandoned on the estate to clean up the mess we had made with our pyrotechnical skills. We had to sweep up the debris and then rake up the fallen leaves in addition to helping to pacify the swooning fowls. All this while we remained naked for, save our socks and shoes, our fathers had confiscated our uniforms and underwear and gone back to work with them. It would be a good three hours before they knocked off work and returned to claim us.
To add further to our insult, Skin's youngest siblings were entrusted with the task of keeping an eye on us. "Since you boys see so much humor in watching others in the nude, you may now experience for yourselves how amusing it is to be watched naked by others," our fathers had said.
It was too awful. Here we were - well into our teens and most of us had fully developed _s_e_x_ organs and a hefty tuft of pubic hair. It was worse for me; I was sprouting a week-old stubble on my crotch having shaved my pubic hair for my inspection by my kickboxing instructors at school. We were now compelled to watch each other's spanked bottoms glimmering red in the sunlight and penises flopping lamely between our legs while we served out our punishment.
Some time during the evening, we heard Skin's obsequious siblings loudly comparing our bodies and then grading (or rather degrading) our private parts. I heard the girl giving my penis an A- for length and B+ for thickness. My skin burned both from the sun and from sheer humiliation.
All my spanking that day had not been a wasted exercise. The following week I decided to pay Skin a visit. But this time it was with Father's permission and blessing.
"I'm sorry about last week," I said to Skin. I noticed he was wearing a latex loin covering. It was all he had, but he seemed unabashed. I guess growing up like this, he must be used to it.
"And I thought you might like to read this," I continued, handing him a book.
Skin graciously accepted my gift.
"'To Kill a Mockingbird'," he said, reading the title on the cover with his accented English. His voice was low and waspy. Then he smiled to me in gratitude.
As I made my way back to Father's car, I heard him whistling to me to come back.
It was his turn now to give me a book. I held the Christian Bible in my hands. It was old and fraying, and even the words embossed on the cover in gold were fading. It must belong to him. I wanted to say that I subscribed to another belief but decided it would not be decorous.
"May I visit again some time?" I asked instead.
Skin nodded. "But next time, use the front door," he advised.
Despite our religious polarity, Skin and I went on to forge a deep and trusting but shortlived friendship built on our similitude as social marginals. We spent a lot of time debating about religion and other important issues over the delicious rice cakes he made. He always wore the latex loin covering to maintain some decency when I came but his parents monitored the time he wore it because, like all fabrics, after a while it made him nauseated, feverish and break out in a painful rash. But not once did I hear him complain. One time I sneaked him out into the silvan glades near the estate and ended up having to be rescued from a hornets' attack. After that he kept me safe in his arms. As I molded myself into the curves of his naked bosom, I wanted to make myself his vassal to love. I loved him with all his nakedness. Besides, being decent was overrated anyway.
I asked him if he regretted being the way he was.
"Life's too short," he said. He was deteriorating before my eyes. He coughed all the time now. "I'm too busy for regrets. There's so much to do."
And then the day came for us to say goodbye. I was leaving for America. Skin presented me, as a parting gift, a pen holder he had made out of tree bark. It was the last time I was ever to see him again.
My sweet friend is now in a happier place, I am sure, safe in the bosom of his Jesus.
THE END