One Saturday when I was thirteen I had to go into a strange yard to retrieve a lost ball. My friends and I had been playing baseball in the park and I had knocked the ball over the fence. We had to break for lunch and, since it was my ball, I told the other guys that I would get it, or try my best to get it on the way home, but several agreed to bring theirs after lunch just in case I didn't succeed.
Keeping track of the houses, I ran around to the other side of the block and saw that my ball had gone into the back yard of the house at 626 Greenland Street. I knocked on the door and rang the bell, but no one answered. Figuring that no one was at home, I took a chance and lifted the latch to the side gate. I went into the back yard to retrieve my ball. I was in luck. My baseball was lying in plain view in the middle of the back lawn.
Just as I picked it up, I heard a door open. I was startled, but relaxed a little when I realized that it was not to this house but to the one in the neighboring yard. As soon as the door opened, I also heard voices, the scolding voice of a man and the pleading voice of a boy. The man was very angry and the boy was evidently in trouble:
Have you got 'em off now? Good. Leave 'em in the washroom and get out here!"
"Please, Dad, don't make me go outside like this."
"Enough of that now! Come on! I told you, I won't stand for your being cheeky to me. I won't have it at all, and certainly not in public. That was very rude and disrespectful what you said to me at the soccer game, and now you're going to catch a proper hiding for it!"
"Are you gonna give it to me in the yard?"
"No, the shed. Now let's get on with it."
My amazement at the scene I had encountered was redoubled with the realization that I knew the people whose voices I was hearing. The man was a big, beefy red-haired pipe-welder named Davidson. The boy was his ten-year-old son Dougie, who went to the same school as I did, only he was in the fifth grade while I was in the middle school.
As luck would have it, there was a knot-hole in the fence between the two yards, at a spot between two bushes. Placing my face up to it and looking through it I could see most of the Davidsons' back yard, from the back steps of their house to the porch of the shed behind the house. At once I recognized Mr. Davidson by his large, muscular build and by his graying red hair. I recognized Dougie by his wavy brown hair and snub nose.
Maybe I should have suspected as much from the dialogue I had overheard, but I was agog at what I saw. At his father's command Dougie was proceeding toward the shed, across the back yard, without any pants or underpants on. He had on his orange and white soccer jersey, but other than socks and sneakers he wore absolutely nothing below the waist. His shirttail did not even come down far enough to cover his bottom or his privates. As he walked toward the shed soon his back was toward me and as he headed for the shed his buttocks rolled like two wrestling puppies or the proverbial jello on springs.
Before that moment I had not really paid much attention to bottoms in general or to anyone's bottom in particular. And I don't mean to sound as though I got obsessed with the subject either. But that was the day I really started noticing other kids my own age and younger. Also I realized that spankingÐ-at least when carried out on certain people under the right circumstancesÐcould really turn me on.
When they got up on to the porch of the shed, I heard Mr. Davidson tell Dougie:
"In there! Grab the bench and wait for me."
While Dougie was in the shed waiting, his father stood in the yard and smoked a cigarette. I wondered whether he was getting himself ready for what he was about to do, making his son "sweat" the forthcoming hiding, or maybe a bit of both. Anyway, when he stubbed out the cigarette butt, he took off his big brown leather belt and gripping it in his right hand, then walked into the shed.
That rough wooden structure did little to muffle the ensuing sounds:
WWHHAAPP! "OWW!" WWHHAAPP! "OWW!"
"Take those hands away! Don't touch your bottom till I tell you it's over and you can get up!"
(Tearfully) "But Daddy, it hurts so bad!"
"Take those hands away. Don't try to get up or cover up! Otherwise you get 12 instead of 6.!"
"Yes, Daddy!"
WWHHAAPP! "OWW!" WWHHAAPP! OWW-WOW-wow!" WWHHAAPP! "WWAAAAHHH!" WWHHAAPP! "WAAAAHHHHHH!"
"All right, now let that be a lesson to you!"
"Yes, Daddy! Waah!"
With that the screen door to the shed opened and Mr. Davidson strode back to the house. A few minutes later Dougie came out of the shed. With a shudder he clutched his burning little bottom in both hands and jumped up and down on the porch. As he did so it was funny to see his little hairless _d_i_c_k_ and balls flop up and down. Then after he had settled down I noticed that though his balls came down, his little _d_i_c_k_ did not: his little wiener was standing up stiff and hard, fully erect, all the time he walked back to the house. Just before he got to the kitchen door he turned so that I got a brief but full view of his little whipped bottom. The skin was not broken anywhere, but both bottomcheeks were quite well reddened. And his face was blushing as deeply as though he had put on rouge. I bet it was a long, long time before he ever thought about talking rudely to his Dad again!
I got out of that neighboring yard as quickly as I could, closed the gate without making a sound, and took off for home. I didn't feel like talking to anyone about what I had seen that day, but I sure thought about it for a long time, and never forgot it. I probably never will, either.