Palouse - 11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Spokane – Fall 1988

David Stirling stood outside the mini-mart, clutching a $5 bill, looking very nervous in his school clothes, holding his book bag beside him. He had gone into the store earlier and scouted out the magazines. He saw what he wanted: a Playgirl. But it was behind the counter along with the Playboys and Hustlers, and he knew, at 13, that he didn’t look old enough to buy anything but candy bars. He had to find out more about himself, who he was and what he was, sexually, and he knew that part of the answer was in the Playgirl. He’d heard talk about what kind of pictures were in that magazine.

He walked across the small parking lot away from the store and up the sidewalk to the next street, barely noticing the stores that he passed by. He turned around and went back until he could see the front door of the mini-mart across the parking lot, bordered by signs advertising the lottery, an ATM, and the fast-food special of the month – or year. The battered sign appeared to have been there for at least that long. He didn’t come by that store that often, so he didn’t really know.

As he stood wondering what to do, a large pickup drove up, and out jumped three young men in their early 20s. That gave David an idea, and he ran up to the last one out of the truck, a slender man with sandy blond hair and clothes and hands dirty from a day of work.

“Excuse me, could I get you to buy me something?” he asked in a plaintive voice. The young man looked at him, assessing his age.

“I won’t buy alcohol for a twelve-year old. Sorry. And you are too young to smoke.”

“I’m thirteen, not twelve,” David said with a bit of irritation. “I just want you to buy me a couple of magazines.” He looked at his feet in what he hoped appeared as shyness. “For me and my girlfriend.”

The young man sighed loudly. “Okay, okay. Give me your money.”

David got a $5 bill out of his wallet. “Would you get me a Playboy and a Playgirl, please?”

The man looked curiously at David then shrugged his shoulders and took the money. In a few minutes, he emerged with a flat, brown paper bag. “You owe me another buck.”

David opened his wallet again and took out a dollar bill before gratefully accepting the package. He ran all the way home along the leafy streets of Spokane’s South Hill, opened his front door and ran upstairs to his room before his mother could notice his odd behavior. He slipped the magazines between his mattress and bedsprings before going back down the stairs to greet his mother.

He stayed long enough with his mother to appear as if he was returning from school normally and then excused himself to go up to his room to “study.” He closed his door firmly, knowing he wouldn’t be disturbed without a knock and time to pull on some clothes. His parents were always respectful of his privacy.

Pulling the magazines out from beneath his mattress, David quickly pulled the wrapper off the Playgirl then watched in horror as a bunch of cards with subscription offers scattered around the room, one sailing under his bed. “Shit,” he said aloud as he gathered them up, reaching several feet under the bed for the stray one, and put them back in the paper bag. He didn’t want his mother to discover a subscription offer to Playgirl when she was in his room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, David opened the Playgirl as he slowly unbuttoned his school shirt and unzipped his pants, pulling them both off, keeping his eyes glued to the magazine. He felt his erection developing quickly, getting harder as he flipped through the pages until he reached the centerfold. The tufts of hair under the arms of the male in the photograph, the patch of hair between the nipples, the penis that lay soft and large in a bush of pubic hair and then the same penis hard, proud and erect, the leanness of the male body, the masculine features of the face and the hair on the legs – all these caused David’s cock to get harder and harder until he had to pull his boxers down and begin pumping. Less than a minute later, David was spewing spurts of cum up onto his undershirt with the final surges burbling down his erection. It was an erection that wouldn’t subside until he had another orgasm from the pictures in the Playgirl.

The rest of the fall term found David in the library, searching the shelves for books on homosexuality. He would take a book off the shelf then go to a different floor in the library to find a table where nobody could connect him with the books he was reading. He was careful to keep a more innocent book from the shelves on the table, as well, in case somebody he knew came by.

The range of points of view in the books was broad – from Kinsey, who found homosexuality to be almost normal, to Christian books, which found homosexuality to be a sin. David’s family was not particularly religious – attendance at the Unitarian Church at Easter and Christmas in most years was the extent of their reverence – so a literal reading of the Bible didn’t carry much weight with him.

His father’s view was that most of the Bible was written in a time when having babies – procreation was the word his dad had used – was imperative because so many children died so young, and a large family was needed to maintain existence of the village or the tribe. With modern medicine and hygiene, all this had changed, his dad had said. Before, it was important to have as many babies as possible. His father thought that the ancient need for procreation was the reason for the Biblical prohibition of spilling a man’s seed on the ground. It took David a few days to realize his father was giving his roundabout version of a birds-and-the-bees lecture on masturbation and, in his own way, accepting it as normal.

David scoured the shelves of the library and wished he could find more especially about being a young, gay teenager, but he couldn’t find anything. He decided it was probably okay to be gay, but he had no idea what to do if and when he found somebody to do something with. He decided also that his parents would probably have no problem with his being gay; after all, Aunt Pat, his dad’s sister who lived in Los Angeles, was gay.

But was this a phase, as many of the discussions seemed to suggest? Was he temporarily bisexual? Would the pressures for children – grandchildren for his mother – be enough to cause him to repress his homosexual side and rely on his heterosexual side? These were the questions that would trouble David for the near future.

In any event, several weeks later, the Playgirl was well-thumbed, while the Playboy was in little-used condition.