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All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act, without benefit of experience.

______________________________Henry Miller

Transition is one of the many costs of growing up. No matter how much you might prefer to stay where and how you are, change demands your full attention.

The Elementary school I attended was just a block from my home and a familiar place for me. I was totally comfortable going there and playing on the swings and old rickety rusted merry go round, even on weekends. It was across the street from the Mrs. Mount’s Kindergarten which I went to before the first grade. Every day at eleven o'clock I walked the one block home for lunch where Vera, our maid was always in the kitchen preparing the noon meal. After lunch at home I returned to school and would sit on the dilapidated old merry go round that sat out in the play yard rusting away. When the sixth period bell rang I would reluctantly return to the building. The merry go round served as the first place I ever experimented with a girl. Her name was Rose, she was cute and more importantly she was available. We only kissed and rolled around groping each other beneath the Merry go Round on the ground late one evening but it was fun and exciting. She was far more experienced in those matters that I but that wouldn't have taken much. Puberty had not yet called my name, so there was a lot I just didn’t get. Certainly that night it was the case. I got nothing but dirty. Upon arriving home my mother asked me, “What have you been doing, rolling around in the dirt? I responded, “Uhhh, nooooooo!”

Going to the Junior Hi School didn’t appeal to me at all, partly because it was across town and in an unfamiliar area. Ultimately I went anyway because it was the only one.

The Junior high school was, even then an ancient structure that I assumed had been there since the beginning of time. It was a yellowish tan building with white elaborate concrete trim, identical to many others constructed during that same time period. An interior walkway went around three sides of the inner part of the building open to a courtyard and served as a passageway connecting the classrooms. In the winter it was a frigid trip between classes and perilous as there was no guard rail to prevent someone from falling five or more feet into the bushes and the dirt. This junior high building was a strange, unfamiliar and threatening place. The teachers were abrupt and frightening as well. Many of them were men which was a concept that I had never even considered, having never had or seen a male teacher before. It was not a pleasant experience having to abandon the comfort of the old elementary situation and go to this strange new school where there were, what could only be described as thugs. The thugs, whose names I never learned had “duck Tails”! They hung around together and smoked cigarettes behind the gym when no teachers were in sight. They came from the far side of our town. The girls too, were like nothing I had ever seen before. They had large hair and walked with a swagger. Many of them smoked too. There was only one Junior high school in our town at that point and all the other schools fed into this single middle school. It was a mix of classes and backgrounds. The children from the wealthiest and the poorest families all converged on this one place in the seventh grade, no matter how unprepared they were.

Lush vegetation grew out in the play yard of the Junior High near the baseball diamond. There at P.E. you could find four, five and occasionally even eight leafed Clovers. Sue, who was a contemporary of mine in the seventh grade, would follow me out to the Clover area and we would hunt through the plants for the exotic multiple leafed clovers during the little free time we had. Junior High School was a time of radical change. Most of them were unexpected by the children experiencing them and came as shocking revelations. At least for me they did. Hair began to grow in unexpected places and things grew, that I had assumed would stay the same size. It was like being run over by an eighteen wheeled Semi. There was no clue what was happening to me. Although I had three older brothers and two fairly intelligent parents, no one had given me even a hint as to what to expect. It was as though I had been possessed by some nether world devil. Being a good boy was something I just gave up. Not that I was ever that good at it but at this precarious age I quit pretending.

Entering Junior High School I had lived a fairly protected and privileged life. I had never heard either one of my parents or anyone else in the family use a dirty word. Not that I had experienced only simple, innocent things. When I was ten or perhaps younger there was a boy, the son of my Mother’s best friend, some years older than me who came to spend the night with us on occasion, at our beach cabin with his parents. One night I woke up from a sound sleep and realized he was in the bed with me and had his hand down the front of my underwear. I said, “What are you doing?” He replied, “Be quiet you are going to really like this!”He was manipulating my small immature hairless penis. I tried to make him quit but he only quickened his actions. At first I was shocked, embarrassed, and ashamed. This feeling soon disappeared as he continued to massage my small member. After some minutes the sensation became so intense I felt as though I would die if he quit moving the skin on my stiff cock. Then suddenly this amazing eruption of heat and almost electrical pleasure swept over me as I pushed against his hand. My hips pumped involuntarily and a couple of audible auggrugs escaped my lips. He whispered, “Sushhhh, not so loud, you’ll wake everybody up!” When the feeling suddenly subsided I felt a great sense of loss that I couldn't explain even to myself. He said, “You liked it didn’t you?” I said, “Yes!” He got up from my bed and went to the bathroom. Laying there in the darkness I felt sure the end of my penis had just exploded and I couldn't even get into the bathroom to see. Everyone else in the house was asleep and all the lights were out. It was the first time I had ever experienced such intense pleasure. Although I really liked it I didn't understand any part of it. Who knew what this thing meant? The experience emboldened me to take matters into my own hands, (so to speak) and try to recreate this amazing feeling for myself, again and again, and again! The boy had told me that I would really like this “thing” he was doing to me and I did! One Sunday morning I was upstairs in the process of trying to attain “that feeling”. Shortly after reaching that point my little penis began to swell at an alarming rate. The sudden change frightened me so badly that I ran downstairs and showed it to my Mother. She said, “Have you been playing with it?” I of course replied emphatically “Nooooooo!” All this, long before time, maturity and word of mouth made me realize what all of this was about.

You might think that what happened to me was traumatic but you would be only partly right. I was perhaps a victim in the beginning but later a willing victim. The pleasure to me was so immense that nothing about it, no matter how it came about could have been bad. Once started there was no way not to continue doing that “thing” that I had no words for. It ruled me and do it, I did! This cousin and I continued this somewhat one sided relationship for some time, until years, puberty and other more interesting things came along. I knew nothing about sex, except for the “feeling thing” and in no way knew that it had anything to do with reproduction or even what sex was, or its consequences. Since I was far too young for ejaculation, the intense pleasure was all it was about as far as I was concerned. I knew nothing else. There was a great amount of guilt involved in the pursuit and accomplishment of this immense mystery but I managed to deal with it in a number of different ways. At the age of thirteen I experienced my first ejaculation and my first thought was, oh my God, I broke it! Everything changed in Junior High School.

Dreams for me have always been very realistic and were at times more compelling than reality. In those dreams I experienced many things that were far beyond the possibilities of my daily existence. Many of them were horrific and scary. Still today I have these Technicolor stereophonic sound dream experiences while asleep. One particular dream at that time expressed the anxiety and guilt over the masturbation thing, (not that I knew what it was called at the time.) In my dream, I woke up to a heavy feeling and could not really move in my bed. Turning over was impossible and as hard as I struggled I could not even sit up. I thought someone had gotten into the bed with me and was lying very close. That wasn't it! Flinging the covers away I looked down in horror to discover that my penis had grown so large that it filled up the entire bed and weighed so much that I could not even move it when I tried. It was huge, purple, swollen and leaden. The dream scared the Hell out of me. How was I going to explain this to Mother? I could just hear her saying, “You've been playing with it again, haven’t you!” I would respond with, ”Uhhh nooooooo!”

There were young people far worldlier than me at the Junior High School. I had never heard a dirty joke. The first one I ever heard was in the study hall in the library. Two boys I did not know sat next to each other and one said to the other, “Did you hear that Liberace’s mother died? “ The other boy said, “No, what happened?” The response was, “His mother told him to go back where he came from and he took his piano with him!” At first I didn't get it. When it finally dawned on me I snorted so loud that the teacher in the study hall stood up to see what the disturbance was. He said, “Is there some problem, Mr. Daughtry?” I replied, “No sir “, but I had snorted a stream of clear viscous liquid that ran from my nose to the pocket on my shirt. The older girl in front of me turned around in her desk, looked at me, then at my pocket and said," Oh my gosh, how gross." During this same time the First Methodist Church had organized trips on large Greyhound Busses for the youth that took us to Pensacola and nearby cities for plays and other points of interest. Planned most likely, to give the parents a little breathing space and some small moments when we were someplace else. The most interesting thing that ever happened to me on one of those trips was a girl named Meredith. She was beautiful and willing to "make out" with me the entire way from Dothan, Alabama to Pensacola, Florida and back again. When we got back home I was in such a state I couldn't even walk. She didn't think I was all that gross I suppose. I had an immense crush on her for years after but we never even spoke to each other again that I remember.

During the junior high years there was a group of the students that met each other at the Saturday morning cinema every weekend. It was a time to pair off with a member of the opposite sex and engage in some moderate to heavy petting. My usual partner was a Jewish girl, tall with deliciously soft lips, her name was Beth. She and I kissed and tenderly touched, neither very sure what was expected. Our tongues eagerly explored each other in the flickering lights of the movie, while Buster Crabbe chased bad guys across the screen. Not much could have been better that those mornings in the Martin Theater. There was a balcony in the top back of the theater and it was divided into white and colored sections. There was no entrance to the other side from either direction. There was a friend, James who lived on the other side of town that became one of my better friends, at least on Saturday mornings. Some times on those mornings when neither of us could find a partner of the opposite sex we would steal up into the balcony and sit on the front row. There we would unzip our pants and masturbate till one or both of us ejaculated. The point was to see if the fluid could be made to fly up into the air and sail over the short wall, beyond which was thin air all the way down to the lower seating area. He was as baffled as I was as to what all this was about but we were very sure it had to be kept a secret.There was almost never anybody up in the balcony so it was pretty easy to get away with something so crazy. I do not remember whether it was his idea or mine. The place always smelled of popcorn and grime.

The poorest people in our town were the black ones, although many white families were close to the poverty level too. Since the schools were all segregated in Alabama and all of the rest of the south there was little chance of meeting a Negro in a social situation, like school. The maids who were ever present in our home were more like family than servants and some of them I loved very much. There were several swimming pools in our small town. Some like the Country Club were frequented by those whose parents were affluent enough to be members. The folk from the other side of town did not come to the Club. They went to Kelly Springs or Porters Fairyland or did not go at all. The colored people had their own swimming pool. There were times, much later after we had a driver’s license, when we would drive past that Negro recreational pool and find ourselves fascinated by their dark skinned bodies bobbing around in the Aquamarine water. I cannot for the world think now why we thought it was so interesting.

Something about Porter’s Fairyland was foreign, dangerous and forbidding. There was a great swimming pool, large slides to go down and two lakes out back where Bream and Bass swam in large numbers. These were just a few of the attractions. Fishing was not allowed but you could feed the fish bread if you supplied it yourself. The students from Junior High that wore duck tails and smoked cigarettes were there in the shadows of the trees. Cigarettes were rolled up in the sleeves of their t-Shirts. They talked and looked at you in a menacing way. I frequently heard rumors about fights and strange happenings at the fairyland. Once someone even got killed there, or so they said. Almost none of my acquaintances went there even though it was an exciting place. A deafening jukebox blared away nonstop the entire time you were on or near the premises. The Country Club was far more civilized and had no such thing.

Porter’s was the place where the Junior High’s annual swimming party was held. Among the boys of that age a certain amount of status came with wearing a jock strap under your bathing suit. The bathing suits that required jock straps were reversible, thus the reason for the jock straps. It was indicative that you were packing some serious weaponry underneath that had to be firmly controlled. There was no mesh lining in the reversible suits to support and control the genitalia. All of my older brothers wore a jock strap even though it was euphemistically called, a “nose guard” in our house. I never knew why! In junior high I naturally assumed it was time for me to wear one too since many changes had begun to happen in that department. On the eve of the swimming party I asked mother to buy me a reversible bathing suit and bring it with her when she picked my friends and me up at the end of the school day to transport us to Porter’s. I knew she would also have to buy a jockstrap to go with it because that was the way they were worn. Thinking things out ever so carefully was my stock and trade even though it rarely went as intended. This effort was no exception.

Mother showed up on time to pick us up at school with a bag from Blumberg’s, a department store where she had gone to buy my new bathing suit. Opening it I realized it was one of the old type suits with the mesh lining, no jock strap. I was so crushed. “Mother”, I yelled, “This is not the bathing suit I wanted”! She calmly looked over her shoulder in the back seat where I sat with my friends and said,” I didn't buy you one of those reversible bathing suits because you have to have a nose guard to wear under them and you certainly don't need one of those ”. One of my friends said, “What the heck is a nose guard?” My mother turned ever so slowly around and said, “I think you might call it an athletic supporter.” The friend replied, “No, he really doesn't need one of those!” By that point he was laughing hysterically. I was destroyed! My friends laughed as I melted into the floorboard of the car. The day was a total disaster after suffering such a direct hit on the ego, which was not doing so hot in the first place.

One of the girls I found interesting at school was sitting on the edge of the pool. She had one long leg in the water and the other one sexily crossed over it. When I approached, she smiled but quickly got up and dove into the water. When her legs uncrossed I caught a glimpse up the gap of her bathing suit and saw hair. Oh my god! I never knew girls had pubic hair! Our house was filled with art books that showed lots of naked women but not even one had hair, down there. Believe me; I knew because I poured over those books until mother began to think I was very interested in art, for god’s sake. She even offered to give me drawing lessons, which I took rather than admit to looking at the books with prurient interest, not artistic. The sparse beginnings of pubic hair I already had but this girl was truly endowed! I was impressed and repulsed at the same time. Following the girl all over the pool that afternoon I really did not know what to think. Trying so hard to get a better look I went home with a severe case of eye strain. It could have actually been the chlorine. She must have thought I had a terrible crush on her and was more than a little crazy. She was, of course right!

The following Monday brought a torrential downpour, everything was flooded. School went about as it always did and nothing much was happening until break time, some talk about the swim party. Nothing was said about me not really needing a nose guard, thank God! Since the rain was so heavy all the kids were standing on the covered walk way that faced the open court yard, no access to the play ground was available during rain. Down in the sunken area there was water beginning to pool at an alarming rate and mud welling up in orange swirls. A small group of students gathered around Sue my friend from the clover hunts, talking. Standing behind several people I saw an arm reach from my rear and hit Sue in the center of her chest with the palm of a flat hand. She careened backwards; her arms began to simultaneously spin in the opposite direction of the drop behind her. In a desperate effort to regain balance her hands grappled for something to hold onto, wide questioning eyes, and a mouth forming a perfectly round zero. No support was there. She was going to fall backwards the five or more feet into the ankle deep water and mud there in the court yard. I reached for her but my fingers grasped only air and never touched her. She fell in slow motion from what was a considerable height and landed with a huge splat on the upper part of her back, hair completely drenched and mud everywhere. Again, I never touched her. Poor Sue was fished out of the muddy water with wet pine straw, dried boxwood leaves and orange mud all in her hair and face. She  was sent home for a change of clothes and the investigation began. All of us standing around her were called to the principal’s office and interrogated as to what happened. Almost all of the students said that the last person that touched her was me. Even Sue thought I had done it! One teacher said that since she was on hall duty and happened to be looking in that direction and had seen me intentionally push poor Sue backwards off the elevated walkway into the bushes, mud and rain.She said I stiff armed her in the chest and was responsible for her fall. The more I declared my innocence the tighter the noose of guilt, circumstantial as it might have been ensnared me. I declared I had not touched her and was totally innocent. The principal didn't buy it. He said,” Come on Mister Daughtry, you did it, everybody saw you and if you go ahead and admit it you will feel better and I will not be so hard on you. You did it didn’t you?” I said, “Nooooooo!” Since I was obviously guilty he would give me the option of staying in after school in his office for a week or getting five licks with his notorious paddle. I opted for the staying in part, not being into physical pain. All of us had heard about the ferocious licks he gave with his paddle and I wanted no part of it. The licks from principals were usually exaggerated in schools during those days when corporal punishment was still legal but let me tell you, his were not! After staying in for two days I could not think up anymore lies to my parents about why I was staying late at school. I took the three licks from the principal in trade for the next three days I would miss. The blows from his paddle were memorable. He said, “Mr. Daughtry, bend over and grab your ankles.” I did. and offered my small skinny ass up for destruction. After the first lick I would have declined the next two but could not catch my breath. The second and third came fast and diminished none whatsoever in ferocity and rapidity of delivery. He said to me when it was over, "I hope you have learned your lesson here today, Mr. Daughtry.” I said to him, “I didn’t do anything to her!” The principal’s name was Mr. Turk. I carried around bruises for a week or more after his assault on my posterior. Even though totally innocent I learned a valuable lesson from this experience. Even though a person may look guilty and everyone agrees on his culpability he may actually be innocent. A lick once delivered cannot be taken back. This goes for capital punishment also.

The only other licks I got in the Junior High School were not long after the first and delivered by the P.E. coach, Mr. Gilstrap. His was an appropriate name to say the least. I was talking to an acquaintance in the bathroom and said, “I hate Mr. Turk he is a real bastard for paddling me, because I didn't push that bitch Sue off the walkway. I never did it!” The door to one of the stalls opened and coach Gilstrap walked out. He said, “Mr. Daughtry, I will need to see you in my office at your P.E. period for a little attitude adjustment concerning your trashy mouth and lack of respect for the principal. Be in my office as soon as the next bell rings.” Two more licks, one for each curse word, more bruises on my buttocks. At least there was no staying in after school time. That was too hard to explain to the parents. He said, “Make sure your privates are out of the way, bend over and grab your ankles, Mister Daughtry.

Fuck!