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My father and his three brothers were gross, coarse, crude, vulgar, and brutal men with bald heads and huge beer bellies. My father was a wife-beater and a child abuser. No, not sexually, just brutally. I never met any of my mother's brothers until I was an adult, but on the Michaels side of the family, there was no one whom I would choose as a role model to emulate. I loathed all of them and, in early childhood, I decided "If this is what it means to be a man, I want no part of it. I don't want ever to grow up. I just wanted to remain a nice cute boy." As I watched other boys, teenagers, young men, and older men, though, I realized that growing up was unavoidable. With the passage of time, boys inevitably changed into teenagers,and then into men. None of it seemed to be any kind of improvement, however. All of the teenagers I knew were tense, nervous, irritable, and conflicted. Men ended up looking and acting like my father and uncles. By the time I finally became associated with much nicer men, my attitude toward adulthood had already soured. When I was nine, my father nagged me into joining a Little League baseball team. I wasn't a bad hitter, but, in the field, I was an utter klutz, the original "butterfingers." But, I learned one useful thing from Little League baseball. One day, our coach, Mr. Johnson, explained to us why we were required to wear athletic supporters and protective cups. One point that he made at which I perked up my ears, was that our testicles are the glands which are responsible for changing our bodies from those of boys to the bodies of men. So, those things were the culprits ! I conceived an instant hatred of my testicles and an intense desire to be rid of them and thus, never to become a man. He also happened to mention that though our testicles were already very sensitive to pain, as our bodies began to change, they would become very much more sensitive, so much so, that if one of them were to be broken by impact, the shock could actually kill a man . That was why athletes wear protective cups and even boys like us needed protection. This posed a problem for me. In 2 or 3 years. my testicles would start to change my boy's body into a man's body. But that wouldn't happen.....if.....I.....didn't.....have.....any. But, how could I get rid of them ? I couldn't just cut them off. People would think I was crazy. I might be able to arrange an "accident" that would smash them so that they'd have to be removed, but, that would hurt terribly and would have to be done soon or it would be too dangerous. While precious months flew by, I thought about it and thought about it without finding any method of destroying those hated glands that I dared try. When I was ten, I built a tree house, by myself. The thought of my fat short-winded father climbing a tree to build me a tree house is too grotesque to imagine. No, I hauled boards (no two the same size) up into that tree and nailed them together to build a shack. I put an old tarp over the roof, through which I could see daylight in many places. At the front of the shack, I extended the floor so that I had a narrow deck where I could sit on a folding camp chair. The tree in which I built my tree house formed the end post of a rail fence and I built my laddee just to the left of the fence. One day, while I was sitting on the deck, it occurred to me that falling astride the top rail of that fence would no good whatsoever to the testicles I loathed so. I leaned over the edge of the deck to see how great the drop to the fence was. Just as I decided that it must be some 12-13 feet and much too far, I lost my balance and fell off the deck. directly onto the rail, directly on my testicles. It was too far and I did myself more damage than I had ever intended. I did, indeed smash my testicles. I also crushed all of the nerves and muscles in my crotch, paralyzing my "thing." I fractured my pelvis and ruptured two discs in my spine. My back hurt terribly, at least as much as my testicles, and I screamed until mom came out. She found me sitting astride the fence holding my groin with both hands and shrieking. I was also yelling "My back! My back !" Mom explained to me that, if I'd hurt my back, she didn't dare lift me off the fence and I'd have to wait until the ambulance arrived and the attendants could do it right. So, I sat there resting right on my shattered balls . It took 20 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. The attendants put their hands under my behind and lifted me off the fence without putting any tension on my spine. I spent 5 weeks in the hospital. They had to bolt my pelvis together. The operations on my spine were successful. I could walk afterward, though my back has always been somewhat stiff. There was absolutely nothing left of my testicles. The surgeon had to scoop the remains of them out of my little scrotum.The pudendal nerve, all of the erectile nerves, the bulb of the penis and the erectile musculature were all crushed. I have never felt anything in my penis since then. I can't even tell that it's there. It has not grown a single millimeter since the accident . It is still the same size as when I was ten years old. I suspect that my father would have insisted that I take testosterone at 13 to develop a masculine body. Luckily, from my point of view. he didn't get a chance to. My father died at age 38 when I was 11 years old, of a massive heart attack A year later, mom and I had a conference with Dr. Weatherby about my future. He was not enthusiastic about my taking hormone replacement therapy because I would always be totally impotent with or without it. Mom said that it was my body and my decision. Besides, I would always have the option of changing my mind. Dr. Weatherby explained to me that if I underwent hormone replacement therapy, my voice would change, my beard would grow, and I'd become more muscular. On the other hand, I'd develop male-pattern baldness in my late 20's and be prone to heart disease and prostate cancer. Worse, I would have a normal male sex urge but no means whatever of satisfying it. I told him, "I'm not interested. I have a low voice for a boy my age anyhow; if it doesn't change it won't be very noticeable. I hate beards and mustaches and I don't plan to be an athlete." So, I never took testosterone. Many pre-pubertal castrates become freakishly tall, but the shortness of the men in my family offset this, though I was taller than my father or any of my uncles. I have the face of a boy and the slab-sided sexually indeterminate physique of a boy . In short, I'm just what wanted to be , a boy who never grew up. Sometimes, I've considered changing my name from Harley Davidson (my old man's idea, of course) Michaels to Peter Pan. |