I was rooting around a garage sale a while back and came across a bunch of old cassette tapes. Modern digital recordings have just about made old analog records and tapes obsolete, but I still have a tape deck and besides that, most of the music in the box was from the 70’s, when I was much younger and really into music. There were more than a dozen tapes in the box and I finally haggled the guy down to four dollars for the lot.

There were two vintage Cat Stevens, a Crosby Stills Nash and Young, a great Kris Kristofferson, a few heavy metal bands that I don’t much care for, and several others that I kind of liked. All in all a bargain. I went through them carefully that evening, and played a few of the cuts to check on the quality. They were great, hardly used at all, and I was still congratulating myself on my purchase when I came to an unmarked tape.

It was just a plain unlabeled Memorex tape, like what an answering machine may have once used, or like what a guy might use to record a mix of his own or to pirate a copy of a buddy’s tape. I threw it aside and listed to a few more of my favorite old cuts and didn’t pick it up again for almost a week.

The first minute of the tape appeared to be blank, and even with the volume turned up the only sound was the pop and hiss of dead air. I was ready to eject the cassette when a plaintive “Please mister, don’t make me do that!” issued from the speakers. There was another moment of silence, and then a cry of pain, and then a coarse raspy guttural command, as if the speaker was using a Darth Vader breathing device. “Do it or I’ll crush them.” After that came a series of shuffling noises, and finally the young voice imploring Darth Vader to ‘let go of my’ ears.

It was an immediate flashback to when I was a horny sperm-spewing thirteen-year-old and Kenny Thompson was showing me what he had discovered. Kenny was poor and my parents weren’t too thrilled about me hanging around with him but he was a good friend. He lived in a run down apartment, one of several that had been carved out of a large old house. His put his finger to his lips to indicate silence, then led me into his parents’ bedroom, then knelt down by the heating grate. A young married couple had moved into the adjacent unit, and they were obviously also horny. There were a lot of grunts and moans, and finally, a woman said, “Let go of my ears, I know what to do,” and a little bit later a sort of choking cough.

Forty-five years later I heard the same choking cough, and finally a raspy voice ordering the other person to “lick it clean”. I rewound the tape and listened to it again with the volume turned even higher. This time I could hear the subtle slurping and the grunts and the moan of ejaculation, and also the faint squeak of the bedsprings. The younger voice could have been an adult, but his use of the honorific Mister and the youthfulness of his voice indicated that it was a teenager that had been forced to service an older man.

There was another minute of silence on the tape, and then what could only be perceived as the sound of a boy or young man being anally raped: First the pleadings, then the sound of a struggle, the shriek of violation, the moans of pleasure and pain, and the jubilation of orgasm and the sobbing of pain and humiliation. I turned the player off and sat there a long time, building up enough nerve to listen to the rest of the tape.

The term ‘heart rendering’ has been tremendously overused, and if I were a better, more articulate writer I would avoid it, but that’s exactly what the remainder of the tape was. The begging, pleading, crying, as the young man realized his fate, and finally the muted slamming together of two stones or masonry objects on yielding flesh that silenced the young man’s screams. There was no doubt in my mind that a boy or young man had been castrated in a most brutally inhuman manner. I sat there a long time trying to remember, and at the same time forget, everything I’d just heard, until I finally to replayed the tape to verify my suspicions of what had occurred. There was no doubt about it; a young man had just been face-fucked, ass-banged, and nutted, and the acts had been recorded on audiotape.

What to do? What to do? The police could analyze the tape and determine if it was a hoax or if a crime had been committed, and it was clearly the responsibility of any upstanding citizen to contact the appropriate authorities. Problem was, I wasn’t an upstanding citizen. I had a stack of unpaid traffic citations, and any contact with the police would first result in my own prosecution. I could turn the tape in anonymously, but then I lose all track of the outcome and it might all just get swept under the rug. I could also copy the tape, but that might destroy valuable forensic evidence. I finally realized that it all probably took place years ago, before the advent of videotape, and that a few more weeks wouldn’t make any difference, and that I may as well pursue it on my own for a while.

I started out at the house where I had gotten the tape. It was now vacant and up for sale. “Such nice people,” an old woman on the porch next door lamented. “They just couldn’t afford the house anymore. It’s a crime what those damned Republicans did to this country.”

I didn’t want to get her started on Bush and Cheney, so I merely asked, “Did they liver here long?”

“Oh yes,” she answered, “practically forever.” This seemed strange; the house should have been paid for years ago. I was about to ask what had happened when she volunteered the story. “It was those damned lawyers. After little Hubert got in trouble they had to borrow to pay off the lawyers, and after that, well, it just didn’t work out for them.”

“What happened to little Hubert?” I asked, now caught up in her story.

“Such an awful man,” she replied. “Thirty-five years old and never worked a day in his life, and such terrible things he did to that boy.”

“When was that?” I asked, joining her on her porch and accepting her offer of a cup of coffee.

“Oh, let’s see. Not long ago, it must have been in 1984. Yes, I’m certain. Ralph, my husband, had just retired.” Twenty-five years ago she remembers like yesterday. It’s probably what happened yesterday that confuses her. “They sent him to prison, you know, for the rest of his life. I hear the other inmates there gelded him, just like what he’d done to that poor boy, served him right if you ask me.”

I finished the coffee and listened to her talk about her grandkids and late husband, and then went home and burned the tape, wishing like hell that I’d never listened to it.