I never really got to know Dad’s brother, my Uncle John; he died in 1964 when I was only fifteen, we lived on opposite coasts, and some issues between he and my mother made him unwelcome in our home. I talked to him a few times at the unavoidable family gatherings like weddings and funerals, and I didn’t much care for him. He was obese, vulgar, and had the same smell as the pungent cigars that he constantly smoked. I wasn’t at all offended by the fact that he didn’t seem to care for me, either. Most of the rest of the family considered him to be some sort of pariah, and none of our conversations involved him.

Dad and I got kind of drunk one night, long after Uncle John had died, and he finally loosened up enough to tell me about his brother. This is how Dad told it, except for whatever lapses there are in my memory.

“John was born in 1909,” Dad said, “fifteen years before me. He was grown, fully feathered, and had left the nest before I could really remember him. He was just another one of the Big People.

There must have been quite a bit of money back then, because he tried college for a while. That didn’t work out for him so my father paid flying lessons for John and even purchased an airplane so he could make his fame and fortune. This was right after Lindberg flew the Atlantic, and aviation was an up and coming thing. I remember him coming home a lot after that, and he even took me up for my first ride when I was five or six years old. Scared the shit out of me.

John knocked around the country in the airplane for a while, and he even made a little money flying it until he flew under a bridge and had his license suspended. He then had the airplane taken apart and shipped to South America, where he could get a different license and go back to flying. I was in school by then, and the post cards John sent me were really neat. I’d show them off to all of my friends and look in the atlas to find all of the places he wrote about.

The airplane got destroyed somehow and John wanted money from home to get another one, but by that time the depression was in full swing there wasn’t any money for things like airplanes. John stayed down there and took to doing something else. No one really wanted to hire him as a pilot, nor would they rent him an airplane. His letters became few and far in between, and sometimes months would go by before we heard from him again. He wasn’t very specific about what he was doing then, but as long as he wasn’t asking for money papa didn’t much care.

The next time I saw my brother was in 1937 when I was like thirteen years old. I had just gotten home from school when this bright red ’36 Ford coupe comes rolling down our street and stopped.”

“Hi ya, Peewee!” A tall guy in his late twenties smoking a big cigar hollered at me.

I didn’t even recognize my own brother! He had gotten into New Orleans a few days before and had bought a car and driven to Roanoke without even calling us.

Anyway, he said he was going to be in around for a couple of weeks, then he would be driving to the West coast and get on a boat back to Argentina. He had a whole wad of twenty-dollar bills and he seemed intent on spending every one of them before he left. He told Dad that he was involved with the Argentine government doing something or another that he really wasn’t supposed to talk about, so Dad just kind of left it alone.

John spent a lot of time with me, and he seemed to really enjoy having a kid brother to impress. I liked it too. I had a lot of friends my own age, but having an older guy to mess around with was neat, and we did things that I guess any brothers would do. Also, my nuts had dropped a few months previous and back then you didn’t talk to just any adult about such things as girls and sex. I had been taking a slop sock to bed with me three or four nights a week, and I knew my equipment all worked but I had a lot of questions. My only information had come from other guys at school my age and they didn’t know any more than I did. He did enlighten me on a couple of things, but he ducked the really explicit questions by just telling me that I’d figure it out sooner or later.

My room had a set of bunk beds, so we both slept there. There were actually four bedrooms in the house, but Mom had rented out the extra two to boarders so we could get a little bit of extra money. Times were tough back then. There was only one bathroom in the house, so each bedroom had a table that held a large basin and jug of wash water, thus saving the precious bathroom space for the toilet functions and the bi-weekly baths.

The night before John was going to leave I came into the room at bedtime. John was shaving in front of the mirror, and he was completely nude. That kind of startled me, because we never took our clothes off around each other back then. I had been nude with other guys my age at school, of course, but I had never seen an adult, not even my own father completely naked. I had some hair down low, but John was hairy all over, even his butt, and his tools were at least twice the size of mine.

“Hey, Spike, how they hanging?” John asked, turning to me.

I got all embarrassed, and turned away so he could get dressed in private, but he didn’t seem to care. He just went ahead shaving, and then sat down on the chair without even bother to wrap a towel around himself or put on his underwear.”

“Come, on, Stud,” John challenged, “drop your pants, lets see what you have down there.”

I was still kind of antsy, but I finally pulled down my skivvies and showed him my massive manhood.

“Not bad.” He said, with obviously fake admiration. “You’ll make some girl really happy with that setup of yours.”

Then he rose and retrieved a brown paper bag from his suitcase and emptied it onto the bed. Three small boxes fell out, and he opened one to reveal a half dozen circular foil envelopes. Then he told me what they were.

“You can get these at any drug store,” my brother informed me. “They’re one size fits all, so don’t let anyone try to make a fool of you. Always carry one in your wallet; you never know when you’ll need it. Hide the rest so Mom won’t find them. Don’t open the envelope until you need to use it,” he said, “then you just roll it onto your cock. Nothing to it. They’ll keep you from catching a disease that might make your dick fall off and also will keep you from getting a girl pregnant.”

I knew I was turning red with embarrassment, but it didn’t seem to faze John a bit.

“Be careful about who you stick that thing into,” John said, pointing to my dick, “or some pissed off daddy might hire someone like me to nut you.”

“Huh?” I said, not quite sure about what I had heard.

“Yeah,” my brother said, “I cut the balls off of a kid not much older that you are. He knocked up big shot government guy’s daughter, so the guy had the boy kidnapped and brought to me. I really hated to do it. He was a good looking kid with big balls, and I really felt sorry for him, that is until the little turd jizzed all over my hand.”

That really got my head spinning. I had never even imagined any guy cutting off part of another guy’s body, and the idea of my own brother doing that kind of thing, especially to a guy’s most sensitive parts, was simply too much to take. “Uh, just what is it you do in Argentina, John?”

“The President there doesn’t want some people to be able to make babies,” he answered. “He made it a law that queers, or maricones as they call them there, imbeciles, retarded people and some men with severe birth defects be sterilized, which is done by cutting their balls off, or technically, castrating them. The doctors won’t do things like that, and most everyone else is so religious that they think they’ll go to hell for doing it, so I learned how. Every now and then they have me do it to other guys too, like the kid who got the government official’s daughter in trouble. Also, if a guy gets caught raping a woman or messing with little boys he gets the knife.

“There’s really not much to it. Unless the guy is being punished for something, like the kid was, he is sedated and doesn’t even know what’s going on. I just slice his bag open, tie the blood vessels off with silk sutures, and cut the testicles out, then stitch the bag shut. I have to disinfect everything first, of course, and shave off any hair from around the incision, but the whole procedure only takes a few minutes, and I get twenty dollars for each one.”

I thought of all the twenty dollar bills he had, and of what the Ford must have cost, and wondered how many guys he had done that to. “Don’t they ever die?” I asked.

“Hardly ever,” he replied. One guy I was working on keeled over, but he was a convicted rapist so it didn’t much matter. He wasn’t sedated, and I don’t know if his heart gave out or if he just didn’t want to live without his balls. The rest of them all survived, as far as I know.”

My already smallish cock had shrunk to the size of my thumb and my balls had sucked tight up against my body as John told this to me, but it had the opposite affect of him. He soon had a huge boner and was starting to breath a little hard. I didn’t much like that, brother or not, so I got into my bunk and covered up and tried to sleep. I stayed awake most of the night.

The next morning John left. I didn’t see him again for over fifteen years. I was still in high school when the war broke out, and John came back to the states to try and get into the Army Air Corp, but he wrote and said that he flunked the physical and was going to Texas as a civilian flight instructor at an Army base. I joined up as soon as I graduated, and by the time I got back he had already left again for Argentina.

I got married after the war, and then you came along in 1948 and we moved here to Washington. It must have been ’52 or’53, you were just a little fart, when John blew into town, again driving a new car. He said the government had changed in Argentina, and he had gotten asked to leave the country. He had a line on some kind of real estate deal in Georgia and was headed there next. He spent a couple of days with us. Your mother and I went out to a movie one night and left you with John. When we got home he had your pants down and was messing with your balls, just kind of rolling them around in his fingers. Your mother went ape and threw him out, but I’m sure you were too young to remember any of it. After that we never really talked to each other again,” Dad said, concluding the story.

Dad died a few years after telling me the story, possibly by his own hand. I subsequently came into possession of all of his old letters and keepsakes, along with those that he had inherited from his brother. Uncle John had been meticulous in his record keeping, and each one of the procedures he performed for the Argentine government was detailed as per date, name, and the condition of or offence committed by the person he castrated. I started to read them, but instead I dumped them into the incinerator and watched them go up in smoke.