Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 01:42:30 -0600
From: jwhstloo@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Boy-in-the-Booth (t/t)(mast)(youngfriends)

USUAL DISCLAIMER:  You might be too young, this stuff might be illegal
where you are, or you're upset to find out that sex for love and
pleasure happens between anybody, let alone boys, etc. You know where
you are and what you're reading--if you don't like it, just go away!

Author's note: Like my earlier "Fishin' Tale," this is another "Memorial
Day story," based on people in my life no longer around, and remembering
what was or might have been. As usual,  could be truth, could be
fantasy--imagine whatever you want.

Comments to jwhstloo@ix.netcom.com, please.  Thanks to all who read my
stories, find some connection to their own lives or feelings, and write
me about it.  --Jack


Boy in the Booth (t/t)(mast)(young friends)
By Jack Fellowes
Copyright 1999 by the Author; All Rights Reserved.

Life as a teacher's pet wasn't all bad. Oh, sure, I got ribbed by my
classmates about being a suck-up and a goody-two-shoes (those *were*
more innocent times a couple of generations ago), but my straight-A
average and record of good 'comportment' kept me on the good side of
teachers and principals, and actually gave me a lot of freedom that
other students in my middle school didn't enjoy.

It wasn't really a 'middle school' in the formal sense--I don't even
think that concept had gained currency at that time. It was just that
our small town's high school was overpopulated, and so were the three
old grade schools. So, when they built what was originally supposed to
be a new elementary school, it provided the school board a convenient
solution for the overcrowding in the other buildings. They simply
decided to move grades 6-9 into the new school building, officially
christened Villars Junior High, in honor of a recently retired
superintendent of schools.

I had already finished 6th grade at Bailey Place Elementary and started
7th grade at Wilmont High when they made the move to the new building in
the middle of the school year. So the shock of moving wasn't as great
for me as it was for the 6th-graders, and it was actually a real blow to
the ego for some of the older kids who were "demoted" from high school
status. Some of our teachers came from the high school and some from the
grade schools, so the situation was as new and different for them as it
was for us students. (That was funny, too, because it seemed that all
elementary kids were called "pupils," while high school kids
automatically became "students." I know it didn't have anything to do
with a sudden change in our study habits. But anyway, we at Villars were
all now referred to as "students.")

Anyway, I was lucky, as I started to say at the beginning, because my
new homeroom teacher was also the boys' guidance counselor and
audiovisual supervisor.  Lucky, because he knew I didn't need to study
in study halls, so I could be released to act as student projectionist
when other teachers wanted to show films or slide strips in their
classrooms or the school auditorium. After he had trained me to operate
the equipment and knew that I could handle it, he didn't even bother to
check on me--since I was a "good boy" who could be trusted to do what he
was supposed to do and not take advantage of the extra freedom.

I didn't think I was so lucky, though, when he decided that I was
responsible enough to act as a mentor and role model for a
6th-grader--especially one who had a reputation for acting up in class
and defying teachers' authority. Ralph Hayes was assigned for me to
tutor and to train as an assistant projectionist.

I had already known Ralph slightly for several years. We went to the
same elementary school and we went to the same Sunday school. He was
actually the same age I was, except that he had been held back a year in
the 3rd grade when he had had a lot of trouble adjusting to his mother's
death. His father, not much of a parent to begin with, had given up
custody of Ralph to the county. So, for the past four years, as a county
ward, Ralph had lived with about 20 other kids at the county children's
home.

In those days, there was no such thing as foster care or in-home
placement of kids who were orphaned or abandoned or removed from abusive
families. There was just the children's home--a big brick house with
dormitory-style rooms for the kids, sitting in the middle of several
dozen acres of farmland just north of town. It was a working farm, and
the kids were expected to do their chores, assigned on the basis of age
and physical strength.

The "supervisors" of the home were an older couple named Matthews whose
only training was that they knew how to run a farm, and they loved
children. And it showed:  the kids from the home were invariably among
the most polite and respectful in any gathering of boys and girls, and
they behaved toward each other like regular brothers and sisters might.
And, no matter what the kids' own upbringing had been, they all went to
Sunday school together at the church my family attended. They were not
intentionally segregated from the rest of the town's kids; they just
seemed more comfortable in each other's company.

So Ralph was the exception for a "children's home kid." First, because
he seemed to have only one really close friend--another, quieter boy
from the home named Richard. And it was really rare when one of the
Matthews' charges became a disciplinary problem. Mr. Hunt, my homeroom
teacher and the guidance counselor, told me Ralph couldn't sit still in
class, spoke out of turn, and generally didn't seem to like
school--except for shop class, where he really seemed to be both
interested and talented. Mr. Hunt thought the mechanical aspect of
running the audiovisual equipment would appeal to Ralph, and that being
with a well-behaved, good student like me would help calm him down, and
maybe my love for schoolwork would rub off on him.

I didn't really think that was likely, but I didn't object because, from
what I knew of him, I thought Ralph was funny (in a rude, wise-cracking
way), he'd never shown any hostility toward me, and he was kind of cute,
if a little rough-edged and wiry. Yes, I thought boys were cute, and I
especially liked the boys who were tougher and braver (about being
themselves) than I was. He had kind of fine dark-blond hair, tanned neck
and arms, and really bright green eyes in a very angular face.

Even as a 7th grader, I was one of the biggest kids in school. I had
gone through puberty almost a year earlier than most of my classmates
(that earned me the admiration of even the straightest future
jock-types, who couldn't keep from asking me what it was like "to--you
know--'get big and shoot off'"). I had a simultaneous growth spurt that
left me, at 13 years old, almost 5'11"--one of the two or three tallest
kids at Villars. And at 185 lbs., almost everyone assumed I'd play
football. I didn't. I played in the school band instead--the sousaphone.

Choosing band over football, not being particularly good at any other
sport--except for bowling!--and a whole slew of other choices, like
taking ballroom dancing lessons, being president of the French club, and
writing poetry in my spare time, didn't strengthen my reputation with
the jocks and regular guys. But they did endear me to most of the girls
in my class, whom I enjoyed as friends if not romantic prospects. They
loved my "sensitive" side!

So it surprised me when I found my first one-on-one encounters with
Ralph were very pleasant and low-key. He *was* interested in learning
about the projectors and other AV equipment and--maybe because he was
sort of an outcast in his own way--he didn't make fun of my music or
dancing or other "soft" qualities. The fact that he was only 5'6" and
weighed about 120 lbs. may have had something to do with it, but I think
he knew that I would treat him fairly without prejudging him. I did have
a reputation for being a nice guy, after all.

It especially surprised me that I enjoyed being alone with Ralph. He had
a wicked sense of humor, but he was never hurtful. The people he made
fun of deserved his mockery because of their self-importance or their
self-righteousness. And he was fiercely protective of the other kids
from the home, especially of his friend, Richard, who didn't have it
easy. Richard had been taken from his mother after she threw a pot of
boiling water at him when he was four years old, leaving him with
permanent disfiguring scars on his face and arms. Nobody, no matter how
unthinking, was allowed to tease Richard when Ralph was around. I said
he was wiry, and he had a strength and fierceness that would have been
more likely found in someone twice his size. In fact, I think he could
have taken me easily, despite my height and weight advantage.

After we'd worked and studied together for a few weeks, Ralph's grades
started to improve and the incidents of acting up in class decreased
markedly. As a result, Mr. Hunt, giving me full credit, wrote more and
more excuse slips for Ralph to get out of study hall and help me run
films and filmstrips for classes and school assemblies.

Assemblies were especially fun, because we had to run the films from the
projectionist's booth in the back of the balcony. Even when the whole
school had assembly, no kids or teachers ever sat in the balcony. There
were plenty enough seats on the main floor, and of course it was the
respectful thing to do (and what the teachers enforced) for kids to sit
up front so they could pay attention to the film or speaker.

So Ralph and I often found ourselves alone in the nearly sound-proof
booth some 40 feet above and 60 feet behind all our schoolmates. And
since all we had to do was start the film, watch for sprocket misfeeds,
sometimes change reels for a longer film, and of course rewind the reels
at the end, we had a lot of time just sitting beside one another on tall
stools looking out the slotted windows of the projection booth.

I also began to notice how muscular Ralph was--not bulky, but tight and
lithe. He always rolled his long sleeves up past his elbows, and when he
put one of the big 16mm film reels on the projector, I saw his biceps
ball up to about the size of tennis balls. I wasn't fat, but I had
nowhere near that kind of definition. I couldn't tell much about the
rest of his body, because of the baggy, oversized clothes he wore all of
the time.  We didn't share the same phys ed class, so I never got the
chance to see him in the dressing room or shower. But I was certainly
starting to think about finding some way to check him out a little more.
It would have to be totally accidental, though, because I would never
have had the nerve to barge into the boys' dressing room when Ralph just
"happened" to be standing there without any clothes on.

An accident happened a few weeks before the end of the school year. We
had a spring heat wave unlike any our town had experienced in many
years. The kids packed into the front of the auditorium for weekly
assembly were restless and noisy, fidgeting and fanning themselves while
waiting for the film to start. That week's film was a "hygiene"
production. (God forbid that it could ever be called "sex education" in
those long-ago days!)

So, not only were the kids restless, they were also on the edge of
giggling out loud, mostly from nervousness at hearing about the delicate
mechanics of human reproduction in mixed company. Teachers were on full
alert, shushing the worst offenders Ralph was more sanguine about the
topic; I had the feeling that he already knew as much about the topic as
the film's narrator--after all, he did live on a working farm. But he
was showing the strain of the oppressive heat in the non-air-conditioned
auditorium. I was sweating pretty good myself.

Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. He began unbuttoning his shirt and
finally stripped it off, wadding it up and tossing it behind him with a
huge sigh of relief. I tried not to stare, but I couldn't help it. His
tan stopped at his collar line: his upper torso was like alabaster, his
skin a taut white covering over a thin but finely etched layer of
sinews, themselves packed tightly across a fine-boned skeleton. With his
shirt off, his pants seemed even baggier, his belt almost encircling his
waist twice to keep them in place.

He saw me staring, but just grinned and told me to get comfortable. No
one will ever know, he said. Then his attention, and mine, went back to
the film.  The film's leading character so far--the hardy,
fittest-surviving male sperm--was about to meet his leading lady--the
female ovum. Even though we might have know the real facts of life, it
was always fascinating to hear how adults waltzed around the topic when
trying to explain it to adolescents.

Fairly intent on the film, I was still distracted by a movement I saw
out of the corner of my eye.  I first turned my eyes without turning my
head, and saw that Ralph had his right hand jammed down the front of his
pants and that, somewhere under all that baggy fabric, a regular
movement was taking place. Of course, I knew what he was doing--I'd done
it myself, but never in front of anyone else!

My sense of shock--or was it curiosity or admiration?--made me look
over. Ralph saw me look, turned toward me with a sly grin, and just kept
doing it. When I didn't look away, he pulled his hand out, unzipped his
bulky trousers and extracted a very hard, very white, five-inch,
uncircumcised penis (OK, dick!) and resumed his regular, gentle
stroking, pulling the skin back off the head and then pulling it forward
again.

Pleased by my unfaltering attention to his actions, he grinned more
widely, reached over and grabbed my hand and brought it to his hot boy
meat. The skin felt so soft and smooth, but like a velvet cloth sliding
over a steel rod. My hand automatically took over and fell into the same
rhythm and familiar stroking movement I had just witnessed.

With his hands now free, Ralph reached over and grasped the tab of my
zipper. Soon I felt the heat of his hand surround my own rigid uncut
six-incher.  Two strokes, maybe three, was all it took, and I blasted my
boy cream all over the front wall of the projection booth in several
arcing spurts. Seeing my white load dripping down the drab wall was
enough to trigger Ralph's echoing ejaculation. His coming matched mine
in distance and in quantity.

When we both relaxed, and I felt him release my softening organ, I was
suddenly aware that I was still gripping his thick piece, not painfully
but possessively. I looked into those sparkling green eyes, and returned
his grin with an audible sigh and a conspiratorial giggle.

We put our dicks away and refastened our zippers, but we finished
watching the film each with a hand in the other's lap--not stroking
anymore, just resting impudently on what I knew and he knew would be the
source of many more secret comradely episodes in our future service as
school projectionists.

******

In the middle of the summer following that school year, I sat in our
Sunday school classroom waiting for Ralph and Richard to come in
together as they did each week. I had gotten to know and appreciate
Richard much better since becoming friends with Ralph, and I understood
why Ralph felt the way he did and why they were so inseparable outside
of school. Richard was a sweet and gentle soul who loved Ralph like a
brother--or perhaps more.

So when I saw Richard walk in, slumped over, and saw our Sunday school
teacher put her arm around his shoulder and lead him to his chair, I
knew something was wrong--terribly wrong. The teacher explained to us
that Richard's friend, our friend, Ralph, had gone swimming in the old
quarry the previous day. He had hit his head when diving, been knocked
unconscious, and had drowned before anyone could get to him. All I could
do on hearing that was move slowly to the chair beside Richard's and
rest my hand on his arm, squeezing gently while my own tears flowed. The
pain in his eyes when he looked up at me shocked me.

Richard, just 12, committed suicide the following week.