Wiggly Ones

With no siblings or neighborhood friends, there was nobody else to ask. Not that I would have. I wasn’t supposed to trust in anyone else.

It had been about six months since I discovered the pleasure down there. Six months of staring at it and wondering what made it work. Six months of exploring different textures—toilet paper rolls, cotton swabs, stuffed animals, pillows. Everything was an object of my sexuality. Still, I wasn’t sure whether I’d reached that point where I could have a baby. Was that milky ooze sperm?

There wasn’t anything special about that night, except that I decided after exploring myself with a handful of shampoo to ask. One of my fisher price toys was in the bathroom—a small plastic construction worker. Really he was a plastic cylinder with a plastic ball for a head and a tiny construction helmet. He was flat along the base, which I used to scoop up some of my goo. The rest, I ate; it was the easiest way to clean up.

After cleaning and covering up, I proceeded eagerly to the kitchen. Mama was boiling down some beans and rice and with a wooden spoon she stirred the chunks of yucca that fried in a pot of oil.

“Mami?”

“Oh! You scared me! It’s that you have a habit of surprising me.”

“What is this?”

She looked at it. She grinned. She bore her teeth in an ear-to-ear smile and asked, slyly, “Have you been tickling yourself down there?”

I took a deep breath, afraid to get reprimanded, “Yyyes.”

She smelled it.

“This is your semen.”

“Is it sperm?”

“Yes.”

“But...the wiggly ones?”

“Yes. Now you’re a man. It’s not bad to tickle yourself down there. But you shouldn’t do it too much. They say it’s bad.”

They? There must’ve been a group of them, sitting around, watching boys like me and counting the number of times they masturbated. There must’ve been a study, and a medical analysis. She must be right, I thought.

I smiled. “Okay, I’ll be careful.”

“Wait. Leave that here. Let me show your father—he’ll be very proud and his nostrils will flare the way they do when he’s happy.”

For the next several years I tried not to masturbate more than eight times a day. If I surpassed that amount, I asked God for forgiveness.