11-16-2025, 11:32 AM
This happened in the summer between junior high and high school. I lived in a small town in Indiana called Huntington, not very big, but famous for Dan Quayle who was vice president back then. Now, a few roads and a highway remember his name, but then, he was big news.
I was barely fourteen. My birthday was the week after graduation from eighth grade. I think I was a pretty normal guy, mostly. I had a few friends, a couple of really good friends, a best friend, a bike that got me around town well enough, the new Nintendo video game in my room, a phone on my bedside table that wasn't a corny old rotary thing, and was looking forward to being a real high school student.
I was kind of tall, like my dad. I think he was about six feet tall. Mom was tall, too. So I never thought I was going to be small. I had my mom's hair, real light blond and straight. Had her mouth, too. Small and with fat lips. I thought they made me look girly, so I started keeping a kind of frown on my face, keeping my lips tight and straight. I got my big frame from my dad, and his big ears and huge brown eyes. I mean huge brown eyes. They looked like they belonged on Ewoks or something.
I'm going to brag, but the truth isn't really bragging, right? I was really hung. I was fourteen, and measuring it since the hair started at barely thirteen. Back then, the major source of information outside of school and textbooks was the library. I had found out there and from talk with the guys, and some show and tell, that four to five inches was normal at my age. Four was pretty normal, less was still normal, depending on if you had hair yet, and how much. Five was really long for fourteen. Unless I had a freak of a ruler, I was six and a quarter inches on my fourteenth birthday. It was thin, though, so it was shaped like one of those permanent markers. I was cut and it wasn't smooth at all. Veins made it seem sort of rough, and the flared edges of the head stuck out more than what I saw on my friends.
I hoped I was pretty average, otherwise. I never thought about fags, except in jokes or calling a friend one as a joke. I just didn't think about that. In small-town Indiana in the eighties, gays were on the news as spreading AIDS, wore weird clothes, and lived in big cities - they had nothing to do with us.
Especially not barely fourteen-year-old me and my friends.
That summer, Gabriel Sheer moved into town. His parents did, so he did, too. He moved into a house that had been empty almost all year, after the old couple there moved in with their son in Fort Wayne. They cleaned the place up and me and Russell were playing in my yard one day, when that kid came out of their garage with a mower, obviously to mow the yard. We felt like spying, he didn't seem to have seen us, so we went inside and sat in my room and watched out my window as he fought with the mower for a long time before he put gas down the carburetor and it finally started.
As he bent over the mower, pulling the cord over and over, his butt and legs showed off in his tight jeans. He had to be a little older than us. It was blazingly hot, and he took off his shirt before he got the mower started. Now we could tell that he was way older than us. He had hair on his chest and obviously worked out. It didn't do anything to me at all. I wasn't gay at all. Russell made jokes, I did too, and soon I saw how Russell was touching himself.
"Fag," I teased with a laugh.
I remember how he got really red in the face and laughed kind of funny, but it didn't mean anything to fourteen-year-old me. He stopped doing that, but it got me kind of hard, which made me feel pretty weird.