I was in second grade when I met Kevin. For the rest of elementary school, I considered him to be my best friend. From then until five or six years after I met him, we literally did everything together. At the time it seemed that the two of us were perfect together. Little did I know Kevin would be the boy who would put me on a downhill spiral for the rest of my elementary and middle school career.
It all started when we were in sixth grade when he called me to tell me that he had just purchased a “boner” from Best Buy. When I had first heard this, I smirked a little bit. I was in sixth grade so the word “boner” was new to my vocabulary and hilarious to me. It was one of those words that me and all of my friends would write over all the nerds’ homework and think we were fucking hilarious for doing so. But right after the smirk, I started picturing disturbing things in my head. I still remember all the horrible images that were flying through my mind when I heard him say that sentence. I couldn’t stop picturing Kevin and his dad stepping up to the cashier at Best Buy, putting a giant erected dick on the counter, having the nice old women who was ringing them up scan the tiny barcode on the shaft, then walking out to their Wrangler and strapping it down to the roof with bungee cords (in my mind, the dick was GIGANTIC).
With this image floating around in my head, I failed to realize that Kevin was still on the phone repeating, “No you retard, I said BURNER. CD BURNER.” Kevin and I had spent all of our latter elementary school years wanted a CD burner. This was back in the mid nineties, when having a CD burner in your computer was something that normal households weren’t capable of affording. We saw so much potential in being able to create our own mix CDs so that we wouldn’t have to make our parents go out and spend money on real CDs for us to listen to. Plus, we could download songs for our friends and burn the songs onto a mix for them for a few bucks. This never really worked out, because Lars Ulrich scared the shit out of us with the whole Napster thing, so we thought we would get arrested for selling these illegally downloaded songs. This is all beside the point though. So now I knew that Kevin wasn’t saying the word “boner,” but the word “burner.” I wiped the sweat beads off of my forehead and told him how awesome it was that he had a CD burner, and then I hung up the phone and went back to doing my homework.
Two weeks went by and I had completely forgotten about the whole “boner” incident. It was two nights before Halloween, whatever year that was, and I went with my dad to Halloween Adventure so that I could pick out a costume to go trick-or-treating with. I remember really wanting to be Jason Voorhees that year even though I had never even seen any of the Friday the 13th movies. I was only twelve years old, so my mom assumed I was too young to watch anything with that much gore and language. I guess that makes sense, but then again she let me watch the last Nightmare on Elm Street film with my stepbrothers and that was ten times more gory than any of the Friday the 13th films (that movie really did scare the shit out of me though, even though I wouldn’t admit it.) Anyway, back in the nineties, the Halloween stores always had an adult costume section. I’m pretty sure they still do actually; the aisle just isn’t blocked off from kids like it used to be. There was a black curtain on each side of the aisle, and every time somebody went in or out I tried to peek in. I was too young to understand what would be in the aisle that I wasn’t allowed to see. At the age of twelve, you don’t realize that Halloween isn’t just a holiday that kids dress up for, so you have no reason to think that there would be a section of a Halloween store that isn’t appropriate for children. As I peeked past the curtain, something really interesting grabbed my attention. It was a giant hot dog costume. I really needed to have this costume, so I ran away from my dad and through the curtain.
My eyesight has always been 20/20, so I’m still not sure how I didn’t notice this from glancing past the curtain: the costume was not a hot dog at all; it was a giant black cock in a hot dog bun with cum and blood dripping out of the top and covering the shaft like ketchup and mustard. There was a hole for a face right on the head of the dick and there were huge balls where the leg holes were with giant red veins emerging out of them. Immediately after seeing this, I screamed at the top of my lungs and tried to run away, only to crash into the other side of the aisle and knock it onto the ground. I looked up at all the damage I had caused and saw the dick costume sitting right in my face, which caused me to scream some more. My dad angrily grabbed me, apologized to the manager of the store, and took me back to the car without getting a costume.
I spent the car ride home getting yelled at by my dad. He kept asking what had happened but it was far too awkward to tell him the truth of what I saw. If I mentioned the dick it would just start a whole “sex ed” conversation, which everyone knows is the most awkward conversation to have with your parents as a child. I may have only been twelve, but I already knew what dicks and vaginas were for. I guess I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a vagina looked like at that age, but I knew enough about what dicks looked like to know that I shouldn’t be that freaked out when I saw one. Maybe it was just my homophobia starting to kick in at an early age. Not really homophobia I guess, but more of that stage I would soon go into in middle school where we called everything that everyone did “gay.” If a guy shook another guy’s hand, it was gay. If a guy went to the movies with a bunch of other guys and no girl, it was gay. I’m pretty sure it was this stage that scared the gayness out of Kevin and made him decide to get a girlfriend, but that’s a completely different story.
We returned home from the unsuccessful trip to Halloween Adventure around nine thirty, which was about my bedtime at that age. As I tried to get ready for bed, everything I looked at looked like a dick to me. I couldn’t brush my teeth because my tooth brush was just a skinny erect cock that I didn’t want to touch my teeth with. I couldn’t wash my hand or face because the soap dispenser looked too much like it was dispensing cum out of an irregularly shaped phallus. I couldn’t even shower because it felt too much like a giant penis was cumming all over my entire body. I had to get this out of my head before I fucked myself up for the rest of my life. The only thing I could think to do was call Kevin.
“Kevin, I need your help. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about dicks ever since you called me about your CD burner a few weeks ago.” No, that’s not going to work. He would just make fun of me for the rest of my life if I told him that. As I was sitting next to the phone to think of what to say to him, the phone started to ring. I looked at the caller ID and it was coming from Kevin’s house. I guess now I had to say something to him. “Hello?” I answered.
“Hi, Jason. This is Kevin’s mother. Has Kevin been acting strange around you recently? I just went through his book bag and found a notebook with a bunch of inappropriate drawings that all had your name written under them.”
I was now completely confused. I had no idea what this could possibly be about, and I really didn’t care to know. I was too busy freaking out about what I should say to Kevin when I finally talked to him. “What were the pictures of?” I asked.
“Well…” She paused. “They were all pictures of… how do I say this… men’s personal body parts.”
This came as such a giant relief to me. Kevin was having the same exact problem that I was having. I asked her if I could talk to Kevin and he picked up the phone laughing about how his mom just saw a bunch of pictures of dicks that he drew. I asked him why he drew so many pictures of dicks and he just said it was because they were funny. Fuck, maybe we don’t have the same problem. He’s laughing at them and I’m becoming scared shitless of them. I couldn’t tell him that I’ve been thinking about dicks all the time and freaking out about them. What would he say to that? I said the only thing I could think of.
“That’s gay, you faggot.”
I hung up the phone and went back to my room and turned on the TV. I thought that maybe watching Home Improvement would get the images out of my mind, and to my advantage, it did. After about an hour I turned the TV off and went to sleep.
Sleeping was the worst idea I could have possibly had that night. What I dreamt that night still scares me to this day. I awoke in a room full of all different size dicks, all of them hard. Black dicks, white dicks, big dicks, small dicks; use any rhyme from any Dr. Seuss book and replace the nouns with the word “dicks” and it was all in this room. I ran out of the room as fast as I could, but all of the dicks were chasing me. They all had legs sticking out of their balls just like the costume did. I kept running from all of the dicks only to end up at a door. I remember being ridiculously scared and did not want to open the door, but I had no choice. If I didn’t open the door, I would be stampeded by a herd of giant multicolored penises. I grabbed the door handle, and on the other side was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life: a “CD boner”. It was a giant erected black cock in a hot dog bun, slightly different from the one at the Halloween store because it didn’t have legs. It was shooting cum and blood straight up into the sky, but even weirder was that the cum was on fire, and it was aiming straight at all the CDs on the roof. After the CDs would catch fire, they were falling off of the roof and around where I was standing, so I had to try my best to dodge them. The last thing I wanted was a flaming, cum covered CD. As I moved around like a snake trying to avoid getting hit by the CDs, the rest of the dicks behind me burst through the door. This is what woke me up.
I looked at the clock and it was four in the morning. There was no way I was going to be able to go back to sleep after that nightmare, so I pulled out a Goosebumps novel and started to read. I wanted to go wake up my dad and tell him about my nightmare, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t. I thought that maybe I could change the dicks into vampires or werewolves or something, but my dad knew that I wasn’t scared of any of those things. I was fucked. When you’re a twelve year old kid, the last thing you want to think about is how for the rest of your life you are going to be scared to death by penises. There had to be some solution to this. While I was thinking about this, I fell back asleep.
I decided that I was going to talk to Kevin about in school the next day. I sat down at my desk right across from him and said “hello,” but he was too pissed at me for calling him a faggot the night before to even acknowledge my existence. I needed to think of a way to get him to talk to me. I had the perfect idea.
While Mrs. Rodman was giving a lecture on the Oregon Trail, I sat there drawing dicks all over my social studies book cover. I figured that Kevin would talk to me if he saw that I was doing the same thing that he does. He glanced at it and smiled. I couldn’t tell if he smiled because he realized I was drawing dicks like him or because he got genuinely happy from the sight of penises. Turns out the real reason he was smiling was because Mrs. Rodman was standing right behind me, watching me cover my book with images of penises. “I think you need to go down to the principal,” she whispered in my ear. Fuck.
The rest of this story isn’t really interesting. My parents got called in to the school and I got suspended for three days, but that was really it. My parents realized it was just a stage that I’d be over really soon, so they let it slide. They were right. After seeing Kevin smile at me for getting caught drawing dicks, I no longer continued to see dicks in everything. I’m not really sure how that worked, but I wasn’t really complaining about it. The only problem was that I still had the image of the “hot dog dick CD boner” in my head. I just assumed I’d forget about it someday.
Never happened.
