A Millennium Boy

CHAPTER 1

I am as old as the century; but, in fact, I am also as old as the millennium as I was born in the year 2000. Of course I am as delusional as 99.99% of the world's population in thinking that January 1st 2000 was the start of the twenty-first century and simultaneously the start of the third millennium; for as all enlightened people will recognise, the new century did not begin until January 1st 2001; the year 2000 was, of course, the last year of the twentieth century. But I can well understand why the misguided world and I with it, had I been old enough to understand it, celebrated January 1st 2000 as the start of a new era. After all, 2000 has a pristine newness about it which 2001 most certainly does not. Anyway now that we have got that misunderstanding out of the way, I can quite assert, in the full knowledge that I am technically quite wrong, when I say that I am as old as the century which began on January 1st 2000; but we will live with that misconception as it makes checking on one's age so very much easier.

Right or wrong, it's a great feeling, for you can never be wrong about your age as all you have to do to check how old you are (and believe me as you get older, there are occasions when you are not sure about your own age) is to look at the calendar to see what year it is. If the year is 2009, you are nine years old; well maybe, but, equally, maybe not. If you were born in September 2000 and you happened to confirm your age as nine years old, by checking what year it was in June 2009, then you would of course be wrong. And this is where it gets interesting, for lots of people -- millions in fact -- were born in the year 2000 and can, therefore, casually -- and I use that word advisedly -- claim to be as old as the century. But only a rarefied few of us, those who were born on January 1st 2000, can truly claim to be as old as the century. And I can go yet one better; only those who were born immediately after the stroke of midnight on December 31st 1999 can truly claim to be as old as the century at any moment in time. And of course as you have already probably guessed I was one of those people. I have to say that I have often wondered how many of us there are in the world. But it is a question I have chosen not to pursue as it is irrelevant to this story.

My name is William Alfred Symes and I am a Millennium First Minuter -- a true Millennium Boy -- as I was born at one minute past midnight in the year 2000. Both my given names were rather pompous and old fashioned, so I became known to my school friends as Liam; but not to my father, who always, to my great annoyance, I might add, called me William. I am writing this in the year 2025 and so I am twenty-five years old at the time I am telling this story. But to start at the beginning, we need to backtrack quite a few years and look at my early childhood.

I never knew my mother, who, according to my (odious) father, died when I was only two years old. Whether she did actually die or just left him, I do not know; but I am quite prepared to think the worst, for my father was (perhaps he still is, for all I know, as I do not have any contact with him at all anymore) a truly awful man; I count him as belonging to a group whom I characterise as The World's Worst People. As far as I can see, other than my father, I had (have?) no one else whom I can count as family. I have no aunts and uncles whom I know about; were both my parents only children like me? And I did not, and indeed still do not, appear to have any grandparents, either maternal or paternal; the laws of nature tells us that they must have existed; or indeed possibly still exist; but I have no knowledge of them; nor were they ever mentioned by my father,. So as far as I am aware, my only living blood relative is my father with whom I lived -- if you could call it living -- until I was eighteen.

My father, who apart from me, lived alone, was a truck farmer: a market gardener, in miniscule town in northern California near the peculiarly named town of Yreka, close the the Oregon State Line. I don't know exactly how many acres of land we cultivated, but it was a non-stop job. He employed a number of illegal Mexicans, to whom he paid a pittance, to till the land and cultivate and harvest the crops which he delivered to various outlets in the local town. He employed another illegal Mexican immigrant, a woman called Juanita Rodriguez Rodriguez (I never really understood at the time why she had twice the same surname) to keep house for him. Juanita, who lived with her only son, Ramon, in a miserable shack on our land, was a maid-of-all-work for my father -- and for me too, I suppose. She looked after the house, cleaned, cooked and did the shopping, all without complaint and again for a miserably low wage.

As our farm was rather isolated, Ramon, who had been born in the US, was the only playmate I had and we became bosom friends. Ramon went to the same school as I did and spoke English like an American without that sing-song, somewhat nasal accent which older Mexicans have. But to my father, he was just another idle, no-good, damned Mexican. Whether my father, who railed on about his Mexican employees more or less continuously, realised what good workers they, in fact, were, I very much doubt; but without them we would have been in a hole. My father was very much a Bible puncher. He (and I perforce, as my father made me) attended one of those churches set up by some cult or other, in which America abounds, whose main objective is to line the pockets of their so-called clergy with cash contributions from the congregation. Religion seemed to occupy the greater part of my father's life. His favourite subject was sin. My God; listening to him rant on about sin, you would have been forgiven had you got the impression that breathing missed being a sin, but only by a hair's breadth; in a word, sin was everywhere. In short my father was a miserable, mean-minded, religious zealot.

One day, when I was about six, he caught Ramon and me in the barn playing with what we then called our willies. Of sex we then knew absolutely nothing; but as curious little boys, we did as so many before us and since have done; we compared and played with our little penises. There was nothing untoward in what we were doing and any reasonable parent, many of whom have experienced the same with their own sons, would have told us to stop it otherwise it would drop off or some other unpleasant but very unlikely happening would occur to our tiny cocks, and then how would we be unable to pee, or some other such nonsense and that would have been that. But my father was not a reasonable parent; not even the most charitable of judges would have called him that. He called us a pair of little perverts, a word we did not understand at the time and before we knew it, he had the pair of us with our pants down across the kitchen table, where he proceeded to belt the living daylight out of our bare bottoms with an old razor strop which he had picked up from somewhere. Ramon and I both howled with pain, but there was no stopping him as he laid into the pair of us as if there was to be no tomorrow.

Looking back over the years, that little incident marked the beginning of the end for me with my father, as I now began to see him for the bully that he was. As time passed, he graduated from the strop to a cane. I remember well the first time he made me drop by pants and beat my backside with it. My father had always insisted that I come straight home from school after classes finished for the day to work on the farm; but that day I was late returning home as I had hung around for an hour or so with some of my classmates, chewing the fat, as lads do the world over. Anyway, he was in a volcanic rage when I walked into the house. Within less than a minute after my arrival, he had me arse naked across the kitchen table and proceeded to thrash my backside with a cane he had acquired from somewhere. I don't remember how many strokes he gave me that day, but I know that I could barely walk by the time he had done with me. And that beating was the first of many; as my father now began to show his true character: a died in the wool sadist, if ever there was one.

I suspect that many and indeed, possibly most of you reading this story, will never have experienced firsthand -- or possibly more accurately put, first arse -- a beating with a cane. I say cane, as I had really not the faintest idea where the rod with which my father beat my naked arse on so many occasions, came from or of what material it was made; suffice it to say that it was a long, rigid but relatively flexible cane-like stick, which whether designed or not for the purpose for which my father used it on my naked arse, was, in his hands, was utterly devastating. Its rigidity allowed him to target very precisely that part of my naked anatomy on which he wished each cut to land, but at the same time as the blow landed on my naked flesh, the cane's innate flexibility ensured that it mated perfectly with the contours of my naked buns, thereby ensuring a long and continuous welt across the entire width of my arse -- and often down the my far flank as well.

I remember the first time that he told me to drop my pants and Y fronts and bend across the kitchen table, grasping the far edge with my hands. I was utterly terrified as I had never before had my bare arse beaten with a cane. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as, stretched as I was with my arse taught across the table, I waited for the inevitable: a clear swish of the cane, hissing down through the air, heralded the downward trajectory of that rod of correction, to be flowed a split second later by a sharp crack as it mated with its target: my naked arse. For that brief moment, as the cane landed on the naked flesh of my arse, I felt absolutely nothing; but then that split second moment of respite had gone and my arse suddenly felt as though someone had laid a red-hot poker across it. As I said earlier, most of you will never have experienced the extremely doubtful pleasure of a naked arse beating; but just let me tell you that if ever there was a number to miss, then that is it!

No matter what people might tell you, believe me as a veteran receiver of beatings, a cane, well applied to the naked arse, is indescribably painful and leaves you unable to sit down comfortably for the next several days. That first time, I begged my father to stop; but my pleas went unheard and he went on to give me twelve stinging cuts of that fucking cane for some piffling fault, which he claimed I had committed, but which have long since forgotten. That night, I went to bed in tearful agony and prayed, in vain as future events showed, that I would never again have to undergo such a dreadfully painful punishment.

CHAPTER 2

Isolated as we were on our farm on the outskirts of town, I had no friends other than Ramon. My father grudgingly paid me a few dollars a week for the work I did on the farm and the only respite I had from him and his relentless hounding was on Saturdays, when I was grudgingly allowed a day free for myself. From the age of about thirteen I took to cycling into town and, by way of earning some pocket money, I used to stand around the checkouts at the local supermarket and offer to help the lady customers with their shopping; I would take their bags to their cars and load them into the trunk and get a little tip for my efforts; and it worked very well. With with no false modesty, I can say that I was an attractively handsome young lad, to whom the ladies took. Eventually, the shop manager saw what I was doing and offered me a part time job at the checkouts to speed up the packing customers' bags, for which he paid me a few dollars. By the time I was fifteen, I had graduated to a fulltime Saturday job where I filled up the shelves in the supermarket and got a real salary of about $25 a day. So one way and another, what with the pittance I got from my father and my Saturday earnings, I started to build up a little nest egg.

At home, things went from bad to worse with my father, who became steadily more vicious in his treatment of me. There were no women in his life or, I might add, girls in mine. Juanita was still around as housekeeper, but in spite of what one might have thought there was nothing at all between my father and her: she was just an employee, glad to have a job and a roof over her head for herself and her son. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, thanks to the interminable discussions about sex with my schoolmates, I had become a little more worldly wise in the ways of life, I did start to ask myself about my father; did he, in fact, have a sex life at all or was the church enough for him? I had never known my mother and apart from Juanita there were no women at all in my father's life; not that Juanita was in his life. However, by chance, one evening, all became clear to me.

I had already gone to bed and was almost asleep when a bump aroused me. Wondering what it was I went out of my room into the corridor; it was around midnight and I saw that the door of my father's bedroom was slightly ajar; a light was on and I could hear strange grunting sounds emanating from within. I very quietly approached the door, pushed it slightly further open to see my father and the pastor from our church completely naked together in bed. The grunts I had heard came from my father, who on this occasion was playing the active part as he thrust himself into his partner's arse. This was the first time I and ever seen two men fucking; or for that matter, anyone fucking; but I knew instantly from the interminable sex discussions with my schoolmates, that what I was witnessing was an act of gay sexual intercourse: my own father was fucking the pastor's anus. So there it was: my father and the pastor were both homosexuals, which finally explained the complete absence of women around the farm; and also, possibly, the total absence of my mother.

But seeing my father fucking the pastor set me thinking about myself and my own sexuality. At school the main topic of discussion among my male schoolmates was the girls with whom we all sat together in class; sex and how one went about it and what they would (hopefully) do to a girl if ever the chance arose was the interminable subject of most conversations among us lads. These discussions had begun when we were about fourteen or fifteen years old and intensified with each passing year as we moved towards manhood. But there was for me a big question mark overhanging the whole question of sex; it was the gradual realisation that I found myself more attracted towards other boys than to any of the girls with whom we were in close proximity in class. I have already mentioned that I was a good-looking well-set-up young lad and many of the girls at school made eyes at me. Alas for them their efforts fell on stony ground; what attraction they had for me was was never mutual.

As time progressed I found myself fixated on some of my male classmates although it never went any further than that: visual attraction; there was no action and I never ever divulged my private thoughts and feelings to anyone. But ultimately I came to the conclusion that I myself was very probably gay: like my father, I felt that I too was homosexual. But any thought of developing a physical relationship with any of my male classmates was nipped in the bud when aged sixteen, my father pulled me out of school to work with him fulltime on the farm. Whether what he did was legal, I am not at all sure, as I think that Californian law mandated obligatory schooling until aged eighteen: the age of majority. But in the rural farming community where we lived, legal eyes were closed, as boys like me were needed to work on their parents' agricultural holdings.

So aged sixteen, thanks to my father's actions, I was effectively cut off from any meaningful contact with my hitherto schoolmates.

Ramon, my only close friend, had also disappeared from our farm. His mother, Juanita, still worked for my father, but she told me that her son had just gone off on his own, aged but fifteen, and that she had no idea where he was or what he was doing. So with his disappearance I had no company at all of my own age, either male or female. And as time passed, things between my father and me went from bad to worse. Even though I was now a young man aged sixteen plus, he still berated me continually, complained about everything I did and generally made my life a misery. Neither did he stint on this use of the dreaded cane on my naked buttocks, as any misdemeanour, real or imaginary, led to a bare-arsed thrashing for me.

So from the time I left school aged sixteen to my eighteenth birthday, my life with my father was barely worth living. I lost count of the times I went to bed with my arse well and truly roasted by my father's ministrations with his cane. As time passed, my hatred for my own father grew and I realised that I had no future at all on his farm. I was used relentlessly as cheap labour, from which my only respite was my free Saturday, when I went into town to escape from the depressing atmosphere in which I lived. It was then that I decided that once I reached the age of eighteen and was legally free of the yoke of my father, that I would leave the farm and him forever; and so I bided my time until that glorious day of liberation arrived. I had tried to saved as much as I could of my meagre earnings over the years and by my eighteenth birthday I had about $3500 in cash, all of which I kept secretly in a tin box under my bed.

In fact, this little nest egg of cash was my only asset, for having been pulled out of school aged sixteen I had no high-school diploma or paper qualifications of any kind. All I knew how to do was farm work: not an attribute that would lead me to a fortune! Add to this my growing realisation about my probable sexuality, for as time passed I saw that I really did have eyes only for other men; especially for young muscular types; women were of no interest at all to me; and so, sexually still a virgin as I was, I just knew that I was potentially gay: a homosexual man. It seemed obvious that it was only a question of time before I would find myself in a situation of no return and have to physically acknowledge my sexuality by indulging in some act of sex with another man.

As I had no computer of my own -- I didn't even own a cell-phone -- I had, on my Saturdays spent down town, quite frequently gone to an internet café where I had instructed myself in the rudiments of gay sex. Well, to be quite honest, I had actually wallowed in the gay pornographic websites I found on the internet and wondered what it would be like to indulge myself in some of the sexual activities between men which I saw enacted there. The only thing was that I had so far got no further than the wondering stage. So my own sexual urges, which were becoming ever more urgent as time passed, I satisfied in the normal manner of any frustrated young man; I just jerked myself off, wondering what it would be like to fuck another man and in turn to be fucked by him, which is really what I wanted to do.

I wondered what my father would have said had he known the direction my life was taking. Of course, he was himself a hypocritical closet gay. From my first discovery of that fact when I had chanced upon the pastor and him copulating together in his bed, I had observed that the pair of them were regular practitioners of the gentle art of anal intercourse. I still remembered how he had thrashed Ramon and me all those years ago and called us perverts, when as innocent little boys we had been doing what so many lads do: fiddling with our tiny penises. Looking at myself now, I was proud of the fact that, for some reason, my own cock had grown to a good size.