Rodney and his Friends in Tights

"Well..?" she asked.

He was frozen.

There was a scrape of shoes at the garage door. He glanced with the look of a frightened deer. There was Mrs Reilly's second maid, Dorothy, dressed in grey uniform with white pinafore, eyes ablaze, broad lips wreathed in expectant grin.

She took in the scared white boy, facing off to the side, hands hovering around his waist- near-nude.

Doris and Dorothy were from Alabama. In both there may have stirred age-old race-memories. A hint of plantation life, a notion at once sexual and historic: the slave-owner's son, arrogant and proud, stripping to the buff...in front of female darkies.

Power relationships shifted, here in the spacious, three-car garage. The white boy being ordered out of his clothes.

In a soft voice Doris ordered him to take his boxers down.

"And we'll take you out into Mrs Reilly's garden."

Heart beating he stayed frozen.

"Doris, this boy not gonna strip down."

"Son, Mrs Reilly wants her boys naked as a robin."

"Nude as a needle, she says."

And the two of them giggled: naked as a robin, nude as a needle.

He stayed frozen, heart beating.

Doris moved to him and reached for the hem of his shorts. She paused. Then she whisked them down to his knees. They stuck there. His cock dropped free, clothed in foreskin.

He knew he was doomed. He bent and pulled the boxers down and stepped out of them. He folded them and placed them on the saw horse and faced the maids- yes, naked as a robin, nude as a needle- hands folded over his groin. His shaven groin. Not a hair. Not a bit of fuzz. No stubble. Shaven twice a week by Milly.

Johnny felt strange all over.

But, here in his birthday suit, he wouldn't have changed places with any boy in all of Minnesota.

They beckoned him to follow them- one on each side- into the warm sunlight.

The three of them walked the curving garden path, Johnny rubbing against each of them, taking short steps as he pressed his soft cock and balls into his groin, the sun now all over his skin. His nostrils filled with the flavour of recently turned soil, of roses and lilies, of freshly mowed grass.

He felt sun on his butt. It kissed both his cheeks. It reminded him that he was nude.

Mrs Reilly's vast three story house, with its turrets and attic windows, its wrap-around porches, its stained glass and ornamentation, loomed above them. Was she looking at him from one of those high windows? The boys of Brewer were terrified of the lady and the spanking and supervised masturbation sessions she encouraged their mothers to join and her love of full nude punishment for males. And they were terrified of the alliances she had struck with school doctor and Kinsey sex researcher Dr Ida Speight, with drama teacher Miss Cuff, with some of the cheeky and confident girls at their school.

They entered an alcove enclosed on three sides by two wall-like hedges and a trellis thickly layered with climbing roses and ivy. Asiatic lilies filled the space with perfume-like fragrance. There were more earthy smells of leaf mould compost. A wooden A-frame ladder stood near the trellis and its roses. Gardening tools littered the lawn.

Johnny was brought face to face- groin to groin- with two boys who had gone through Grover Cleveland High some years ahead of him.

Rickey Fasolt, tanned all over, stood garden pruners in his gloved hands, with his perky six inch cock poking parallel to the ground. Johnny noticed his penis had a heavy, mauve-coloured glans. He thought of the expression, bell-end. The boy was not embarrassed by his nudity and made no effort to shield his erection from Doris and Dorothy. They had seen it so many times, Johnny guessed, there was no point in shielding...

...but, still, the humiliation...the two Negro maids knowing what your cock looked like. What it looked like- stiff!

Yet Rickey seemed to like showing it off.

Johnny savoured this.

This guy liked showing off his cock. Even stiff. To dressed females.

"You boys: this here is Johnny," said Doris. "He's in trouble with the po-leece too. He gonna be working with youse in the garden here."

"Yessir," added Dorothy. "Hey fella, you better drop those hands now. Mrs Reilly says no covering up here."

Johnny let his hands fall to his legs.

He caught a glimpse of Dorothy: her eyes were sleepy, insolent and aimed right at his groin. Jolt! He felt the excitement of being looked at, naked, by a dressed female.

His cock began to lengthen.

He saw Doris smile. She was looking direct at his groin, must have noticed the stiffening. "This boy's bald as a badger," she said.

Dorothy said, "His Mommy must shave him down there."

Johnny shrivelled.

Brad, with his blond crew cut and body builders physique, stood with one bare foot on a shovel, at the edge of a flower bed. The heavy gardening gloves just made him look all the more buck naked. His fleshy, wide penis hung between his thighs. "Hung" seemed fitting, thought Johnny. And he noticed Brad was uncut, like him.

He noticed that Brad made no effort to cover up or turn sideways, seemed happy for the two maids to see his cock.

Doris and Dorothy moved off, giggling. As they vanished from sight Johnny though he heard the expression, "white boys' wood." Followed by more giggles. And one of them said, "nude as a needle." And there was more laughter.

Shit, thought Johnny, it's normal now for these guys to be stark, totally nude in front of these two Negro maids!

Hell! And these two guys...seem to like it.

And the thought made his cock stretch more, the rounded head projecting out of its cloak, as if to ask, what's going on here? It was pink, with its big slit like an upside-down grin.

Brad and Rickey noticed and grinned. Brad had square teeth like Chiclets. He was said to have been the most handsome guy in his school year.

"I see you're one of those guys who gets shaved at school. Makes you look bigger. And you get stiff easy, like us. That's cool," he said, perfect teeth flashing, nodding at Johnny's prick. "Look at Rickey's. His hardon's always bobbing ahead of him. As for mine..."

He looked down at his white uncut prick hanging heavy and low.

"...it just stretches when those schoolgirls come and stare."

Rickey contradicted him: "Pal, you get hard when the 'ole ducks come and look at you with their eyes popping outta of their heads...it's the Moms and grandmoms make you get a hardon.

Brad laughed and shrugged.

"You mean they get to see you...hard?" Johnny was flabbergasted.

His cock stretched some more.

They just laughed.

"You bet! And it's a real buzz!" said Rickey. "But if you're shy, this is what you can do."

And he got down, planting palms and knees on the grass, bent over, turning himself into a quadruped. He dug away at the garden bed, finding weeds.

Johnny could see Rickey's pouting hole, surrounded by wiry auburn hair. Even his scrotum- tiny, ball-like- between his thighs.

"Get down and pretend you're searching for weeds. On the other hand, you can be like us- let 'em see the works, let 'em see you stiff and enjoy it. For the filthy thrills!"

Johnny trembled at the thought. His penis jolted again. Stretched out full length and began to rise.

From over the high hedge there came the sound of car doors and flighty ladies' voices; the front door of the house opening, the Alabama accents of the maids welcoming the visitors.

"They're here!" said Brad, peering around the trellis. "The Moms."

"Give 'em an hour and they'll be touring the garden," said Rickey, getting up. "With their Brownies."

Johnny started.

"Cameras?"

"Oh yeah! Mrs Reilly's latest trick. She lets 'em photograph us fellas naked and they all get their pics developed at Donovan's..."

Donovan's Photo Shop and Dry Cleaners was Brewer's one spot for developing photos.

"Ole Ma Donovan and her nosey daughters get to see pics of us in the nude...as they develop them one by one...she and her fuckin' daughters staring...you can imagine them, giggling and pointing...before they get handed over to the Moms and stuck in shoe boxes and albums...to show their friends at bridge...or let their daughters peek..."

As he told the horrible story Rickey's prick bolted upright.

Johnny, his own penis curving from his groin, absorbed this news. Something stirred in his tummy, at the idea of ladies looking at photos of him nude and erect.

Beyond the hedge there was sound of car doors, women greeting one another and entering Mrs Reilly's hallway.

Brad, too, had got stiff. His wide white cock now stretched parallel to the grass. A large vein zig-zagged its length. Johnny imagined first the Donovan girls and their mother, then a host of Brewer's mothers and girls, looking, wide-eyed and smiling, at photos of Brad's prick- broad, long and white with that powerful zig zag vein on its roof, as they tried to compare it with those of their husbands', sons', boyfriends'.

"If there's a group of girls at the soda who bend over giggling when they see you," said Rickey. "Then you know they've seen pics of you standing here with gardening shears without a stitch. Even trapped up on the ladder."

Johnny gulped with distress. With excitement.

"Yeah, they're the best, standing up on that ladder, your dick and balls on display. Pretty cool, huh?"

Johnny started trembling uncontrollably.

The fellas saw the shaking in Johnny's torso, his delirious eyes, the throb in his penis.

"Can tell you like it, bud. Hey, what do you think, Rick, he's just like us?"

"Yep, reckon he's gonna like showing himself off. On the ladder. Getting photographed. You're gonna have girls carry a shoe box full of nude pics of you. Boy! Are they gonna have fun seeing your smooth balls! Not a fuckin' hair! Bare as a baby!"

Johnny went white. His knees shook.

"The bitches get together after school and trade pics taken by their Moms," said Rickey. "I reckon lots of them have seen Brad and me, down to the last wrinkle. Probably with a flashlight, under the sheets."

"In the meantime," said Brad, pulling off his gardening gloves. "Come and have a look at the poor fella being punished. That's what her afternoon teas are about!"

The three young men padded on bare soles down the curving brick pathway, out of the protected garden with its nooks and crannies, towards the side of the grand house. They felt the summer sun on their asses. Their now-erect cocks wobbled in front of them, as if pointing the way: Brad's hefty, white and veined, Ricky's perky and heavy-ended, Johnny's curved inwards from his splendidly hairless groin.

"That banana shape," said Brad, looking back over his shoulder. "Bet that gets attention in those rehearsals you guys gotta do- that Red Indian musical with the little loin cloths..."

Johnny said it did. But it happened with all the boys, he said, they all got hardons in those flaps, with female teachers looking on.

They came to a rounded protrusion on the side of the mansion, with a long bay window wrapped around it. There were three other nude young males there, setting a wide beam between two saw horses. The tawny backsides of two of them suggested each had been on duty in the garden for some time. The third boy was a Negro. His skin was black as coal. They greeted the new arrivals. One of them- a lanky guy with Elvis hairdo- put his finger to his lips.

He jerked his thumb to the window from which there emerged a hum of female talk. Cigarette smoke drifted out, and wafting perfumes.

"It's starting," he mouthed.

He carefully stepped up onto the plank, steadied himself. As he did so his smallish cock stretched out and up. Thought Johnny, it's stiffening in anticipation of what they were going to see. His companions followed: a short guy with a crew cut and cocktail sausage dick and the mahogany-coloured Negro with frizzy pubic hair and a heavy, fleshy cock, starting to flesh out even more.

"C'on," whispered Rickey. "This will be the show of a lifetime."

"But won't they see us?"

Brad chuckled. "These ladies concentrate on the performance in front of them: they won't look back and out the window at us peepers. No way!"

They stepped up.

The plank wobbled with their weight and then steadied.

As he pressed his nose against the wire screen Johnny found the smell overwhelming. The fug of Camel...the reek of perfume...and another smell he had noticed when being inspected by the school doctor or being shaven by Olivia, a smell at once sour and intimate that seemed to emanate from their skirts.

The six boys held onto the window sill and shifted their weight on the plank and pressed their noses to the fly-screen of the open window.

The living room was illuminated like a theatre set with light from higher windows. It was richly furnished and decorated. A huge oil painting showed a naked youth being taken over his knee by a stern mother figure, something Johnny recognised as a scene from the classics. And the ladies- a sea of ladies, dressed in hats, gloves, wide skirts, all plainly excited, talking in high pitched voices- were packed tight, a good 20 of them.

Most had cameras draped around their necks, in their hands or lying on the chairs or settees- shit, thought Johnny, it's true: they're gonna be photographing me naked, in the garden! His tummy turned over. But right now Doris and Dorothy served the women tea and sandwiches from silver trays while they looked to the front of the room where Mrs Reilly and Dr Speight were clearly preparing to start proceedings of some sort.

Johnny felt safe; where he and his companions stood was dark, shaded by heavy foliage and the wide eaves. They could be perfect- he had recently learnt the word- voyeurs. He noticed more details: there were ladies he knew from church and from Brewer's shops, mothers of boys he knew, a few whose homes he had visited. There was his Mom's old friend Miss Fenster who visited and had once remarked, staring quizzically at Johnny's pants front, "Young Johnny's growing up these days...becoming a real young man."

Johnny noticed more art. Several paintings on easels showed beach scenes, perhaps from the last century, with nude boys exposed before clothed girls. It made Johnny shiver. It made him think of those medical exams.

A flurry at the front...there was another easel and it was covered in a cloth...and it was this that Mrs Reilly was now beginning to talk about.

"...a most stunning purchase. One I could not believe would ever come on the American market. The final artistic statement in the area of my great love, the theme we elevate in this house, that of the submissive naked boy being confronted- mocked, examined, teased or punished- by dressed females, in this case, females his own age. It is a painting by the French artist Edgar Degas. It is called Young Spartans Exercising...or, in another translation, Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys..."

She whisked off the cloth cover.

There was a loud murmur.

The painting was instantly recognisable as a classic, its tan skin tones and flat green background and sketchy details carried the unmistakable style of a Paris atelier of the mid-nineteenth century. From a follower and contemporary of the Impressionists if not from an Impressionist himself.

It showed four nude boys- quite nude, without a stitch- stretching and flexing, with a group of girls wearing skirts confronting them, lunging and pointing. They were standing on a field. In the background a larger party of females, older. They were mothers perhaps, eyeing their sons.

One of the boys had been trapped on all fours, like a dog or like Rickey when showing Johnny how to shield an ungainly erection. Another had his back to viewers, displaying his cleft bottom. They may have been limbering up for an athletic contest. The pricks were small- this may have been the source of the girls' contempt. The males were clearly intimidated, caught out, trapped in their state of nudity.

Degas painted Young Spartans in 1860.

"Who knows?" asked Mrs Reilly. "He was a bachelor and the subject may have given him a frisson of excitement. We know there are many men excited by the idea of being naked in front of dressed females. Boys, too- if what Dr Speight tells us about some of her medical examinations at school is true."

Dr Speight nodded sagely. At the window, Johnny flushed. After all it was something the doctor had diagnosed in him, as he had sat in front of her, with a banana-shaped erection sprouting from his groin. Some boys, she had said, have this problem- especially when it came to medical exams by female doctors. She had forced him to admit- him shaking all over- that he too was one of those males.

Mrs Reilly returned to the painting. And the discussion continued for five minutes or so. Then she announced that one mother had brought her son to this house this afternoon and again the ladies of Brewer, or "at least those of you lucky enough to be here today," had an opportunity to explore the whole world of nude punishment of boys in front of females.

There was movement at the door and some of them shifted in their seats, some rose. A crouching, blushing boy, wearing only boxers, was walked in, a lady who appeared to be his mother by his side and clearly in charge. When they got near Dr Speight and Mrs Reilly he shuffled around until he faced the audience in which many women were standing or straining to get the best view. The boy looked at the floor, clasped hands in front.

Dr Speight consulted a clip board.

"Let's see...yes, he's Homer Dockweiler."

She bid him step forward and Johnny recognised the tall, beanpole thin 18 year old, with the heavy Elvis hair cut and the manly explosion of tangled black chest hair. Johnny knew him from Pop's Soda where he worked at the counter. He was a high school drop out. Right now he was blinking with fear and his Adam's apple was going in all directions. His hands- large and veined- fluttered in front of his groin.

His mother, her black hair in a bob cut, was tall herself, elegantly dressed in red polka dots and cinch-waisted, wide-skirted dress. She hovered, ready. She wore a grim smile.

Homer's baggy white boxers looked as if they were about to vanish any second.

The doctor explained.

"Ladies, it is the age-old problem. An addiction. Not to alcohol, because Homer is a sober boy, who attends Fourteenth Street Baptist church and has taken a vow of lifelong abstinence. No, the boy has a different addiction. It is to self-pleasuring..."

"To masturbation," clarified Mrs Reilly.

"Yes, Homer is a masturbator," said the doctor.

There was a lowing from the audience.

"So let's look at the area of concern..."

And Mrs Moira Dockweiler, the boy's Mom, manoeuvred herself to stand behind him. Homer's eyes went wild with fright. At his rear his Mom bent over. She was taking hold of his elastic waist band. He must have felt her fingers at his waist, just above his bottom, because he trembled and exclaimed, "Oh, Mom...no!"

The audience held its breath.

She gently tugged.

The shorts descended down his hips. His timberline of pubic bush appeared.

He appealed again.

"No, Mom...Mommy...no!"

Maybe the infantilism offended his mother, this reversion to the playroom, this "Mommy" business. In a flash Mrs Dockweiler whisked his shorts down his furry legs- oh, the cruelty thought Johnny!- and poor Homer stood, buck naked, before the audience, hands flattened over the contents of his groin.

From the window Johnny felt a surge of excitement. He dreaded what was happening. But in one corner of his consciousness, he wanted to be Homer...getting shown off in front of his Mom's friends, their neighbours, the mothers of girls he knew and the mothers of his friends and ladies he saw every day, in the street or at church. He feared and craved it- the enforced shame, the humiliation, the stripping before the females. Johnny shuddered with lust. I want to be...him! I wish I were...him! Getting stripped in front of all these ladies! Yes, oh yes, he thought! Yes, yes, yes!