Violet the Voyeur

The first time was St. Moritz. I was sent there for the summer after high school graduation, soon after my eighteenth birthday, to distract me I suppose, from the tragedy and all that. Exchange students, they called us, but we never studied anything, not even German. There were activities, like hiking, and beautification projects in the nearby parks of the Graubünden, and we lived in barracks, or so they called them. More like an above average hostel. What a certain class of people consider as 'roughing it,' or 'character building'. We were all high school graduates, of drinking age, and the mountains were filled with expensive drugs. We all got along just fine.

Initially I kept to myself, writing in my journal and taking photographs of the edelweisses and the snowy peaks and the quaint Swiss chalets, pushing out the horror show of my memories in favor of the picturesque, the sensuous, and the immediate. Perhaps that lay the groundwork for what was to come, or perhaps that is just who I am, when all else is cleared away.

By small steps I made a friend, Kimberly, a Great Dane of a girl from somewhere in Idaho, a rugged outdoorsy type who was always climbing the ridges around us, jumping down upon loose rocks, causing mini-avalanches that would scare me half to death. At first I found her blunt simplicity grating, but her earnest love of nature and her expression of that joy won me over. We became close, closer to the girls I had gone to school with since kindergarten. Manhattan girls don't share -- not feelings, not anything. Even to this day, I don't think I have been as close to anyone else.

The boys were just boys, boys you'd find anywhere. They wore ball caps and funny t-shirts, drank beer too strong for them, and hit on the local girls in English. Kimberly had a thing for some kid from California, who I found to be vacuous and preverbal. There was one I liked. His name was Liam, from Montreal: dark skin, a broken nose, and wavy black hair, and he spoke English with a slight accent. In the nights all twenty of us would listen to music, sip wine, and roll hashish cigarettes with tobacco in them.

Earthquakes are sudden events. They happen, and then it's the aftermath. There is no forecasting for a temblor, unlike a hurricane or even a volcano. But there is a momentary warning -- a sound wave, an echo -- that will let you know that it's too late. For me, that sound wave was Kimberly, coming back from the showers on a late August afternoon.

"Dude," she said, as if I were a dude. "You will not believe what I just found." Her too-wide eyes and her dopey, slack-jawed grin flustered and spooked me. I felt nervous and queasy and I had no reason to yet. I could read something unnatural in her naturalist face. This was not joy. This was something else.

She led me to the showers, pulling me as she ran. The girls' shower room was like any common showering space -- multiple heads, no privacy. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"I was out of soap," she whispered, "so I started looking around for some extra. Have you ever gone in the service closet?" I had not. I always assumed it was locked.

"It is locked," she laughed, as she demonstrated by rattling the handle back and forth. "But the door's all fucked up. I just pushed it with my hand." She shoved at the door, and the latch slid past the plate.

We were welcomed by a musty smell of old wood. It was more spacious than I expected it to be, long and narrow. Along the shelved sides of the closet were supplies of toilet paper, rusty tools, and yes, extra soap. Across from us, about ten yards away, was another door.

She pulled me inside. "Do not close it behind you," she giggled.

I knew what was coming. I'm sure you do, too. What I remember most was that walk, as if off a plank or through the Gates of Hell, Heaven, Somewhere. My throat closed up and my fingers shook and she dragged me to the other side. The brown darkness of the closet got brighter as we approached the slats. My face went cold and my heart was breaking in two. I was dying, and I knew it.

The cracks between the slats of the door -- why are there slats on a door? -- gave a perfect view of the boys' shower. I could see three of our friends, each under a different nozzle. They were drinking beer from green bottles, a local custom they picked up that they often bragged about, talking and laughing more than cleaning themselves.

I started to smile. They were having fun. It was an intimate moment between young men, boys really, splashing and playing and getting tipsy, slippery and hairless, fit from sun and exercise. My fear melted into bliss.

I felt a sharp tug at my sleeve, nails jutting into my arm. "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod," she scream-whispered into my ear.

The Californian entered from the left, wearing a thin green towel and holding a lager, and he bellowed at his compatriots in some kind of guttural salutation. Gold-streaked brown hair down to his round, cleaved shoulders; flat, quadrilateral pectorals; developed stomach creases, from swimming or surfing or whatever they do. Long arms, big feet. Tan.

She was clenching my arm skin so tightly I almost squeaked. Resting her face on my neck, hiding behind me, I could feel her warmth, the dampness in her still wet hair. She passed her excitement along to me, like a current. My nipples stiffened as he put down his bottle. He turned away from us as he removed the towel, his white rear end contrasting with the brown of his skin, and hung it on a hook near the shower head. Kimberly embraced me from behind, kissing my cheek, and I embraced her arm back.

His hair formed around his head as it got wet, sticking to his neck and his back, as rivulets of water ran down the middle, splaying as it hit the cheeks of his ass. I could feel Kimberly shaking her head into me, in disbelief, good fortune, or both. He scrubbed at himself with an old bar of green soap, and lather ran down his legs. He bent down, rubbing his feet with one hand, the other grabbing his beer. Kimberly leaned in to me hard, pressing me against the door. I could faintly make out dark shapes between his legs. He stood up, swigged from the bottle, and turned toward us, letting the water run down his face, and his front.

Kimberly's grip loosened. "Oh," she let go. "Aw."

Yes, the tall, attractive boy from Southern California had a disappointing cock. In retrospect, it wasn't abnormally small -- I have, in time, seen much, much smaller -- but it was the smallest in the room that day, and given the boy's stature and good looks one expected him to look good everywhere. It hung like a pinkish thumb, overwhelmed by thick pubic hair. The testicles were nowhere in sight. It felt lost in the sea of skin, made pathetic by the wetness and the whiteness. It felt wrong looking at it, as if I shouldn't have known this, but it felt darkly wonderful to know. My stomach aches and my pussy lit aflame.

I looked over my right shoulder, smirking obnoxiously at my friend. Kim shrugged her shoulders and opened her hands plaintively, as if to say, "What're ya gonna do?" She started to giggle.

The giggles set me free. I spun around and gave her the biggest hug I ever gave another soul, rocking her back and forth, both of us shaking from silent laughter. I never had felt so alive, electrically charged, and happy.

There was a sexual rush, sure, but it was more than that. I had been with boys before, and I wasn't much into it. The obvious trajectory of a mediocre date with an artful lover felt forced and undesirable. The unzipping of tented pants to reveal an already hard cock, and then the fumbling, the condom pause, the awkward insertion and the messy finish. I felt no real joy in it.

This was different. It was clandestine, deviant, raw. Shameful, for them and for us. Evil, yet civil; vivid, detached. I felt powerful and weak in the knees. I wanted to share the moment with them, laugh and drink beer with them, naked and free like river nymphs; I wanted to taunt them, humiliate them for their flaws and their useless modesty. I wanted to drool and masturbate while Kimberly hugged me from behind, supporting me, breathing into my ear, describing everything for me so I could see it more clearly.

And I was smugly content my dear friend would never fuck that poorly hung boy from Marina Del Rey. I only wish he knew why.

Kimberly and I never told the other girls; we kept this to ourselves. Secrets create close friendships, and we didn't want to be close friends with anyone else. It wasn't always possible to go our sacred place at the right time, when no other girl was there, or when the boys were.

I believe went about three more times together. We had seen almost all of the boys -- the hot ones, the gross ones, the awkward ones with surprisingly large packages, and of course the Californian, who we dubbed as Thumbelina. All, except for my Liam.

It began to obsess me. When did he shower? I watched him after exercises, trying to guess at his habits. Did he not shower? The others entered as a group while he would be reading or listening to music. And then suddenly, when I would only just then realized I had lost track of him, he would appear, combed and clean. It was as if he understood my motives and my methods, toying with me. One evening I spent two full hours, sitting on the floor of the closet, seeing only the head counselor's naked body, his hairy legs, fat cock, and misshapen torso.

Kimberly was no longer joining me. She had taken her pick of the litter -- a boy from Georgia with skinny legs but a thick, meaningful penis hanging between them, and the game no longer thrilled her the way it did me. I was, in truth, no longer thrilled. I was hunting. I had to see them all, and the one I wanted most eluded me.

"Why don't you just hook up with him?" she asked me. "I'm sure he'd be more than willing." She didn't understand, and I think it bothered her that I went to the closet without her. What I couldn't tell her, because I didn't yet have the vocabulary, was that I didn't want to have sex with him; not seeing him naked on my terms had made me hate him. I needed to win. I would never hug her as tight again.

There were two days left in the summer. Cowbells dimly rung in the distance, and the farthest reaches of sunlight were just beginning to make their presence felt. I stared out the window from my bottom bunk at the shadows of mountains. I got up, not bothering to change out of my pajama shirt, grabbing my camera from my bag, hoping for some interesting photos of dawn.

I lightly shut the door, to not wake the others. Liam stood right in front of me, wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe and black sandals, with a small kit in his hand.

"Oh," he meekly said. He looked mildly startled. "You are up early." He quickly glanced at my bare legs.

I nodded, raising my camera, and smiled back, putting a finger to my lips, tiptoeing around the corner.

I stopped immediately, back against wall, heart pounding like mad. I listened for his flip-flops, flip-flopping their way to the men's room. A door opened and closed.

I counted to thirty. Then I dashed down the hall in bare feet, carefully opening the door and closing it behind me. The girl's room was lightless, black; I left it that way. I knew my way around. The service closet stood in front of me. I strained my ears, listening for the sound of water running. It did. I pushed the door with my hand, closed my eyes, and walked through the Gates of Somewhere once more.

Breath heavier with each step. It felt like the first time, but now I was alone. It felt more like victory. I leaned in toward the slats of the door to see between.

I saw the water flowing. No one under it. I scanned the room with my eyes. Had I missed it? Impossible. Must be letting the water warm, I figured. I could feel my pulse in my mouth, my dry tongue stuck to the roof of it. My ears were swelled with blood. I did my best to breathe without sound. I closed my eyes again, ready to scream, to be caught, anything to end the interminable.

I opened them again. There stood Liam.

I became aware that my fingers were clutching into something. My camera. Another earthquake. Seismic. I wasn't alone anymore.

I almost wretched. It glowed in my hands. Fingers shaking, I turned the camera on, and switched it to video, and held it close to my eye.

Liam was still wearing his robe. He meticulously set down his shower kit, taking out a couple small white bottles, placing them on the soap dish on the wall. He began to undo his cloth belt. I trembled awfully. My cheeks burned. The robe fell open.

I zoomed in, slowly, on his penis, till it damn near filled the screen. It was dark, like him, only a shade darker. And it was hooded. As I zoomed in fully, I could see the head inside, hiding, the foreskin drooping like the mouth of an aardvark, with lips almost kissable. He had no pubic hair; it was shaved. His balls hung low and full, like those of an older man, largely occluded by the girth of his shaft. It wasn't the largest I had seen, but it gave me the most pleasure. It was beautiful. Better than the sunrise.

He hung the robe on a hook and took one of the bottles. As he began to apply soap to his hands, I pulled back the angle. He showed me his bottom: lithe, athletic, firm. He had great legs, like a cyclist. He spread the soap all over his face and his body, rubbing it into his arms and chest. His arms were in shape, but they had almost a feminine quality to them, hairless as well and taut. He added more soap.

He began to wash his parts. I zoomed in again. Pulling back the foreskin, he scrubbed the glans with a finger, rolling it around in there. My eyelids felt heavy. I wet my lips. My shakes turned to warmth. With the other hand he fondled his balls and beneath. He turned as he did so, and I could see his index finger approaching his anus. His soapy digit entered inside once, twice then again and again. He turned back to me, and his cock had visibly swollen.

He rinsed his hands, and added soap again, returning them to his parts, this time with intention. He cupped his balls with the left, took his piece with the right. He stroked it long, each one increasing the size of it.

I took turns watching him through the viewfinder and with my naked eye. I imagined that he was thinking of my legs, of me. As it reached fullness, the movement shortened, quickened, focused on the head, now glistening in the suds, pushing the foreskin up and around. I put my hand on my clit and mimicked his movements.

I pulled back the zoom again, so I could see his face. He moaned softly as he rubbed it faster. I was moaning softly too. I wanted another hand on me somewhere, my breasts, my hair, my mouth. But I couldn't put the camera down. He closed his eyes; the noises he made got louder.

I watched in the viewfinder. I zoomed in tight, as tight as I could. I stopped breathing.

I watched in rapture as the spunk jetted out of his cock, a small sound coming out of me as it came out of him. My fingers were soaked, my mouth hot, my body on fire. It came, and it came, in ropes of off-white, all over the tile floor. I slumped against the door.

I looked again at the viewfinder screen, praying it still read 'REC'. I had captured it all. Gradually I panned up, to catch the orgasm still in his ruddy face. He was so dear to me then, at that moment. And now I had it forever. I hit the stop button.

I ran back to bed, hiding under the sheets with my new prize. I watched it again, and again, until the sun came up and the other girls awoke, masturbating to potent orgasm each and every time.

I never told Kimberly what I saw, and we never really stayed in contact thereafter. But I still consider her my only real friend, because she gave me this. She helped me find out who I am, what I am. I owe all this to her.

I am seasoned now, and if you appreciate my work you understand that I am a full-fledged and elite voyeur, with specific tastes and a commitment to detail. But it is all an attempt, often poor, of capturing those early moments in a hostel outside of St. Moritz — of watching Liam, the others, my lovely Californian surfer with a tiny little wee wee — when I knew what it meant to have a purpose in life.