It was 1985, and if you weren't a diehard “Knight Rider” fan or kicked ass at “Dungeons & Dragons,” then you probably wouldn't survive long in the savage and perilous institution known as St. Charles Junior High School. It was a time for 8th graders who stuck firecrackers in cats' asses, a time for pretending to be murdered to freak out the neighbors and a time for realizing that no one really liked you.
It was the perfect time for a Dirty Little Altar Boy. A native of Los Angeles, Christopher survived nine years of Catholic school at the peak of Reaganomics just to be able to write a novel about it – the good times and the strange times.
Recounting one of his many salacious experiences from 7th grade, the author presents an excerpt from Dirty Little Altar Boy – a portion of a chapter in which the young altar boy and his schoolyard posse, his Catholic “A-Team” –come face to face with the age-old question: If it feels so good when it's in there, why do you have to “move it in and out” when you're having sex?
A pair of pants, some underwear, and then some more underwear. The first pair of underwear was your standard, white, brief-style kind – the type every 12-year-old kid at Catholic school wore. The second pair wasn't really underwear at all; they were gym shorts that I had worn every day for two years over my real underwear, and they had seen so much action that they were as thin as Kleenex tissue, and the elastic strap was so withered it required a safety pin to keep them up. But I wore them every day over my underwear and under my pants. It was my ritual. It was my shield. It was like my pistol holstered at the ankle. It was my added protection.
Even at 12 years old I had enough insight to question why a seemingly normal kid would wear two pair of underwear everywhere he went. And I wasn't questioning why it was that I decided to wear them both everyday; I was questioning why it was that I had to wear them both everyday.
My schoolyard posse consisted of an extremely short kid from Guadalupe named Javier Fulton, as well as the new rich kid in school, Marshall Lamberto. Javier was so dark you could hide a Hershey's bar on his arm, and Marshall just started hanging around us because the rough-necks in our class started calling him “The Fish Man” his first week here. Anyways, that was my crew – my A-Team. We watched each other's backs on the playground, or we watched each other's fronts when one of us got pushed onto our backs on that playground.
We more or less moped around the playground during lunchtimes. Most of the other first-through-eighth graders were busy playing kickball or basketball or football across the five asphalt acres behind the school, but our posse just moped around. “Dungeons & Dragons” scenario possibilities were the major conversation pieces during our lunch hours. That, and sexual theories. And since none of us had actually had sex by age 12, these theories usually ended with the fictitious woman pulling out a sword from somewhere hidden under her cape, and then a swordfight taking place as she grew horns and devil claws. And big tits.
“Why do you have to move it when it's in there?” I turned and asked Marshall as we veered left at the corner of the southeast bend of the playground. “When it's inside and you're laying on top of her, why do you have to move back and forth?” I had just seen a late-night soft-erotic film on Select TV the night before, so the visual motions of the sexual act were still fresh on my mind. “I'm just going to lay there! If it feels so good when it's in there, then why in the hell would you take it out over and over? I'm just going to leave it in there, not move or anything. We can talk that way. You wouldn't get tired or anything. I don't like sweating.”
© 2007 by Brandon D. Christopher. Reprinted by permission of Ghost Pants Press/iUniverse Publishing.
Dirty Little Altar Boy is currently available through Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and selected bookstores.
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