Read Foolish Fire for Free Online

to the days when everybody was reading comic books and trading them.”
    “Yeah. Those were the good old days. But you can’t go back, you know. Changing is normal.”
    “Oh yeah? Well I don’t know about you, but I’m never gonna be any different than I am now.”
    “Come on, Bobby, not all the changes are bad. There’s some that are pretty good.”
    “Oh? Like what, for instance?”
    “You know….”
    “No, I don’t. What?”
    I looked at him. Bobby had always been a late bloomer, a little slow to catch on to things. For all I knew, he might not even have discovered masturbation yet. In order to find out for sure, I started talking about something completely different, but making veiled references to it, weaving phrases like “doing it,” or “wrist action” or “shooting off” into my talk, with obvious emphasis. He laughed along good-naturedly, sensing a joke but not quite getting it, with a hint of lostness in his face—and I took a malicious delight in this subtle needling.
    “Come on, Guy, what are you laughing about? Are you making fun of me?”
    “No. It’s just that you’re so innocent.”
    “What’s wrong with that? Why should I feel ashamed because I’m not as smart as you? Good grades aren’t everything, you know.”
    “No, dum-dum. I’m talking about the facts of life. Sex and that kind of stuff.”
    “Oh.” He fell silent. “You mean like dirty jokes and stuff. If you want to know the truth, I just don’t like those kinds of jokes.”
    “Maybe it’s because you don’t get them. If you don’t understand the punch line, it won’t make any sense to you.”
    He shook his head vehemently. “No, I mean they’re all so stupid. Like this one joke about a man with a ten-foot long dick. It’s so long it reaches all the way up to the ceiling. He trains his pet monkey to climb up it but the monkey keeps slipping down. Or something like that. It’s a dumb joke.” His voice trailed off and he looked truly lost.
    “Don’t worry, Bobby, it’ll come to you someday.”
    He made a face, then turned to me with a serious expression. “Guy, what’s all this about ‘beating off?’ I heard some guys talking about it once, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
    My suspicion was confirmed: he knew nothing. And it made me feel so superior. “You mean to tell me you don’t know ?”
    He shook his head, big-eyed. “What is it?” he whispered.
    I smiled mysteriously with the smug look of one who knows all the secrets of the universe. “Boy, are you dumb.”
    “Come on, Guy, tell me.” Then with a suspicious look on his face: “Do you know?”
    “Of course I do.”
    It was delightful to savor the immense gap I felt suddenly yawn between us. Leaning back, I laced my fingers together and cupped my palms behind my head. After peering up through the cracks in the roof at the patterns of leaf and sky beyond, I hesitated for a moment, then said: “You know what? I don’t think you know anything about anything.”
    A worried look crossed his face. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, about sex. Where babies come from. And how babies are made. That kind of stuff.”
    “Oh, I know all that. We saw a film about it in hygiene class.”
    “Yeah?”
    He shrugged his shoulders. “The woman gets pregnant when the man puts his dick inside her. There was a cartoon explaining it all.”
    “Yeah, we saw the same thing. What a laugh. The cartoons made it all seem so mechanical, like pieces of a machine fitting together. No mention about how good it feels.”
    “How do you know how it feels?”
    “Because it probably feels a lot like beating off.”
    “Oh.” He looked perplexed.
    I grew impatient. “Listen, ‘beating off’ is just another term for masturbation.”
    “Masturbation?”
    “Yes, dum-dum. That’s when you make yourself come . You know what I mean by ‘come,’ don’t you?”
    His face fell a little. “Yeah,” he said evasively, his voice getting weaker. He seemed to sense that the