Finding yourself Chapter two
lets see. I think I was eight or nine when I started to look at boys as something more than potential friends. It started with my friend eric. He was a year younger than me, having blond curly hair, a cherubic face and just a touch more than baby fat. We were wrestling on a hot summer day and we both were in shorts with no shirt. He eventually got on top and pinned me using his whole body. I didn't know why at the time, but I loved the feeling of him on top of me, his bare chest and mine touching with his weight on me. Even to this day I love the touch of bare skin to my chest, stomach, and of course, further on down. I don't remember having an erection, but I am sure I must have.
We did that several times until eric started to get uncomfortable wrestling with me. We just didn't wrestle any more. Eventually, about a year after we stopped wrestling, I moved away from my home town to Lima ohio It turned out that we were only going to be there a year since my Dad got laid off at the garage he worked at. I was in the fourth grade when I moved away, just ten years old. But it was up in Ohio that my sexual education really began. Literally.
The school system up there started teaching sex in the fourth grade. It was there I heard the words semen, erection, and orgasm for the first time. I overheard my parents one night trying to decide whether to allow me to attend or not. I think they let me see the films because it was easier than having to talk to me themselves.
I had friends up there, eventually. But one person stands out in my memory. His name was Stan. He was named after his father, had his blond hair in a bowl haircut (I must be attracted to blonds, eh?), and wore what I call birth control glasses (thick rims usually in an ugly brown color). He was, like me, a geek. We were both intelligent and small for our age which made us easy targets for the intellectually challenged. So we naturally took to each other right away.
Toward the end of my time in Ohio, our fifth grade session of sex ed went into more detail regarding the function of the plumbing and what came out and when. This, while just technical information, was vaguely arousing in some form. Stan and I would play act having girlfriends and getting caught in the act by her father or something like that. We never actually did anything other than playact. I enjoyed his company more than anyone else up to that point in my life because we were equals in all ways that mattered. But my Dad did get laid off and we had to move back to my home town.
My homecoming was difficult. I knew everybody, but I didn't. It was like I was in suspended animation and woke up a year later with everybody aging a year with out me. I still didn't know much about sex, but it seemed that everyone else was messing around and kissing. I didn't know how to react to this, so I didn't, and acted like this adolescent behavior was behind me. Then I met Blaine.
Bliane was a year older than I was but we were still in the same grade. He was a trombone player in our school band. Of average height and average build, he did look good. All the girls definitely noticed him. He was more popular than I, having played on the football and basketball teams. His dad was the Scoutmaster of our pack, so everyone in the Scouts knew him.
His dad, Joe, was also a fireman for the town we lived in, very big on the male scene. In his mid forties, he still had a youthful appearance, and kept himself in shape. Slightly gray at the temples, he none the less had a full head of hair and a chiseled face. He was into all of the macho stuff, like cars, hunting, fishing and such. Intellectual pursuits were not his forte.
Blaines mom was a stay at home housewife like June Cleaver. In her early forties, she seemed the perfect wife. Blond hair and a pretty face, she liked to dress well even for the housework. When Blaine asked Brenda about it one time, she said she like to look nice for his father. I somehow got the feeling that she didn't approve of me, but allowed Blaine to make his own choice of friends.
From all appearances Blaines family seemed perfect. A real man for a father, the devoted mother and housewife, the smart and beautiful child. We found out later that not everything was idyllic as they would have us believe.
Blaine and I somehow became friends. I don't remember how. But we ended up spending a lot of time together. By the beginning of the seventh grade, we were inseparable, being in several of the same classes. We sat by each other in every class, at least until the teachers split us up. We would eat lunch together, play on the same team in PE if we had a choice. And we would split our weekends, one at his house and the next at mine.
We would spend those weekend days out in the woods playing army or something else equally silly. We would have pinecone fights (it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye), catch tadpoles or frogs, whittle branches into small spears, generally do what twelve and thirteen year old boys do. We would talk about girls and sex and get terribly excited. I realize now it was because he was talking about sex that I got excited, not because of the girls we were talking about. It was all very innocent teen fantasies. I can't speak for him, but I was thinking almost exclusively about boys at this time, but our conversations always had a girl in them. Sometimes I got lost in the conversation because I was staring at him marveling at his beauty. I am still surprised he never caught on when he had to repeat himself so many times.
Neither of us up to this point had any sexual experience, relying instead on locker room stories and Penthouse letters. That is what we used as a reference for our conversations, using crude slang for the parts of the body. We did this because we both believed it was expected. If we didn't talk about girls or a girl and a guy together than we thought we would be labeled gay or queer or a fag. We were both afraid to tell each other how we really felt, I think.
Blaine had a face that would turn heads, male or female, gay or straight, anywhere in between. His skin was always tanned to a perfect shade. This was his natural skin tone, and not from the sun (I found that out later when I saw he had no tan lines). He had started working out when he joined the football team about a year before we became friends, so he had a perfect body or so it seemed to me. He had a sexy six pack, well defined pecs and arms. He had a great set of legs and a butt to die for. And that smile! And that curly black hair, now I know why I wanted to be around him.
My name is Kurt Hummel At that time, I was short, skinny, and running behind in the muscle department. At just over five feet and eighty pounds, I think I was the smallest person in the entire seventh grade, and was the smallest boy up to my junior year in high school, when I hit my growth spurt, such as it was. Anyway, other than my height, I was average looking. I have brown hair that goes straight no matter what angle it comes out of my head (I keep it nearly buzzed for this reason), a lot of freckles, and pits in my face when I smile. A joke we have is for him to ask what that flash of light through my cheeks was when I smile. When he says that it makes me smile even more, so I never hear the end of it.
In January of our seventh grade year, Blaine got a girlfriend. Her name was Melody. I was crushed. He started to spend more of his time with her and less with me. This was to be expected, but I didn't know what to do with myself when I was left to my own devices. I grew restless and bored. I let myself get absorbed in books and singing so I didn't have to think about Blaine or how miserable I was with out him. When baseball season rolled around, I tried out for the team and made it. I dedicated myself to becoming the best player I could, but that was just another way to keep my mind off of him. It came to the point where we stopped hanging out all together. I saw him in the hallways and he would flash that cute grin and say, "Hi,Kurti." I hated it. And I really hated Melody. I didn't even look at her. I would go out of my way to avoid them in the halls. The pain was just too great. Eventually, I stopped trying to talk to Blaine at all and he didn't seem to notice.
As I said earlier, I was an intelligent person, and a shrimp. I went through more than my share of abuse heaped on by classmates, especially the popular guys that had to prove they are tough, that they are a man. I was teased, pushed, beat up, denigrated, derided, however you want to put it. This started all the way back in kindergarten and continued up until my sophomore year when I threatened to castrate my worst antagonist at Blaine's urging, but I digress. What I ended up getting out of all this zero self worth. I don't think you can have a lower self image. That is why, to this day, I have a hard time believing that Blaine chose me to share his life with; I just wasn't deserving enough to have someone that special love me.
My dad knew that I was having some trouble at school, going as far as getting me a counselor, who was worthless by the way. Other than that, the 'rents just let me be. Still do, as a matter of fact. Don't even talk to me most of the time. Yup, they pretty much emotionally abandoned me. But that is another story. Maybe I'll tell you sometime