Eros Squandered

Blokes I never kissed.
That magical experience at age 6, when my dad took me to the local sugar mill communal showers and we showered naked together, my face at the level of his private parts. Our bathroom was being rebuilt? I know at least once in my childhood a cyclone struck our central Qld town and demolished part of our timber house. Okay, I have had to endure some prim Sydney queen cry “incest”.
At primary school my classmates were given sex instruction by our paedophile priest. He loosened my foreskin and removed a wad of smegma that had accumulated. In that, he did me a service as later when my dick grew to adult size the foreskin tore and I consulted my older bro. I endured a week of agony until it healed. The last session of sex instruction the priest dropped his own trousers and showed me his swollen but not erect dick. He complained that he was not able to make himself erect but that he’d not had that problem earlier. Another classmate, who’d had this attention and who, I later found out, had refused to return to the priest’s room, took me aside.  Knowing that I spoke another language he wanted to know the word for dick in German. The one we used at home was probably baby talk, “lula”. David, however, pranced around the playground chanting the word. Later, we played “show me yours”. We were sitting on the ground, behind the school and we compared tiny, boy dicks. He told me how, soon after his birth, he sister who was helping their mother bathe him, exclaimed, ” David’s got a teapot tail”.
He must have reached puberty before me because he invited me home, but I never took him up on the offer. In later married life, he had four/five sons, one openly gay, and I suspect he continued to enjoy gay sex. The rumour was that he roamed in rough areas of Mackay, late at night throughout his marriage and died mysteriously in those circumstances.
My older bro literally took me in hand. I knew the manual rhythm from my time with the priest, but this was late at night and I began to feel waves of intense sensation. My brother said, “don’t come on me”, an instruction which was meaningless. I was standing in the doorway to my bedroom, my younger brother had come in, saw what we were doing and laughed. Suddenly, something tipped over. On the wall opposite, was a sentimental print of Jesus wearing his thorn-crowned heart outside his djellebah. I felt as if my soul had flown out of my body and merged with his heart. My brother complained, “you came on me, but that’s okay, I will clean up”. We carried on an intense series of initiations, modified by a series of inhibitions he rehearsed about what made a boy gay, namely oral and anal. Also, he brought to the situation better social skills than mine and an interaction with another boy in town. On another occasion we’d been on a scout camp. I do not understand where the leaders were, but under cover of darkness the situation deteriorated into an orgy. I, however, slept soundly to find out that my brother had stayed awake all night to protect me from the fate of other younger boys, both oral and anal.
In my boarding school I totally misread a situation where a boy was pissing, fiddling (?) at the trough; I joined him and joyously reached a conclusion. He looked at my large tool and ran off screaming. The room emptied but perhaps the cheekiest boy returned and coyly asked, “is it really that large?” I was petrified, literally frozen at the thought that I had brought trouble on myself, so said nothing. He whined, “okay, don’t show me”. Had he reassured me that the situation could be mended I would have gladly obliged.
At my local high school I was the butt of a series of gay jokes by a classmate who was one of the in crowd. “Tony thinks blue omo is a detergent”. Only later, did I realise that he was probably amenable and the jokes were a way of keeping the topic alive. Once, I saw his demonstrably hetero friend look at him quizzically while he was being humorous. My reaction was just to cringe.
At the end of high school I did some jobs, sugar cane harvesting, tobacco leaf picking, roadside council worker and watermelon picker. During this last job a fellow worker made me an offer which I did not read accurately at the time, and would have been too scared to act on, anyway.

North Qld was a wasteland of harsh relationships. My sexual energy was spent in masturbation and my room at Uni Hall in Townsville smelled strongly of semen. An older student came to the doorway of my room, no further, leant inside and said with disgust, “this room stinks”. I moved to a house in an inner city suburb, six of us. It was close enough to town that I  could frequent the local gay bar, abandon all hope. I bleached my hair and wore it long, bouffant and sprayed. It was a virtually transsexual phase. The barman, or was it the teacher at the local ballet school where I decided to exercise, took pity and said, “if I were free I’d head south to Sydney”. I was in the middle of a 3 year uni scholarship so I followed his advice. I moved south and transferred to Macquarie Uni. I was able to have a gay night life in what was a flourishing culture. A pub near Paddo town hall, a bar at Bon Jn, Chez Ivy. The latter featured a vivid drag scene. One of the ladies tried to recruit me as her man, “but you’d have to be very, very butch”. It was a complexity that I had no stomach for. I was watching the show one night at the back of the crowd with others standing near. Again, I misread the intentions of one of them. Suddenly, one boy burst into tears and his friends gathered round. “It’s okay”, one of them tried to console. I had no inkling that I had been desired. This was a terrible combination of lingering teenage situation panic, inferiority with my self image, an awareness that I was not coping with the way gays expressed themselves in this glamorous big city. Had I been more attuned I would gladly have entertained him all night long.
I rehearse that and other near misses often. The writer and film producer John Lonie wrote a story where a character says that the God Eros punishes us for amorous opportunities squandered.