ralph hall- confessions of an all american boy

Through the ages of innocent thirteen, annoyed fourteen, bitter fifteen, again annoyed sixteen, and angried seventeen, I was more or less into performing what I call “quickie” masturbation scenes, male nudie magazines in hand, in the storm cellar underneath our house on Main Street in upstate New York. The masturbation may have been quick, brothers, but the events leading up to the performance of the masturbatory act are quite involved, as you shall see.

Our cellar, a dismal, cold, musty place full of old bedsprings, piles of dirt and other debris, was the only place I ever felt I really wanted to be alone. I actually grew to like that cellar as a home, a home I created for myself beneath a home. No one, no one but I, ever lived in it. It had a quaint and intriguing—if somewhat surreal—atmosphere, one that invited adventure of my kind. It was a cellar with an overall desperate facade, for it was there, in that very tiny and misshapen place, that I, Ralph Daniel Hall, faggot, Social Security No. 060-36-9277, Military Serial No. 595-35-09, would for five consecutive years achieve minutes of wonderful sensual masturbation orgasms which relieved my innermost sexual frustrations, which as a result grew into various high planes of ecstasy and satisfaction, which in turn gave growth to my own autonomous freedom, the inner sanctum of my faggotry, created by myself, just for me, to spite all else ever taught me.

I was a successful but poor newspaper boy during those prime years beginning in 1958. I was also a TV-Guide salesman, a greeting card salesman, and an all-round door-to-door ego-builder, a flirt, a bullshit-to-make-the-quick-buck sort of soul. My travels, however objective or subjective I thought them, were remote but not extensive, being restricted to going from one end of the village to the other (but only on my mother’s business passes). I usually was able to find the time to fit in all the candy stores along the way, and I guess that’s why my teeth are in such bad condition now.

One store especially I remember. It was a combination news center and everything-for-everybody place. Two brothers owned and operated it. One was a passive “occasional” idiot, the other an obnoxious, silly, aggressive fool; both of them could easily sell you Fourth-of-July sparklers in the middle of winter. Summer and holidays they had a nice display, an elaborate array of timely “cockie” nudie magazines—Playboy (of the late fifties), True Confessions, Strength and Health, Young Physique.

Once a month I’d patronize that store with one asset: boldness; and one mission: to assert my right to purchase the latest and greatest issue of Strength and Health magazine. By the time I was sixteen, having by then outgrown the mere desire for strength and health and bodybuilding, I switched to buying the slicker, more daringly daring Young Physique.

I had a canvas shoulderbag in which I carried my newspapers, and when it was empty I’d wear it around (like the dandy homosexuals in the Greenwich Village scene do now), not as a symbol of or for anything, but as a grab bag—for stash. I’d cruise the newsstand and the whole store for at least half an hour before I could get up the nerve to pull the magazine off the stand, whip around, lay out my buck on the counter and, taking my magazine and shoving it into my bag, open the store door just as the next customer was coming in. When, after moments of perfect timing, I was outside, free, I could breathe again.

No—not yet, no stopping, no stopping. It was just a matter of ridding myself of my paranoia: Is anyone going to come up to me, maybe one of my school friends, and want to search my bag (hey, watcha got in your bag?) and discover this filthy dirty magazine in my possession? I would try to ascertain the quickest route home to be sure no one would catch me with the goods. In a half hour’s time I can walk home and be safe (if I don’t look back).

The only way I could pull off the purchase of the magazine was when the passive, much nicer, “idiot” brother was tending the counter. It was to him I gave my dollar, and no one else. I trusted him. He remembered my father well. When my father was young and had the very same paper route, he’d stop at the very same store (but not, I’m sure, for the same purpose). We would talk grandly at length about my father (“How’s your father doing? What’s he look like now?”); it was a bore for me, but good enough for him to be able to converse with someone many times his younger. Trust came after I had purchased my sixth issue of Young Physique, no longer a stranger but now one of his best regular customers.

One evening it was snowing hard, blizzard warnings were out. I decided to stop in at the store on my way home to brush off the snow and to get warm. I began talking with the passive brother—about my father of course—when suddenly in the middle of a sentence he blurted out, “Hey there, by the way—I almost forgot, young man.” (What does he mean, I wondered.) He fumbled a second beneath the cigar case and came up with—yes—Young Physique nudie magazine, of course. That almost floored me. I knee-jerked, my face turned a passion-ripe tomato red and my mouth a blue-green dry. I was frozen silent. “Here’s the new issue,” he went on. “I went ahead and saved it for you.” I turned my head quickly to the rack where the Young Physique magazines were usually located; there were none there. “Oh—gee—thanks,” I said. “It was the last one left and I saved it for you,” he declared, as if he had saved the day. Well, he had—at least I had something to think about going home. I reached into my pocket with my mittens still on and fumbled nervously until I was able to pull out one crumpled dollar bill. Then I scooted out the store. Zip. Zip. Zip. Wow, is it cold.

Maybe I should go back in and get warm again. No, I don’t want him to start talking about the magazine, although I know he won’t. I had confidence in him to keep my secret and he had my trust, as I had his, that neither of us would “tell.”

For many, many months thereafter this brother saved Young Physique for me under his cigar case and never asked further questions about my father. I was now recognized as one of his most regular customers, just like those for whom he reserved the daily and Sunday papers. He was swell, and yet it never occurred to me that he might have thought or known I was a fag or realized what I was doing with that magazine. Me, a body-builder? A one-hundred-fifteen-pound featherhead, just skin and bones, frail and ready to fall apart? Maybe he did know, and maybe he had something in common with me and kept it quiet too.

In winter I usually didn’t get back home till after dark when I was carrying “the goods.” I’d sneak in without (hopefully) anyone seeing me and wait until I was sure everyone in the household was upstairs. If I could hear them there, and if no one was outside in the street, I’d sneak underneath the porch (which stands on stilts), glide my body quietly over to the cellar door, carefully lift it, close it slowly over me, and make my way down the cement stairway into the dark. There I’d reach for the switch to the meager twenty-five-watt light. Finally. Safe. Mission accomplished. Done. The magazine and I were home safe.

First I’d take that damn restrictive bag off my neck and back, and open up my coat. Then I’d take the magazine out of the bag and place it at my feet. By the time I’d done all that I had a hard-on with hardly any thought or command. Then I’d make a decision: whether or not to take my cock out of my pants. I mean, I like to see my own cock hard once in a while in the privacy of my cellar world and get to hold it in my hand without fear of having someone come into the room unexpectedly and discover me holding my cock in my hand, jerking it off. Sometimes I’d pull my pants all the way down, and sometimes I’d just let my erection hang out my pants while the cold air from my mouth could be felt and seen and tasted and gulped in and out of the lump in my throat. Oh, such a great feeling. It all depended on how cold it was down in the cellar, and how frustrated and anxious I was to relieve myself, and how much time I had before I had to get back upstairs.

The magazine would be spread out in front of me. When I found a page of a guy who really turned me on, I’d cum all over.

I must have rubbed my cock too fast or too hard. I had achieved the orgasm I desired and that was that. Great. I loved it, but I wished it could last, I wished I didn’t have to hurry. I didn’t even feel cold standing there with my pants down and my cock dripping of sperm and my hand full of my sperm, and wow, it felt so nice to cum.

I was in love. In love with a picture of a nude guy in Young Physique magazine.

How incredible. Gee, what I’d go through just to be able to masturbate within one minute or two. But it was a relief to be able to share my orgasm with guys in those nudie magazines, even if I couldn’t be with them in the flesh. After cumming, I’d pull my pants up, putting the new magazine with the others behind some bricks. Then I’d go upstairs and make believe I had just arrived.