“Okay Abbott, that does it! Get your butt in my office now!” Coach ordered, obviously pissed. I didn’t think it was that big of deal; a bunch of eighth graders letting off steam in the locker room after PE often resulted in a little bit of pain or embarrassment for someone, and at that age a naked guy’s nuts were fair game.

We’d had a pretty typical PE class that had started out with a round of calisthenics, then a short game of baseball, and finally two laps around the outside of the field. I was a little on the slow side, so most of the other guys were already in the shower by the time that I’d finally stripped down, and Kenny had finished and had grabbed a towel from the stack and was headed back to the bench as I was headed to the noisy, steamy, shower room. I heard the snap of the towel and felt the mild sting as it barely kissed my butt cheek. An inch closer and it would have hurt like hell and left a big red welt.

“Butthead!” I used the strongest language allowed a junior high student at the time, and then lashed out with my hand in the direction of his naked crotch. I connected, and he doubled over in real or theatrical pain just as Coach Marshall, the PE teacher, entered the room.

I started to explain that Kenny had started it and that my pop to his balls was a justified retaliation, but Coach didn’t want to hear it and instead marched me into the small office adjacent to the lockers and closed the door. Nowadays no teacher or coach would dare risk his position by being shut in a room with a thirteen-year-old boy, but back then ass-chewing was normally done one-on-one behind closed doors and nobody considered it inappropriate even if the boy happened to be jaybird naked.

“What’s your problem, Abbott?” He had me backed up against the wall was right in my face, just like the drill instructor at Fort Lewis would be in a few years, only I was a foot shorter and had to crane my neck backwards to meet his stare. “Weren’t you listening in class the other day?”

He was referring to the weekly class and lectures that we all endured about health, hygiene, anatomy, and other male issues. The last class had stressed the importance of guys always protecting their assets by wearing jock straps during sports and warned us about the consequences of seemingly harmless horseplay involving each other’s crotches. He lectured me for a while and must have sensed that he wasn’t getting through to me, because while I was busy trying to not blink he reached down and grabbed my naked balls and gave them a squeeze.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked, knowing that he finally had my full attention. Damn right it hurt. I had taken pops to my balls, of course, but nobody except a doctor had ever grabbed on to them, and what was now happening sure as hell wasn’t the gentle palpations of a doctor’s physical. He kept squeezing me for what seemed like an eternity before letting go and telling me to get my stinky butt into the shower.

I shuffled to the shower trying to ignore the pain in my belly and balls, and most of the other guys had already left by the time that I had finally finished dressing. I never tangled with the coach again, and although I saw him around from time to time many years would pass until our next encounter.

After high school I tried college, but dropped out after a year and got married, and even though Sandra soon became pregnant, that wasn’t enough to defer a healthy nineteen-year-old from the draft and Viet Nam.

Simone was born while I was overseas, and although I had not yet even held her I told anyone who would listen that my wife and child were my reason for living, and it must have worked because I came home unhurt.

Michael was born two years later, and right from the start I bonded with him. My own father had been cold and aloof to the point that I sometimes wondered if I’d been adopted, and I vowed that I’d never be that way if I ever had a boy of my own. We did everything that we could together and I tried to involve myself in his activities whenever possible. I was an adult and a parent and he a teen, and although I never kidded myself that we were best buds that could freely discuss Sally Robert’s camel toes, the finer points of masturbation, or who sold the best grass, we did communicate and he knew he could talk to me about anything on his mind.

“Dad,” Mike called from his bedroom, “I don’t feel good.” He’d skipped supper and was moving a little slower than normal and not saying much that evening, but I dismissed it to teenage moodiness.

“What is it, Honey?” My wife, the diligent mother, inquired.

“Uh, I need to talk to Dad about it,” Mike replied. I went into his room to find him lying on the bed in his underwear. He was extremely pale and a sheen of sweat was clearly visible on his beardless face. “Uh, I think I hurt myself, Dad.”

“Where son?”

“Uh, down here, Dad,” he answered, motioning towards his crotch. I hadn’t seen my son naked since he started getting self-conscious about his body a year ago, but I knew by the change in his voice and the occasional curly hair on the toilet seat and the telltale stains on his sheets that he’d entered puberty. He painfully pulled down his skivvies to reveal the wispy hair and slender dick of a normal young adolescent, and a scrotum that was grotesquely swollen and bright red on one side.

Most minor injuries and childhood ailments quickly mend themselves, and we’d always used the ‘take an aspirin and we’ll check in again in the morning’ approach, but this was obviously an emergency. “Get dressed, son, and we’ll go to the emergency room.”

“Uh, I don’t think I can, Dad.” Mike wasn’t a whiner and if he hurt so badly that he couldn’t get dressed I knew it must be serious. I wrapped him in the top sheet from his bed and carried him to the car.

Pacing the waiting room helpless as my son cried out in pain was the hardest thing that I’d ever had to do, but the doctor and nurse had banned Sandra and I from the examining room.

“Your son has a torsion, or twisting of the spermatic cords, of the left testicle,” The doctor explained a half hour later. “I’ve given him something for the pain, but we’re going to have to go in and fix it immediately.”

“Will he be okay?” I sure as hell didn’t want my son to be a eunuch.

“We won’t know for sure until we open it up,” the doctor hedged. “If it hasn’t been too long since the injury we can usually untwist it and anchor the testicle, but he said it happened this morning, and if that’s the case we may have to remove the testicle. Otherwise, gangrene may spread to the other one, and that would, of course, be very bad, and could also involve the perineum, which would result in permanent impotence and possibly loss of bladder control.” The doctor assured us that Mike would be unaffected by the loss of one nut and that he could enjoy a normal sex life and father children, and that a prosthetic testicle could be inserted to prevent him being self-conscious whenever he had to strip down in front of other guys.

Mike was home two days later, minus his left nut. He wouldn’t be able to take PE for the rest of the school year, and come June he’d go in for a rather minor surgery to install a prosthetic fake nut. “What happened, Son?” I asked as he rested comfortably in bed. His face turned red, and he hesitated a bit before answering.

“I had stripped down after PE and was headed for the shower when Shane came up behind me and pulled a jock strap down over my face. I kind of kicked back with one foot, and the next thing I knew Shane was on the floor holding his balls.” It seemed as how the eighth grade hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years. “Then Coach. Marshall came in and dragged me into his office.”

“Warren Marshall?” I asked. The guy we called Coach had been promoted to the high school years ago.

“Yeah,” Mike answered, “Our regular teacher is out for a while, so Coach Marshall has been filling in. Anyway, he got me into the office and was ragging on me, then all of a sudden he grabs me, uh, down there. I turned around and tried to get loose, and felt a little kind of pull or something, and it got worse all day.”

When I was in the eighth grade Coach Marshall was probably in his late thirties and looked fearsome to a little runt like me, but twenty years later he looked pathetic. His once firm torso was now packing an extra thirty pounds of flab and his two packs a day Camel habit had wrinkled his face to the point that he looked like an old man even though he wasn’t yet sixty years old. The legs that I remembered as being heavily muscled and extremely hairy were now fish belly white and almost hairless, and were tied to the corners of his own bed, and his once powerful arms were no match for the light cord that bound them to the other ends of the bed.

“Where’s the safe, asshole?” I asked, infecting a gutter accent and lowering my voice an octave from my normal tone. A ski mask prevented him from seeing my face, and I knew that I was now indistinguishable from hundreds of other people in the area.

“There’s no safe,” he said, breath laboring. I had tied him to the bed after invading and ransacking his home, and on the pretext of finding a hidden stash of jewelry or bullion, had been asking about a safe. I had also stripped him naked, and now I brushed his fat limp cock to one side and took his balls in my hand and gave them half a twist.

“Where’s the safe?” I repeated the question; even though I was sure that there wasn’t any safe and that his recent divorce had probably cost him anything of value that he might have once possessed.

One more half twist and I could see the veins bulging out on his forehead. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” I said softly, certain that he’d used that same line on dozens of kids, and that even if he suspected his tormenter was a former student he couldn’t identify which one. I gave his scrotum two more full turns and then freed his bonds and left him to his misery.

The paper ran a story a day later about a home invasion robbery that left a local teacher hospitalized with ‘unspecific serious injuries’, but I heard no more about it and he retired before the start of the next school year and was no longer teaching when Mike entered high school.

I’d like to think that I castrated the asshole, but then again, it doesn’t matter; even if he still has balls he can lie awake at night wondering when another of his former students might pay him a visit. What the hell, someday Mike may even find out where he lives.