Clinton City’s Crime Of The Century, such as it was, took place forty years ago and the authorities are no closer to solving it now than they were thirty-seven or thirty-eight or thirty-nine years ago. Clinton City’s just a hick farm town and to folks around here it was just as big a deal as 9/11 or the O.J. Simpson bullshit, and just about everyone seems to remember the morning that Sean Kent was found tied to a picnic table in Rotary Park. The small city park would be hard pressed to accommodate more that two dozen people and is virtually deserted at dawn, but four times that many claim to have personally been there when the hapless youngster was found, and all can recall the horror that had been inflicted on him.

What kind of person, people wondered, could willfully castrate another human, especially an innocent, probably virginal sixteen-year-old boy? And Sean wasn’t just anyone. He had been raised right here and his parents were both considered pillars of the community. The handsome boy was popular and well liked. He played both football and basketball for the Clinton Warriors and was always on the honor roll as well as working after school at the Safeway. Nobody recalled Sean ever having alcohol on his breath and he never had the glassy eyes or running nose of one of the lower class boys suspected of using drugs. He didn’t swear; in fact he probably wouldn’t say ‘shit!’ if he stepped in it. No one ever caught him sneaking a cigarette and his bare ass was never seen pumping up and down in the back seat of his dad’s car. No rumors circulated accusing him of knocking up someone’s sister or daughter even though Amy Walters said that he’d gotten his hand inside her blouse one time at the Rialto. She’d pushed it away and said no, not yet, and he’d respected her wishes like a perfect gentleman and had even continued to date her.

Was the monster still living in the community or was he just some psycho that had just been passing through? Would he strike again? Would he also attack young girls? Nobody knew, but doors were kept locked from then on and kids were suddenly required by their parents to be home earlier. Any one of four of us could have eased the public’s fears and assured them that they were now safe, but by breaking our vow of secrecy we’d be putting our own balls on the line.

“I sometimes wish that you could be a little more like Sean Kent,” Mom said, sitting down to the supper table. Dad worked the late shift and ate early, so Mom and I always ate together and she insisted on me being there every evening.

“He’s not that great, Mom,” I replied. I was in a hurry to eat and leave and go out and screw around with my buddies.

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” she said, piling some more fried potatoes onto my plate, “but if you’d slim down a little I know you could make the tennis team, and maybe if you studied just a little harder you could be on the honor roll, too.” The real issue here wasn’t me, it was Mom. Honor roll postings and athletic letters were handed out at an awards ceremony and the parents were always invited to rise and be recognized for their kids’ achievements, and Sean’s parents did a lot of standing up and smiling humbly. Dad didn’t give a shit about stuff like that but Mom felt cheated that she was always left out of the limelight.

“I told you, I don’t like tennis. And Sean doesn’t take Advanced Algebra and Physics, mom. They’re a lot tougher than Woodshop and Art, you know.” I replied, trying to act like I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Sean. I was faking it, though. I hated Sean with a vengeance.

I was in the Fifth grade when Sean transferred into the school. He was from somewhere in Texas and the local grain company had hired his dad for a plant manager. The old manager had died and my dad was in line for the position, but instead of giving him a promotion the owners hired an out of town bigshot for the somewhat prestigious position. Sean was ten; the same age as I, and he had a slow southern drawl and the nasty habit of calling all women Ma’am and all men Sir. He even complimented the cafeteria cooks on the quality of their daily slop and praised the effort of the janitorial staff. As if that wasn’t enough he was also a smart little asshole and twisted the bell curve up to the point where my own grades fell down a little bit.

He was taller and stronger than any of his classmates and even as a pre-adolescent he could shinny up the climbing rope in the gym like a monkey, and he could run faster and hit a baseball farther than anyone else in the fifth grade. He was always first choice for the pickup games we played, and whichever team he was on was automatically the winner.

Even his named pissed us off. There were a lot of Dougs and Jims and Bills and Mikes, a Robert and a Bob and a Larry and a couple of Kens and a few of the more uncommon names like Kevin and Aaron in our class, but no one had even heard of a kid being named Sean. A few years later Sean Connery would immortalize James Bond and that would change, but in 1962 no one even knew how to pronounce the name.

By the time we got to the Seventh grade we all had formed an opinion about Sean. All of the girls absolutely adored him. Half of the guys admired him and tried to emulate his shy and polite demeanor and spent hours trying to imitate his Texas drawl. The rest of us either didn’t much like him or hated his guts. He had never really done anything to me, so although I didn’t hate him I also didn’t have any reason to like him. That all changed about the middle of the school year.

Sean was among the first guys in the class to grow hair and get balls, and he was the very first to come under their hormonal influence. I don’t have any idea if he was really interested in girls but he was sure as hell interested in other guys’ balls. The guys whose nuts hadn’t yet dropped were safe; he no interest in them, but any guy with hair was fair game and he’d wrestle them to the ground and put a nut lock on them or thump them hard in the balls. We were all kind of bad that way, but he was by far the worst. The rest of us tapped each other a little but he was positively vicious, almost as if by some primordial urge he wanted to keep other viable sperm out of the breeding pool.

I hadn’t entered puberty yet so I was safe but all of my newly pubescent buddies got it sooner or later. ‘Where’s Bob?’ Someone would ask. “Oh, he got Seaned,’ would be a typical answer. Bob wouldn’t show up for school the next day, and the day after he’d have a note from home forbidding him from taking PE, or if he did strip down his balls would be swollen and purple. I figured that someone would rat Sean out so that even his super polite brown nosing ass would be grass, but it didn’t happen.

I grew hair and balls myself over the summer, and I entered the Eighth grade taller and stronger, and also keenly aware of the pain Sean could inflict. I saw him eyeballing me in the shower room, but there were five other guys that were now also endowed so I figured that I might have time to make some kind of plan. Yeah, right. He nailed me right after I got off the school bus on the third day of school. Instead of riding the bus with the peons, his mom picked him up and dropped him off. He lived a mile down the road from me, so as soon as he got home he beat feet back and hid in the brush alongside the long driveway and waited for my bus.

He had me down before I even knew what was happening and quickly opened my zipper and grabbed my balls. Damn, he was strong! I was kicking and screaming for him to stop, but he just clamped down harder. I flailed at him wildly, trying to beak his grip, and eventually had a clear shot at his nuts. My balled up fist connected with a solid metallic clang. The asshole was wearing a steel nut cup!

I distinctly remember pissing my pants, and that made him let go, but before I could grab my aching balls he slammed his fist into them. I rolled up in the dusty road and puked out the remains of my lunch. Two walnuts landed in the dirt right in front of my face. “You gonna tell on me?” Sean asked, stomping his foot down to shatter the nuts. The implication was clear, and the knowledge that I was helpless against him hurt as much as the physical pain in my balls and belly.

Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to putting up with four years of high school with Sean and his crap. He didn’t jump me again, but his very attitude made it clear that it was waiting for me again any time I wanted it, or any time I pissed him off. He eventually nailed every kid in our freshman class, and the next year, when we were sophomores, he started in on the newly arrived freshmen.

Mike and Bob and Doug and I were dressing after PE one day in the late spring, and happened to notice Pete Wilson, a diminutive freshmen that everyone liked, had a bad case of swollen balls and was walking kind of stooped over. “Asshole Sean,” Mike commented.

“Yeah,” Doug agreed. “Someone needs to take him down a notch or two.”

“You know what I’d like to do?” Bob interjected. “I’d get him alone somewhere, all tied up. And wrap a piece of strong wire around his nuts and hoist him up and let him hang until he dropped.”

“That ought to do it,” I offered, “but I’d rather take a knife and cut them off, nice and slow like.”

“I’d band him, just like a calf, and sit there and watch his balls die,” Mike said, getting into it.

“You know that thing he does with the walnuts?” It was Doug’s turn. “I’d do the same thing to his nuts. That would be a good lessen for him.” We all laughed it off and got dressed and went to out next classes.

“Seriously, guys, how would you do it?” I asked later when we had all piled into Doug’s car for the five-mile ride home that usually took at least an hour.

“Do what?” Mike asked.

“Fix Sean.” I answered.

“I told you, I’d put an elastrator band on him.”

“No, I mean how would you get away with it? You know, not get caught.” I pursued the subject.

“Hell, I don’t know, maybe knock him out and blindfold him or something.” Mike replied.

“I saw this movie once,” Doug interrupted, “where this woman put some kind of knockout drops in this guy’s drink and then tied him up and shot him.” We casually kicked wildly insane and improbable ideas around for the next hour as we cruised around on the way home.

That night, for first time, I masturbated while thinking about something other than sex. The next morning after PE I told the guys that I wanted to do it. “So do I,” Mike said, “My way.”

“Let’s figure out how first,” I said. “Then we’ll pick the method.”

“Okay, lets think some more on it.” Doug’s motion was quickly seconded by Mike and Bob. “One thing, though,” he added, rinsing the soap from his body. “We’ve got to keep this all to ourselves. Right?”

We’d been studying word roots and origins in English an hour before, and one of the words we discussed was ‘testify’. The ancient Roman penalty for perjury was castration, and men giving testimony in court grabbed their testicles to acknowledge that fact. “I swear,” I said, grabbing my naked balls. The others followed suit, and four high school sophomores began to plan a major felony.

I don’t think we were serious, to start with, about castrating Sean. It was more like a school research project, or in my case, masturbation fodder. It was only after we got into it that we all realized that it was indeed likely that we could do it and get away clean.

We concluded that Rotary Park would be the venue. The City had just fertilized the grass with waste treatment plant sludge and it wasn’t yet considered to be safe for kids to romp, and the place came alive after dark with mosquitoes. Sean knew no fear, so a challenge to a fight after dark would be impossible for him to ignore.

He would have to be quickly silenced and blindfolded, and we would have to be completely disguised. Banding him or hanging him by his balls would take too long so we agreed that the winner of the draw would either have to crush his nuts or cut them from his body. A tourniquet would have to be used should he be cut, as we would have to leave him tied up for others to discover, hopefully not until the next day. Most of our ideas came from the popular TV shows of the day or from the juvenile adventure stories that we’d read, so our plans obviously weren’t very sophisticated.

I won the draw by picking the longest straw from Doug’s hand, so I had the honor of wielding the knife. Doug typed a note on one of the schools office machines calling Sean a chickenshit cocksucker that was afraid of a fair fight, and if wanted to dispute that fact he should come alone to the park at nine Tuesday evening. There was a PTA meeting that night, and my Mom, Doug’s parents, and Sean’s parents were all regular attendees. Mike’s dad drank a lot and would crash early, and Bob would sneak away from home.

We met in the park at eight and rigged a drop net up in a tree. We all looked like some kind of comic Ninjas; black sweatshirts and ski masks pulled low over our faces. Sean showed right on time, looking pissed, and the net caught him just according to plan. I shot him in the face with a can of spray paint, and Doug blindfolded him and stuffed an old sweat sock into his mouth while Mike and Bob and I held him down, and in less than a minute he was tied spread-eagle to a picnic table.

We had not spoken a word since we began our assault, and we would remain silent until we were well out of earshot from out victim. I had won the draw and the right to perform the actual castration, but the other guys were entitled to a piece of the action. Doug was carrying the knife, and it was he that cut the crotch from our prisoner’s pants and discarded the nut cup that I knew he’d be wearing. We’d initially planned on stripping him naked, but finally realized that it would take extra time from our primary activity. Doug gingerly pushed Sean’s cock to one side and then slammed his fist into the boy’s exposed testicles. Sean gave a sudden lurch, and let out a series of short gurgling sounds as he attempted to catch his breath breathing only through his nose. Doug wasn’t through though; he finished his performance by grabbing Sean’s balls and squeezing them and giving the scrotum a half twist.

Mike grabbed the trophies gently and slowly tugged until they were stretched far out and then held them there while Bob stretched and wrapped a short piece pf latex tubing tightly around the base of the scrotum, and then Mike and Bob each gave the captive nuts several hard squeezes and raps.

I took the scrotum carefully into my hand, noting that his nuts were no larger than my own, and placed the edge of the knife against the soft skin just below the tourniquet. Sean recoiled at the touch of the knife and began a new series of contortions, trying his best to free himself from his bonds, and arched his back and lifted himself clear of the table by his feet and shoulder blades as I tugged upwards on his balls.

Doug suddenly pointed to his watch and gave me a signal to hurry it up. It was a good thing he did: I was so hard that in another thirty seconds I would have blown my wad right into my skivvies. One quick push with the knife and it was over. I threw the detached scrotum into the brush and we hurried from the park, leaving Sean to his misery. We removed our ski masks and stuffed then in our pockets, and I threw the knife into the river and we casually walked back to where Doug had parked the car. Nobody said much on the way home but I could see that the other guys were also trying to conceal boners. Later that night I had what was by far the best orgasm of my young virginal life.

Sean was found early the next morning, and by eight everyone in school seemed to have heard about it but no one had any details about the extent of his injuries. News came out that he’s been mutilated, and finally whomever it was that found him leaked out the scoop that he’d been castrated. City police, state police, and country sheriffs all questioned everyone that Sean had ever known, but no one knew anything. One kid told them that he thought Sean was a bully but didn’t offer any supporting evidence.

I never saw Sean again after the night I nutted him. He never came back to school and his dad resigned his position and they moved away somewhere, and Dad was finally appointed plant manager.

I went to college while Mike was busy getting killed in Viet Nam. Doug married young and moved to the East Coast, made a ton of money, got divorced, bought a sailboat, and is somewhere or other. Bob succumbed to cancer a year ago. People ask what I do for a living and I tell them the truth: I’m a drug dealer. I had my own pharmacy for a while but I work for Safeway now. They built one of their superstores and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Dad and I were talking a while back, and the subject of The Crime came up. Dad said that he never liked the Kent kid, and he always thought he was a little too oily and sneaky and that his dad, the plant manager, was just as bad Dad said his management style was to get everyone by the balls, so as to speak, and force his methods on them He also told him that he wanted Sean to be the best at everything. The kid had came home with a B one time instead of an A, and the dad had pulled the kid’s pants down and grabbed his son’s balls and given them a hard squeeze and told him it would be twice as bad next time.

Dad came right out and said he owed a big favor to whomever it was that castrated the little asshole, because that had resulted in him being promoted to plant manager.

You’re welcome, Dad.