Dad grew up during the great depression and got out of school just in time for World War II, and like most men of that generation he believed that a man’s word was everything. He felt that an untrustworthy guy was completely useless and once a fellow had proved himself trustworthy you could put your life in his hands and be sure that he wouldn’t let you down. He held in contempt anyone who went back on his word or failed to do what he promised, and there were some people that Dad completely shunned and wouldn’t have anything to do with because they’d reneged on a deal or let him down in some way. He instilled the same sense of honor in me and even as a little kid I wouldn’t take another kid’s candy or toys or purposely tell a lie. I also learned to trust my best friend implicitly, and that’s what ultimately cost me my balls.

Dad was a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker and he worked for large firm that did a lot of fancy houses. The framers, or rough carpenters, erected the shell of the house and then turned it over to the other tradesmen. Dad would come along after the plaster was up and install the window trim, doors, and wainscotings as well as fabricate and install the cabinetwork. He taught me the basics of woodworking and although I lacked his skill and attention to detail, by the time I turned eleven I had free rein to use all of the hand and power tools in the little shop in our back yard. This ability also contributed to my castration.

My best, and most trusted friend back then was Pat Bailey. Pat lived just down the road and his mom was a friend of my parents, so even as pre-schoolers we got together for occasional play dates. We started school together, and except for occasional tiffs we got along great and he was always welcome at our dinner table and I at his.

We were eleven-year-old kids when our class studied Colonial History. We were both fascinated by the pillories that held a miscreant by his or her head and hands immobile in the public square for all to ridicule. “Let’s make one!” Pat said, knowing that I had the ability.

“What for?” I wasn’t quite as taken by the contraption as he.

“I’ll be cool,” he said. I finally agreed, and after school we went into the backyard shop and went to work. Pat was allowed to use hand tools only, so I cut the required semicircular notches in a pair of two by sixes while he sanded the edges smooth. We attached a strap hinge along one end and a hasp to the other, and found an old dog chain snap for a lock. We didn’t get as far as a frame for the whole contraption before Pat stuck his head and hands into the notches and told me to lock it up.

“What do you think?” I asked as he tested the strength of the thing, looking for opportunities to escape.

“Cool,” he said. I responded by tickling him in his ribs to point where he peed his pants. I let him loose and took his place in the thing. I wasn’t ticklish so I had nothing to fear. Then he gave my prepubescent scrotum a little tap.

“Ouch!” I cried out. “No fair! Knock it off!” He finally stopped laughing long enough to let me loose, and by that time I could also see some humor in the situation. We made a promise to respect each other’s sensitive areas and messed around with it a few more times before casting it aside in favor of other childhood interests.

I changed a lot that summer, and although we didn’t compare notes it was obvious that Pat had too, but it wasn’t until the first day of school and we stripped down for Seventh grade PE and saw each other naked that we both realized that we were special: a couple of the other kids had a few downy curls, fine as smoke and nearly transparent adorning their crotches, but Pat and I both had luxurious dark bushes. I was too embarrassed to tell even my best friend that I had also acquired a depraved, filthy, and perverted habit. I was certain that I was the only kid so addicted to something that I knew was wrong but that felt so good.

There was no such thing as sex education for Seventh graders in 1962, but as more of the class entered puberty the exchange of knowledge increased exponentially, and my dad eventually got up enough courage to explain a few things to me and I learned that masturbation was a normal adolescent activity. Pat wasn’t quite as lucky; his dad had died years ago, and his mom, a nurse, took a dim view of self-abuse and preached that he’d likely go blind if he continued the perversion. Pat shared a small house with one bathroom with two younger sisters, so he frequently took refuge in the old barn behind the house, and I sometimes joined him to compare techniques and cock length. We never touched each other, let alone swapped slop, but we looked at dirty pictures and jacked off together.

Curiosity killed the cat, they say, and it was also curiosity that killed my balls. Roger Johnson passed a small object around our lunch table one day. “What is it?” I asked. The small green rubber ring was slightly larger than a Cheerio.

“It’s a lastrater band,” he explained. “My cousin gave it to me. It’s how they turn bulls into steers.”

“Huh?” I said. I knew that milk came from cows and that matadors fought bulls in Mexico and that TV cowboys rounded up steers and drove them to market, but I didn’t know that steers were man-made.

“You know, steers,” Roger explained. “They take a calf, a bull calf that is, and put the band around the nutsack. The balls fall off after a while and then you have a steer.”

“How do they do that?” Pat asked, trying to stretch the band. It wouldn’t budge a fraction of an inch.

“It goes on the end of a special tool,” Roger explained. “My cousin showed it to me. You squeeze the handles and it opens right up. Then you open the handles and roll the band off. Want to try it out?” No one said anything, but five hands nonchalantly disappeared under the table to enter five pockets and surreptitiously fondle ten testicles.

“Come on over after school,” Pat meant the barn, “and bring that thing we made last year.”

“The pillory?” I had forgotten about it.

“Yeah. It’ll be really cool,” Pat said. By now I’d figured out that ‘cool’ meant something that would give Pat a boner, and that ‘really cool’ meant that he’d probably get his rocks off.

The wooden device was right where I had left it, but I couldn’t fine the snap that secured the hasp, so I grabbed my bicycle lock instead and hurried over to join Pat in the barn. Pat pulled some ordinary rubber bands out of his pocket and dropped his pants and held his hands up beside his head. “Lock me up, then put some of the rubber bands around my balls,” he said. “It’ll be just like putting one of Roger’s bands on a calf. He knows it’s there, but can’t do anything about it.”

“Put the bands on yourself,” I replied, looking down at Pat’s crotch. He had the start of a boner and his balls sagged low in the afternoon heat. “I’ll lock you up but I don’t want to touch your balls.”

“Okay,” he said and doubled one of the rubber bands and slipped it over his scrotum. It wasn’t tight enough to suit him, so he stretched it out and doubled it again, the added more bands until his balls were constricted into a small, slightly hairy lump. He was fully erect now, with his four-inch adolescent boner almost vertical against his belly. “Lock me up.”

I positioned the wooden pillory around his neck and wrists and closed the hasp and clicked the lock shut. “How’s it feel?” I asked.

“Weird,” he said, then started thrusting his hips as if trying to fuck air. He bent forward, almost double, squirmed around a little, then straightened up, tensed, and shot four big streams of semen. My dick and balls were at least as big as his, but I could never match his volume. I had a bathroom of my own and could also take a sock to bed and jack off whenever I pleased. His mom watched him like a hawk and made him sleep with his bedroom door open, and she checked his sheets, tee shirts, and underwear daily. It was only during her once a week swing shifts that he could slip away to the barn and get rid of a week’s load. “Okay, let me loose.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, teasing him a little.

“It hurts now! Hurry!” He pleaded. I let him loose and he quickly unwound the bands from around his scrotum. “Your turn,” he said, “unless you’re chicken.” I was a twelve-year-old macho he-man stud with hair on my balls, and nobody called me chicken.

“They need to be tighter,” he commented after I had doubled a couple of rubber bands around my balls. “If they aren’t tight enough to cut off circulation it won’t count.”

I stretched the bands tight and doubled them again and held up my hands to accept the pillory.

It didn’t really hurt at first; it was just kind of a pressure down there with the sensation that someone was gently squeezing my balls, and it wasn’t until I looked that I realized that I had a boner. It was weird having a boner that I couldn’t touch or do anything about, and I responded the same way Pat had by bending forward in an effort to get some friction. Had I not jacked off that morning I might have been able to get off like Pat had. As it was I couldn’t, and after a few minutes my boner actually began to be uncomfortable.

“Okay, I’ve had enough. Unlock me.” It was neat having a guy like Pat that I could trust standing by with the key. Some of the other guys in my class were genuine assholes and would just laugh at me and watch me suffer.

“Crap!” Pat exclaimed, using what was for him the ultimate swear word. “I dropped the key! It went under the floor.” I looked down, and sure enough, the key had fallen through one of the gaps between the boards and was lying on the ground beneath the barn. “Do you want me to get the key or take the bands off?” Pat asked.

Like I said, I trusted Pat. He was a good friend that I could always count on, but I didn’t want him messing with my balls. “Get the key,” I said. “ I’m okay for a few more minutes.”

Pat slid under the floor and retrieved the key, and had just opened the door to the barn. “Crap!” He said, “Here comes Mom.”

I heard a car door slam, then “Patrick, come here right now! You were supposed to go over to Dr. Wales right after school. You’re an hour late and he called. Get it the car right now.” Pat’s mom was so paranoid about Pat’s perversion making him go blind that she had his vision checked every six months, even though he was the only one in his family that didn’t wear glasses.

“But Mom,”

“Don’t sass me, young man, and don’t think I don’t know what you were doing in the barn. Come on now, hurry up.”

“I’ll be right back,” Pat whispered as he closed the door.

“Don’t forget to lock the barn door,” Pat’s mom hollered, and I heard the click of the padlock and the car door slam.

My best friend, the one person I completely trusted, had left me trussed up with my balls in jeopardy instead of defying his mom for the fifteen seconds that it would have taken to unlock me. I was pissed off, but not really in great danger. It didn’t hurt too badly and my boner had subsided, and Pat would be back within a half hour or forty-five minutes. There was another way out of the barn, but it involved climbing up a rope and swinging out through the hay hole, and even if I could get outside I’d still have my pants down around my ankles and my banded balls would be visible for all to see, so I complacently sat back to wait for Pat’s return.

An hour later the pain was almost unbearable, and every time I moved it felt like taking a hard thump to the nuts, and as soon as Pat got back I intended to demonstrate to him just how it felt. Of course I didn’t know at the time that Pat’s mom had wrecked the car and that they were both in the hospital and would be kept there overnight.

I don’t remember a lot about the next ten hours; I was in kind of a self-inflicted coma and had lost all track of time, and the only things I remember were the flies that kept landing on my balls and the constant pain. It was only afterwards that I learned the whole story. Pat’s mom’s injuries were non-critical, and she’d called my mom to pick up Pat’s sisters and bring them to the hospital, and Mom spent most of the night there while Pat was in surgery. Since I hadn’t been with Pat it was assumed that I was safe and sound somewhere because, after all, I was trustworthy. It wasn’t until Ten that night that anyone figured out that I was missing and it wasn’t until the next day that I was located and by then my nuts were history, done in by curiosity, my craftsmanship, and the trust I had placed in a friend.

Ironically I ended up in the same pediatric ward as Pat. Even though I’d been castrated and would spend the rest of my life as an asexual eunuch, he was worse off. Few of the cars had seatbelts back then and Pat had gone through the windshield. He had a broken arm, a mild concussion, and his eyes were full of broken glass. His mom was right: His jacking off had resulted in blindness.