Circle Of Friends - Vinnie Z

One or two of the guys I knew at school were proud of the size of their cocks and they paraded around the locker room displaying them like trophies they had earned and a couple of guys were fanatically proud of their hair, which had to be perfect before they would leave the locker room after P.E. Vinnie was proud of his gun.

Vinnie was of Slavic extraction and he had a last name that was nearly impossible to pronounce. You could hear him pronounce it and you could do a reasonably good job of it until you saw it written down. Once you got a look at all of those consonants with no vowels other than a few Y’s it all went out the window and you’d get tongue-tied trying to say it. Even the teachers referred to him as Vinnie Z.

The object of Vinnie’s pride was a Smith and Wesson K-22 revolver that his dad had purchased for him a couple of years ago. He lived out of town and worked on a farm and packed the thing on his hip. He couldn’t bring it to school, of course, but that didn’t stop him from talking about it, and other than sex it was the only thing he knew anything about. H e would rattle on about how the .22 shorts would drop a robin or sparrow, but for mean game, like porcupines that ‘can throw their quills six or eight feet’ you needed to have the long rifle ammo. They were more fun to shoot, he alleged, because they would ‘literally vaporize’ most small animals. He wanted to send it off and get it re-chambered for .22 magnum, ‘so he could hut elk and bear with it’ but he was kind afraid of how hard it might kick then. It was also better than any other K-22 ever built, and ‘it wasn’t even supposed to have been sold to anyone but the police.’

I didn’t know it at the time, but Vinnie was a classic example of arrested development. He was sixteen, the same age as me, but he had the mental maturity of about a thirteen year old. He wasn’t obese like the Body By McDonald’s fat kids of today are, but he was pretty chunky, just the same. He didn’t like stripping for P.E. and although he had all of the proper equipment he was embarrassed being naked among the kids who were more fit than he was. He would put his shirt on to cover his flabby belly even before he had finished toweling off and then stare at the other guy’s jocks as they dressed.

He seemed to have a fixation on sex. That alone wasn’t unusual for a sixteen-year-old guy, but he was pretty extreme. He talked constantly of the various positions he had tried, and he was always coming up with off the wall BS like how he had ‘got this girl out at the farm last summer and screwed her so hard that I bruised my balls and they swelled up like lemons’. I knew enough about screwing and bruised balls to know that wasn’t how a guy got them bruised. Nobody that I knew had ever seen him talk to a girl, let alone go out with one, and even the homeliest dog in the school wouldn’t have went out with him anyway so we all figured he was still a virgin.

He also had a nasty habit of busting other guys in their balls when they let their guard down. I had gone through that phase myself when I was about twelve or thirteen, but had outgrown it. He wouldn’t try it with me or any of his other classmates because we would have kicked the crap out of him, but he was merciless around the younger and smaller sophomores and freshmen and I had even seen him smack a few junior high kids in the gonads. I often wondered if he knew how much pain he was inflicting, and I even thought about giving him a friendly little kick in his nuts to see if that would make him knock it off, bit that had happened to me once and I wouldn’t have wished the pain and swelling on anyone.

I didn’t much care for Vinnie, but I had three classes with him, and his dad was my dad’s foreman, and he had something I wanted so I tolerated him. Vinnie and his parents lived on his granddad’s farm that adjoined a large tract of private lease land. Access to the lease land was controlled and I wanted to ride my Honda on it, and Vinnie’s place had an access road to it. I would go out there sometimes, spend the minimum amount of time listening to Vinnie brag, and then go ride for the rest of the day.

Vinnie had an old Sears Allstate motorcycle made by an aptly named company called Puch, and he wanted to ride along with me. It wasn’t street legal and the two-cycle engine laid down a smoke screen that could be seen for miles. It sounded like a bunch of pennies rattling around in a tin can when it ran, and it would just barely haul his fat ass up the access road. We started out together a couple of times, but I’d just wait for the first hill and then crank in on and leave him in the dust.

He was always bugging me to let him ride my Honda, and he even offered to let me shoot his precious revolver, but even though I had passed my hunter’s safety course Dad would kick my ass if he found out I had touched a pistol, and I didn’t want Vinnie or anyone else riding my bike.

May 1966 arrived with a sudden warmth and greenness after the snow, cold, and mud of winter. I would be a senior next year and I had met a girl who liked motorcycles and loved to ride, and also had a reputation liking to be rode. Two weeks before school let out I invited her to go for a Saturday ride with me out in the sticks. We stopped off at the Texaco station, and after filling the bike with Sky Chief premium ($1.25 for a fill up) I made a quick visit to the men’s room where I put a quarter into the vending machine on the wall, turned the handle, and then dug out another fifty cents in case I got extra lucky.

Motorcycling has a dark side, and teenagers are particularly susceptible to the gravel rash, broken bones, and pretzeled knees that are the rewards of carelessness, but there is no other experience quite like sharing a motorcycle seat with a girl. No amount of clothing can mask the perception of her nipples digging into your back, and you are her only handhold, and if she happens to like you or the vibrations of your bike her hands can be pretty distracting. I don’t know if Vinnie could see the beginnings of my boner when I pulled into his yard to get the key to the gate, and I didn’t much care, as long as I got the key.

“I’d go with you,” he said as we went in to get the key, “but I have to baby sit my cousins, and my balls are still kind of sore from my date last night.”

His three cousins looked to be twelve or thirteen and seemed to be familiar with the kind of crap Vinnie pulled. They were pretty careful to keep just out of range from him unless they had their hands clamped protectively over their genitals.

“Hey! Watch this!” Vinnie said, as Sue and I were getting ready to go. He kind of hunkered down in an imitation of Matt Dillon, Little Joe Cartwright, or any of the other horse opera TV actors on the tube back then and whipped out the K-22 in a fast draw and fired, kicking up dust ten feet from the can he was aiming at.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Great, Vinnie.” I said, as Sue and I saddled up.

“What a dickhead!” Sue muttered, nicely summing it up.

The 250 Scrambler wasn’t a very good dirt bike. Unlike today’s motocross derived dual-sports it was a conversion of a road bike. It had high exhaust pipes, universal tires, and a flat handlebar but it’s poor weight distribution and street oriented torque curve made it essentially useless in the rough country. It was okay for casual trail riding and it was a lot of fun on dirt and gravel roads, and we soon found ourselves at a small, isolated pond that had been formed by excavation of gravel. Later in the summer the water would be warm enough for swimming, but in May it would freeze the balls off of a brass monkey. It did have a fringe of green grass though, and it was here that I parked the Honda.

“Smoke?” I asked Sue, placing a Camel in my mouth and shaking another out for her. Track was over with now, and I could smoke a little.

“Later.” She replied, taking the unlit cigarette out of my mouth and replacing it with her tongue. She gave me the longest, hottest, kiss I had ever had while putting her hands on my ass and pulling me close so she could feel my swelling erection before breaking off long enough to shed her blouse and bra.

I wasn’t a virgin, but it was the first time I had been naked with a girl in the great outdoors and in broad daylight, and it was an incredible experience, even though we both got a little bit burnt on some areas where the sun usually doesn’t shine.

It had been a relatively fantastic day for me and I wasn’t in a hurry to get back. There had been no illusion of love or sense of conquest on my part; I was just scratching her itch. I liked the feeling that went with knowing that everything worked correctly, however, and when we finally left it was getting late in the day.

Sometimes things seem weird when you realize that if you had started a trip five seconds later you might have been killed in the car wreck that happened right behind you, or if only the dog would have stopped to take a piss before crossing the road it wouldn’t have gotten hit. It is all fate, of course, and not anything you have any control over, but it’s weird how things that seem insignificant have the power to change the course of events. The Keihin carburetors on the Scrambler, designed for smooth roads and flat ground, had a propensity for flooding and fouling the spark plugs when going down a steep, rough, grade. You could pull the clutch in and rev the motor up to clean it out, or just shut the fuel off, kill the motor, and silently coast. The last mile down to Vinnie’s gate was steep, and being in no hurry to get home I let it coast. That act may have cost Vinnie his balls.

We could hear the popping of the little .22 as we neared the gate, and we stopped as soon as we saw them so they would see us and hold their fire. One of the boys was standing in a combat stance, feet spread, holding the .22 in both hands, slow firing at a can. He was doing pretty well too, hitting the can with every shot. The other two youngsters were watching the can, and Vinnie was behind him.

If Vinnie had heard us coming he might not have done what he did, or maybe he would have anyway, who knows. At any rate the boy shooting had his back turned and his legs spread wide, presenting Vinnie with the perfect target, and Vinnie came up behind him and lifted his foot smartly into the boy’s unprotected nuts. It wasn’t the gut grabbing, debilitating bust that leaves the victim rolling on the ground gasping for air and helpless for several minutes, but it was enough to definitely get his attention and he reacted by pitching forward and clutching his balls. He dropped to his knees, and as he did the revolver spun around his finger and discharged, rendering Vinnie collapsed on the ground with his hands clamped to his crotch.

Sue was the real hero that day. She was a lifeguard at the pool and had been trained in first aid. She calmly sent one of the boys to the house to summon an ambulance while she went to work on Vinnie. We pinned Vinnie’s hands while she pulled his pants down and attended his wounds. The little bullet seemed to have passed through his scrotum and had pierced an artery in his leg, which was spurting blood. Sue commandeered a t-shirt and clamped one hand on his thigh and the other on his crotch and held them there for over a half an hour, stemming the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived.

Vinnie came back to school the next fall. He said it was just a minor wound, and that one ball had a hole in it but was okay and the other had just been nicked. ‘Good thing the guy that shot me had shorts in the gun If he’d had long rifle ammo my nuts would have been history’. I had heard the shot and seen the wound so I suspected otherwise. I wasn’t among the six guys that called his bluff, took him down, and field stripped him for inspection, but I heard about it later and wasn’t a bit surprised when they officially declared him nutless.

The real surprise was the improvement in his attitude. He dropped a bunch of weight, stopped acting like an asshole, and even became popular with the girls. I don’t know what all he was capable of but he never seemed to be without a girlfriend all of his senior year, which is more than I can say of myself.

Vinnie even got married. He never became a father, obviously, but they adopted two Korean orphans and he is a respected member of the community.

Sue and the Latin teacher tangled with a train at an unguarded crossing two weeks after graduation. I was headed for boot camp and missed the funeral, but an ambulance driver told a friend of mine that they found part of his dick in her mouth. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t lying.