Mom’s family came over on the Mayflower, or so she claimed anyway, and one year she browbeat Dad into a family vacation to New England so my sister and I could gain an appreciation of our roots. I was just a little fart then, eight or nine years old, and I don’t remember a lot about the trip other than an interminable ride in the back seat of the old Ford Ranch Wagon battling with my teenage sister, and the pillories in the town square.

Pillories were one of the means of punishing colonial wrongdoers. Two heavy slabs of wood with half circles cut out were locked together around the victim’s neck and hands, immobilizing him or her in a public place for all to ridicule. I recall the town square where we went had three of the devices on display: one sized for men, one for women or older boys, and a small one for kids. Tourists would lock each other up in the contraptions and then take pictures for the folks back home. Mom had to have a picture of me, of course, and I grudgingly allowed myself to be manacled while she snapped away with her old Kodak. I didn’t like being locked up and I started whining, which prompted my sister to goose me until I peed my pants right in front of everyone.

Later on, I asked Mom what a kid could do to warrant such punishment. “Probably for doing something dirty with his hands,” she replied cryptically. Dad was too pussy-whipped to say anything but my sister was sixteen and had started dating and she got the joke and let out a snicker and reached across the seat and jabbed me in the ribs. I didn’t know what was so funny and by the time that I figured it out the joke would be on me.

Four or five years later I suddenly became aware that my body was changing. Hair had sprouted here and there, certain parts of me were larger and more sensitive than ever before, and thinking about some things caused a condition just like the one I usually woke with up each morning. I knew that most of the other guys in PE class were also changing and we all talked some about it but no one admitted to knowing much. Sex education was virtually non-existent in Junior High back then, and Mom and the other Puritans in the PTA would have shit bricks had any teacher dared to enlighten us. Dad could have explained it, but he’d died three years ago and my sister had suddenly gotten married, moved to the West Coast, and given birth to a healthy nine-pound boy that had arrived two months prematurely, by Mom’s calendar anyway.

I still hadn’t figured out much when Mom collared me after school one day. “Here,” she said, placing an open book on the kitchen table. “Read this page.”

“Out Loud?” I asked.

“Just read it, Sammy,” she instructed.

‘Self abuse, also called masturbation, is a vile, unhealthy practice that must not be tolerated in boys of any age.’ The text explained. “Huh?” I asked. Whatever the author was referring to went over my head.

“This,” Mom said “is what he’s talking about.” She then produced the bottom sheet from my bed, spread it out on the table, and pointed to a brownish stain several inches wide shaped somewhat like the continent of Australia. I was mystified. I hadn’t knowingly done anything to produce such a stain and I honestly had no idea where it had originated. “Never do that again,” Mom warned, then dropped the subject.

It happened again two weeks later, again without my knowledge, consent, or cooperation.

“Here, read this,” Mom said, placing the same book in front of me and turning to a new page.

‘Masturbation in boys nearly always leads to complete mental and physical deterioration. Boys who are known masturbators should never be placed in apprenticeships of any type or given any other position involving responsibility. Restraining the boy’s hands at night will curb masturbation. Castration is the only known cure for serious cases. In closing, semen is God’s gift that must only be used for procreation, and ejaculation for pleasure or amusement is a sacrilege.’ Okay, the damning substance seems to be semen, whatever that is, and my crime appears to be ejaculation. I knew about restraints but castration was a word that I hadn’t heard.

“Get ready for bed, Sammy. I’ll be in to see you in a minute, Mom said. I brushed my teeth and stripped down to my skivvies and hopped in the bed, just like always. Mom came in a few minutes later carrying a weird looking device. “Sit up,” she ordered,” and hold out your hands. Leather cuffs that bucked down around a protruding eye were fastened around my wrists, and were then locked together behind my neck to a strong leather collar.

“Mom!” I complained, “I can’t move!”

“That’s right, dear, just go to sleep and we’ll take them off in the morning. “It’s for your own good.” She turned out the light and left the room, leaving the door open.

I could sit up or roll over, but I couldn’t even scratch anything that itched other than my ears. I didn’t go to sleep until after midnight night and was still sound asleep when Mom snapped the light on the next morning.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” She said cheerfully and then threw my covers down. She stared for an instant at the morning tent in my skivvies and then hauled me out of bed and marched me, still bound, to the bathroom, turned the shower on cold, and pushed me in. A minute later she freed me from my bonds and allowed me to use the toilet and get dressed for school.

That’s the way I slept every night for the next year, bound up like some colonial miscreant. I could use the doorknob to pull my skivvies down if I had to get up in the night to pee, but I couldn’t even wipe my ass if I had to crap. Years later, after she died, I found the book she’d used for an adviser. It was a family medical guide published in 1882, and she’d made me read from the section on child rearing. The chapter that dealt with men addressed nocturnal emissions. They were normal for all healthy celibate males, the book said, but if for any circumstance they were objectionable the remedy was, you guessed it, occasional masturbation.

Fortunately I figured out how to jack off before I had another nighttime episode. Mom made me keep the bathroom door open all of the time and insisted that I take only cold showers, so I’d stop in a secluded spot on the way to school, drop my pants, and have right at it. I was doing just that right after my fifteenth birthday when two young girls happened to stubble into my hidey-hole. They saw me and screamed, and even though I started to turn away part of my emission landed on one of their dresses.

The teenage sex fiend was apprehended before he had a chance to attempt to rape anyone else, and it was with his mother’s blessing that the State of Kentucky strapped him to an operating table, anesthetized him, slit his scrotum open, and excised his testicles. “It was for your own good, Sammy,” Mom said, sitting beside my hospital bed. “Someday you’ll thank me.”

Thanks Mom, I hope you’re rotting in Hell.