Circle Of Friends - Bobbo

I looked his picture up in my old yearbook when I finally realized that the guy in the freshman men’s dorm who went by ‘Bobbo’ was the same one that I had known in high school. His sophomore picture showed an incredibly young kid. All high school sophomores look young now, but this kid didn’t look like he was more than about twelve years old. He had no trace of a beard, and his bright, unblemished skin and pageboy bangs belonged on a junior high or grade school kid instead of someone in high school. He had aged some since the picture had been taken, but at fifteen he still had a wild, unrestrained look in his eyes that told the world he was just a little bit special.

He must have been eighteen that freshman year of college, and compared to me, a twenty-year-old chain-smoking Army veteran, he still looked like a kid. He still had an innocent, almost angelic expression that was accentuated by the fact that he still didn’t need to shave every day, and at five six and a hundred and forty pounds he didn’t appear to be any great physical specimen either.

There is no more privacy in a men’s college dormitory than there is in an Army barracks, and I soon had another reason to dislike Bobbo. Despite his puny physique he had a hose and a set of nuts on him that would do a porn star justice, and like most guys who are over-endowed he didn’t take any extra care to conceal them. It was also pretty obvious after I talked to him a while that he had an extremely finely honed sense of humor. He was always up to something, and any practical joke or act of creative vandalism that occurred in the dorm was traceable directly to him although he always skated clear of getting caught. I categorically hate people like that, and it was against all odds that I eventually came to like him.

Washington State had a policy at that time dictating that unmarried freshmen under twenty-one had to reside in the dorms. I was a veteran, and would turn twenty-one before the end of fall term, so I could have gotten an exemption and taken a pad off campus, but I was a cheapskate with marginal grades and my advisor thought I stood a better chance of not flunking out if I lived in a dorm the first year. I was kind of a fish out of water there; most of the kids were in school to keep from getting drafted, and there I was, not much older and having already served my time. Back then you could volunteer for the draft. It didn’t include any enlistment perks, like technical training or any hope of choice of posting, but you only had to serve two years instead of three or more, and since I was going to serve eventually I had taken that option right out of high school to get my service out of the way.

I commanded a little bit of respect as I was a vet and had been to Nam. That impressed most of the kids there, as they didn’t have a clue that a clerk/typist is just another Rear Echelon Mother Fucker instead of a Boonie Rat, or real fighting soldier. Washington State wasn’t very politically active as far as the anti-war movement went, so I was pretty much left alone and I soon developed sort of a symbiotic relationship with Bobbo and the other young freshmen: They helped me with my studies and I helped them get drunk. You had to be twenty-one to buy alcohol in Washington. Idaho was only a few miles away and could sell beer and wine to eighteen year olds, but you had to show I.D. and most people there wouldn’t sell it to an out of state kid. I had a military I.D. card and an Honorable Discharge, and no storekeeper anywhere with a single hair on his ass will refuse to sell to any veteran, and consequently I supplied the whole floor.

Bobbo also had a talent for picking up girls. I think they liked him because he was so cute and young looking, and non-threatening. Sooner or later he’d slip their hand down the front of his pants, and as soon as they felt his hog they would just melt. This was in 1969, right after the ‘summer of love’, and it was okay to fuck anything that moved. I had been overseas, and had experienced some pretty exotic stuff, so these college girls who usually wouldn’t even blow a guy weren’t anything special as far as I was concerned. I did go out with a few who really put their hearts into it though, and I did participate in a couple of gangbangs or gang rapes, depending on your point of view, in the basement of a sorority house.

Despite my prejudices and all of our differences Bobbo and I had become fast friends by the end of the first term and I really enjoyed being around him.

I didn’t consider myself to be much of a mover and a shaker, so I was surprised when I received an invitation to join the Order of the Plank. The plank was an informal group or club that operated on the fringes of college society. It wasn’t sanctioned by the college or any fraternity; indeed most of the legitimate clubs and organizations disavowed all association with the Plank and refused to even acknowledge its existence. It was supposed to be an honor to be invited to join, and members were obliged to offer all reasonable assistance to other members, which were identified by a small pirate skull and crossbones insignia worn on the collar. I didn’t know what relevance a pirate symbol had in a landlocked college in the middle of wheat country, but membership in the club was known to grease the skids and procure the wearer of the insignia a table in a restaurant that was booked solid, make traffic tickets go away, and it guaranteed marginal students a passing grade in a couple of subjects.

Bobbo was also invited to join, and our initiation was scheduled for a Friday night. The initiation was a secret ceremony, and if ours hadn’t gone terribly wrong and if the Plank hadn’t been dismantled and banned in perpetuity from the campus I wouldn’t be revealing the bizarre ritual to the general public.

The initiation, like just about every other unsanctioned event on campus, involved copious quantities of alcohol and liberal dosages of other controlled substances as well. It took place in a locked storage basement with access naturally denied those who had not been anointed. It started out with the recitation of some oaths of allegiance and secrecy, a lot of mumbo-jumbo and incense sniffing, and concluded with ‘a physical contest to test the reflexes, balance, and intelligence of the applicant’, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

I had heard about some pretty weird rituals, and I had already set a limit on what I would participate in. I wasn’t going to do anything homosexual, nor was I going to eat out a gal who was on the rag. I would consider having sex with an animal, but I wasn’t going to do slaughter one as an offering. Tattoos, piercings, and other modifications to my body were also out of the question

All seven initiates were escorted to another room and told to strip. That alone should have been enough warning for me to bunch it all and split, but hey, I had been trained as a soldier and had been issued a rifle and had served overseas and all that shit, so what could a harmless bunch of college kids do to hurt me, right?

My name was called first, and I was escorted out of the waiting area, buck-ass naked, back into the main room. The tables had been pushed apart and a painter’s aluminum scaffold plank, about twenty feet long, had been place across the gap between them. All I had to do was walk the plank from one table to the other. Piece of cake, no problem, even for a semi-drunk college kid.

They had to make it a little more difficult than that, however, so bacon grease had been slathered on the plank to make it slippery, and to mitigate the fall hazard a safety line in the form of a stout rope was looped around an overhead steam pipe that paralleled the plank and was tied around my nuts. I had survived basic training, which is just about the most dehumanizing, humiliating experience a young man can legally have inflicted on him, but with the exception of a faggoty assistant medic who seemed pretty friendly with them during my discharge physical no one in the Army had ever screwed with my balls.

A person in this predicament might tend to lose his balance, so I was given two iron sash weights as stabilizers, one for each hand. These might hurt someone if dropped, so they were also secured to my now captive nuts with short lanyards of strong twine.

It still wasn’t quite challenging enough, so a blindfold was added and I was told to walk the plank. There wasn’t any hurry, and I have always tended to be calm and collected when under pressure, and the plank was a foot and a half wide and reasonably stable, so I took a few tentative, exploratory steps, and soon encountered the next distraction.

Although I had seen the ostrich plume duster setting in the corner I hadn’t attached any importance to it. Now it was being played up and down the inside of my thighs, in and out of the crack in my ass, across my belly and chest, and of course all around my cock, which responded to the stimulation in the expected manner. I felt my face flush with embarrassment as the room erupted in a loud round of applause. Men have always been guided by their cocks, and mine, unerringly pointing the way, led me to the other side.

I had been counting the steps, and I knew I only had a few feet to go when my hands convulsed in a lightning like blaze of fire. Einstein was right: Time isn’t absolute. Anyone literate enough to read this far most likely knows the thirty-two feet per second per second formula for calculating the acceleration of a falling object, and working the numbers would prove that it would be impossible for my mind to grasp the enormity of my error in dropping the sash weights let alone have enough time to make a futile grab for the lanyards securing them to my manhood before they pulled me from the plank. My sex life was flashing before my eyes and my hands were still enroute to my crotch when the weights crashed onto the concrete floor and the room erupted in laughter. I sheepishly removed the blindfold to find that the lanyards had been cut, probably before I had even started walking, and certainly before the application of high voltage to the sash weights. Another celebrant with a sharp knife stood ready to cut the tether line to the overhead pipe had I started to fall from the plank. The joke was on me, all right, and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself as I got dressed and waited for the next applicant.

I’m not the type of guy that gets off on seeing other guy’s erections, but the look on their faces when the feather started in on them was priceless, as was the expression of horror when they realized they had dropped the sash weights. One kid grabbed his balls so hard that I thought he had hurt himself, and he had to be helped to the floor. One of the initiates took great offense at having his nuts touched, and he declared that we were “all a bunch of fucking perverts” and he wasn’t having anything to do with it. He claimed that he was above such immorality, but I knew the guy and just figured he was too chickenshit to try to walk the plank. He was escorted to the door, still naked, and allowed to make his own way back to his frat house.

Bobbo went last. He was always kind of an exibitionist, and this type of thing was right up his alley. Neither the waiting room nor the basement were particularly warm, and a grope and a tug were necessary for the installation of the tether and lanyards, even on balls as big as his. He seemed to enjoy this and he was still smiling as the blindfold was applied. The lanyards were silently snipped, the feather was brought into play, and his dick started to grow. I had never seen him with it up, and I kind of wondered just how big it got, since it hung almost six inches even when soft. Surprise surprise! He only had about seven inches hard! Only slightly longer than my own and nothing like what his flaccid dimensions suggested.

There were thirty people there, and thirty different versions of exactly what happened next, but I know what I saw. Two guys gently placed the spark coil wires on the sash weights, and the current was applied. His smug smile disappeared in a grimace of pain, but he refused to drop the weights. He finally inevitably did release them, but with such a convulsion that one of them hit the guy with the safety knife on the head, beaning him out cold. In slumping to the floor he leaned against Bobbo, sending him off balance. Bobbo’s arms were wind milling furiously as he tried to regain his footing, and he may have made it if he hadn’t been turned slightly when he took a step backwards. The same gravitational forces acted on Bobbo’s body as the sash weights, and he let out a piercing scream as he came to the end of the three feet of slack in the tether cord. Another guy, seeing what was happening, rushed to his aid, but with reflexes and senses dulled by alcohol he tripped on the errant sash weight and landed on top of Bobbo, adding his weight to that already being born by Bobbo’s hapless scrotum.

Bobbo had been reduced to a quivering mass of jelly by the time we got him unloose and into an ambulance, and his balls now hung somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. The local hospital took one look at him and then hustled him on an airplane to Seattle, but it was to no avail. Modern microsurgery techniques may have been able to save his nuts, but such procedures didn’t even exist then and after a two-week struggle with infection gangrene finally set in and they were amputated.

I had been in the Army long enough to know that shit always rolls downhill, so it wasn’t really any big surprise when the college expelled me for my part in the ceremony, which was limited to the purchase of some of the rocket fuel that was consumed.

I was flunking out by then anyway so I didn’t really give a shit about getting my ass booted out, but I still feel that Bobbo got the shitty end of the stick.

Author’s note: The characters in this series have been assembled, Frankenstein style, from bits and pieces of kids I knew in school and are all fictional. The hazing ritual described in this story was used in frat houses during the 1960’s.