If Jesus Came To My House

According to the New Testament Jesus was crucified by the Romans atop Calvary. His apostles entombed their Messiah in a cave. His mother and Mary Magdalene mourned his death. The High Priests of Judah celebrated the demise of another troublemaker. Only Jesus didn't die easy.

On the third day the Son of Joseph supposedly rose from the dead.

Fifty days later He assumed divinity and Christians have worshipped the Living Christ for thousands of years.

IF JESUS CAME TO MY HOUSE by Joan G. Thomas was a popular Catholic School book during the 1960s.

As an atheist I read it to discover the thoughts of my enemy.

It wasn't a bad book, although Jesus never cooked anything or performed any miracles.

Gods don't have to work.

Just like rich people.

Both worry about idle hands and the Church came out a handbook to prevent Catholic schoolboys from masturbation.

According to the Vatican 2352 masturbation is to be understood as the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.

True love.

The Church has never acknowledged true temptation other than Jesus' trails before Satan, where he refused the wilds of this world.

However Jesus saw half-man.

God is all-seeing, so Jesus is half-seeing.

And temptation is everywhere.

God knows where too.

Like I said, "Thankfully I'm an atheist."

And if there ain't no God, then God knows nothing.

Thankfully all my temptations are left in the past.

But not the need to masturbate.

ANCIENT PORN - 2010

The ancient Greeks invented the word Pornography by linking two Greek words; porno for prostitute and graphos to create Pornographos according to Biblehub.com. The portrayal of sexual acts can be traced to pre-Ice Age. Neolithic anthropologists claim the Venus of Hohle Fels, a naked figurine carved from a mammoth ivory dating back 40,000 years ago, was man's first attempt at figurative representation. Religious opponents to this thought counter that lurid images have never been found amongst the thousands of prehistorical cave paintings around the world. I doubt it and I'm certain that the ancients had hid their XXX material far from the prying eyes of society whether they were Cro-magnon or Neanderthal, as I had hidden mine underneath my mattress as an adolescent. 

Late spring 1964 my best friend Chuckie and I were exploring the abandoned army base not far from our suburban housing tract on Boston's South Shore. The hilltop installation was a victim of military cutbacks for Massechusetts after JFK's assasination. No soliders, no missiles, nothing. Not even guards. It was a DMZ for young boys from the surrounding towns. I had vandalized several buildings with Chuckie's older sister, Dennis, her boyfriend, and Bush, a motorhead from Fore River, Weymouth. We weren't the first to create a path of destruction. 

By summer's end there was nothing left of value in the abandoned Nike military base. It had beenbecome a rendezvouds for teenage parties. Chickie and I were 12. Twelve year-old boys weren't welcome at these beery events.

One day Chuckie and I entered a dilapidated office. The corners were steeped with beer cans. The impact of bullets pocked the walls. Fire had scorched the entrance. 

Teenage parties. 

Maybe older.

Chuckie discovered a a moldy cache of 1950s porno mags in a corner next to a mouldy mattress. The collections' content ventured to another dimension of perversity than the Playboys from his father's closet. This was not the birds and bees. We had played with our sisters' undressed Barbie and Ken. We knew our penises were for sex, but had no idea about workings of the female organ. This was our introduction to sexuality via pornography. We separated the mildewed pages with the care of the Zionists handling the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most of the sex was straight. Some was homosexual. A little sadism and a few filmy images of men with women who were men. Chuckie and I didn't have a word for that. In many of the photos the women were completely naked and the men wore sox.

"Why?" Chuckie was dumbfounded by this mystery.

"Maybe their feet are cold." I kept on my sox in the winter.

"No, the girls' nipples aren't erect."

"Why does that rule out the cold?"

"Because mine get that way in the cold." It was adolescent logic at its best.

"Maybe the actors forgot to take them off in the excitement."

"If a girl is naked, I'm going to be naked too." Chuckie divided the magazines by genre. He took some of the queer stuff. One of the boys looked like him. I didn't comment on one of the boy's looking like him.

When I got home, I crammed the magazines under my mattress closest to the wall. Far from the edge. My mother liked to tidy the covers after we went to school at Our Lady of the Foothills. I shared the bedroom with my older brother. He fell asleep before me. I explored the magazine one by one. My fingertips smelled of their rotten pages. From that moment the photos and words from those books and magazines inspired long evenings of masturbation. My brother was a deep sleeper, but my sessions came at a cost.  

I dozed off during the morning classes. My grades slipped from As to Bs. Mother Superior examined my eyes. Her glasses were thick. Her nose sniffed at my hands. I washed them with Ivory Soap after every time I sinned in deed and thought. 

"What's your excuse for these lapses?" Sister Mary Josef had been born in Stuttgart. The 7th grade called her 'Hitler'. She beat students with a ruler. Usually for no reason.

"For my grades?" I had been the #2 student in that class. "I reading all the assignments and finishing my homework."

"Chuckie Manzi is having the same problem, only he's slipped from B to C." Sister Mary Josef was tall. I was scared of her. She also taught at a Diocisan School for the Deaf. I had heard disturbing stories about how she treated those girls. 

Nasty as the magazines under my bed.

"I don't know why."

"Have you been touching yourself?" She seized my hands and turned them palm up. Her eyes pingponged across the whorls of my flesh, as if she was reading runes.

"No." I answered with feigned horror. The sisters taught us that we would grow hair on our palms, if we sinned with ourselves. I shaved every morning with my father's razor just to be safe. "That's a sin and I'm an altar boy."

So was Chuckie and my older brother. We were paid $5 for funerals and $10 for weddings. People died more than they got married in our parish. Three funerals a week. $15. Good money. Levis cost $6 at Walker's Western Store on Boylston Street in Boston. A good deal, even if I was an atheist.

"Make sure you do nothing to lose your soul." Sister Mary Josef released my hands. "I'll be watching you."

My nocturnal forays into the magazines became more clandestine. My older brother dropped off to sleep early, but my mother was insomniac. She didn't shut off her lights until after THE TONIGHT SHOW. Once her bedroom went dark, I slipped my hand under the mattress. My Boy Scout flashlight guided my travels through a maze of warped encounters. I read each magazine a hundred times that spring. Their images and words had been memorized more fervently than the Baltimore Cathecism.

And no one saw nothing.

Same as the anthropologists searching for erotic prehistoric paintings. They exist in the recess of unexplored caverns. Chuckie and I scoured the Blue Hills for more pornography. Our magazines were falling apart. We traded them to each other, but we needed something new.

Red Tate was the man to ask. He lived at the dump. His home a concrete bunker. Something bad had happened to him in the Korean war. My uncle said that Red was a hero. My uncle had won the Silver Star. He gave Red money for beer. We did the same with a request.

"I'm not giving you anything weird." Red Tate exploded after hearing our request. "You're good kids. How you think people would talk, if they found out I was giving kids stroke books."

"We're not kids." I protested since I was almost thirteen.

"You don't even shave." Red Tate touched my cheek. His fingers smelled like discarded cigarettes. The callouses were rough as a cat's tongue. "Stay away from that shit."

"But you must have some." Chuckie was desperate.

"I'm not interested in sex. Not the real thing. Not the fake." His family kept him in clothing. He actually didn't look too bad if you ignored the jagged scar across his forehead. Red must have been a good-looking soldier in his youth. "Not any more."

"Maybe you can answer a question."

"Like what?" Red licked his lips. The talking made him thirsty. 

"Like why do the guys in porno books never take off their sox?"

"That's easy. They keep on their sox, so they can put on their shoes easy, if the police raid the studio. That's where you get the expression 'blow off your sox'." Red pushed me away roughly. Parents didn't want him speaking with children. He was Satan's cohort in their Christian minds.

By month's end my right hand was cramped and the magazines were in shreds. I threw mine away far in the woods. Chuckie flushed his down the toilet. They clogged the pipe. The plumber didn't say a word to Chuckie's father. We returned our devotion to our studies. Chuckie was B+ and I was A-. Sister Mary Josef commented my dedication.

"I prayed to God." I was an atheist. I only prayed to God at Mass.

"So was I." And I continued by requests to a pagan god for more pornography. 

Certainly the nuns' God was not into filth.

He had more important things on his mind.

Me, I had only one thing.

And it wasn't god.

Not then and not now.

Wicked forever.

Unschlocking the Schlong

WRITTEN 6/26/12

German courts have banned circumcision of older boys on the grounds that the traditional cutting off of the male foreskin causes the child bodily harm. In babies the healing process takes up to 10 days, but for older boys the scar will remain for months. Jews and Muslims angrily protested such a judgment as an attack on religious freedom.

I was circumcised at birth. My parents were told that the procedure was painless and my penis would be cleaner than someone with a foreskin. I had no choice in this matter. The doctor sliced off my foreskin and that was that.

As a boy we heard the following joke.

A surgeon retires from his long career as a specialist in circumcision. Throughtout his career he has saved hundreds of foreskins as mementos and now wishes to turn them into a souvenir. He takes his specimens to a leathersmith and asks him to make something out of them. A week later the surgeon returns and the leathersmith presents him with a wallet.

"All those foreskins and you only made me a wallet?" exclaims the surgeon.

The leathersmith replies, "Yes, but if you stroke it, it becomes a briefcase."

None of us who were circumcised found any humor in the joke, because circumcision takes away more than a snip of skin. The total area of skin removed from the penis is about the size of a 3" X 5" index card and with this loss of elasticity the skin becomes taut thereby shortening the penis by a 1/2 inch.

Not much doctors say to guarantee cleanliness, except in coitus the phantom nerves of my absent foreskin ask me, "Why?"

The origins of circumcision lay in ancient times. Some scholars of antiquity consider it a rite of passage or religious sacrifice pointing to Egyptian hieroglyphics, although the man in the image looks more like he is being punished for a crime, since his hands are restrained by another man.

In the Victorian era English doctors prescribed the the theory that circumcision would prevent masturbation in young boys. I have disproved that hypothesis thousands of times as a boy and a man without the pleasure of that extra length or sensitive flesh.

My foreskin is gone.

The operation was performed at Boston Lying-In for Women.

It did not accompany me home.

I doubt it was buried with respect.

In fact it might have been used for cosmetics.

Years ago at the Bangkok-Pattaya hospital I looked into the possibility of a foreskin reconstruction. The Thai doctors shook their heads. They were good at transforming men into women or re-attached penis cut off my angry wives, however there was no procedure for replacing my foreskin.

There is no unschlocking the schlong.

And that is the final cut.

Moonshine, Masturbation, and Eclipses By Peter Nolan Smith

Children are cruel by nature. Young boys and girls instinctively bully the weak and ridicule the infirm. There was nothing funnier than a cheap trick at the cost of a poor unfortunate in keeping with the ageless adage, "Comedy is when a beggar falls down the stairs. Tragedy is when a duchess does."

In the early 60s our teachers and parents offered the blind/deaf/mute idol Helen Keller as an icon of individual triumph. Anne Bancroft won the Academy Award for her portrayal of the teacher who brings light to a young Alabaman girl without the power to speak, hear, or see in THE MIRACLE WORKER .

It didn't take long for Helen Keller jokes to hit the grade school circuit.

How did Helen Keller's parents punish her?

They moved the furniture.

Her triple affliction gave healthy children comfort that they were normal, however our parents and teachers swiftly instilled a new fear in callous youth unafraid of the Devil.

At age ten my sins were small; mostly disobeying my parents and telling lies. The priest in the confessional announced my penance in a hushed voice, "Ten Hail Marys and two Our Fathers."

These prayers cleansed the black spots from my soul, however my innocence was soon challenged by a deadly scourge signaled by waking in the middle of the night with pajamas soaked by a sticky substance. This oddity was a terrible embarrassment for a 12 year-old.

Bed-wetting was for babies.

I hid my shameful affliction by washing my PJs the next morning.

My father was dumbfounded by my obsession with clean bedwear.

"You're pissing in his bed," my older brother kidded me about a regression to infantilism.

"No, I'm not." I threatened him with a beating. I was taller by two inches.

"I've seen the wet spot."

I didn't know how to handle my shame, until my best friend Chuckie Manzi solved the mystery by opening the Boy Scout Handbook to a small section entitled NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS.

"It's when your balls are too loaded with semen and you shot a load without even knowing it."

"That's not what they say in the Handbook." I showed him the text.

"At times the glands discharge part of their secretions through the sex organ during sleep. This process is called a nocturnal emission or a “wet dream”. It is perfectly natural and healthy and a sign that nature has taken care of the situation in its own manner.

"There you have it, even the Boy Scouts say it's normal."

Normal was important to us. No one wanted to be weird.

I read more from the Handbook, which stated that there are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry.

Any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be avoided or overcome. If anything like this worries you, this is not unusual – just about all boys have the same problem. Seek the correct answer to any question which bothers you about your development from boy to man. But be sure to get your information from reliable sources – your parents, your physician, your spiritual adviser.

"I'm not talking to the priest or my parents about this."

Chuckie shook his head.

"Keep your confession to the normal and never tell the priest about that."

"Why not?"

"Because some of them are not right."

By 'not right' Chuckie meant that they liked to touch boys. None of our parish priests were that way, but I limited my confession to swearing and disobeying my parents, even after I osmotically learned how to effect nocturnal emissions.

No boys told the priests about touching themselves after dark, for masturbation was a mortal sin threatening the immortal soul.

For the Church sex was strictly for procreation. Pleasure in the act disrupted the natural order of life and the priests warned their young male parishioners that wasting the holy seed of life endangered the sense of sight.

"You could go blind or suffer from effeminacy."

The man across the street from my parents' house was queer. Arthur flew jets for Eastern Airlines. His boyfriend, Joe, coached football. Chuckie and I suspected them of masturbating each other.

"It's what queers do, isn't it?"

"How should I know."

That spring the mystery of men with men was solved by the discovery of rotting stroke books in the woods of the Blue Hills. Queers did everything married couples did in bed and more according to the moldy paperbacks titled 'JOCKS ON FIRE' or 'COCK-MAD COACHES'. I whacked off to pages 75-78 of THE ITCH about seven hundred times without losing my eyesight, although my sight worsened throughout the end of grammar school.

My seat was moved to the front of the class. I got good grades. Bullies didn't like smart kids with glasses. The beatings were painful, but at least I hadn't had my eyes plucked from their sockets like Tyrone Power in PRINCE OF FOXES. Orson Welles played Cesare Borgia.

Blind teenagers were sent to a special school for the blind, deaf, and dumb. The nuns taught them how to live in the normal world. People said those school were more special for other reasons and none of them good.

In high school the brothers were hip to drugs. The vice-principal held an assembly to inform us of the danger of looking into the sun. The guest speaker was an acid head who had stared into the sun during a total eclipse.

"All I can see is the sun. Nothing but the sun."

I used my savings to buy prescribed sunglasses. Eclipses were rarely announced on teenage TV. Being an ex-Boy Scout I had been trained to 'be prepared', plus Ray-Bans were the height of style in the 1960s.

Girls thought that they were cool. The bullies stopped hurting me. They liked the girls who liked my glasses. The nuns tried to stop me from wearing them in classes. My optometrist said I had sensitive eyes.

Doctor Shaw wasn't scared of the nuns. He was Jewish.

The last threat to my eyes was moonshine.

Two year ago I bought a gallon from a Mississippian hanging around Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene. I tried a few sips of Homer's concoction and the corn mash burned a light in my stomach. A match to a spoon filled with the illegal alcohol ignited a blue blaze. This meant the 'shine was clean.

A yellow fire was cause for caution, for rotgut moonshine can blind or kill the unsuspecting, mostly if the manufacturer isn't too tidy with his contraptions such as a car radiator, which offers a deadly concoction of lead and anti-freeze.

A high-minded distiller will 86 the 'foreshot' of the batch i.e. the first offering from the still. After that it's white-line fever and I see the light.

And I still suffer from nocturnal emissions.

It's only natural.

IMPURE AT HEART by Peter Nolan Smith

In the early 60s the nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students that our sins were punished in the burning fires of Hell, until then Mother Superior subjected the palms of potential heretics and religious backsliders to a cane. Whisperers and jesters suffered the yardstick. All of her victims were boys, for Sister Mary Josef had a sweet spot for girls who were made of sugar and spice, while boys were scrapped together out of snails and puppy dog tails.

As the star student of my class I had escaped her persecution by studying the Old and New Testaments. My grade for religion was always an A+ and no altar boy could fake the Latin of the Mass better than me. Mother Superior even spoke to my parents about a possible scholarship to a seminary, but even as the star student of my class I couldn't escaped her persecution.

This was the Spring of 1965 and I had prayed to Satan for the Rolling Stones SATISFACTION to vanquish the Beatles from #1. My hair ran over my collar. No one knew that I was an atheist.

"Yes, my son." The priest had been advised about my prospects. "Do you have something to say? Something about sin?"

I had plenty of them; Cher from WHERE THE ACTION IS, Julie Christie in DARLING, the French Yeh-Yeh singer Fr

ancoise Hardy, my classmate Kyla Rota, and a fantasy about a naked female guitarist were my succubii.

I had never ratted out my loved ones out in confession and I wasn't about to start.

"Father, you said 'eternal damnation'. Forever and ever."

"Yes.” His eyes squinted with hesitation. "Hell will not freeze over."

"Never?"

"Nunca."

No altar boy could fake the Latin of the Mass better than me. Mother Superior even spoke to my parents about a possible scholarship to a seminary.

“That whisper in your ear is the voice of Satan. Your hand becomes that of Lucifer. Eternal damnation awaits any boy succumbing to the siren song of the Devil.” The priest glared at his captive audience, as if he were seeking out young sinners of the flesh and pointed over our heads. “The Lord knows your hearts. Jesus loves the pure. An eternity of flames awaits the hands of onanists.”

The last word was unknown to the assembly. Heads turned to friends for guidance. Mother Superior caught the movements and cracked the nearest trespasser with her pointer. She showed no mercy to the 6th Grader and pinched his reddened ear with painteresque fingernails. The boy squealed in pain and the priest glowed with satisfaction.

"Masturbation."

We gasped at this word. The Boy Scout manual called ejaculation nocturnal emission. We had many names for it.

There hadn't been a priest in my family for a generation, however my reign as the Great Catholic Hope died on the day Sister Mary Josef had assembled the 6th, 7th, and 8th Grade Boys to hear the rant of a diocesan priest warning us against the temptation of touching ourselves.

We knelt on the floor throughout his hour-long tirade.

"That whisper in your ear is the voice of Satan. Your hand becomes that of Lucifer. Eternal damnation awaits any boy succumbing to the siren song of the Devil." The priest glared at his captive audience, as if he were seeking out young sinners of the flesh and pointed over our heads. "The Lord knows your hearts. Jesus loves the pure. An eternity of flames will burn the hands of onanists."

The last word was unknown to the 99% of the assembly and stupified heads turned to friends for guidance.

Mother Superior caught the slight movement and cracked the nearest trespasser's cheek with an open palm. The perpetrator was a 4th Grader, yet she pinched his reddened ear with claw-like fingernails. The boy squealed in pain and the priest glowed with the ecstasy of reviling masturbation.

"Satan is everywhere." His hands sought something to hold.

"Father?"

This was the Spring of 1965 and I had prayed to Satan that the Rolling Stones SATISFACTION would vanquish the Beatles from #1. My hair hung over my collar. No one knew that I was an atheist.

"Yes, my son." The priest had been advised about my avocation to God . "Do you have something to say?"

If he was expecting an admission of impure thoughts, I had plenty. Cher from WHERE THE ACTION IS, Julie Christie in DARLING, the French Yeh-Yeh singer Francoise Hardy, and my classmate Kyla Rota were my succubus. I had never ratted them out in confession and I wasn't about to start.

"Father, you said 'eternal damnation'. Forever and ever."

"Yes." His eyes squinted with hesitation. "Hell will not freeze over."

"Maybe not, but after the Last Judgment won't the universe will be reincarnated with a new heaven and a new earth meaning that eternity will come to an end."

"St. Luke says "I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! ... ‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"

His voice shook in anger.

"So there will be no new heaven and no new earth?" I rose to my feet; 13 years-old and 5-10. There was no fear in my eyes.

My best friend had drowned at the age of 8.

The priest's god had done nothing to save Chaney from death.

Whispering footsteps announced the Mother Superior's approach and I sought redemption in the Scriptures.

"Matthew 13:40-43: Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth

. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!"

"Exactly." The priest waved for me to join him at the podium.

"They say that abusing yourself makes you have hairy palms." He grabbed my wrists and turned my palms upward.

"Like a werewolf." I unclenched my fingers.

"I knew it."

My palms were bald and the priest smiled at my purity, placing his hand on my shoulder.

"And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. Revelations 20:11-12."

"Yes, father." I accepted his faith in those beliefs without questioning my disbelief in his.

"Then we are good?" He lifted his face to heaven.

"Yes, we are good." I glanced over to Mother Superior, who was not so easily fooled by words.

"I'll be watching you." Her narrowed eyes studied me, as if I was a triple agent between her Holy Trinity and the Prince of Darkness.

"Yes, sister." I was none of the above.

"Assembly back to your classes." The lecture on masturbation had come to an end.

"Yes, sister."

Like all good boys and girls of Our Lady of the Foothills we obeyed Mother Superior's command.

Even me, for I was scared of someone damaging my hand and I needed my hands smooth for the better things in a young man's life.

There was no telling when the real thing was coming in 1965.