Kick Me Read online

  When my turn arrived, I approached the rope and awkwardly took it in my hands. It was hard and a bit slick-feeling, not at all what I was expecting. I assumed the rope would be soft and easy to grip, a magical Nerf rope of sorts that would render me weightless and carry me up to the gym ceiling like Mary Martin in that creepy TV version of Peter Pan my parents made me watch. But the minute I touched that rope, I knew my success was going to depend strictly on how much strength I did or didn’t have in my arms and legs. I reached up as high as I could on the rope and tried to pull myself off the ground. It was almost impossible. I’ve never had much upper-body strength, and at age seven I couldn’t defeat a newborn baby in an arm-wrestling tournament.

  “Just pull yourself up,” Mrs. Handler said in an encouraging tone, assuming I was a newcomer to the ways of gravity on this planet.

  “And spit on your hands,” said Norman, a future bully who was on this day still about five years away from making my life a living hell.

  I looked up the rope and decided that if I could jump up and grab it, at least I’d be off the mat. I sprang up a few feet and gripped the rope. I immediately wrapped my legs around it and hung on. It felt like I had gotten myself pretty high up, but when I looked down, I saw that I was about one foot off the mat. I looked over at my classmates, who were staring at me impassively. My aunt Sue was an Avon lady and she had given my dad a Soap-on-a-Rope for his birthday once. I suddenly knew what the soap felt like.

  “Keep going,” Mrs. Handler said politely, although there was already a hint of “Jesus Christ, just climb the goddamn rope already” in her voice.

  I peered up and tried to figure out the best way to accomplish this. A couple of kids had done it using nothing but their arms, kicking their legs wildly as they climbed. I knew this wasn’t an option for me and so I fixated on the kids who had taken the teacher’s advice and held the rope tightly between their legs as they pulled themselves up hand over hand. I readjusted myself so that the rope was firmly pinched between my thighs and started to pull my body up. And to my amazement, I was actually getting up the rope. Mrs. Handler is quite a teacher, I thought. I pulled and locked my legs, pulled and locked my legs, pulled and locked my legs.

  And then something happened.

  All of a sudden, I felt this strange wave coming over me, a powerful sensation that seemed to be building inside my body but I didn’t know from where. It almost seemed to start in my chest and expand outward. I felt it in my butt, in my legs, in my arms . . . but especially in my pants. (These were the days when you wore your school clothes in gym class. I guess this was either because we didn’t sweat at that age or because we always smelled bad, so what was the point of making us change into clothes whose job it was to get stunk up anyway?) I stopped climbing and held on to the rope. The feeling was building stronger and stronger. And the weird thing about it was that it felt good. Better than anything I’d ever felt in my life. Suddenly, my body started to pulse and, the next thing I knew, the entire sensation rushed into my groin area and specifically into my—as the girls who lived next door to me used to call it—“thing.” It was a strange, wonderful pounding sensation, a velvety version of the pile driver that almost crushed Bugs Bunny during a Warner Bros. cartoon I had seen about a construction site. Boom boom boom. All my muscles tightened and I was frozen in a blend of ecstasy and utter confusion. Was I having a heart attack? Was this what a stroke was? I had no idea what they were and figured that maybe this was what they felt like. But the biggest thing I remember was that (a) I didn’t care if it was a stroke and (b) I didn’t want it to end. Ever.

  “Paul? What are you doing up there? Are you stuck?” Mrs. Handler called up.

  “. . . no . . .” was all I could muster. I was now guarding this moment and I wasn’t going to let anything interrupt it. I was afraid that if I moved, it would stop. And I couldn’t move, even if I wanted it to stop.

  “Can you go up any higher?”

  “I don’t know.” The sensation continued to pound in my privates. My head seemed to fill with fog.

  “Well, either keep going or come back down. People are waiting.”

  “Uh, okay.” The feeling was starting to subside and so I cautiously began to let myself down. As I slid slowly down the rope, it happened again. This time it hit harder and actually made me gasp. I froze again. Another wave of euphoric muscle contractions swept through my midsection. Boom boom boom.

  “Paul, I don’t know what you’re doing but please hurry up.”

  This time the feeling faded quickly. But it was now indelibly etched in my brain. And I knew it was something that I was going to make happen again, even if I had to dedicate my life to it.

  I got to the bottom of the rope and put my feet on the mat. As I tried to walk away, I almost fell onto the gym floor. My legs felt like Jell-o and I was having ghost pangs of the feeling. It was like my body was now vibrating slowly like a car that’s about to stall because of a dirty carburetor. I walked among my fellow students but everything was a blur. I had experienced something that felt almost religious in its scope and I was quite sure that no one else in the gym that day could even begin to understand what I’d just been through.

  A few hours later at recess, I decided to find out if I was the only one who’d experienced “the rope feeling.” I asked my friend Brian if he’d felt anything during his climb.

  “My hands really hurt after it” was all he offered up.

  “Didn’t you feel anything else? Anything that was really good?” I didn’t want to get more detailed than that for fear that I would be informed of some life-ending disease that had as its main symptom “an intense, pleasurable sensation when climbing ropes in gym class.” Kids were always interpreting any abnormality or injury I had as the tip-off of a fatal disease. Once I had a scratch on my arm and a kid in my class saw it. He told me that if you have blood poisoning, it looks like a red scratch on your arm that runs along one of your veins and when the red scratch reaches your heart, you drop dead immediately. Of course I spent the rest of that day staring at my scratch, convinced it was growing longer, and well on its journey to kill me. But as far as “the rope feeling,” Brian just shrugged at my question.

  “I didn’t feel anything. What did it feel like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to figure out how to verbalize it. “It was like I was floating or something. It felt really good.”

  “Huh. I don’t know. Maybe you have cancer.”

  The next day in gym, the rope had been put back up into the rafters and I stared at it longingly. “Can we climb the ropes again today?” I asked.

  “Paul, you were the only one who couldn’t make it up the rope yesterday. Why do you want to do it again?” Mrs. Handler said as she bounced a kickball, clearly more excited at the prospect of teaching us a new competitive sport.

  “I don’t. I was just wondering if we were going to do it again.”

  “Not today. We’ll try them again next Wednesday.” She then launched into a lecture on the fundamentals of kickball and I stood there trying to calculate how many hours separated me from next Wednesday.

  That night, I was watching TV in my usual position, lying on my stomach with my chin on my hands and my legs bent at the knees behind me, my calves and feet slowly moving back and forth. Then something strange happened. The rope feeling started to come back again. It wasn’t as strong this time but it was definitely creeping up on me. As I had on the ropes, I immediately froze. I stopped moving my legs. The feeling pulsed a bit, then started to fade. I was very surprised and stunned. What happened? I began moving my feet back and forth again and the feeling started to return. I stopped breathing, hoping that it wouldn’t fade again. I kept moving my legs and the feeling continued to grow. I started to move my feet faster, as if I were swimming in the air. When I started to go too fast, the feeling began to fade again. And so I held a steady pace with my legs. My brain was now beginning to overload with the joy I was experiencing at the return of my n
ew best friend, “the rope feeling.” As the sensation built, my father walked in the room.

  “What are you watching?” he asked.

  At that moment, I had no idea what I was watching. I was numb with intense feeling as the pounding returned. Boom boom boom.

  “. . . nothing . . .” was all I could get out.

  “Well, you shouldn’t lie so close to the TV. You’re gonna hurt your eyes. Move back.”

  It was as if the world were conspiring against me. I started to think that maybe what I was feeling was somehow forbidden and so God had sent my father in to put an end to it. But once again, I couldn’t move.

  “Okay, I’ll move in a minute.”

  “Move now,” my dad said impatiently.

  I slid myself back and the feeling immediately peaked. I gave a little gasp.

  “What’s the matter? Did you get a carpet burn?”

  I couldn’t summon the breath to speak and so just shook my head no, pretending to be too engrossed in whatever it was I couldn’t see on the TV through my orgasm-hazed eyes.

  “Well, just be careful that you don’t get so close to the TV. You’ll end up having to wear glasses.”

  Whereas bath time used to be an opportunity to make my G.I. Joe perform all sorts of underwater adventures in his Army Jack scuba gear, my time in the tub was now transformed into a quest for knowledge. It had become apparent where the feelings were emanating from. I just didn’t know exactly how to re-create them. My mind fixated on the idea that if I could somehow figure out how to replicate the circumstances under which “the rope feeling” occurred that didn’t involve sliding a twenty-five-foot-long piece of braided cotton between my legs, then I would discover the key to overwhelming joy. The incident in front of the television had given me hope. Re-creation of “the rope feeling” apparently had something to do with pressure or contact between my private area and another surface and movement or friction between them. The bathtub became a virtual testing ground as I tried everything within reach to create the necessary ingredients. Shampoo bottles, sponges, washcloths, soap bars, the side of the tub—yes, I’m afraid even G.I. Joe was called into duty—but nothing seemed to work. “The rope feeling” was to remain elusive for another day, it seemed.

  However, as with all great inventors, a breakthrough occurs when one least expects it.

  Somehow, through a coincidental sequence of washing with soap, scrubbing certain areas harder than normal, and keeping my eye out for any possible disturbances in my lower reaches, I stumbled across what appeared to be a possible winning combination. There was a stirring deep within the part of my brain that had earlier frozen me to both the rope and the carpet that seemed to say, “You may be on to something here.” Bath time lasted longer than usual that night and by the time I emerged, my skin wrinkled and puckered from too much exposure to water, I was a veritable Jonas Salk on the day he discovered his polio vaccine. I had cracked the code and found that my discovery worked every single time I performed the same sequence of events. And trust me, I had just test-driven it. Many, many times.

  That night as I lay in bed, the universe seemed a strange and wondrous place. I felt as if I had discovered something that hadn’t existed, at least not before I plucked it from the world of overlooked human abilities. I had found a mysterious way to manipulate my body that could produce a feeling of such intense pleasure and euphoria that now my only worry was how I would prevent myself from doing it constantly. Would I ever be able to leave my room? Would I be able to control this ultrahuman power I had stumbled upon? I was now a seven-year-old Clark Kent, possessing an awe-inspiring secret that I would have to hide from the world. Superman never used his powers to rob banks and so I vowed that I would somehow find the strength to keep my new ability in check.

  But I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  When next Wednesday arrived and I was reunited with my girlfriend, the rope, it was as if I were a formerly cornpone country boy who had returned to his sweet and innocent new bride after coming home from the war. Our first encounter the previous week had been a brief, fumbling union that found both of us inexperienced and awkward during our inaugural dip into the rivers of ecstasy, much like the virgin recruit who marries his best girl the night before he ships off.

  But on this day I had returned a savvy, worldly-wise Lothario, bringing a week’s worth of experience back from my travels and into the world of my braided cotton lover. As I ascended the rope that day, I knew what to expect and planned on taking full advantage of it. I had been struck with the notion that if, instead of freezing on the rope, I were to continue my climb as the feeling overtook me, I might find myself sailing into unthinkable new heights of pleasure. I was practically trembling with excitement and anticipation as I waited my turn to once again become one with my twenty-five-foot friend.

  “Think you can make it all the way this time?” chuckled Mrs. Handler. Oh, I can make it, all right. Just make sure you all have something to distract yourselves with because I might be up there a while. If it’s anything like it was last week, I might climb right up through the gym ceiling and take the rope with me.

  I nodded and headed up the rope. At first, nothing was happening. I reached the point where the feeling overtook me last week but still there was nothing but the unpleasant realization that I was climbing a big, stupid rope in gym class. What had I done? Had I run through my life’s limit of rope feelings in the past week? Had my momentous discovery revealed itself to be my Frankenstein’s monster, turning on its master and taking all that is precious from him? I started to feel as if life had lost all purpose.

  Fortunately, I found the fortitude to pull myself up one more time. There, at the ten-foot mark, I once again felt the stirrings that I had spent so much of the past week attempting to re-create. Another few pulls and the religious feeling returned. Boom boom boom.

  I froze. Keep moving, I told myself. Stick to the plan.

  But I can’t, came another voice. If I move, it’ll stop.

  It’ll get better, I swear.

  It’s already about as good as I can handle.

  That’s what you think.

  Okay, okay, I thought. I’ll do it. Muscles locked and tight, head spinning, throat clamped shut, I moved my hands up to pull. Unfortunately, my arms were Jell-o. My stomach suddenly seized into a cramp and my head and shoulders pitched backward. My legs flinched and contracted and the next thing I knew, I was plummeting downward. I heard a girl scream and Mrs. Handler yell “Stand back!” as I thudded heavily onto the mat.

  “Maybe climbing the rope isn’t your cup of tea, Paul,” Mrs. Handler said sympathetically.

  “No, I know I can do it,” I said, my voice trembling from the continuing contractions taking place in my body. “I just think I need to keep trying. Is it okay if I come back after school today?”

  That afternoon on the playground, my friend Brian came over to me with urgent news. “Paul, I felt it! On the ropes today!”

  “You did?” I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or not. I had been leading myself to believe that I was the Chosen, that “the rope feeling” was mine and mine alone, something that Mother Nature had given me to make up for the fact that I was so goofy and girls didn’t seem to really like me.

  “Yeah. It was weird. It felt really good.”

  I stared at him for a second, thinking. Should I let him in on the fruits of my bathtub research? All great scientists share their work in order to let others reproduce their results. And yet, was I hoping to have others benefit from my hard work or was I more interested in keeping this breakthrough for myself? Although I was convinced that I should probably just keep my mouth shut, the lure of bragging about my genius simply proved too strong to resist.

  I leaned in close to him. “I figured out how to get that feeling without a rope,” I said in the same way a guy in prison might tell a fellow inmate about a tunnel he’d been digging for years with a teaspoon. “You can do it in the bathtub.”

  Brian’s eyes went
wide and he immediately wanted to know everything. And so I filled him in. He sat, rapt, taking in every detail. I told him about all the different techniques I had tried, the ones that had failed and the one that worked. I mentioned that shampoo bottles provided an interesting feeling because of the smoothness of their sides when used in conjunction with the soapy bathwater. I impressed upon Brian that while the inside of my thigh seemed to be the surface of choice, he should experiment, too, and see if he could find a surface that was even better. By the time I finished, I could tell I had planted a seed in Brian that would grow into the same overwhelming crop that I myself had harvested all week—that he might feel that force of nature that makes you run, not walk, home from school and head straight for the bathtub.

  The next day, I noticed Brian giving me dirty looks as we passed in the halls before school started. We weren’t in the same class and so I didn’t see him at length until recess. As I sat on a parking block, avoiding any and all competitive activity, Brian walked over and sat down next to me.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said angrily.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I got my thing stuck in the shampoo bottle. My mom had to come in and take it off. She’s really mad at me now.”

  I was flabbergasted. And then I was mad. Try to give a guy the keys to the city and all he does is open the door to the broom closet. “Why did you stick your thing in the bottle?”

  “You told me to!”

  “No, I didn’t. I said to rub it on the side.”

  “Well, now my mom’s making me read the Bible. She says she’s even going to make me go to church camp.” Brian looked at the ground and shook his head.

  I immediately felt mature. I knew I was clearly way ahead of my classmates when it came to feeling pleasure and figuring out the mysteries of the human body. I studied Brian as he sat there, staring at the asphalt, knowing that his quest for sexual gratification had led him to ruin, and I kind of felt sorry for him. I could tell that his humiliating episode last night had probably soured him on ever trying to re-create “the rope feeling” on his own again. And while I celebrated the fact that I was now in possession of the greatest morale-boosting activity of which I could ever conceive, I felt bad that Brian wouldn’t be able to attain the heights that I knew I would—many, many, many times—over the course of my life.