Memoir of a Russian Punk

3

Eddie-baby tries to recall when he first discovered masturbation. He remembers unconsciously examining his penis, turning it in his hand… Yes, he suddenly recalls, it was after a bath, when he used to go to the baths once a week with his father. His father had pointed Eddie's penis out to him and told him not to forget to wash it.

Surrounded by clouds of steam and naked men, Eddie watched his father rub and scrape his penis, and for the first time he realized that the tip of his father's penis was red. Looking at his own sprout, Eddie at once noticed a difference: its tip wasn't red, it was the same brown color as the rest of his skin, although it was wrinkled and had a little bluish-red skin inside, but only a little, and only around the opening through which his urine passed. After eluding his father, who was trying to catch him in the steam in order to wash his penis for him (Eddie wouldn't even let his mother touch him), he decided on the way home to examine his penis more closely as soon as he was alone.

It was not until the next day that he managed to do so, since the previous one had been his father's day off – it was in fact on his day off that he and Eddie took the trolley to the baths. Eddie's mother used to go to the baths with Auntie Beba, but now she's going more and more with the Auntie Marusyas.

The day after the incident in the baths, Eddie-baby waited for his mother to go to the store, and then he got undressed, sat down on his couch, and began looking at his penis. It turned out on closer inspection that the design of his penis wasn't really much different from his father's. The wrinkled skin covering its tip could be moved back, thereby revealing the same bluish-red skin that Veniamin Ivanovich had on his.

Eddie-baby was astonished by his discovery. Moreover, when he attempted to move the skin even farther back, his penis immediately increased in size, and when he pulled the skin down as far as he could, he suddenly discovered that several centimeters from the tip of his penis was a ring of some yellowish-gray fibrous substance. Picking at it with his fingernail, Eddie-baby lifted some of it to his nose and sniffed. It didn't smell very good – rather like Roquefort cheese. Picking at it again out of curiosity, he managed to separate a whole layer of the yellowish-gray substance from the tender whitish-pink skin underneath.

That scared him. He thought that he had accidentally destroyed something on his penis. "What will happen now?!" he thought in dismay. The fact is that Eddie-baby's knowledge in the areas of botany, zoology, or seafaring far exceeded his knowledge in the area of human biology. As far as explaining it to him was concerned, nobody had ever explained anything, and now he was sitting on his couch with his penis in his hand and was quite confused.

After sitting in perplexity for a while, Eddie-baby for some reason decided to remove the rest of the yellowish-gray substance, pulling it off little by little. Without that substance, the tip of his penis looked like the head of a large screw, and his penis like the screw itself, only made out of flesh. Eddie-baby moved the skin back and forth on his penis. Nothing happened. Then he moved it again. The sensation was a pleasant one. He continued moving the skin on his penis until he surprised himself by suddenly emitting a quiet moan and slightly opening his mouth, while from the opening where his urine usually shot out a large yellow drop emerged, remained there for a moment, and then slowly slid down the side. Thus did Eddie-baby come for the first time in his life. A sense of relief as if after deliverance from a difficult thousand-year labor descended on him. Along with anxiety about himself and about his body.

It was at that moment that the bewildered Eddie-baby heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock. And it is precisely to that moment that the emergence of his baneful habit of using the calendar sheets may be traced, a habit that sometimes resulted in his tearing them off for several days into the future. For no sooner did he hear his mother at the door than Eddie-baby grabbed the first thing that came to hand – the calendar – wiped his penis on a couple of its sheets, and climbed back into his pants as fast as he could. Luckily, his mother went into the kitchen first to put away the things she had purchased. Eddie tossed the stuck-together calendar sheets under the couch.