Tickle Novella

Tickle

(1)

Parents bear a heavy responsibility when they're naming a new baby. Will this name be a blessing or a burden?

So your last name is Smith or Johnson. Why would you give your new baby a perfectly ordinary name? Joe? Bill? Ryan? Or Jane, Janet, Barbara? Their names will be forgettable because both elements are so common.

But sometimes parents (drunk, perhaps?) give a whimsical name for the fun of it. Or a name that can be mispronounced into something humiliating. I never knew my father, and my mother says that he was the one who put the name on the birth certificate.

So now let me introduce myself. My last name is Tickle. Wikipedia says the name came from Tickhill in Yorkshire. But it's Tickle now.

So what did my loving father name me?

Richard.

I don't know why he picked Richard. Why not Henry, William, Howard, Graham? No, I have to get the one with the common nickname Dick, which is slang for penis, and which rhymes with the first syllable of Tickle.

So as soon as some fellow student realized that I could legitimately be called "Dick," it became my sole first name. Thus: Dick Tickle. It's so fun to say, especially with the phallic meaning. "Hi, this is my friend, Dick. Dick Tickle. You don't have to DO it, unless you want to. I assure you he likes it. So do I." Oh, how I loved that in junior high and high school and college.

You can't go into law with my name. I'd be laughed out of court, my law firm would be ridiculed if they ever made me partner: Tickle, Suckett, and Howe. His honor, Judge Dick Tickle.

No matter what course I pursue in life, the name will be a detriment, making it hard for people to take me seriously. When in high school, one subgroup referred to me, and addressed me, solely as TickleDick, there were times I wanted to buy a gun and shoot every bastard who used that name and posted it online and wrote it on chalkboards around campus.

United States President Richard Tickle, commonly referred to by the opposing party as "TickleDick."

An annoyance. Something to live down. I have some abilities, so I expected to rise above it. Only cried myself to sleep a few times over that. Couldn't find my father and beat him up, Johnny Cash style, because the drunken bastard died in a car accident in which he wiped a five-member family off the face of the Earth. There were times I prayed, God, why am I alive? I should have been the one my drunk dad killed, not those kids, not their parents.

But I never said those things to Mom, because the last thing she needed was to know she had a son who was praying about how he should be dead.

My father died before my first birthday. Mom says she held me up to look at him in the coffin. So I could be sure he was really gone? Mom said the morticians did a wonderful job of making him look natural. I can't remember, of course. The point is that I grew up with only a picture for a dad, until Mom found and married the guy I've been calling Dad ever since.

I only learned about the drunk driving thing when I was in fifth grade, and only because we were assigned to use the library and one of my "friends" did a search on my name and came up with Dad and the family that he killed. My friend said, "Is this your father?" and I said yes. He didn't say any more ... to

me.

But by the end of the day, everybody was looking at me weirdly, and I realized they all knew.

And one guy who never liked me commented, loudly, where I'd be sure to hear, "Bastard only got what he deserved, driving drunk, killing people."

I touched his arm, then jumped back when he flailed out to hit me. He missed. "Lighten up, guy. You meant to hurt my feelings, but I agree with you. I never knew him, but he died killing a whole family because he was too stupid to call a cab. You can't say anything as bad as I've said or thought about him. Are we okay?"

He silently nodded, and I went on my way. Maybe they all heard about what I said, but nobody else tried to goad me about it. Maybe he was the only barbarian in the school.

A few days later, I ran into the new girl whose father was in the Foreign Service and so she just moved into our school after attending the American School in Tokyo for a few years. She was killer smart, or maybe the American School in Tokyo is that much better than ours, or both. I got good grades, but let's say I wouldn't be vying with her for valedictorian, if fifth grade bestowed such an honor.

"Hey, Rick," she said.

She didn't call me Dick? What was

that

about?

"Hey," I said. "Ruby?"

"That's my name, but I hate it."

"I know how

that

feels," I said.

"Oh, I know you know," she said. "But my friends call me Rub. Rhymes with flub. For Ruby, see?"

"Clever nickname," I said. "I haven't known a lot of Rubys in my life — my total reached one just this year. But I bet that's the best nickname."

"It's the one I like," she said, smiling a little. "Listen, Rick, I only wanted to talk to you because most people in this school don't blame you at all for

anything

your father did, especially beccause you were a baby at the time. There are a few jerks who might say some ugly stupid things, but most of us don't feel that way."

I wanted to ask, Did Harris or Nielson get this statistical information? But instead of being snotty, I said, "That's what I hoped, but it's not like I could ask."

"I could. And I did. Maybe along with a hint that anybody who

did

blame you was a flaming asshole, or something worse."

"I admire your eloquence. And your boldness. And kindness to a complete stranger."

"I don't think of you as a stranger," she said. "Remember I was in your class the first three days of the school year? As soon as they heard my name and then found out I had lived in Tokyo most of my life, I heard little remarks about "Jap Ruby," "Ruby the Jap."

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry for that."

"

You're

sorry? You're the one who said to shut up. No, you said 'shut the duck up,' or something very much like that."

"I never cared for noisy ducks," I said.

"I don't know why they listened to you, but the jokes about my being a Japanese spy were never told in my presence, and I wanted to thank you."

"To tell the truth, I don't remember that at all, but I believe you. Why would you make it up?"

"I wouldn't. Rick, are we friends now?"

"I hope so," I said. "You're one of the smartest girls in school, and —"

"I'm the smartest," she said, "and not the smartest

girl.

Simply the smartest."

"No quarrel from me."

"It bothers some boys."

I shrugged. "Don't know why. We're not all applying for the last scholarship in the universe. We're in fifth grade."

"And you're the first person I ever heard personally use the word fuck."

"And now

you

just said it, so ... welcome to the club."

That's how Rub and I bonded over our willingness to utter the forbidden word in front of each other.

Her dad was a diplomat, her mother a scholar — her verbal agility and her wide-and-deep knowledge were no surprise. My mother was educated — the insurance money had been enough to pay for Mom to finish college starting when she was still nursing me. I got a weird kind of pleasure that because I was still nursing, I provide opportunities for the college boys to ogle Mom's tits. Kind of a public service baby.

Showing her breasts while feeding me also showed those boys

me

, and college boys are not famous for wanting to get romantically tied to a single mom. So her tits might have made my mother friends, but my existence drove wooers away fast.

My step-dad — I feel like he's my

real

dad — met Mom when I was still only about seven, and he took my existence in stride, even tried to teach me baseball when neither of us knew yet how much I loathed team sports. He took me running, helped me learn to pace myself, taught me to swim, to ride a bike — and he moved us to our nice house in the school district where a fine and prosperous diplomat brought his daughter Ruby so she and I could meet. And that diplomat and my dad became backyard-barbecue friends, and Mom and Rub's mother became book-club-and-volunteer-projects friends, so when Rub and I became best friends, they made sure Rub and I got plenty of chances to socialize because our parents socialized.

That was ancient history, which I learned when Granite — our nickname for Granny, Mom's mother — told me the story about Mom's life as a single parent, with a lot of needless blather about how I kept drooling milk all over myself

and

her titties while I sucked. Did I

need

to have that information? Granite apparently thought so.

Unsurprisingly, not only did Rub move on to sixth grade, so did I. And then seventh. The first couple of summers I expected Rub's father to get a new overseas assignment, but Rub assured me, "He's so close to retirement, they don't give him an area, they just send him out to troubleshoot."

I had to get her to explain that word to me, since I'd never heard it before. "So he's a fireman," I said. "They get an alarm, they give him the address and send him out."

She shrugged and smiled. "I have to tell my father you said that. I think he'd like hearing it." And then she thought of something and sputtered, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned my dad."

I laughed, but I thought she was sweet. "My old shithead alcoholic birth father is dead and I don't miss him. So I don't feel bad when you mention

your

father. That's not a real problem."

"What would a

real

problem be?" she asked.

"Okay, let's say I had a rectum that I couldn't open voluntarily to let farts out, so they all got stored up till I got home from school every day —"

"And then let 'em rip," she said.

"It was just hypothetical," I said, having recently learned the word. "I don't have any kind of fart constipation."

She burst into laughter at the words "fart constipation," so I said

fartstipation, I

laughed, and laughing made a fart explode out of my ass, probably burning a hole in my underwear, and it stank like a swamp.

Rub laughed even harder, because even in seventh grade, farts are still funny. Hell, they're funny as adults, if you're with somebody you're comfortable with. But in my life I didn't remember releasing a single fart that was so loud and so revolting in ... what, flavor? as the flatus I had just let fly. Just smelling it made me want to brush my teeth.

"Let's get away from this ... this ..."

"Miasma?" she asked. "Rick, what's the fun of farting if you don't

own

that fart?"

"Own that fart, own that fart," I began chanting. She quickly joined in, while we got used to the pungent odor. A couple of other kids approached, got a whiff, and walked away quickly. Meanwhile, a couple of

other

kids approached, sniffed, and joined in our chant. "Own that fart! Own that fart!"

When the fart faded and the chant died, a couple of the kids started talking about the worst fart they ever smelled "from a girl."

"Hey," I said. "That was

my

fart."

"Oh, you're so

gentlemanly

to take the blame!" said one, and "It was Tickledick's fart!" And they were off.

By lunchtime, the school was evenly divided between kids who called out "Tickledick's fart!" and kid who corrected them, "Rub's fart!"

I was annoyed. Rub was amused. "Your fart will be legendary."

"It had some of the spices from my Sausage McMuffin with Egg this morning," I said.

"So you're assigning that classic, legendary, near-mythical fart to the

McDonald's

breakfast menu? The blandest food this side of baby custard?"

"How do you know how baby food tastes?" I asked.

"I used to sneak jars of custard from my baby sister's food shelf," she said. "I think she knew I was doing it, but by the time she learned how to talk, she must have forgiven me."

"Or forgotten." I said.

We were such obvious friends that of course we got openly teased — people would say things about "my girlfriend," and, ridiculously enough, people teased

her

about her "stud." Oh, come on.

I was so familiar with Rub's face and form that it wasn't until near the end of eighth grade that I noticed that puberty was treating her kindly. She had a nice shape, she was taller than me but not a giant, and her face thinned out and lengthened and she started caring about her hair — or her mother did. I was not yet conquered by puberty, but I could see that she was pretty. And in ninth grade, beautiful.

But that didn't make a bit of difference in how we were together. She was smart and funny, and while I'd never catch up to her on either, I was trying for better grades. And because I had a filthy mind, my wit took an anatomical turn. Not sexual, more like bowel-centered.

It was in tenth grade that

I

got tall, and in junior year, I actually got taller than Rub. I began passing my hand over her head whenever we ran into each other and compare it to my own body, though I exaggerated the difference by moving my hand from the top of her head to my neck. Her only comment on this was, "Don't muss my hair."

Along with getting tall, my dick finally grew. I had hated changing in the locker room because I still had a pointy little child's dick when most of the other guys had something between five and seven inches — or so they claimed, and I didn't whip out a ruler to check.

I didn't get taunted about that very much because most of the guys remembered when

they

had little-boy penises. Or that's why I

thought

I wasn't getting any crap from them. Imagine my surprise, then, near the end of junior year, when my penis was a respectable size, and I thanked a couple of the guys most likely to ridicule me for not giving me shit about my dick.

They looked at each other in surprise. "We didn't dare," one of them said.

"Why? I wasn't likely to beat you up."

They rolled their eyes. One warned the other, "She'll kill you."

"You think he doesn't know?" said the other.

"Of course not."

"You have to promise not to tell," one said to me.

"Tell who?" I asked.

It took them another ten seconds before they worked up the courage. Simultaneously, they said, "Rub."

My first thought was, Rub couldn't beat up either of these guys. Then I thought, Rub was watching out for me even in the locker room? I mean, she knew the mockery really bothered me. And so she must have decided to keep these guys from ridiculing me for ... my tiny baby-boy penis? How would she even

know

about that?

"She heard a couple of guys —

not

us — talking about guys who still had little dicks and what with your name being —"

"Richard," I said.

"You got mentioned kind of prominently in that list. Back in freshman year."

The other guy said, "Rub said, 'Would you make fun of me for being flat-chested?' And we just laughed because, you know."

"She's got serious boobs," said the other.

Yeah, I suppose so. I didn't look at her that way, or think of her that way. She didn't show up in any of my erotic dreams — which, in my opinion, were the best thing about puberty. No effort on my part, and I didn't forget those dreams, they seemed so real. I just didn't look at Rub thinking about her breast size.

"So how did she stop you?" I asked.

"She said that if we didn't leave you alone about it, we would

never

get to see her titties."

"It wasn't

exactly

a promise that if we played nice, we

would

get to see them." They both laughed.

I haven't told you their names because they're not the same assholes now that they were then, so ... bygones, water over the dam, semi-trailers under the overpass, bathwater down the drain without the baby.

At that moment, the idea of either or both of these guys ogling Rub's naked breasts was so infuriating that even though I would get seriously pounded, I felt the urge to rush them and shove them into the lockers.

But Rub had done this to protect me, and it had worked. It was a price she offered to pay, even though I would have begged her not to, if I had known.

Ordering

her not to was not an available option — I knew her well enough to understand her deep resentment against anybody trying to control her.

Seriously, that was the first moment when I actually thought about Rub's breasts and tried to picture them in my mind. But I had a naive adolescent's view of unseen body parts — her breasts were tiny, her breasts were huge, they had giant areolas, they had nipples just like mine — tiny and useless. I knew nothing. But

thinking

about her never-seen breasts made me feel sad and ashamed because it felt like I was betraying her trust, to think of her the way these guys thought of her.

It also got the nub of an erection started, which was way more disturbing to me. This was

Rub.

This was my

friend.

I didn't look at her like a lecherous loon. I didn't ogle her. She was my equal, not a target for my lusts.

Except now she was.

No she wasn't. I wouldn't

let

her be. She had secretly saved me from a lot of mortification. She would never know that I had saved

her

from a lot of unwelcome ogling and imaginary intercourse. Wasn't I noble, in my sacrifice?

Here was the

hard

part of my self-control — still treating her normally when we were together. I didn't forbid myself to look at her tits — in the normal course of conversation, it was natural to glance at any part of the person you were talking to. It would be obvious if I

stared

at her breasts, but it would be almost as obvious if I deliberately looked away from them.

Apparently I wasn't as subtle and natural as I thought. Because we were eating lunch out on one of the picnic tables at school, because it was May and it was spring in a spectacular way. So many blossoms, so much new green on the trees and bushes. I was eating my normal tuna fish and mustard sandwich on Pepperidge Farm thin-sliced wheat bread — because even if you don't have much money, you can still have standards. She was eating some weird kind of sushi thing from a thermal box with dry ice inside. As she explained to me, "You have to keep sushi cold or it gets dangerous."

And I answered, "Canned tuna fish doesn't have to be coddled."

"Rick, I know they told you."

Innocent time. I didn't speak, I just looked at her inquiringly.

"Because they

told

me they told you. Somehow you forced them. You know about my deal with them."

"You have no idea how much it means to me that you would put yourself at risk in order to save me from some mockery."

She gave me a little smile.

I went on. "You also have no idea how the idea of you knowing that I had a tiny dick for all those years makes me want to crawl in a hole and die."

"I knew puberty hadn't wrecked your life yet," she said, "because you were still shorter than me."

"Now I'm not," I said.

"You think I didn't notice? And I have tits."

"I'm ashamed to say that for several years I did not notice. I was too sexually immature, I guess, not having pubertized, but also you were — you

are

— my best friend in all the world, in all my life, and I didn't look at your

body

, I talked to you and listened to you and I know your face, every expression, everything you do that makes me love to be with you all. The. Time."

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. Like a sister. The kind of kiss that would make a guy lose his erection immediately. Not that I had one right then. But that sisterly kiss gave me a negative erection. It would take effort to get myself back to zero. Maybe I'd never have an erection again. The sisterliness of her kiss was

that

powerful.

Her lips had touched my cheek. Sisterly hell. Her lips had touched my cheek.