My name is Ben Washington Jr. and I have a confession to make. While I might look like your average race-conscious, positive brother, I am not. I have a wild undercover sex life. I have had many crazy, sexual adventures that have taken me to unbelievable places.
Like a lot of brothers, I grew up with a single mother. Mom had gotten pregnant with me when she was 18, and my father was killed fighting in Vietnam. I grew up only knowing my father through pictures. My first memory of dad was a picture of him looking all handsome in his Marine uniform. Mom also decorated our little apartment with picture of her and dad in Afros and dashikis.
Dad's death caused mom to get political. She dabbled with the Black Panthers in the '70s and always stayed active with the cause, whether it was pushing for affirmative action, opposing the death penalty or fighting apartheid. And she always took me along with her on her protests. I started carrying a placard before I was old enough to actual know what the words meant. Mom eventually went to law school, and got a job as a public defender in Washington, DC, helping protect desperate brothers from the Man.
Since mom was politically active she made me a reader. She would take me to the library every weekend to check out a book. She realized that black children often didn't get any education about their people in white-run schools and wanted me to know there was more to black history than slavery and Martin Luther King. I learned about the many different tribes of Africa and of African kings like Mansa Musa and Shaka Zulu. I realized that black people had a rich history before slavery,
However, Mom did her job too well. I fell in love with reading and preferred staying inside devouring books instead of riding my bike or playing sports. I became a nerd. Now there is nothing more loathed in the black community than a nerd. You can be a drug dealer, wife beater or ex con, but god forbid you are a black nerd. Black nerds are rejected like they have herpes. Young women simply weren't attracted to boys who could quote Malcolm X, they liked guys who slung dope and starred on the football field or the basketball court.
Mom did her best, but she was clueless about navigating the minefield of teenage dating. All she said is "Always treat women like queens." That shit might have sounded good on paper, but it didn't work in a world where women threw themselves at hoodlums and jocks who treated them like dirt.
Mom saw I was struggling and decided to bring in a mentor. I started getting closer to my Uncle Brian, who was Mom's older brother.He was a dark-skinned brother who was always sharply dressed. He had been in the Air Force, then became a commercial pilot. He drove a Corvette and had been married a few times, but finally became a playboy. He always had a different woman on his arm, black, white or Asian. And considering this was the '70s and the '80s, this was kind of of scandalous. Mom didn't approve of his interracial dating, She wanted him to settle down with a strong, righteous sister, but after two ugly divorces that was never going to happen.
One Saturday, Uncle Brian turned up in his 'Vette and took me to see a movie and get a burger. As we ate our food, I told him about my problems with girls. He was sympathetic,
"Don't worry, young blood. Young girls are crazy, they love them thugs," he said."Things will get better when you go to college. The pussy will be falling from the trees. Meanwhile, have this."
He handed me a copy of Playboy. Now this was before the Internet, so porn was hard to come by in those days. I had seen some kids handing crumpled copies of them around at school, but I had never had one of my own.
"Don't tell your mom," he said with a wink.
I took the magazine home and hid it under my mattress. When mom had gone to bed, I would pull out the mag and look at the pictures of gorgeous, naked bodies. I had started experimenting with masturbation in the shower, but armed with the Playboy magazine and some lotion, I learned how making myself cum. Afterwards, I felt relieved. I could deal with the girls at school, who gave me no play, now that I had my right hand.
Of course I didn't tell mom about this. She was a dedicated member of the local black Baptist church, which was the center of the community. We went every Sunday and watched the preacher holler and sweat as people got caught up with the holy spirit. I didn't buy it and like most kids fidgeted through church. Mom had done a great job educating me. She had made me learn about the history of Africa and read books by Frederick Douglas and Frantz Fanon. I came to realize the Christianity was not the religion of our ancestors. Christianity had been beaten into us during colonialism and slavery. And along with the images of a Caucasian Jesus, Caucasian angels and a Caucasian God, it was just another way of reinforcing white supremacy.
The black church could also be quite hypocritical too. They never talked about sex and as a result a lot of church girls ended up getting pregnant. There were also rumors of the preacher running around with several women in the congregation and fathering a couple of kids out of wedlock. Of course, his wife suffered in silence and Mom would never say anything bad about a man of god.
I talked to Uncle Brian about this. He had started taking me to the local gym to work out and pack muscle on my scrawny frame. Uncle Brian rarely went to church and I asked him why.
"Shit, I gave all that stuff up when I was flying planes in Korea," he said as we lifted weights. "Man, you didn't know if you were going to make it through the next day, so I decided to live for the moment. When I wasn't flying, I was either getting drunk or screwing hookers."
"What was it like?" I asked eagerly.
"The girls were freaks, I mean they were professionals," he said with a smile. "They would do this one trick where one of them would climb into a cage and lay naked face down. Another girl would use a rope to hoist the cage in the air. I would be lying down on the bed with my dick hard. The girl in the basket would be lowered onto my dick, then the other girl would spin it around. I wouldn't last more than a few seconds. Man, those Asian hookers ruined me. When I got back home, I could never be happy with regular pussy." His story thrilled me!
Although I was gaining muscle, things didn't improve much in high school, When prom rolled around I didn't even have a date. But I didn't care. Uncle Brian took me to the local strip club. So while my high school buddies, were dancing awkwardly with their dates, I was getting a pair of big ol' titties smashed in my face! I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
When I was in high school my life consisted of studying, chess club, hanging out with Uncle Brian and fighting the good fight with Mom by going to marches and NAACP meetings. Mom figured if I was busy I would stay out of trouble and since it was DC during the crack wars there was plenty of trouble around. Her plan worked. Since I hit the books so much, I got really good grades and was able to get a scholarship at a large state university in the South. Mom and I were reticent about me going down South, but we decided that I couldn't pass up a full ride.
To describe going to school in the South as a culture shock was an understatement. It was an eye-opening experience being a minority after growing up in majority black DC. The college's student body was 85 percent white. And a lot of the students were straight up gun-toting rednecks who chewed tobacco and drove pickup trucks. There were a handful of black students, mainly athletes, and a large number of international students from Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
