I don't believe that there is an actual town of Philadelphia in the State of Texas, if I am wrong, and there is, this story did not happen there. It is a work of fiction.
All fictional persons engaging in (or even thinking about engaging in) sexual activity are 18 years of age or older.
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I don't do alcohol. I don't do drugs. I don't have to. I do pain. My God in his limitless love gave me a gift more potent than the product of all the poppy fields of Asia. My body creates its own 'happy juice', a magical elixir, from pain. I ran cross country in high school. All the girls on the team, or at least all the serious ones were into pain. We slapped each other with wet towels. Breasts, butts, crotch shots were all fair game. We slapped each other, punched each other to make us tough.
Philadelphia, that's a hoot, it means city of brotherly love. But this was a town that was dying. I lost my whole, what was supposed to be freshman year of high school, to a teacher's strike, everybody lost a year. The town lost a quarter of its population, property values plunged. They are going to shut our school down if they can find someone stupid enough to merge districts.
None of us here in this locker room are going anywhere. Grown ups acting like little kids took that away. The state athletic association moved us up a class because everyone is a year older here than in Abernathy, Heckville or Becton, schools we used to compete against. We are running against schools in Lubbock with ten times our enrollment. Tech doesn't seem very interested in 19 year old runners who frequently lose to 18 year olds.
So the senior girls team is just for fun. A bunch of eighteen and nineteen year old jockettes who should be ditching college classes. But instead are bored stiff going to mandatory overcrowded high school classes. Taught by unqualified and often uncertified 'substitute' or 'temporary' teachers. In a district without money to hire anybody, buy anything or even fix what they have. Well, we have a pretty twisted idea of what fun is.
We had a crotch kicking contest once to see who was toughest. One sleepover at Donna's house we played a variation of spin the bottle. The 'winner' had to take her panties off and masturbate herself with the lubricated bottle in front of the rest of us. I lost my hymen to that bottle. Four of us were inseparable, 'the Gang of Four', hey it was the seventies after all. We got matching Chinese character tattoos and had our nipples pierced at a shop down in Lubbock.
I ran at a meet two hours after getting my nipples done. And won, against a HUGE school. I love pain. Pain loves me back. We passed around books made of 'unobtainium' like 'The Story of O' and 'The Happy Hooker'. I played with my nipple rings when I masturbated and dreamed of someone worthy of my devotion piercing my labia and putting a ring in it. Sometimes a pretty one with diamonds like Sammy Davis Jr. gave Marilyn, or one like 'O' received with her Master's name on it.
Sally Fullbright, our coach, she was a mean old lesbian, if you believed all the stories. Of course Philadelphia was a typical small town where everybody knew everybody else's business, while simultaneously not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground. She taught us to seek out pain. To control it, to embrace it, to revel in it. We had some damned weird talks in the locker room over the years. About childbirth and how we needed to be strong to bear the pain of an entire fully formed human being popping out our vaginas. Tearing us up as they emerged. Like I said, she was really, really weird. But as long as she just told bizarre stories and never touched she was alright. At least she cared about us. And, in spite of the many stories I never knew anyone who had first hand knowledge of anything that was said.
We learned to let our pain make us happy and invincible. "Oh yes, I am wise, but its a wisdom born of pain. Yes, I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained." I must have heard that song a million times in Sally's classes. I took every course offering that Coach taught before I walked for graduation. Two reasons for that. She was easy on her athletes and it made those annoying little boys think that I was a lesbian. So they quit asking me to let them grope me, or give them a hand or blow job.
When I say walked for graduation, I did, right off the gangplank and into the abyss. I set the school records for the 330, 660 and mile. But that was not fast enough to get an athletic scholarship anywhere. For most of us there was nothing after high school. Mom and Dad owned a working farm. We were what they called land-poor. We had land, but with our income it was a constant struggle to pay the taxes, the household bills, upkeep on the property and such while still maintaining a standard of living.
The farm was a study in chic entropy. The orchard's trees were past their prime and should have been replaced. The berry patch was out of control. Fence posts were rotten and the wire rusting apart. Getting the tractor going was an experience to behold. The roof on the little cabin by the lake was leaking, badly, rendering the structure uninhabitable. The barn walls were held in place by poles and cable stays.
To keep it going, and we had to keep it going, with the implosion of the Philadelphia School District, and its debt, and the pending settlements, you couldn't give property here away cheap enough. So, to keep it going Mom and Dad worked off the farm at times. First Mom worked in town while Dad ran the farm. The money sucked. Then Dad drove a truck while Mom and Christopher and Robert, my older and younger brother, worked the farm. Then as an eighteenth birthday present to Robbie, Mom and Dad took a job together in the oilfields down by Odessa, staying with dad's brother, uncle Mike.
Now Chris and Robbie and I run the farm. Or more accurately Chris and Robbie run the farm and I run the house during the week, with Mom and Dad driving home early Saturday morning and back to Odessa Sunday night. Adversity made us stick together. Chris worked very hard trying to keep everything together without our parents being there. His body would be sore from the physical labor he performed. I would try to work his muscles, try my hand, my hands, at being a masseuse.
I had gone out with a boy or two, and I knew they came with penises, standard equipment. I knew that all penises liked attention. I saw Chris working so hard to keep us going. No time to go out, no time to have fun. Now that I had graduated, and was almost twenty, ok, it is six months away. I felt, guilty, I guess. I watched Chris do all the hard work so that Robbie could do school stuff, go out with friends and the like. It suddenly dawned on me that while I was out having fun with the girls senior year, Chris was the one picking up my slack as well.
