Chapter 1: Solitaire

John Kostner experienced puberty on a Wednesday afternoon in the fall of 1971. The suddenness was more perceptual than biological.

His father had given him a book called My Body Is Changing some two years before, and many of the changes had begun. He experienced erections at the most inappropriate and embarrassing times. His voice hadn’t decided on an octave but was experimenting with several. He’d started finding the material in the book more exciting than when he had first read it.

John had a fine inquisitive mind when it came to academics. He had skipped fourth grade a year before the school district had decided that skipping grades was wrong. He had reached “G” in Britannica, despite the competing attractions of decent school, public, and home libraries.

Outside the intellectual arena, John was a damn snoop. He prowled the house like a cat and had found, years before, a stash of marriage manuals his parents thought hidden. The secretiveness attracted him then. Erotic stirrings had begun to tempt him back. Nevertheless, he was unprepared for the lightning bolt.

On Wednesday, September 22, he had been preparing for a piano lesson with mean Miss Lockhart. “Preparing” meant trying to learn in the last half hour what he hadn’t in the hour-a-day practice over the previous week. What was worse, it was Indian summer; the day was bright after the cold drizzle of the past three weeks. Even John, who wasn’t much for the outdoors, wanted to be out in that weather not trapped inside with his demanding teacher. When Miss Lockhart came in, however, she was an entirely different person. She was wearing a light blouse and perfume. He noticed both the perfume and the breasts. This time his erection was specific and relevant, if even more embarrassing.

That lesson was a disaster. But piano lessons, which had seemed useless up to then, made sudden sense. They were a means to the delicious torture of sitting next to delightful, beautiful, Miss Lockhart. He practiced an hour a day and usually more. He studied what she had told him before about finger positions. He learned to adjust himself before the lesson so that the inevitable erection started from a contained vertical position instead of catching in his underwear. He bloused out his shirt so that his lap was invisible from the top. All that effort earned him 30 minutes in heaven and hell glancing sideways at the most erotic pair of breasts in the world and trying to imagine what they might look like without that confinement and cloth.

John’s sister, Debbie, was four and a half years older. She had not been amused to have her senior year in high school contaminated by John the freshman. She dealt with it by introducing him as her “baby brother” whenever he got too close. She normally defined ‘too close’ as within eyesight, but was willing to make exceptions for all-school assemblies, football games, and similar occasions. Then, speaking distance was ‘too close.’

John’s regard for her was not quite so warm. He had read a Heinlein novel involving a brother and sister who had a different chromosome from each pair in each parent. He thought that some chance arrangement like this could explain how two such different people could be siblings.

Lloyd Kostner had weighed his finances two years before, with two children approaching college age. The pay of a circuit-court judge in Wisconsin -- which probably looked munificent to most voters -- was significantly lower than what a respected lawyer could earn in practice, though the disparity was much smaller in Clay County than in Milwaukee. He left the bench and returned to private practice early in 1970.

He was still judge (and jury, and -- occasionally -- executioner) where his children were concerned. His theory of legislation was that the statutes should be like a jungle gym, rigid with lots of room to move between. His family rules came surprisingly close to those standards. He had a very heavy hand and used it rather rarely.

He had played with his babies and toddlers. He expressed pride in his kids’ school achievements. But, having left the games of youth long before and without regret, he led his children towards adulthood rather than participating in their youth. The downstairs bookshelves, except for those in his office, were open to the kids. Encyclopedia volumes and the atlas needed to be replaced with a slip of paper naming the borrower. “The dictionary” had to be used in situ. (There were smaller dictionaries available, and each child had a paperback one.) John had itched so at being prohibited the books in his father’s office, that he had been given a tour. They were law books, mostly out of date.

The Kostners had a tight curfew combined with a liberal entertainment policy. Debbie could entertain her boyfriend in the rec room after a date. As far as the Kostners were concerned, the boy could stay until it was time for Debbie to get ready for bed. John had regarded that privacy as a challenge to his ingenuity.

Now, spying fed his libido. He was caught late in January. The boyfriend, Zach, held him as Debbie struggled back into bra and blouse. Then she called her dad down.

“Fifteen swats,” sentenced his dad, “and you don’t go out, except for school, for a week.” It was the only time that the number of swats had run above ten.

“But how about Debbie? I saw her...”

“I’ve never put over a spanking, but if you invade your sister’s privacy by finishing that sentence, it will be fifteen swats tonight and fifteen more tomorrow. Now come here.” And he had. He had stopped trying to spy after that, and the hook-and- eye that his father installed on the door was superfluous.

One suppertime, his dad explained about the halo effect. He continued: “Many of your teachers know Deb, John. She gets good grades, does her work.” [John thought that Debbie had better do her work. She didn’t seem to learn anything without hard studying.] “You don’t have to say anything about being related -- it’s not like our family’s name was Jones -- but let them think of you as ‘Deb’s brother.’ They’ll think well of you, then. You, too, Deb. John might not be a social success with your friends, but he meets -- exceeds -- teachers’ standards. Don’t mention your disagreements to them, and they’ll think of you as two smart kids.”

That made some sense, John -- at least -- let his teachers think of him as ‘Debbie Kostner’s brother.’

The school gave vocabulary tests late in the school year. Each student got his results privately, and the top twenty in each class were listed publicly with their scores. For three years running, Debbie had reported her score at dinner, and every year she had been justly praised for it. When she made no report in her senior year, Sylvia Kostner called the school.

Debbie had tied for twelfth in her class, with only 15 kids in the entire school ahead of her. One of them had been her brother, who was seventh in the school behind five seniors and a junior.

“Your father and I are proud that both our kids were in the top twenty in the school vocabulary test,” she said at dinner that night.

“I’m getting Jerry Dalton next year,” John replied. “The seniors are gone. But I’m not going to let Jerry beat me again.”

By that summer, the relief that Debbie was going to live in Madison, combined with their different schedules, brought some peace to the household.

In July, Miss Lockhart gave up. If she had noticed his erotic interest in her, she never mentioned it.

“But he practices every day,” his mother argued.

“And that produces accuracy. But that only makes clearer that he has no ear. I’m really sorry.”

The music lessons had been his mother’s idea. She was a great believer in discussion. She had discussed studying music with John. He hadn’t been interested. She had discussed the idea the next month, he still hadn’t been interested. She had discussed the idea the next week, and then the day after, and the day after that, with the same result. When he’d expressed interest during their twelfth discussion, she was pleased and grateful.

Claiming that her husband -- and later her husband and son -- represented the intellectual side, Sylvia Kostner took it as her duty to uphold the artistic side within the family. Her ‘art’ included literature, and neither her husband nor her children gave much credence to her lack of intellect.

With the specific object of his lust wrenched out of his life, John raided the manual stash again. It was less exciting than he had imagined. The store where he bought used Science Fiction, however, also sold used Playboy magazines. By that summer, the family consumption of Kleenex was higher than it had been in the cold and flu season. John’s mother never mentioned it.

One weekday when he was certain the house was free of his parents and sister, he sorted through his magazines to select all the best ass shots. He stripped completely and got into bed. He folded two Kleenexes together into a sort of pocket. Then he read all the (preselected) sexy parts in the Harold Robbins book that he had borrowed from the library. As he got hard, he gave his penis some slow strokes with the bed sheet. He read last the incident involving doggie-style sex.

As he shifted over to the pictures, the strokes became more frequent. He pictured one of the high-school cheerleaders tied over a fence rail. (He had removed Miss Lockhart from all the explicitly degrading scenes. Anyway, he had a much better picture of the cheerleader’s shape.) He looked at a new picture, then thought of how the girl would look all naked. He switched pictures and thought of how she would wiggle as he felt all over her ass and cunt. He switched pictures and thought of putting his penis right against her virgin opening. Thinking of her screams and pleadings for mercy, he gave an evil chuckle. There was an anticipatory tightness, and he dropped the sheet, wrapped himself in the outside of the Kleenex pocket, and switched to the sexiest picture. His victim wiggled the inch that her bonds allowed and cried, while his hand imitated that wiggle. Then he drove into the victim, the Playmate, and his hand simultaneously. The cheerleader screamed. Four strokes later, he spurted. He took two more strokes and then held tight until the penis relaxed.

He lay there for ten minutes, then dumped the Kleenex in the wastebasket, returned his magazines to their pile, grabbed up his underwear, and donned a robe for a fast trip to the bathroom for a shower. The book was good for two more uses, one of them next week. Nobody at the library seemed to notice that he visited twice a week and kept many books for the maximum loan period. Actually, his library usage was down from the previous summer.

One Saturday in August, John came home to find that there wasn’t a magazine in his room. He searched the house over. His father was puttering in the garage when he came in. There was a box on the garbage can and his magazines all stacked neatly inside.

“John.”

“Yessir.”

“I’ve told you that sex is a natural, joyous thing.”

“Yessir.”

“I’ve also told you that it is private. There is a box there, that I was going to throw in the garbage. You can take it to your room, but -- if any part of that is found outside that box while you aren’t in your room -- they all go in the garbage. Keep them in the box. You could get yourself another box when you need it.”

And that was all they said. John’s father mentioned the joyful, good, natural aspects in several more talks. John preferred sex to be dirty.

A few nights after one of those talks, he heard rhythmic creaking from the bed in his parents’ room. He thought wryly of keeping sex private.

He remembered the Saturday a year and a half before. His sister had a social event. His father had taken him to the library. Everyone expected the staff to shoo a reluctant John out at closing time. After half an hour, his guts warned him; and he visited the toilet. Fifteen minutes later, he did the same. By then, he knew he had a serious case of stomach flu.

A bailiff had been moonlighting as a security guard at the library. He took one look at the pale face on the Judge’s kid and got the librarian’s permission to take him home. John made it to the top of the stairs when he heard the creaking bed. There were grunts along with it this time. He sat on the toilet and listened as the grunts were joined by moans. His mother cried out in what sounded like pain, his father answered with shouted blasphemy, John’s guts gushed liquid. He sat there in an awful stink worrying about the sound of the flush. A new spasm shook him, and he flushed after that. By the time his parents found him, their joint concern for his health overcame any concern for what he might have heard.

For a while, the memories of fear and diarrhea and embarrassment had overcome any erotic tones to that scene. Later John had imagined himself sneaking back when his parents thought that they had the house to themselves and hiding in the closet. He pictured it now, inventing and magnifying the voices to add to the soft creaking. He imagined the sight and stroked himself. Too soon, however, the regular creaking ended. There were one or two more sounds that not even an adolescent could imagine were anything more than bodies shifting into sleep position. John went back to his cheerleader and branded her this time before raping her. It wasn’t as good, however, since he had more trouble conjuring her screams when the house was occupied and still.

Not only his vice was solitary. Before school started, he approached his mother about an early Kenbak computer, although the price was high.

“$750 is a good deal more than we were planning to spend on you for Christmas,” she said. The tone was more inviting than final.

“I have some money and can save up more. But I was thinking of something else...”

“Hmmmn?”

“What if I got all ‘A’s on my major subjects the first two marking periods?”

“Why don’t you talk to your father? Wait until the weekend.”

So he had.

“Well,” said his dad, “that sounds an awful lot like rewarding you for ignoring those subjects in the past. Why only major subjects?”

“Dad, I am not going to get ‘A’s in gym. Effort has nothing to do with that.”

“Well. We have to think about this. I’ll get back to you early in the school year. I’m not forgetting it.”

Early in the school year, his dad laid out the standards. They were all ‘A’s in academics and ‘B’s in Gym and Art. That required John to stretch in every non-academic subject (and to actually pay attention during the academic ones) for the full year. If he delivered in the first two marking periods, he got the computer. If he failed to deliver in the later marking periods, he lost use of the computer.

John signed. He got the computer for Christmas. He got a ‘C’ in gym for the third marking period. He delivered the computer to his father with the report card. He worked like a maniac the fourth marking period. He got all ‘A’s for the first time in his life. He got the computer back for the summer and the next marking period.