My first year of college, 1961, was one of the more tumultuous periods in my life. There was one particular night when, after dinner, my roommate was out, and I was too lost and depressed to study. Our room in the scholarship house was furnished with a bunk bed, two chests of drawers, and a table with two chairs. I sat at the table staring at a book for a while, then got up, closed the door, turned off the light, got into the top bunk, and lay on my side staring out into the darkened room, waiting for something to happen.

In high school, I had had an established identity, a position in the pecking order, and the goal was relatively simple and straightforward: graduate and go to college. Now that I was in college, the pecking order was far from clear--although it was clear I was not so near the top as I had been in high school--and the goal... To graduate, yes, but in what? It seemed I had to decide what to do with my life and then prepare for it, but what was life about? What was the point of it all, and what was my part in it?

What's the Point?

In high school I had never been exposed to anything that led me to question the Christian view of creation and the meaning of life. Not only did I accept it without question, I had engaged in discussions of "The Gospel" with my parents and their church friends, and had even written a couple of short treatises on passages in the Bible that I found interesting.

I had, in fact, been a religious child prodigy. My parents attended a fundamentalist Baptist church, and when I was 6 or 7 years old my mother became a member. Not long afterwards I decided I wanted to join too, to everyone's amazement.

This particular sect, the Primitive Baptists, also known as Hardshells, had no Sunday school for children, and there was no attempt to educate or recruit new members. Their belief was that God, or the Holy Spirit, called people personally to join the church, and that there was really no point in encouraging anyone to join without that Divine invitation. As a result, it was unheard of for someone my age to feel "the call," and rare even for teenagers. I was questioned by my parents and the pastor about my feelings for the church, and apparently gave satisfactory answers.

My baptism ushered in a new and wonderful period in my life. I was the church's darling, and everyone made a fuss over me. By the time we left church on Sundays, my face was covered with powder and lipstick from the old ladies.

A young preacher who sometimes visited our church took a special interest in me. His father had been a preacher, and this young fellow had begun preaching in his teens--another prodigy. He would take me home with him overnight, and I would spend a day or two tagging along with him on his insurance route. (Preaching was not a paying occupation, and all Primitive Baptist preachers had a "day job".)

In those days, no one mailed in their insurance payment--it was collected by the salesman once a month--and it was rarely a matter of simply knocking on the door and being handed the money. We went in, sat down, and talked church and family with many of them, or at a minimum had short conversations on the porch. They were all poor, and black, and they all seemed to care about the young preacher and he them. My exposure to them was not the typical experience of a white kid in the South.

An older guy, a widower, also took me home with him overnight a couple of times to "Help him break in a new horse," which consisted of my sitting on the horse while he led it around the pasture. It was an experience beyond fantasy for a kid whose heroes were Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger, but what he didn't know was that I was as interested in what was inside his granddaughter's panties as I was in the horse. She was curious, too, and while we didn't get far in our explorations, our games were quite titillating.

As you may gather from that last paragraph, my religious experience did not greatly inhibit my interest in sex, and in the sixth grade several things conspired to advance my sexual education. More about that later, but for now, I'm trying to explain why I was lying in my college room in the dark, depressed and confused. My religious upbringing was a major factor.

Factor one.

Somehow, in the summer between high school and college, I came upon and read Philip Wylie's "An Essay on Morals." All I remember about it was that it asked questions I had never encountered before, and once asked, led me to answers that seemed totally obvious: the idea of God depicted in the Bible was ridiculous. I couldn't believe I had been so gullible.

At first there was a sense of amazement and freedom, but as time passed and I found myself in the new and complex environment of the University, some unconsidered implications of my lost belief began to filter into consciousness.

I remember a scene from an introductory Anthropology course in which the professor's presentation brought him to the brink of saying life was meaningless without his actually saying it. I found myself flushed with anger and hostility and forced him over the edge: "You're saying life has no meaning!" I said, my emotions clearly evident.

"That's right," he said, looking at me as if it pained him to encounter such naivete, "Life has no meaning."

I was speechless. Somehow I hadn't gotten around to considering that my prior belief in God had given my life meaning and purpose, and that losing that belief had left me with a void I didn't know how to fill.

This and similar experiences had brought me to my position on the bunk in my room, staring out as if the furniture might speak and give me an answer. None was forthcoming, but lying there, I thought of the cemetery that was only a block from our scholarship house, and grasped at the possibility that the contemplation of death might prompt the meaning of life to appear. I put on shoes, grabbed my cigarettes and went out. Minutes later I found myself sitting on the roots of a cyprus tree, surrounded by graves and tombstones.

I had the magical idea that from somewhere among all those dead people, the answers to my questions would rise up like mist from the ground, but nothing happened. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and gave up, wandering back to the house where, if I looked around, I was sure to find someone willing to drop their studies and distract me with some kind of foolishness.

Distraction, entertainment, romance; those were my only solace that first year.

Distractions.

One of the distractions was alcohol, although my first experiences had serious negative consequences.

Alcohol was strictly forbidden for scholarship students on moral grounds, and most of us were underage anyway, but that didn't mean it was inaccessible. An older student who had left the scholarship program to escape all the restrictions and responsibilities took it upon himself to give the younger kids an opportunity to try what had been forbidden. He bought a few cases of Spearman Ale and put the word out that for a slight mark-up and the required discretion it would be available Friday night at the house he lived in off campus. One of my buddies had a car, also forbidden--we were supposed to be too poor to have cars--and offered to drive a few of us over.

I had tasted beer and knew I didn't like it, but I was curious about intoxication, so I bought five short ales and chug-a-lugged them as quickly as I could. That got the unpleasant taste out of the way, and soon I began to feel drunk for the first time in my life. Along with the drunkenness I felt intense sexual desire, but this was an all-male party--what was I to do? It occurred to me that in one of the neighboring houses, there just might be a sexually deprived woman who would be thrilled to find a young college freshman at her door--all I would have to do was knock. I had a plan. I told my friends I was going for a walk.

Trying to look as normal as I could, I knocked at the house next door and when a man answered, said I had come to take Judy to the movies. When he told me that no one named Judy lived there, I apologized that I must have the wrong address and left. I tried the same routine at every house on the block without success, but in spite of my failure I was elated--I had had a great adventure.

By the time I got back to the Ale house there were several other guys nearly as drunk as I, looking for entertainment. Someone called out, "Hey Norm, show us your dick," and soon the cry was general. I was sitting on the living room floor, and rose to my knees to comply with the request to hoots of approval. The landlord who had given the evening its impetus was the only person who disapproved of the idea, citing the neighbors, and when his exhortations to cease and desist were met with peals of laughter, he brought out a machete and threatened to sever the offending member. He looked entirely serious brandishing the two-foot blade over his head, and I put my semi-erect organ away with some difficulty.

Somehow I ended up half naked in a back bedroom with a guy who turned out to be gay giving me a hand job. Just as I came all over my chest, about four guys with perfect timing burst into the bedroom saying, "Hey, what's going on here? What the hell are you doing?" They proceeded to finish undressing me and shoved me, laughing, into the shower.

That was the end of the fun part, and shortly after I was dried and dressed again, I found myself repeatedly throwing up off the front porch. I had thought that when my stomach was empty the vomiting would stop, but I continued to heave violently at intervals, even after my friends had sneaked me back to my room.

I had definitely enjoyed being drunk, but I was not in a hurry to suffer the aftermath again any time soon.

So why were my friends asking me to expose myself, you may wonder.

Exposure.

Fairly early in the school year when the weather was still hot, I had been awakened in the late evening by a small crowd of housemates standing at my bedside, peering at me and making lewd comments. I was a sleepyhead and always went to bed before anyone else, and on this particular evening I happened to have had an erotic dream, lying on my back in my underwear. The erection had caught my roommate's eye, who quickly gathered a group of witnesses. The word was out. This, however was not the first time my penis had drawn attention.

Way back in the fifth grade, when I was ten years old, what started out as an ordinary recess took an unexpected turn in the boy's restroom. The kid standing next to me at the row of urinals looked over and exclaimed, "This guy's got a dick like a grown man!"

Everyone crowded around to see, and from then on I got a lot of attention in the boy's room.

It isn't that my penis is freakishly huge, it's just that like most things about me, it's up around the 98th percentile, plus or minus two points. Like everything else: it has advantages and disadvantages, more of which I'll get into later. In the meantime let me note that being hung is no reason to be proud--I had nothing to do with its being what it is. It has been a great source of pleasure for me and for some other folks, but it is not the key to happiness. It hadn't kept me out of the graveyard that night, smoking cigarettes and feeling lost.

There have been guys with big dicks who didn't, for one reason or another, have the kinds of experiences with theirs that I had with mine, but mine, and the experiences it made possible, has certainly had a significant influence on my life. It was one among a number of reasons that I came to think of myself as different from other people.

I don't think the size of my penis had anything to do with my sexual education in the sixth grade. That grew out of an aspect of my life in which I was on the low tail of the bell curve--family income. We weren't the poorest kids in town, but we were below the lower fringes of the middle class. As a result my male friends at school--the idea of female friends was unfathomable at that point--were the poor kids, all of whom were older and wiser than me. They took it upon themselves to eliminate what they saw as the gross deficiencies of my prior education.