CAUGHT on the Bus

I was in the late fifth grade when this happened. We lived on-base at the time, but it was a base without schools of its own. So kids rode dark blue Air Force buses to and from civilian schools. As a way of maintaining discipline and guarding against rowdiness, a young airman was assigned to each bus and rode the routes back and forth with us as a calming influence.

A certain kid that I'm going to call Craig always ended up sitting near me on the bus. He was a year ahead of me. Sometimes we shared a seat but usually we sat across the aisle from each other, leaning back and forth to tell jokes or comment on whatever might be happening at the moment.

Our bus was bouncing along one afternoon when Craig slid into the aisle and leaned over to me.

"I'm going to unzip my pants because they're too tight," he told me.

This was something new. I'd had a very small amount of little-boy lookie-feelie contact when I was younger, but I didn't know whether Craig was leading up to something like that or was just giving me advance notice that he would be pulling down his zipper.

Craig got back into his seat, looked all around for any hint of danger, and opened his fly.

Then he just sat there, his pants gaping apart with a patch of white underwear visible. I kept an eye on him. Nothing happened for a little while. Then he began feeling around inside the zipper.

That went on for several minutes. He turned and gave me a look, sort of a wink plus a raised eyebrow. He reached into the open zipper, fumbled around quite a bit, and finally popped a pointed tent of white cloth into view. His little tent stuck up through his zipper, maybe only an inch or so, but very visible. All he was showing me was the straining cotton fabric of his underwear poking up, you understand, not the slightest peek at the dick that was inside that fabric.

He got my eye. "Whew, that's better," he said. From time to time he touched the white bump with his fingers. As we approached the end of the line he tucked his underwear back into his pants and closed the zipper.

Craig's little display of the point sticking up in his underwear began taking place nearly every day unless things didn't seem safe. We kept our eyes open. If there were too many kids nearby or if the airman was watching too closely Craig kept his zipper shut.

After a few days of manipulating his little white bump while I watched, he leaned over to me and said, "You better open your zipper too. We don't want your pants to get too tight."

Call it peer pressure, I guess. Craig pulled the tip of his white rod into view through his open zipper and stared at me to see if I would do the same. So I did it, feeling guilty as hell and yet also loving the forbidden danger of what I was doing.

My white lump seemed to be a trigger for Craig. He took a quick look around the bus. Holding a hand over the telltale white point sticking through his zipper, he hurried across the aisle and slid in next to me. I was feeling of myself, realizing that my thing was having one of its stiff spells.

Things escalated from there. We wiggled our white lumps at each other, snickering and giggling like mad. We had our heads together, looking at each other's rod-shaped lumps. We pulled the fabric tightly against our stiffies. We squeezed ourselves. I was loving this secret way to have fun.

But we were so focused on the white peaks poking out through our zippers that we failed to pay attention to what was going on around us.

I believe Craig and I were on the verge of doing the unthinkable - feeling the bump in the other guy's underwear instead of our own. But something interfered.

"Men!" barked a deep voice right in our ears.

Oh, shit! There stood the airman, imposing in his fatigues and boots and cap, staring down at Craig and me and the conspicuous white bumps poking out of our flies. He had come from the back of the bus and we'd never known it.

You never saw two zippers close so fast. I was unbelievably embarrassed. I could feel the redness spreading from my neck to the top of my head.

Not only embarrassed, but frightened. Craig and I were in very deep doo-doo for military dependents. A brief word from the airman to his CO would work its way up the command chain, and our dads would receive official incident reports that would circulate through the system and then go into their personnel files. I was in sheer panic. This was the thing every family dreaded - a kid getting their father in trouble.

The young airman stood staring down at us for what seemed to be an eternity. I couldn't bear to look at him. Eventually I had to raise my eyes so I could get a feeling for what was about to happen to me.

To my amazement, the dude had a funny grin on his face. He seemed to be trying not to laugh.

Finally he spoke, using a soft and pleasant voice completely unlike his first yell: "Not in public places, men. Save it for later. Understood?"

Craig and I must have given him wide eyes of disbelief that he wasn't shouting at us. "Yessir! Yessir! we agreed, using all the military etiquette our families had drilled into us. My dad was a master sergeant and far outranked this airman, but I wasn't about to split hairs. "Yessir, Yessir" both Craig and I kept repeating.

The airman turned and marched up the aisle. I was still jittery but when I got off the bus he nodded pleasantly at me. I never heard a word about my indiscretion with Craig, and I've felt indebted to that young airman ever since.

I was scared to hang out with Craig after that. It wasn't until two or three years later, when I ran into an old friend named Connor, (see Best Friends, posted on Aug. 17, 2013)  that I discovered the delight of an intimate friendship.

 

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