Bobby Coyle Part 1
Sixth grade was a great time for me. The new elementary school had opened, so I wasn’t having to start middle school that year. I was with a lot of my old friends, but they’d redrawn the attendance zones, so I met some new kids as well. The only real drawbacks were that my brother Matt lived in a different zone, so we no longer went to school together, and my best friend for the last two years, David Bartel, had moved.
The best thing about sixth grade was that a lot of kids were into comics at that time. Before, I’d always been a solo reader, and maybe a few kids new a little something about comics. That year, there were tons of comic readers - Andy and his little brother, John and David, Freddie and Ramon, Jamie Howell, Jimmy, Rudy, Scott and Blaise, Glen, Jerry, Ricky, and Jim Herr. Everyone knew I was into comics and was okay with it.
One of my older friends with whom I didn’t hang around that much anymore came up to me one day, maybe at the end of September of early October and told me there was a kid who had moved in just down the street over the summer. He was in fifth grade, his name was Bobby Coyle, and he was into comics. At recess that day, Jay introduced us, and Bobby and I became fast friends.
Bobby was an only child and seemed a bit shy. Even though we hit it off quickly, I think it was largely because of our shared love of comics. He didn’t talk much when Jay first introduced us, but we really opened up when I mentioned the Super Friends (we both agreed that the first season was horrible - and it would be more than another year before the really good ones with the Legion of Doom started, but at least it was super-heroes on TV).
I usually treated my friends differently than I treated my little brothers (of course, half of my little brothers were still wearing diapers at that point, and with Mike only 4, Matt was the only one of them with whom I could really roughhouse), but it felt natural to treat Bobby that way. He loved it. In those days, father’s tended to not be very demonstrative, and, since he was an only child, he seemed starved for physical affection (for some reason, affection from mothers is gross and icky - probably because they have to act sweet about it, rather than rough, which is what boys are comfortable with). He loved to wrestle and I could tickle him until he turned purple and was about to wet his pants, and five minutes later, he’d start teasing me into doing it again.
Not that I minded. Bobby was one of the prettiest boys I’d ever known. He was a little too soft to really be called handsome, but he wasn’t effeminate, either. He was just pretty. He had light blond (not white, but yellowish) hair, that was a bit long (at a time when long hair was the norm) - I’d say it was usually hanging just over his collar. You knew he was a natural blond, because his eyebrows and lashes were just barely a shade darker than his hair - maybe just dark enough to be medium blond - but the eyebrows were so long and thick you had no problem seeing them (and I know at least two girls that were jealous of them). He had sweet baby blue eyes, cheeks that were round without being chubby; full, red lips, and a nose that was just a bit sharp. His skin was fair with no freckles or moles. I knew Bobby for years, and never got tired of looking at him.
Bobby’s mom was somewhat overprotective, so we usually went to his house. I’d often go to my house after school, churn out my chores real quick, then throw some comics in my backpack and head over to Bobby’s. We almost always ended up wrestling around for a while or reading, until the re-runs of Batman came on at 4:30 pm. When that was over, his mom started dinner and we went to his room to read quietly. Sometimes I’d stay at his house for dinner, in which case we’d watch Star Trek at 6pm. Otherwise, I’d leave a few minutes before 6pm.
One of the things I liked about Bobby was that he preferred DC Comics. Most of my friends were Marvel Zombies. Okay, I was as well; but, I secretly read Batman every once in a while, especially The Brave and the Bold, and I loved Justice League of America and Legion of Super-Heroes. He had a lot more of the DC comics than I did and we’d often read them and talk about them and who’d be great on the teams and stuff. He gave me an outlet that the rest of my friends didn’t.
It was one of those days. We weren’t doing anything special. I’d gone straight over there and we had around 45 minutes or so until Batman started. I’d grabbed some comics I’d not meant to, but Bobby had wanted to look at them. I was okay with that and dug into the new Superman comics.
A few minutes before 4:30, Mrs. Coyle came into Bobby’s bedroom. Bobby jumped so much that even I noticed it. I looked over at him and he was trying to hide the comic he’d been reading. That was the wrong move, since it just drew his mother’s attention to it.
"What are you reading, Robert?"
The boy went pale, and finally buckled under the pressure of her relentless gaze and handed the book to her.
"The Witching Hour? What do you think you’re doing, bringing something like this into my house, young man?"
"Mama, it’s not… I mean, I didn’t…I mean…"
"It’s mine, Mrs. Coyle. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to bring it."
I understood why Bobby had paled. When she turned her glare on me, I jumped myself. After a second, when I thought she was threatening to kill me, she relaxed a bit.
"Well, Jack, I don’t appreciate horror comics and if you want to keep coming over here, please don’t bring any more. On the other hand, even though you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to bring them, Bobby knew he wasn’t supposed to be reading them. "Didn’t you, son?"
"Mama…."
"DIDN’T YOU?" she said in a way that brooked no further disagreement - or plea.
"Yes, ma’am," He said dejectedly.
"Get your pants off," she told him.
"But, Mama…" He couldn’t finish it, but he looked at me.
"Mind me now, unless you want to wait for your father." She stared at him for a moment, until he started to unfasten his pants. I couldn’t help but stare - for all the wrestling we’d done, I’d never seen him undressed. Like many boys, he lifted his shirt by tucking the hem up under his chin. As he unbuttoned his jeans, Mrs. Coyle finally turned back to me.
"Jack, you need to go home. I don’t think that Bobby’s going to feel like having company this evening."
"Yes, ma’am, can I get my comics?"
"Go ahead." And she turned back to Bobby. "Don’t stop, mister."
Slowly and reluctantly, he slid the jeans down his legs, exposing his snow white, moderately snug jockey shorts. He was blushing a deep red and I was trying to pick up my comics and not stare at him. We were already barefoot, so it wasn’t hard for him to take the jeans off.
"And your panties, Bobby."
"Mama, please!" I had to wonder if he was so upset at being told to take them off, or at having his jockeys called 'panties' in front of a friend.
As his mother turned back to me, I shoved some comics in my bag.
"What’s taking you so long, Jack?"
"They’re mixed up. I don’t want to take any of Bobby’s."
She relaxed again. "Go ahead and take them all, and you can bring his back tomorrow. I’m sure he’d rather do that than have you stay around any longer."
I grabbed them all and went to the door. As I stepped out, I heard her saying, "All right, hand me your panties right now or your father will have something to say to you."
I turned to pull the door partially shut behind me as I stepped into the hall, and was rewarded with the sight of Bobby sliding his briefs down past his knees. Since he was facing the door, but bent at the waist, I couldn’t see anything.
I was so hard it hurt, and I was surprised Mrs. Coyle hadn’t seen ‘the rise in my Levis’. I reluctantly headed towards the front door. The last thing I heard, as I turned away from the door was Mrs. Coyle saying, ‘fetch me the spanker’.
I walked slowly to the door, watching behind me for Bobby to come out, showing his bare bottom, but he never left his room. Then I tried to imagine what the spanker was and where it might be kept. The door was open, and their screen door was unlocked. I could only imagine what was going on as I heard Mrs. Coyle’s distant voice raised in ‘Now!’. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I placed my bag down on the floor and crept back to stand outside the door to Bobby’s room.
When I got close enough to hear again, Mrs. Coyle was plainly at the end of a lecture. "Who makes the rules in this house, Robert?"
"You do, Mama." Bobby’s voice sounded a little strange, strained and out of breath, then a sudden WHACK, let me understand why. There was no mistaking the sound of wood impacting against bare skin and I heard a low yelp escaped from my friend.
"Please, Mama, I won’t do it again. I promise I didn’t ask him to bring them."
WHACK! The sound echoed out into the hall followed quickly by a louder yelp.
"I don’t care, mister. You know you’re not supposed to be reading those horror comics. I’ve told you that, but you seem to think you can do what you want. Well, if you don’t do what I tell you," WHACK! "you’re going to suffer the consequences."
"Oww, Mama! I won’t read them anymore. I promise."
"You shouldn’t have read them in the first place." WHACK! "And you’re going to learn to follow the rules."
"I have, Mama. I learned. Please stop, I’ve learned." Sobs and tears were plain in his voice.
Oh no, mister. We’re not half-finished yet."
The whacks so far had been slow and steady, but suddenly they exploded like a drum solo. His occasional yelps and quiet sobs erupted into screams as the wood smacked again and again. I wish I’d dared to peek inside and see what she was doing, how she was smacking that bottom, and how red it was turning. He was loud, but was he holding still or fighting to escape her lap? Did he kick and try to cover? Was she spanking just his bottom or his legs, too? I’d not seen many spankings, but NOT seeing this one was horrible and wonderful - in some ways it wasn’t as good as seeing one, but in others, my imagination was filling things in as I wanted.
Then the swats started to slow and I realized what would probably happen if I was found standing there. Not just the probable spanking I’d get, but how Bobby would feel. Now that it was almost over and my big head was doing the thinking, it finally occured to me that it was a good friend that this was happening to, and I felt a little bad about it. That didn’t make my erection go away, but it did lead me to sneak back down the hall, followed by the sound of Bobby’s choking cries and a few last swats of that paddle, slow and distinct as they’d been to start.
I think there were four blocks between Bobby’s house and mine. By the time I got home, my erection had faded, but the tension hadn’t. I went into my room and lay on the bed, dreaming about Bobby in his briefs, about the spanker, about having been able to watch him getting it. All that tension and no way to relive it - I guess I finally passed out, because Mom had to wake me up for dinner.
I don’t think it was that Friday, but one soon after that I spent the night at Bobby’s place. I knew how embarrassing it could be for a kid to get spanked, so I tried not to bug him about it, but I also couldn’t help but probe for details. That Friday night, though, it was eating me up and I just couldn’t control myself.
It was warm, as Texas often is in early to mid fall. We were lying on his double bed in just lightweight pajama bottoms. As I said before, Bobby appreciated physical contact. We were reading comics and talking about it (we’d both bought copies of the new Justice League Comic and were trying to make up new members for the Teen Titans). I was laying crooked across the bed with my head on a pillow, and Bobby was laying with his head on my chest. We’d just finished a lengthy discussion into a junior sidekick for the Red Tornado (a girl called the Pink Tornado was the best we could come up with - however, a young girl called Cyclone is now a member of the Justice Society, so we must have been on the right track), when I took the plunge.
"What’s the spanker?"
I had a comic in front of my face as I said it, but I could feel Bobby shift around, and I dropped the book. He had turned to look at me. His normally pale complexion had gone a light pink. After a moment, he answered.
"It’s what Mom spanks me with - a paddle, I guess."
"Where is it?"
He rolled over to face me before saying anything else, then just stared for a minute, like he was trying to figure out why I was asking.
"It’s in my dresser," he finally responded.
I put the comic aside and reached my left hand to rest in his hair. "Could I see it?"
Another moments thought, then I could feel him shrug against my side. "I guess."
We both got up and walked over to his dresser. It was a standard kid’s dresser, maybe four feet wide. I knew the middle drawer held his pajamas and some play shorts. He pulled open the top drawer. To the right was a small stack of white undershirts, in the middle were balls of socks, and on the left was a neat pile of briefs with what had to be the spanker lying on top.
The spanker wasn’t real big. I’d guess it was just over a foot long, with about four inches of that being the handle. Past the handle, the blade was something between a rounded rectangle and an elongated oval with a flattened top, but probably not more than three or 3 ½ inches wide in the center. It was lean, maybe a quarter inch, but it seemed sturdy and had a good heft to it, so maybe it was made of hard wood. The edges were rounded and one side had Proverbs ‘23:13-14’ printed on it (if you don’t know, that says ‘Withhold not correction from a child. If you beat him with a rod, he will not die; but you will deliver his soul from evil." or something to that effect, depending upon the translation) and below that, ‘presented by the Baptist Parents Conference to the parents of Robert Dwayne Coyle on 25 June, 1975’. His name and the date had been filled-in in ink and in a rather childish hand. The back of it was neatly printed, in red paint, ‘When buns burn, boys learn.’ and had a number of dates written in after it. As a matter of fact, there were nearly 70 dates written on the back of it - according to Bobby, it was one for each time he’d been paddled with it, including at least two times the same date was repeated.
I was staring at it, enrapt, trying to imagine how red it had turned Bobby’s butt and how he looked, bare bottomed and over his mom’s lap, when I was dragged back to reality.
"Do you think they’ll ever give Green Lantern a sidekick?"
Taking the hint, which wasn’t hard after a quick look at Bobby’s face revealed how uncomfortable he was with me looking at that little paddle, I dropped it back on top of his undies and let him push the drawer shut, then we returned to the bed and began an in-depth discussion of whether alien members of the Green Lantern Corps could be considered the Earth Green Lantern’s sidekick.
And before you send letters asking, I never did get to see Bobby’s mom spank him. That doesn’t mean I don’t have more stories about him, though!