Mark Ledger

I’m not sure if I explained this to the full forum or not, so I’ll give a brief recap here.

In about 1996, there was a fire in my home. We caught it quickly, and there wasn’t a lot of damage, but it happened to be in the wall of my office and destroyed the cabinet with my collection of spanko-porn, implements, and related memorabilia. Just about everything in the bookshelf next to that cabinet was also ruined, though most of that was due to smoke and fire damage.

Among the things I lost were my school annuals.

For a long time that didn’t bother me. I had some family pictures. I had my friends. High school was long behind me (and middle school even further), so I saw no reason to worry about them. Besides, who’d think school yearbooks were replaceable?

Time passes.

I began thinking about developing Bransom, TX into a site, blog, and chat room. I start writing a few stories. High school is not a time when a lot of kids get a lot of spankings, and those that do receive parental CP are somewhat reluctant to mention it. That’s not to say there was no activity in those years, but even I was briefly more interested in sex than spanking (well, would you believe as interested?).

I’m pretty sure I didn’t forget any major events in my life, but what about all those minor events? What about dates I couldn’t quite get right? Which one of those guys was on the tennis team? A lot of it didn’t really matter, and I can and did make up some of the details if I needed them for a story.

Would you believe you can buy yearbooks online? Sometimes they show up on eBay for one thing. Upon receiving a copy of my junior yearbook, I eagerly sat down to look through it.

Mark Ledger.

Not a name that rang a bell with me, but the picture… Why did the face shot of this kid bring a much more specific (and hotter) picture to my mind? I am sure that I never spanked nor had sex with this kid, so why does this one picture keep recurring to me? If he was a freshman my junior year, I would have had little or no interaction with him in high school, and we wouldn’t have even been in middle school at the same time. Who the heck is he?

I couldn’t figure it out and finally put the book down.

The next morning, looking through it again, I happened to see a picture of another freshman, a picture I did recognize, and this time it all fell into place.

I’d known Mark’s family at Church. I guess that’s no big surprise, but I’m not sure why it took so long to occur to me. As soon as I realized that, I also remembered Mark’s dad coming up to me with Mark in tow, explaining that Mark was having trouble with algebra and that I’d been referred as a possible tutor.

I didn’t know Mark well, but it wasn’t a hard decision to make. I even tried to refuse pay, but we finally negotiated twenty dollars a week to cover my gas. In return, I’d give Mark a ride home on those days when I was tutoring him. Seemed fair to me (especially since, in 1981, $20 would fill my tank twice with money left over).

I would have done it anyway, though. Mark was a nice kid – reasonably polite and fairly quiet. He had thick, dark brown hair and light blue eyes. The only thing that kept him from being really handsome was that his nose was too wide –well, that and there was something about the shape of his eyes that made him always look as though he’d just had a shock. Still, he was nice looking.

Mark played football and baseball in middle school and his freshman year. Like many football players, he decided he just wasn’t big enough to keep it up after that, but he stayed with baseball all through high school from what I remember. Whether that’s accurate or not, he had a tight, lean build his freshman year. And while fourteen is at an age where ‘average’ is a somewhat meaningless term, I seem to remember Mark being several inches shorter than me, but not tiny… maybe 5’5" or 6".

‘But what about that one shocking picture I remember of Mark?’ you may ask.

I think it was late January when it happened. I’d had a club meeting after school, which interested Mark absolutely not at all, so he’d walked over to the convenience store to get a soda. On his way back, innocently sipping his Big Gulp, some friendly, careful, caring person drove through a huge roadside puddle, leaving Mark soaked from the hips down, and splattered above that (as well as with mud on his straw).

After the club meeting ended, I found him waiting outside the building door. We walked home, with me making appropriately outraged sounds (the same thing had happened to me more than once over the years).

Mark had a test coming up, which was the reason we were studying that afternoon, but now he was damp, cold, and dirty. We went to his room, and I tried not to watch too avidly as he stripped down, grabbed some clean shorts, and went to the shower.

While he was gone, I checked over his homework to see what problem he was still having. It didn’t take long, so I grabbed the novel I was reading at the time, kicked off my topsiders, and stretched out on his bed to read.

I’d finished a few pages when Mark walked back into the room. He was mostly dry, but his skin was still flushed. He was wearing nothing but a pair of jockey shorts (Jockey genuine Y-front actually), and seemed perfectly comfortable being dressed that way with me stretched out on his bed.

Let me remind you that in those days, guys tended to wear their hair long. Mark’s wasn’t bad for the time, but it was thick, collar length in back, and covered about half his ears. The first thing he did was to pick up a hairbrush, turn to face the mirror, and work his (now clean) hair back into place.

By the way, facing the mirror meant turning his back on me.

I put my book aside and sat up to enjoy the view of a cute, well built boy, dressed in nothing but white briefs. I even put my hands behind my head and was thinking about making a comment of some type when my hands brushed something. I started to push it aside, but then my hands overrode my eyes with an emergency alert.

I turned to look at the paddle that was lying atop Mark’s headboard.

"What’s this?" I asked, picking it up.

Mark turned to look, saw what I was holding, and blushed.

"How’d you find that?" he asked suspiciously.

He ignored my question entirely, which was fair, since it had been rhetorical.

"It was right here," I answered, pointing to where I’d found it.

"Oh," he said after a second. "I guess I took it out of the drawer last night…"

His voice trailed off.

The paddle in question was a novelty paddle, but not one I remember seeing before. While I’d seen novelty paddles that were more like school paddles, most novelty paddles with which I was familiar, the type they usually sold at roadside stores and souvenir shops, were about fifteen inches long, not quite three inches wide, and barely one-quarter inch thick. This one was much bigger. While it looked the same (‘Board of Education’ was plastered across it, with a picture of a boy being dragged by the ear to a barn, with ‘Practical Psychology’ right below that), it was about eighteen inches long, slightly more than three inches wide, and maybe a bit thicker.

"Aha," I said to him. "You took it out of the drawer. It’s not there because Dad was using it?" I finished, making the statement half a question.

"No," he protested. "I haven’t been paddled in… in a while."

I learned a long time ago that people don’t like silence. They feel a need to fill it. It can often be more effective than pointed questions.

Mark had turned back to the mirror and finished brushing his hair, but then he turned back to face me.

"I really didn’t get paddled last night. The paddle goes in my junk drawer, there," he said, nodding to the headboard. "I was just looking for a new excto blade…" he added, pointing to a model that sat on his desk.

It was a nice headboard, with a bookcase area, a couple of shelves, and a drawer on each side.

"The last time I got the paddle was over Christmas break. Me and Matt," he said, referring to his little brother, "were wrestling around in the living room after Mom told us to stop. We knocked some stuff over, and this Christmas decoration light broke, and Dad busted both of us for not minding."

It’s funny, because he seemed almost relieved to admit it. I’m not even sure I can think why, unless he thought telling me about it would make me believe he hadn’t gotten it the night before.

He did look a bit embarrassed by it, though.

"No big deal, man. I was older than you the last time I got it."

"Really?"

"And truly. Summer after my freshman year."

He looked at me, both relieved and a bit amused.

"How do ya use something like this one anyway?"

"Kinda like at school."

"This thing? Can you even feel that?"

He looked offended now.

"You ever get it at school?"

"Yeah, and the paddles were bigger than this when I was in fourth grade."

"Yeah, but they ever make you drop your jeans?"

"You get it bare?"

"No," he replied quickly, blushing a bit. Then, more hesitantly, he added, "On my shorts."

"Yeah, I guess that’d burn some."

"Yeah, and Dad gives me a lot more than two or three swats."

"Okay, that’d be pretty bad."

I hesitated, but the conversation was moving, so I decided to plunge ahead.

"You gotta grab your ankles or something?"

"Nah, I gotta bend over this and grab the sides," he said, nodding towards the dresser behind him.

"Looking at the mirror? That’s gotta suck."

He snorted.

"You think I ever look up?"

He paused a second. I couldn’t believe he was talking about it like this, especially not in just his briefs. I’d already had to cross my legs so my hard-on wasn’t too obvious, but he hadn’t even noticed, so I was more than willing to keep going. What surprised me was that I didn’t have to keep it going.

"You know what the worst thing is?"

I shook my head.

He made a ‘throw that here’ gesture, so I tossed him the paddle.

And there’s the picture in my mind. A boy whom I knew I’d never spanked or had sex with, yet he was standing in front of me, hairbrush in one hand, paddle in another, wearing nothing but briefs, his hair slightly damp, and his skin blushed with warmth.

It was a beautiful picture.

"The worst thing," he said as he laid the paddle behind him, "is the lecturing."

"Mark Jacob," Mark said, dropping his voice and puffing his chest. "If you expect me to treat you like a young man…"

He swung the paddle towards the dresser, then added a sound effect.

"Pow! … then you need to start acting like a young man."

Another swing, another pow.

"If you can’t behave yourself. Pow. If you’re going to roll around on the floor with your little brother, after you’ve been told to stop… Pow. If you can’t mind your mother… Pow. If you can’t show some responsibility… Pow. And maturity… Pow. And common sense… Pow. Then I’ll keep treating you like a little boy… Pow."

He took a breath and looked back at me.

"I guess it’s not really that bad. I can’t really keep track towards the end, but he never really gives me more than about my age. Maybe twenty or so. But it seems like he just keeps saying the same darned thing, over and over and over."

"And you really don’t have to laugh," he added caustically.

"I’m sorry, Mark," I assured him, trying not to laugh out loud. "It’s not you getting paddled – it’s just the way you imitate him."

"Oh…" he replied, seeming modified. "Sorry."

He tossed the paddle back to me and asked me to put it back in the junk drawer for him. While I was doing that, he spoke again.

"No," Mark said, looking thoughtful for a second. "You know what’s really the worst part?"

"Huh?"

"Darla don’t get spanked anymore."

Since Darla was in eighth grade and more than a year younger than him, I could understand him thinking that was the worst part. And since every boy I knew that had a sister agreed that spanking in general and parents in particular were always unfair towards the girl, I didn’t doubt his word at all.

"But Matt still gets it?"

"Yeah, he got it when I did last time, and he’s got it since then, but he’s barely twelve. He still gets it over Dad’s lap."

I wanted to push for details there, but I could already tell the conversation was winding down.

After giving me the paddle, Mark pulled a t-shirt and sweatpants from his dresser and pulled them on.

"So how’s the homework look?" he asked.



We never did get back on the subject of CP. I would have loved to talk to Matt about it, but I barely knew him to say hello and couldn’t think of a good way to bring it up.

I did tease Mark a bit from time to time after that, but only gently and in private. He took it affectionately, but if he ever got another paddling, he didn’t admit it to me.

What he did admit was that his sessions with the paddle were pretty rare by that time and that he often ended up grounded or with some kind of restriction instead. After that came out, it also came out that the reason Darla hadn’t had a spanking in a fairly long time, while her big brother had received one in the last month or so, had simply been because Darla rarely got in trouble, and when she did, she got grounded. Since it was the same type of thing that Mark got grounded for when he did it, it seemed like his parents were actually being pretty fair, and it was only his childish behavior that got him spanked, and her lack of it that kept his sister from it. Still, it’s so much easier just to say that girls get off easy.



I still see Mark from time to time. He doesn’t live in Bransom anymore, but his parents do, and he visits on or around most holidays. He has two sons now, and they’re both at the age where a visit to the comic store is one of their favorite treats. Since I don’t work in the store as much these days, he sometimes even calls me to let me know he’s coming so I can try to meet him and we can catch up.

Mark’s boys must be nine and eleven this year. Once, when they were younger, Mark mentioned to me that the paddles that had been used on him and Matt had both broken at some point and never been replaced. He said he wished he could find someplace like Stuckey’s to get new ones ‘for sentimental reasons, if nothing else’.

"That’s okay, though. You know those paddle ball paddles? I found one of those that’s a little bigger and thicker than normal, and it’s done a great job so far."



Don’t you love how these traditions are handed down from father to son?





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