Buggered Angel (Power, Passion and Submission) Two: You Can Call Me Powder

Two: You Can Call Me Powder

I have many names but you can call me Powder.

Before my first ejaculation, before I knew that my difference went so much deeper than what the other kids at school called moffie, faggot, queer; these same kids began to call me ‘Powder’. The cruellest of them called me ‘Powder Puff’.

In those post apartheid years in South Africa, when being black was truly beautiful and being darker skinned made you privileged, my nickname was not a compliment; it was an indictment of my white heritage; a condemnation

If it were not for a movie called ‘Powder’, this name might have caused me irreparable psychological damage. This movie saved my dignity, my self esteem and my pride. It told the story of an albino child whose mother died during childbirth and whose father rejected him, “This is not my son.” He’s brought up by his grandparents who name him Powder. When they die he goes into the system and, having been protected all his life from the outside world, he learns how cruel the other kids can be and how difficult it is to be different.

In a storm the movie character Powder becomes a conductor of static electricity, a lightening rod. He has an IQ that is off the charts, he can make others feel the pain of a dying animal and he bends spoons and commands objects to fly with the power of his mind. He can see into the minds of others.

In a scene near the end of the film Powder stands in the doorway of the locker room and watches a boy wring out his wet T-shirt over his head. It is an intensely homoerotic moment and as I watched it unfold I felt an affinity with this screen namesake that went beyond our mutual admiration of the male body; our desire to be ‘normal’; to be tanned and handsome and attractive and desired. I understood Powder’s ability to know what others were thinking, to feel what others were feeling.

I identified with Powder’s intelligence and knew that this was, at best, a cruel blessing. I saw myself in Powder’s paleness and gentleness and humanity. For the first time I didn’t feel like an outsider or an alien and my difference was no longer a handicap; it was the badge of my uniqueness and proclaimed that I was special.

In that instant I owned the nickname Powder and no longer saw it as cruel and offensive. It seemed to sum up the accumulated experience of my short life; one moment I was there, a faintly scented dusting that filtered through other lives and the next I was blown away by a gentle breeze, leaving only a fading memory of my presence.

My first public erection took place on a bus. I was travelling to the library and had a pile of books on my lap. The bus was jolting when I felt that familiar stirring of what my parents called my ‘private parts’.

I had experienced erections before of course, so I knew what was about to happen but, being the silly faggot boy that I was, I was not wearing underwear. I was in big trouble. I pressed my books harder into my private parts but this only made matters worse.

The bus stopped and I stumbled down the isle trying to hide my boner from the eyes that I imagined were all trying to see it. I almost fell out of the bus and dropped my books in the gutter and as I bent to retrieve them my hard on sprang from my shorts with the life of a striking adder and said hello to a shocked old lady who was trying to board. Probably no one else saw it but in my mind everyone was pointing and sniggering and whispering, “What a bad, filthy, sinful boy.”

Inside the library I rushed to the public toilet and bolted myself inside a cubicle. I dropped my books onto the piss stained floor, pulled down my shorts and sat on the sticky toilet seat. I began to play with myself in the way that every boy has a built in instinct to do; an inborn knowledge; like the untaught nest building instinct of the weaver bird.

I was staring at the toilet door and the graffiti that crowded it and from the mass of words and images a crude picture of a boy being whipped sprang out and took me to a moment when I had become aroused during a beating from my father. He had caressed my erection with the cane and laughed at my groan of pleasure and shame. But he never touched me with his hands.

Through a hole in the toilet door a huge black, uncut cock appeared and the sight of this, the smell of piss and shit, the whipping picture, my father’s laughter, the feel of the cane cutting into my flesh – all of this – erupted in that length of muscle, nerves and flesh that I was so energetically pounding and I came, for the first time, in great waves of euphoria and relief and cried out so loudly that whoever that big black dick belonged to began to tap on the door and beg to be allowed to enter.

After the waves of pleasure had subsided the agony of guilt and fear entered and knocked at my heart and the voice of my father spoke in my mind’s ear like the voice of an avenging God: “Christ died for you on the cross.”


© Carlton Carr 2013
http://othervoices.blog.co.uk