The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking-off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbe­cile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he’d just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.

Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.

Peter hadn’t lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn’t know, since Onan hadn’t masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique. Pulling out in time.

Some of his junior high school acquaintances-the “racy” ones-bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.

Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman’s legs disappear. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn’t say a thing about it to Bob until after they’d gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.

Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He’d been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The “proper” reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.

47

That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they’d been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn’t have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn’t be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.

Which was a curious attitude. If you didn’t believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn’t recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they’d moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They’d been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.