Read Online The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid; Andrew Tobias - Free Book Online

equally Victorian bits of time. But was I going to argue with prudish administrators?
    The people at Yale were genuinely considerate of freshman problems and offered counseling services of all kinds to make it easier to assume manhood, to conform to acceptable social standards. On an ad hoc basis, faculty members would also try to help. More than one would look at my cosmic depression expression (I thought it looked cosmic, anyway) and ask me what was troubling me. I remember being alone in the office of a young geology professor who radiated sympathy and understanding as he invited me to open up. He seemed to sense that I had never opened up to anyone; he wanted to help me break out of my shell. Go ahead, he said. He wouldn't be shocked.
    The last time someone had told me to go ahead and say the worst thing I could think of, I was eleven, just finishing elementary school, over at Wendy's house for a class party. We were playing a new game. Everyone was given a crayon and a scrap of paper. We had to think of the worst word we could and write it on the paper. Then we would fold the papers, hand them in, and Wendy would read a story—only the story had blanks in it, and every time she came to one, she would fill in the word from the next folded paper. Fun?
    No. Like all party games, it made me nervous. Just how bad a word were you supposed to use? I think someone asked that, or maybe several of us did: Wendy made it clear that we were really supposed to write a bad word. Well, my natural instinct was to write a word like "darn" or even "damn." That was about as bad as I could usually get. In fact, while "darn" was tolerated in our house, "damn" was not. But I was well aware that normal kids had vocabularies far filthier than that, and if the object of this crazy game was to be bad, I wanted to be bad with the best of them. I had been trained to win, after all. And there may have been a tinge of rebellion in what I wrote. As the papers were all anonymous, I could do just what they said, and write a really bad word.
    Wendy collected all the papers and started reading her story:
     
    Once upon a time there was a young prince named Arthur and a young princess named Guinevere. They lived in a... toilet, by a beautiful... ugly, on the other side of the hill from a... wart.
    One day, feeling kind of... backside, the prince and the princess called their... puke on the... devil, and said: "We are going out to take a....
     
    Wendy burst into tears and went running to her mother with what I could only assume was my word. In retrospect I have to congratulate myself not only for having written the worst word, but also for having written the only word that happened to fit the context of the story perfectly. But at the time, I was a nervous wreck. If I didn't look nervous, they wouldn't know it was me who wrote it, but I kept trembling anyway. (Of course, if Chip Morgan had written that word, he would have just sat there smirking mischievously or, if caught, would have taken his spanking and exile without even a gulp. In fact, if Chip had done it, then I would have wished I had.)
    But I had done the deed, and Wendy's mother, who had apparently not sanctioned the game to begin with, came running in to find out who had the red crayon. The red crayon! Of course! How could I be so dumb? How could I fall into their trap?
    Actually, there were several red crayons, so that, while guilt was clearly written in four letters over my face, a reasonable doubt had to remain in the mind of the jury, and they did not call the Supreme Court. But that was the last time I was going to fall for any of this "Go ahead, tell us your worst thoughts; we won't be shocked!" shit.
    I wanted to open up; I just couldn't risk it. In martyr-think, telling one solitary soul breaks the perfect record. If I was going to be lonely, then I was going to be the loneliest boy in the world. Tell one soul, and the shell is broken forever. No turning back. You have lost control of