by Allen Bare
He looked at his watch. "But come with me. I have something to show you." He led me through a door at the back of his office into a narrow hallway. "Fred Mudge has been carrying out the duties of the Dean of Students since poor Harvey Jordan's stroke earlier this year. He has a student in with him now." The old man opened a large closet and beckoned me inside. He pointed to a little door, about nine inches square, on the back wall of the paneled closet. It was about five feet from the floor." First I'm going to turn the lights out," he said softly, "Then I'm going to open this little door. Look through, but be quiet."
A dim light came through the door when it was opened. Leaning down, I saw that I was looking through a peephole about three inches in diameter into a large room below. Like all the rooms I'd seen so far in the administration building, it was paneled in dark wood. There was a massive desk, some bookshelves, a couple of comfortable chairs, and a fireplace. I paid no attention to any of this, however. What riveted my interest was the scene directly below and opposite the peephole. On a leather-padded bench sat the venerable dean, with a large wooden paddle gripped firmly in his hand. He was busily applying this to the bare, squirming bottom of a young woman who lay stretched across his knees, twitching and squawking every time the paddle came down. I could hear clearly the loud splat! Every time the hard wood of the paddle made contact with tender, wincing flesh. Though the girl's backside was thoroughly reddened, the dean kept right on paddling, until she kicked both heels in the air and screeched. I watched, hypnotized, as the dean delivered his final volley of spanks, and the weeping victim was allowed to pull up her panties and depart.
The president closed the peephole door and led me back to his office. "There, you see how it's done," he said. "Do you think you could handle the job?" All sorts of thoughts were spinning through my head, many of which I would have admitted to no one. Thoroughly uncertain of my motivation, I swallowed twice and nodded.
"Good. Now, one more thing. You may be wondering about that peephole. We don't make a practice here at Emberley of spying on one another, or even on the students, but the position of Dean of Students bears a heavy responsibility. We can't ignore the plain fact that punishments like the one you just saw can be sexually stimulating. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you keep it to yourself and never, by the least word or deed, acknowledge it in the presence of a student. When one punishes a student, one does so as a parent would-as their parents should have done, long ago-and one keeps the contact absolutely asexual. The slightest deviation from this policy is grounds for immediate dismissal. I'm sure you can understand that."
"Yes, of course."
"Needless to say, we've never considered hiring an extremely young man for this position. But you're past the age of discretion. We know that we can expect you to be mature, professional, and tactful. The peephole, however, is there to help keep you honest. It's been there since the school was built, and it's helped to keep every Dean of Students for the last 85 years honest. We've never had a scandal of that sort. From down there in the office, you can't tell whether someone is looking, even if you know where the peephole is. You may find the idea demeaning, but when you consider the temptations, you may come to think of it more as a blessing than a curse."
I pondered some about that. "Okay, yes, I see what you mean. But why is there a peephole in Dean Mudge's office?"
The old man laughed. "Oh, that isn't his office. That's yours. All punishments take place in the Dean of Students' office."
"That's my office?" I mentally reviewed the sight, this time passing over the bouncing pink hindquarters and concentrating on the paneling, the furniture, the fireplace.
He nodded.
"So, once again, where do I sign?"
"Right here, my boy. Welcome to Emberley."
During the hours I spent recrossing three time zones on my way back to Pennsylvania, I spent quite a lot of time reflecting on whether I was mad. With my solid if not stellar record in academic administration, I could, in time, have found a suitable position, one I could honestly describe to friends and colleagues. Instead, I had just hired myself out-under the disguise of a respectable administrative title-as chief bottom-swatter in a school for spoiled rich girls. On the pathway I had up to now been following toward my own rather modest idea of success, how could this be anything but a wrong turn?
Well, as I've suggested, I was growing a bit weary of that path anyway, a bit less certain that the kind of success I'd been pursuing was what I wanted. Besides, it would be disingenuous to pretend that the corporal punishment of nubile young ladies was an entirely new blip on my personal radar. As the plane droned eastward across the darkening continent, certain scenes replayed themselves in my mind . . . .
The summer after my second year in college. Because I've just started an early-shift summer job, I go to bed at ten and toss about uncomfortably trying to get to sleep. This is made difficult by a family argument in loud French, coming from the house next door, which has been bought during my absence at school by a new family just down from a farm in remote northern Quebec. The voices are female-accusatory on the adult side, defensive on the teenage side. The first voice grows more and more angry, the second more and more fearful until it is silenced with a loud and perfectly audible slap. The sound brings me to my feet. They sound so close-could they be arguing outdoors? In my drawn window shade is a small hole. Through it I can see the neighbors' house, which because of the slope of the ground is a half-story lower than ours. Mrs. Lamarche, a stout, vigorous woman, and her daughter Yvette, whose 16-year-old prettiness has already attracted my notice.
Unused to living in a town, they have left not only the shades but the window up. It's an adjustment we had had to make ourselves a few years earlier, when we moved from our own farm. I watch, spellbound, as Yvette, crying and pleading, goes to a drawer and takes out a stout leather strap, which she hands to her mother with evident reluctance. Even more reluctantly, in response to a command, she bends over, stretching her body across a bare table. "Enleve," I hear her mother say. Yvette pleads and whines, but the order is repeated sternly. My pulse pounds as she reaches back and pulls up the skirt of her light summer dress, exposing a plump bottom in pink panties. It takes two or three more commands, but eventually she pulls them down to her thighs, leaving the pale, round buttocks helplessly bare. And Mrs. Lamarche, standing well back, blessedly out of my line of sight, swings the strap with a sharp crack that makes the soft bottomflesh wobble and bounce. I count thirty hard strokes before I stop counting, preoccupied with my own tumescence. Yvette howls and hops, jumping and dancing and swinging her bottom back and forth as much as she dares, while the strap covers it with angry red stripes and patches. Her mother continues to scold angrily, until she's drowned out by the girl's agitated screeches.
Meanwhile, my parents and my grandmother sit in the living room downstairs, on the other side of the house, watching a TV turned up so loud (in deference to Grandma's hardness of hearing) that they're totally oblivious to what is going on next door. By the time poor Yvette is released from her torment, I'm in a torment of my own-but mine is easier and far more pleasant to relieve.
For the rest of that summer I keep the lights out and the shades drawn in my room as much as possible, and I never go to bed without checking for interesting developments chez Lamarche. I am rewarded only twice. I see Yvette get another strapping, this one in pantomime because the weather is drizzly and the window down, but I can easily supply from my memory the sound of the cries and pleas and shrill hoots I know she is uttering as the merciless leather reddens her pretty backside.
My last such vision is the crowning event of the summer. Not only is the window open, but this time the victim is Yvette's older sister Jeanne, a graceful young woman whose sophisticated taste in clothes belies her rustic origins. Her protests are quieter than her younger sister's, but they do no more good. With panting excitement, I watch Jeanne step out of her tailored skirt, bend over the table, raise her slip, and, finally
, yank a white girdle down to her stocking-tops. Her panties ride down with the girdle, and I watch Maman Lamarche strap the exposed flesh until both half-moons are wincing and writhing. When the strapping really begins to take effect, I am thrilled to hear Jeanne's 21-year-old voice raised in the same girlish shrieks I had heard from her sister.
Just as it's ending, I hear the sound of my mother coming upstairs, and I quickly get into bed (in a position chosen to hide my erection) and manage to calm my breath into a reasonable approximation of sleep by the time she eases the door open and looks in. She must have gone into the kitchen for something and heard the noises from next door. Naturally, she is curious about whether my sleep is being disturbed by the Lamarches' domestic turbulence. I am indeed disturbed, though not in the way she thinks. My mother, an only child, is remarkably naive regarding the sexuality of young males.
Apparently she finds some way of dropping a hint to Mrs. Lamarche, because for the rest of the summer I find the shades in that room pulled whenever I look, nor does any tantalizing sound escape from the firmly closed window.
Autumn of my second year in graduate school. I meet Nona at a party, get her phone number, and ask her out on a date. She seems shy and reticent at first, but after we leave the pizza joint, she becomes boisterous and frisky, challenging me to a race that soon becomes a game of tag-and when Nona is "it," she tags me quite firmly in rude places. I respond in kind, and soon I am chasing her wildly across the dark campus, dodging among trees and in and out of the pools of lamplight along the walks. Finally she runs into a pile of leaves raked up by the grounds crew and falls down. I leap down after her, almost but not quite landing on her, and we wrestle noisily in the dry leaves, whooping with laughter. Since Nona still seems inclined to roughhouse, I threaten her with a good spanking and begin trying to wrestle her across my knees. She fights hard, but with obvious excitement, and it takes a pretty good struggle to force her into face-down position. I lay a few good slaps on the tight, rounded seat of her jeans, hard enough to sting, delighted by the curved firmness I can feel underneath. Then I let her go, and we sit there, side by side, panting, unable to see each other's faces in the dark. Finally, I get up and offer her a hand. She takes it and keeps my hand squeezed tightly in hers as we walk together away from the scattered leaves.
After that we spend a great deal of time together, when we can spare it from our studies. We don't move in together-this is before 1965-but we often spend weekend nights together in my apartment. (Nona has her own apartment, too, but it comes with a roommate and a nosy, prudish landlady.) My place is over a garage, quite distant from the large house it belongs to, and it is the only apartment, so we have all the privacy we could desire. At some point during every one of our domestic evenings together, Nona is afflicted with an intense spell of brattiness, for which there is only one sure cure. I pursue her around the apartment, dodging the chairs and tables she thrusts in my path, until I have her cornered. I seize her by the wrist-or sometimes I heave her right over my shoulder-and drag or carry her to the sofa, where I flop down and haul her over my lap. Up goes her dress, or down go her jeans (although protesting continually, she is invariably helpful with the unbuttoning), and down come the black or brightly colored bikini panties she likes to wear, and I spend a moment surveying the smooth, compact softness of her hips and buttocks before I begin to spank. I always use my bare hand on her bare bottom-neither of us can imagine it any other way. With loud, fat, fleshy smacks, I print red hand marks all over that white, jiggling flesh, until a uniform rosy patch covers the roundest parts of both cheeks. Nona squirms and pants, and eventually utters little yelps that do not tell me to stop. So well are we attuned to each other that I can always gauge the perfect time to stop spanking, lift her up, and carry her to the bedroom, where in a frenzy I strip off her clothes and mine, and plunge deep into her eager body. Afterwards she lies face down on the bed, and I stroke her still-throbbing bottom. Nona has found a way to prop the hanging mirror over the dresser so that she can, at such times, observe the pinkness of her backside contrasting with the whiteness of my hand moving back and forth over it, cupped slightly to the curve of those lovely hillocks. She breathes an air of such contentment I can almost hear her purring.
It doesn't last. My program is a demanding one, and I need to spend every weeknight studying or fall dangerously behind. Nona, an art student, has more freedom to arrange her schedule. She wants to be with me more during the week, but I resist. For the first time, we have real arguments, and even though a couple of these are resolved in our favorite fashion, the issues remain between us, and the reconciliation is less than complete. Nona becomes angry, refuses one weekend to see me at all. Then, on Sunday night, she appears at the door all tearful and repentant, leads me to the sofa, and places herself submissively over my knee, baring her own bottom for the spanking she says she deserves. Excited by the offer, I give her a truly hard one. She cries, but accepts it as her due.
For a while things look better, but soon we quarrel again. At the end of the semester, Nona, who has been neglecting her work, flunks out of the art program. There is a hysterical scene, in which she demands that I leave school and come to New York with her, and I protest that I can't do that-she knows I can't do that-and she throws a tantrum, calls me names, and stamps out of my apartment and my life forever. Several years later I hear that she is married to an architect in Connecticut.
About three months ago. Jody's suitcases and a pile of packed cartons are standing in the hallway of the little house we'd been renting together for more than eight years. Light patches on the wall and holes in the ranks of shelved books, records, tapes, and CDs show where the strands of her life have been, so far as possible, disentangled from mine. Upstairs, in the bedroom I've been using as a study, Jody stands in the doorway, looking in at me. Her expression betrays just the slightest trace of guilt, a politically incorrect emotion that causes her some discomfort, but which I feel is well-earned.
"You've just been so impassive," she says, referring to the three days since she gave me official notice of her intention to depart. "It isn't like you. We both know you can't say anything to change my mind-this is an action I absolutely must take. But if you have anything to say to me, I feel that, for the sake of ten years together, I at least owe it to you to listen." I look back at her, still not finding words. "Isn't there anything you want to say?"
"Shame," I finally say. "Shame on you, Jody Hoeckster."
She suppresses a flinch. "Is that all?"
"No!" I shout, jumping to my feet. "That is not all! I have one more thing to say!" And I jump out of my chair, take her around the waist, and hustle her into the bedroom.
"Jim! Don't!" she cries, perhaps fearing rape. But that isn't my agenda. I push her back onto the bed and with some difficulty unfasten and drag off the stupid bib overalls she has taken to wearing in solidarity with her sisters in the struggle. She seems too stunned to put up much resistance. Only when I roll her over my knee and strip down her underpants does she start to understand what is coming. She begins thrashing in earnest then, but I throw one leg over both of hers and easily hold her slender body in place. It's a body I've known and loved every bit of during a major part of my life, but right now I feel too much hurt and anger to think about that.
On the dresser, where I can just stretch to reach it, is a walnut clothes brush with flat, oblong shape and a good-sized handle. I reverse this and bring it down with a hard crack across Jody's up thrust bottom. She howls as the flesh bounces, and a little pink oblong patch springs up on the wiggling white surface. The cracks of the brush ring out like pistol shots as I keep them coming, putting plenty of wrist and even some shoulder into it. Jody yells and whimpers, bucks and twists, and tries to kick her imprisoned legs. I say nothing, just keep smacking away as pink and then red patches swarm all over her squirming buttocks, joining and blending into a dark, mottled mass.
"This is for throwing away nine good years," I bark, "and this is for screwin
g up my life, and this" (I raise the brush high and slam it hard against the under curve, bringing forth a shrill squeal) "is for deciding that 'political action' is more important than keeping your commitment to me."
Soon Jody is crying loudly, like a child, tears running down her face. Her bottom is nearly purple. When I'm satisfied that she won't be able to sit down for several days without a sharp reminder of my final "message," I toss down the brush. She lies draped across my knees, limp and blubbering.
"There," I tell her. "That's the last I have to say on the subject. Go now and do whatever it is you have to do."
Well, no, that last episode was only imagined. I didn't really do it, and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to. About 60% of me was aching to roast Jody's butt, but the other 40% couldn't forget the tenderness we'd shared for so long. I knew somewhere deep down that it takes more than one to damage a relationship-if Jody had chosen to get involved in politics and make a fool of herself, my involvement in my administrative career probably deserved a good deal of the blame. Thinking along these lines shifted the balance, until it was 60/40 the other way, and I was glad I hadn't really acted out that scene. Imagining it had given me great satisfaction, and that was enough.
By the time my connecting flight landed at Scranton, I had achieved a reasonable state of equilibrium. Mother Nature, it seemed, had intended me from the first to be a spanker of female bottoms. In taking the job at Emberley, I was doing no more than cooperating at last with my destiny.
Chapter Two
In August, I threw my bags in the trunk of my car and set off across the continent for Oregon. No disrespect to the grand and glorious commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but I felt no regret whatsoever at leaving Sandersville, which held far too many unhappy memories. I had managed to sell my house quickly, thanks to a good-sized severance check from Old Sandy. (The new president might be a rat, but he was rat who kept his promises.) Because of this, I didn't have to price the house high enough to recover my whole investment-doing so could have dragged the selling process out over a year or more, Sandersville not being one of the nation's hottest real estate markets.