Free Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation by Dave Hill

bunch of young men coming to terms with an influx of testosterone tend to go, all three of us freshmen on the team were on the receiving end of a healthy share of abuse. And given my oddball status, I usually got it the worst. On more than one occasion, I’d close my eyes to rinse the shampoo out of my hair in the shower after practice only to notice a stream of warm water hitting me from somewhere other than the showerhead I was standing under. I’d open my eyes to discover one of my upperclassmen teammates urinating on me with a big smile on his face. I’d usually jump out of the way and punch him in the arm, sending myself bouncing off him and skidding across the shower room floor in the process. Since I was barely a hundred pounds, my punches were mostly symbolic gestures causing no actual pain to the recipient. But I felt it was important to send a message loud and clear that while I might very well tolerate being urinated on by just about anyone who tried, I didn’t have to like it. It felt like the least I could do.
    “Ha ha, Hill!” one of the other guys in the shower at the time would howl. “You got pissed on!”
    Since he was merely stating facts, I rarely had a comeback.
    In addition to the urinating, there was also a fair amount of towel snapping and other standard locker-room shenanigans. Occasionally, an upperclassman would use a freshman’s towel to wipe his ass and then leave it on the towel rack in hopes that the freshman would dry himself off before discovering it (and now he) was covered in shit. Somehow I escaped ever having that bit of nastiness pulled on me, but I saw it happen to other guys. At the time it all seemed just really mean and gross, but looking back on it, it was also more than a little bit homoerotic. I guess I’m just lucky no one tried to make out with me or anything.
    While it was practically raining men most days in the locker room, things were balanced out a bit by the drives home from practice on days we didn’t have school afterward. I carpooled with a few of the upperclassmen and they would regularly threaten to drag me into strip joints or try to get me to proposition a hooker as we drove through Cleveland’s seedier neighborhoods on our way back to the relatively whore-free suburbs. I was still a few years away from recognizing the entertainment value in that sort of thing, so I was terrified.
    “What about her?” one of the guys would say, waving at a hooker as we rolled up to a red light. “Would you do it with her?”
    “Please don’t come over to the car, please don’t come over to the car,” I’d think to myself over and over as I prayed for the light to turn green before some woman wearing just a trench coat and underwear walked over to the passenger seat window.
    “How much pussy do you get, Hill?” was another question I often fielded in the locker room.
    “Um, what?” I’d reply. I knew there were probably other guys my age somewhere on the planet with active sex lives, but I was fourteen and still spent most of my weekends hanging out with my parents or watching a PG-13 movie in my friend Andrew’s basement. Besides my sisters, I didn’t really even know any girls. Eventually I realized the guys on my team were just messing with me, mostly just out of plain old teenage obligation, but at the time I was convinced I was a total weirdo for being a virgin who didn’t occasionally hit the local strip joint or chat up a hooker whenever the opportunity arose.
    I was never really bullied in elementary school, so I didn’t understand why I had suddenly become the target of nonstop abuse. “Have I been a total punching bag my whole life and these guys are just the first ones willing to point it out to me?” I wondered.
    But in spite of all the hazing and my teammates’ frequent suggestions that I spend my allowance on sex, I still loved playing hockey, so I just did my best to ignore all of it. And, as cliché as it sounds, I knew that quitting would