King Dong.
While I was meditating, I was getting flashbacks to my youth. At school, there used to be a boy called Andrew Wiggins; he was known amongst us boys as the boy you don’t want to stand next to in the shower; Andrew was blessed (or cursed) with having the most significant ‘Willy’ of us all, it wasn’t just a bit bigger than ours, it was huge, in fact it looked a bit like some of those deep sea monsters you see on sea life documentaries appearing from under a rock on the bottom of the ocean.
We used to crack jokes, asking him what he fed the thing; we were in complete puberty and were amazed at anything and everything bodily; a girl in our class, for example, had six toes on one foot. Everyone wanted to date her just because of that one fact.
Andrew Wiggins was also very muscular, good at sports, and a lovely lad; he wasn’t a bully; if you had him as a friend, you were pretty much safe from the boneheaded bullies that hung around. His speciality in sport was the long jump. Word had gotten around about his huge Willy and the fact that he let it swing free while performing sport; he never wore underwear under the sports shorts, so many a time you would see him taking the run-up for the long jump with the Willy popping out from under the shorts as he ran. It was Comic and awe-inspiring. Wednesday afternoons, when we had sports class, girls -and some boys- would lie down on the grass next to the long jump, trying to get a glimpse of ‘King Dong’ as we called it.
I always wondered what Andrew thought of the whole thing; he was quiet whenever we made comments, never boasted, bragged or got on the macho bandwagon; he just smiled as if it was just his ‘cross’ he had to bear.
In the youth club we all visited on weekends, it was taken for granted that he was the guy to hang around with; his reputation had the girls flocking toward his ‘charisma’, so the thought was, if we hung around with him, we might get to hook up with some of the girls as a sort of second prize.
Yet he never took advantage of the opportunities that came his way; he was quiet, never danced, never flirted, and was almost embarrassed by the attention.
After I quit high school, I never saw him again and often wondered what had become of him; I always thought we had a unique band, even if it was just alphabetically when the teacher called the register each morning calling our names us answering ‘present!’ It was great for me when it got to the ‘W’ ’s the tension was palpable ‘Webb? Present! Wiggins? Present! (laughter and comments like ‘both of them’) then ‘Williams?’… and for that moment, I felt top of the bill… until some witty kid shouted, ‘That’s a long way down!’
