My mom died of cancer when i was seven years old. My memories of her are of her being sick and getting progressively sicker. She was only 35 years old when she passed away. After she died, my father went into a long deep funk. He was not very talkative, but after her death he became morose. His darkness continued over the ensuing years. He went to work and would come home and often spend the evening staring blankly into space. I would go to school and come home to a home that was empty and cold. I was a latch key kid. I and few friends. I would send the afternoons and early evenings reading. We would eat carry-out meals, burgers or fried chicken, pizza or Chinese. On the weekends sometimes my father would grill steaks but usually we would eat carry-out even on the weekends.

For the first several years after my mother's death, my father did not date. When I was 12 years old, he began seeing a woman whom he'd met at his work. Her name was Natalie. She was an attractive woman, a few years older than my father. She was quiet, or at least she was quiet around me while they were dating. There was something about her that I didn't like, but could never put my finger on it. Soon, my father told me that he was going to marry Natalie and that she would come to live with us and that she would be my mother. The idea that she could ever be my mother was appalling to me. It felt like a betrayal to the woman than bore me, the woman who had shown me so much love as a child. The woman who died so very young. The woman whose smile I could never forget.

After a brief honeymoon, Natalie moved into our home, and it was not long before I realized how much she hated me. She was constantly on my case. Nothing I ever did was right in her eyes. She would mete out punishment for slights real and imagined by pulling down my trousers and spanking me bare-assed with her hand, slapping my bottom until it reddened and stung. To say that I found these spankings embarrassing is an understatement. I was, after all, 12 years old and in the midst of the beginnings of puberty. One afternoon, as she was spanking me, my penis became erect between her thighs and the more she slapped my butt, the harder it became, until finally i felt a tremendous release and shot a thin, milky fluid between her thighs. She became enraged, pulling me up by hair until it felt like i was being scalped. "You lousy little perverted bastard! You came on my legs!" I didn't know much about sex, had no idea what had just happened, but I knew i was in deep trouble. I was standing there before her, my trousers and briefs bunched up at my ankles, my cock still standing at attention, still dripping cum, as she slapped me across the face. I began crying, but wasn't sure if it was the pain from getting slapped, or the mortification at what had just happened.

She threatened to tell my father, and I begged her not to. She pulled me by my hair into the bathroom and began rummaging around in the medicine chest with her one free hand. She grabbed a green plastic bottle of Mentholatum, a mentholated salve my father used to rub on his back, let loose my hair for long enough to open the metal cap and dig her fingers into the yellow ointment and then began slathering it on my penis and testicles. Within moments there was a terrible burning sensation spreading across my groin as it if were on fire. "Everyday, you little pervert, everyday you come home from school you will strip bare-ass and I will make sure your thing never cums again." I didn't know what to make of this, but in the succeeding days, she variously slathered my cock and balls with a variety of burning salves or lotions, including Vicks, Ben Gay, and something called Heet, which burned like molten fire, Sometimes, she would have me drop my drawers to see how nice and red my penis had gotten, inflamed by the salve. But she didn't tell my father, and I was willing to put up with the pain and the outrageous shame of it all as long as my father continued to be blissfully ignorant of what I had done.

Over the next several months, my penis grew thicker and longer. My balls became larger and hung lower in the sac, and my groin became increasingly hairy. There were times when notwithstanding the burning pain that she inflicted on me by slathering her hellish salves and lotions on my cock and balls, that I would cum as she worked the salve into my cock by pulling up and down on the shaft, and every time this happened, Natalie would redouble her efforts.

One day, as she had me naked in front of her, her hands working the fire into my cock and balls, the front door opened. It was my father who had come home from work early. He stopped in his tracks, the front door still wide open. He bellowed, "What the fuck is going on in here?" Natalie's hands froze, one on the shaft of my bobbing cock, and one holding my balls, heavy with cum. I had never seen her afraid before but now there was a look of pure terror in her eyes. "How long has this been going on?" he roared. Natalie stammered, but I piped in, ever since the first month you let her into our home, Dad."

I had never seen the old man move like that, but he took two huge steps and was on her, slapping her face and throwing her to the floor. "You've been smearing this shit all over my son's privates? What the fuck is wrong with you, bitch?" Natalie tried to justify what she had done, but that only brought a barrage of slaps which shut her up.He looked back at me and said, "Son, go wash this crap off and get dressed." I ran upstairs and took a long warm shower carefully lathering my cock and balls with soapy suds and washing the burning salve off me. My cock and balls were a bright red and still burned but it felt somewhat better. By the time I got back downstairs, Natalie was gone. I never saw her again and her name was never mentioned by my father.

Soon it was as it had been before, a sepulcher of solitude. My father never dated again. I didn't date until I got into college. The first few times that I tried to have sex with a girl, I would that I would lose my erection soon after penetrating them. I didn't know what was wrong. I saw a doctor at the college clinic, and he said that everything was in order physically and he urged me to see a therapist, as my problem seemed to be psychological in origin. I had a few sessions with a female therapist and she asked me whether I maintained my erection when i masturbated. I sheepishly admitted to her that I didn't masturbate, which caused her left eyebrow to riae up questioningly. "You don't masturbate? Never?" I told her, no, I did not. She instructed me to go home and masturbate and see if I maintained my erection through to orgasm. I went home, and no matter how long I masturbated, I found that I would initially get hard and then my cock would lose its hardness and become flaccid. The next session, I advised the therapist of my failed attempts to masturbate to completion. She asked me whether I had ever been m****ted, and slowly she got me to tell her the whole story. She asked me to again try to masturbate, but this time, to slather some mentholated salve on my penis. Sure enough, with my cock covered in Mentholatum and burning, my cock stayed hard until i exploded in a powerful orgasm.

When at the next session, I told the therapist that slathered in the burning salve, I had no trouble maintaining my erection to orgasm, she advised me that Natalie's actions had caused my brain to equate sex with the shameful masturbatory applications of the salves and lotions and that we would have to work on separating my sense of sexuality from those acts. Over the years, I have managed to have normal sexual relationships with women, but every now and then I come up flaccid, and when I do, I know that relief, is locked in a little green plastic bottle in my medicine cabinet.