By MFC
In junior high and high school I was a bully. That led to tickling. After you steal a guy’s shoes and he’s trying to get them back it always seemed right to knock him down, take his socks and tickle his feet. Even the people who usually stand up for the guy used to laugh and enjoy the show. I like the look on the guy’s face. This kind of anticipation, looking at you like he’s about to get force fed something he doesn’t like the taste of. But he’s going to finish every drop and say thank you because he has no choice.
Tickling a sleeping guy’s feet is good too. I did this a few weeks ago with my friend. My friend is scared of this one guy who works at my college. Don’t ask me why. I shouldn’t go into detail anyway. Maybe part of it is that this guy has the reputation of showing up at work insanely early sometimes, like Monday morning at 1:00 AM, and sometimes other days. Not that I was there to watch, but you hear stuff, and you wonder what the hell does the guy do and how does he do it. It’s weird like some kind of robot. I mean, I need eight hours of sleep.
So, me and my friend are up late cramming at the library. Sitting in the only area that hasn’t been locked up. Trying to rescue our grades. Not many other students are hanging around too–mainly people in tough science courses. It’s quiet and almost empty. Then the guy comes into the library all dressed up for work like its nine in the morning. You can hear him walking up the stairs to his office. You know how dress shoes make this clip-clip sound on hard floors.
So, my friend and I look at each other and wonder hey, let’s find out what this guy does. We hear the guy open a door upstairs. An alarm beeps. The guy goes in. You hear the alarm stop and the door shuts. We head upstairs look down the hall and try the door but it is locked. We’re standing there wondering what to do for maybe five minutes. All of a sudden another door opens up further down the hall and the guy comes out and goes across the hall into the Men’s room.
We hurry down to where that other door is, a back way out of the office. The door is almost closed. You know those automatic closers that don’t close doors tight enough. We go in. The lights are out all over the place. But the lights are on in one office. I guess it’s this guy’s office. The door’s open. We look in. There’s a cot set up in there. We don’t know what to think, but the guy is probably going to come back any minute. Unless he’s taking a shit. We move down the hall into more darkness, and duck into an open dark office. We hide behind a desk. A minute or two later we hear that door open and the guy come in. You can hear the bolt slide into place, locking that door. We look up over the desk into the dark hallway and see it get even darker. The guy is closing his door. We can hear it shut. We get up and look down the hall. His door is closed but we can see light coming out from under it.
We’re just staring at that door for a few minutes. Wondering what to do. Then light under the door goes out. It’s darker now and we’re wondering what to do. I look at my watch and it’s around five of one. We’ve both figured out that this guy is going to sleep or take a nap. So that’s how he gets to work so early. By not working.
We go back downstairs, but we unlock the door and jam a piece of paper into it to make sure it doesn’t lock. We pack up our books and swallow the rest of our sodas downstairs. I go outside to smoke a cigarette. My friend stands outside with me, but doesn’t smoke because its bad for you. Then we go inside and upstairs. We go into the office and close the door behind us. We take the paper out and lock the top bolt so its like we were never touched it.
I look at my watch again. It’s around one thirty. I pull my friends arm and motion him that we should sit down and wait for a few more minutes. We hang out in the dark for twenty minutes more. Then we start moving to the guy’s door. I feel bored, but it’s better than studying. This is a discovery mission. My friend is getting antsy and wants to leave. We move up to the guy’s office door, but my friend seems ready to bolt. I can tell. His body is moving closer to the door with me, but his head is pointing towards the way out. We get up close to the door. We hear this rumbling from inside. It’s snoring. We can tell. That calms my friend down. He was really afraid of that guy, but I can kind of tell that when he hears that snoring on the other side of the door that he’s not afraid of him now, and that he likes the feeling.
I try the doorknob trying to be really quiet. It is locked. Now I’m ready to quit. I don’t know how to unlock a door with no key. But my friend wants to get that door open now. He has his wallet out, and is pulling out credit cards, a Swiss army card and whatever else he has in his pockets that might help.
I step aside and sit down. My friend works away at the door for maybe ten minutes. But it seems like ten years. I’m getting up ready to give up and get up. Then he opens the door just a crack. Finally. He looks back at me. I can tell he is smiling even in the dark. I feel a wicked smile taking my face over too.
We open the door enough to crawl in and close it behind us. It’s not as dark in the office. Some outside light from streetlamps come in from under the Venetian blinds in the window so we can see better than we could in the windowless hallway. And there’s the guy lying on a fold out cot, fast asleep and snoring. Very comfy. He has one of those sleep masks on. His shoes and socks are off. From his ankles to his chest he’s covered himself with a little rug. Nice and warm.
So there is this head with a sleep mask on it about six feet away from us, snoring away. Then right in front of us there’s this pair of feet, pale slender, arches high but not too high. I live sorrounded by water. Grew up fishing and clamming, so let me describe it this way. Did you ever try to open a big live clam and the thing just doesn’t want to open? It stays shut. You pry and pry and get mad as hell. Then finally it gives way and you open it up. You see that naked flesh inside the shell and you say to the clam you bastard, you gave me a hard time and now you’re in for it.
I think that my friend and I felt the same way when we looked at the soles of this guy’s feet. Somebody had to pay for all the trouble we went through and it wasn’t us. We made it through door number one and door number two. We could of been studying. Finally we came to this pair of bare feet. It’s like they belonged to us now, not to him. We could have auctioned his feet off on eBay. The guy’s shoes were sitting empty on the floor along with a pair of socks.
We are kneeling down so that we can press ourselves all the way down onto the floor and hide if we have to. I am by the right foot. He is by the left foot. I reach for the rug with my right hand and pull down on it, not too hard but firmly. The guy doesn’t move. He keeps snoring. I let go and then show my friend what I did. Then we both pull down on the rug. I raise my other hand and dance my fingers around in front of my friend’s face. This shows him what we will do to the guy’s feet. Then I put my hand down in front of the sole and he puts his in front of the other sole. We start to tickle the soles of his feet light and quick. The guy’s feet are motionless for a second or two. Then his feet start to dance up and down really fast, like kicking, but only using the ankles so there’s not much power. Then I can start to feel that his legs are trying to pull his feet away. We hold his legs in place with the rug. Then we pull our tickling hands away and let his feet kick themselves calm. His feet are motionless except for little twitches that become less and less. Now he’s all limp and relaxed again.
Then we start again. This is fun. The soles of his feet right under the balls are really sensitive, and his toes are too. The second time, we tickle him until the snoring stops and his breathing is faster and lighter. Now he groans and giggles when we tickle his soles and toes. We lighten up because we don’t want to wake him up. We sit back to take a break and in about ten minutes he starts snoring again. Then we go back to our positions and tickle his feet again. We switch sides and I take his left foot because I am right handed. We tickled his feet like that five times till he stops snoring. Then we get ready to go. The guy slips into snoring again, so my friend pinches his feet and kind of slaps them around just a little. I guess he wants to get out his aggression against this guy.
I get an idea and take out my lighter. I hold it in front of my friend’s face. He takes it. I kneel down and gently wrap my hands around the guy’s ankles. They’re warm. It feels good holding onto a pair of ankles when your best friend is right next to you with a cigarette lighter. He lights it and moves it closer and closer to the guy’s toes. Then away. Then to the soles. I feel like a back seat driver who can’t say a word, but my friend is good and doesn’t bring the flame too close.
After that we really got ready to go this time. We made sure we didn’t leave anything behind. My friend started to pick up the guy’s loafers. I guess taking them would be the final humiliation. Taking that and the dress socks. Barefoot at the office. My friend put them down on second thought. Better that he left them. The guy will never know. I like that.
I went out the door with the double lock and my friend locked it behind me. Then I went round to the door of the office that was in plain view of people on the first floor. Nobody was around. So I wrapped on the door and he came out. We go out of the library into the cold air. The place is dead. We ride our bikes to the Seven Eleven to buy coffee. I get cigarettes too, and my friend buys a lighter.
Looking back I feel kind of bad. Like I didn’t do enough. I should have put some paper between the guy’s toes and lit it, or tied him to the cot. Maybe I’m losing my edge. But it’s hard to describe the feeling of sitting and tickling someone’s helpless feet and knowing they will never know about it. A really sweet feeling.