Eclipse

It was an accident at first, but I guess a lot of things start off that way...

In the mid to late nineties the art of mooning had hit an all time inspirational low. Once a proud tradition established by men to elicit reactions of shock and revulsion, its excessive and repeated practice had led to a post-modern condition in which it had become essentially meaningless. Not only was it impossible to shock or repulse someone by mooning but by engaging in the activity at all during that time you were pronouncing yourself as being hopelessly dated; someone clinging to antiquated values and ideals.

In the bygone days where mooning was an effective tool of social subversion there were two main aspects of it that were meant to fuck you up:

1. the amount of hair on/in the ass and surrounding area

2. the fact that the person was bending over as they mooned you so as to deliberately spread their ass cheeks, possibly leading to an asshole flash.

In the lazy crawl of the late 90's a lot of college types had forgotten about 2. and had assumed that exposing your ass in any haphazard fashion qualified as mooning. This also contributed to the air of stagnation surrounding the medium.
There is a universe of difference between flashing ones ass and mooning however and if you plan on executing the latter, step 2. is requisite.

Sam never forgot to bend over when mooning. He was a slave to the art and more than anyone I knew back then he felt personally injured by the changing times, weighed down and alienated by the fact he could no longer moon and expect a derisive reaction.

I could always tell when Sam was about to moon someone. He would get this look of steely concentration in his eye like an olympic gymnast before they hit their routine, then he would turn his back on the victim, pull down his pants and bring his head towards his feet as far as possible.
His technique could not be questioned. When Sam mooned you could clearly see his asshole. Every time.
Watching Sam moon back in those days brought me the type of satisfaction you could only get from seeing raw potential realized. You knew you were watching a man who was born to do it.
Still Sam never had a satisfied look on his face after he mooned someone. If you looked closely as it was happening you could see he was constantly trying to bend over further. He was still pushing. I asked him once about his technique and why he kept on pushing even though he was clearly the best at what he did and he told me the following:

"I know people can see my asshole when I moon them. At first I felt pretty good about that and watching them react was enough to make it worthwhile. But then after you do it enough you don't feel like you're accomplishing anything anymore. I have this new thing now - I figure if I bend over far enough maybe my asshole itself will spread so that you could see into it, into me and who I am... and maybe if I can accomplish that I'll have accomplished something that goes way beyond trying to freak people out or trying to make them laugh by showing them your ass."

Months and countless efforts passed. Sam never did bend himself over far enough to spread his asshole , but it was definitely because of this ambition he harbored that the accident happened....

It seemed harmless enough at the time. We were hanging out in front of Lisa's house when her neighbor across the street, a reasonably attractive teenage girl, popped out to say what's up. Sam started talking to her which eventually led to Sam hitting on her but everyone could tell it was going nowhere including Sam. That's when I saw the look shoot across his face and I knew what was to come next. Or at least I thought I did.
The girl was going on about something boring as fuck like what she planned on studying in school or whatever when mid-sentence Sam turned his back on her and began loosening his belt. He proceeded to drop his pants and throw his head towards his feet with a force that could easily have damaged his lower back.

Usually at this point the girl was supposed to either scream or run away or say something like "Oh God!!!" while trying to cover her eyes. That was how it was in the beginning. That was how it was meant to be. This time though there was no reaction at all. It was dead calm.

Since mooning had lost its shock value it was normal to anticipate reactions of indifference or mild distaste, but the calm that we felt in that moment was neither of those two things. It was a different type of stillness that in itself suggested a shock so thorough it had left the victim devoid of any reaction that could possibly explain what it was they felt.
I was standing next to the girl so I could see exactly what she could see and my mind was racing as I'm sure hers was also. Finally she broke the silence, asking out loud a question which we all already knew the answer to:

" Is that his balls ? "

In between Sam's legs, which were spread wider than usual, underneath his asshole you could clearly see his balls. It was the only thing anyone could focus on. The entire world disappeared around us as we stood side by side gazing at his hanging, unkempt sac.

Everyone went home that night a little different than when it had started. Nobody really talked about what happened and there wasn't much reaction from anyone over what had taken place. As I was driving everyone home I looked over at Sam who was seated in the passenger side of my car. We had made this post-moon drive home together many times in the past but this time was different. This time there was a look on his face that I had never seen before - pure satisfaction. Confused a little I asked him "what's up?", to which he simply replied " I did it".
You don't get to live through many transcendental moments in life. Some people get a World War while others get the 80's. The most you can hope for is that in the time you're given you might find a moment where the collective energy of the world aligns with your spirit to create the kind of peak that, while only momentary, can make you feel as though if nothing ever happened again it would still have all been worth it. I can say that I've seen something like that in my life. Not anything as important as a paradigm shift or revolution, but something that was truly transcendental. Driven by his need for perfection Sam had given that moment to me.
When I got home after I had dropped everyone off I turned on the radio and this rhyming couplet from the U2 song that happened to be playing caught my ear:

"..they say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon
you know I don't see you when she walks in the room "

Thinking about this for a bit as I fell into sleep alone on the couch of my living room I concluded that that was exactly what I had seen earlier in the night. Not a mooning, but rather an eclipse. In the urban consciousness this would later be called turkey-necking and lots of people would claim that it existed as far back as man's history itself. They would suggest that I had in fact seen nothing new that night in an effort to dismiss the significance of the moment. For me however it was the eclipse and before that fateful night it had never existed in any real way that mattered.

In the months that followed Sam gave up on mooning in favor of perfecting the eclipse. As always he brought a sick determination to his game which saw him pioneering and perfecting different techniques. I never confirmed this myself but it had been said that he would soak his perfectly shaved balls in a bowl of near boiling water for up to half an hour before a scheduled eclipse just so that he could achieve that elusive "melting taffy" effect that he was known to occasionally display.
Sam's eclipses became the stuff of urban legend. In a pre-digital camera crazed world where social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace weren't the common phenomenon they are now you wouldn't be hard pressed to hear stories being passed around about the time Sam pulled an eclipse where you'd swear his balls hung down to knee level or another time where he held a flashlight against the front side of his recently heated sac to create a transparency effect.
Like mooning, Sams eclipse technique plateaued sometime around 2001 when he somehow managed to swing his stretched balls back and forth between his bent over body in such a way that they would slap off of his asshole.
If you're reading this you're probably saying to yourself "that's not possible", but I can say with certainty that it is because I was there to see it happen. My only regret about the internet era and all its YouTube-ing and social profiling is that it didn't come soon enough to capture Sam at his peak. I fear that in time everything the eclipse was will be lost in the ether. I suppose it is kind of fitting that in the end the only real memory of those times would be those existing in our mind; that we will forever pass through what's left of our lives knowing that we are more than just friends but also witnesses to what our lives were when the whole of the world did not yet know us. It was a time that was special. It was a time that we knew couldn't last forever...

I remember being out with Sam that night, the night his balls slapped off his asshole, looking at him and seeing that once familiar "another day at the office" expression on his face. It was an expression that meant the whole thing was already dead.
With a sadness in my heart I asked him the only question I could think of:
"So what's next?"
He paused for a long minute looking away towards what was an empty night's sky and then said matter-of-factly, "I don't know. Can you get arrested for jerking off in public?"