Bunkered Down
by
Tragudis
How did two normally heterosexual men become involved in doing something associated with gay men? All these years later, Rick Wyatt still doesn't quite understand it.
Back in the summer of 1970, Rick was a twenty-year-old college guy who spent summers in Pennsylvania as a camp counselor at Camp Lake Forest. The pay wasn't great, but you got room and board and decent food. Plus, if you were athletic as Rick was, as most of the counselors were, you got to play sports—softball, volleyball, tennis, etc. When the counselors weren't supervising their charges, they played in a special league among themselves.
Like many camps, Lake Forest offered a safe, isolated haven away from some of the bad news that happened around that time. American troops were still dying in Vietnam, and so were college students protesting the war per what had happened in May when national guard troops gunned down Kent State students (killing four and wounding nine) during a protest on campus. Patton, MASH and Five Easy Pieces were some of the top films released that year. And Mungo Jerry, a British rock group, provided the season's biggest summer hit:
In the summertime when the weather is hot
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
When the weather's fine
You got women, you got women on your mind
Rick did have women on his mind, and so did Arnie Page, his co-counselor in a bunk of eleven-year-old lads whose parents were well off enough to send them to Lake Forest for six weeks. Rick and Arnie had known each other for years, ever since they were campers themselves at the same camp. As young teens, they had bunked together. In the summer of 1970, they were young men who felt like "giving back" to the camp that had given them the summers of their life. Ergo, they became counselors. Both of them had an eye for some of the female counselors that supervised all-girl bunks located about a quarter-mile from the boys' bunks.
Other male counselors shared similar proclivities when it came to women. Romantic liaisons did happen at Lake Forest, but they were relatively rare for lack of privacy. Flirtations were more the norm, and Rick and Arnie had their share. They often compared notes on who they liked and why. It was typical locker room talk, talk that would have made feminists cringe. Their conversations, held a safe distance from their boys, could get graphic—graphic enough that it wasn't unusual for them to become aroused just talking about the way Cindy Foreman looked in a bikini or the way Sherri Becker might respond to oral on her clit.
Young guys like Rick and Arnie could get mighty horny seeing all that college-age poon, prancing around wearing their revealing summer duds. Just about nobody got laid, leaving masturbation as the only outlet. The problem was finding the privacy to do it, no mean feat with a bunk full of kids. However, there were occasions when the kids went on day trips to Hershey Park or to a Phillies baseball game, and they were supervised by other camp staffers, leaving counselors like Rick and Arnie free to do as they pleased until the kids returned.
On one such afternoon, the guys found themselves in their bunk alone, listening to the radio and chewing the fat, which included discussions about the feminine assets of the Cindy Foremans and Sherri Beckers of the camp and becoming aroused in the process. They were on adjacent beds, shoes off and wearing typical Lake Forest attire, khaki shorts and blue T-shirts that read in big white letters, Lake Forest Staff. Both were around the same height, five-foot nine, about their only common denominator as far as looks, save for their brown hair. Rick was the more athletic of the two and looked it. He lifted weights and it showed, from his thick quads to his mounds of pectoral muscle. He was a fast runner also, deflating the myth of the so-called muscle-bound athlete, a myth that was all but dead anyway by that time. Arnie, while not a bad athlete, had struggled with weight issues as a kid. He had been chubby, never obese, but that "spare tire" around his belly had made him the butt of cruel comments while growing up. His exercise regimen had helped to reduce the tire, though not completely, and he had all but given up on achieving the sort of sharp muscularity, not to mention strength, that Rick enjoyed. "I've got too many fat cells, it's not in my genetics," he'd say in resignation.
On that day in the bunk, Arnie wasn't talking about fat cells, but how horny he was. "I'm so horny, I could jerk off right here," he said.
Rick, sitting on the edge of the steel-framed bed, chuckled. "Yeah, me too." He then proceeded to shove a hand down his shorts. "I've got a boner like you wouldn't believe."
Arnie, lying sideways with his head propped up on his elbow, rubbed a hand over his crotch. "You're not the only one."
A novel idea (novel to him, that is) popped into Rick's head. Competitive in just about everything, he suggested a contest to see who could come the fastest.
Arnie raised his eyebrows. "Ah, that's something I usually do in private, old buddy."
"Me too," Rick said. "But let's be daring. I mean, it's not like we've never seen each other's dicks. Are you, um, UP for the challenge?"
Arnie considered this. Rick usually beat him in sports that required speed and strength: track and field, wrestling, hitting a baseball, even swimming. Arnie knew that Rick was the better athlete overall. Even so, he never backed down when Rick challenged him to something. He lacked Rick's power, but he was just as good, perhaps even slightly better when it came to hand-eye coordination in sports such as basketball, tennis and ping pong. And yes, he was definitely UP for the challenge. "You're on," he said, though he felt a bit shy in exposing himself to his friend in this manner.