The time was the early 1970s. I was on the verge of turning 20, but was having a rough time of it personally. My mother had caught me in bed with her boyfriend (an experience detailed in my earlier story "Mom's Boyfriend") one evening when I had come home under the influence and had been taken by him.
While I had done the same thing with Joe earlier, somehow getting caught by your mother - me face down on the bed and drunk, and him taking my ass - was an whole different thing.
I had been depressed after that, and Mom tried her best to help, arranging for me to go camping with my Uncle Dan. What could possibly happen there?
....
Chapter 1: Me and Dan.
I had only vague memories of my Uncle Dan, but I recognized him right away as I pulled in front of the cabin at the end of the bumpiest dirt road imaginable.
A rough looking guy with his now-gray hair still in a crew cut just like back when he was in the Navy, he still looked fit and trim despite his age, which I guessed to be about mid-50's.
He was shirtless and wore only a pair of khaki shorts and sandals as he waved to me while coming down the steps of the rustic old cabin. Deeply tanned, his chest and forearms were covered with a mat of gray fur, although his legs were relatively hairless.
"Timmy my boy!" Uncle Dan growled in his gruffest voice, his smile giving away his pleasure at seeing me again. "Boy, have you changed! Become quite a big fellow, haven't you?"
"I guess," I admitted, now looking at him for the first time at eye level after having to look up in my younger years.
We were both about 5'9" or so, and while I might outweigh him by a few pounds, there was not a great deal of difference in us besides age.
I grabbed my bag and carried it in to the cabin, following Dan up the steps. Dan's back was broad and sported a couple of tattoos, as did his arms. Souvenirs of his service days, I assumed, and vaguely remembered him telling me years ago the stories behind each of them.
"It ain't much, but it's what I call home during the summer," Dan said, waving his arm around the small one-room cabin.
"It's really neat," I said, looking at the small kitchen area on the one side of the room, and the bed and dresser on the other side of the room, with a round table and chairs in between. A fireplace took up much of the wall behind the table.
"It's got all I need," he added. "Got a little generator that keeps the fridge and a light going, and that's about the extent of my modern living."
One bed would be all that a divorced man would likely need.
Chapter 2: Telling tales.
Uncle Dan grabbed a six pack of Rolling Rock out of the refrigerator and invited me to take the grand tour with him. I nodded when he offered me a can, and that made him chuckle.
"Time flies, don't it?" he said as we went back outside and around the back. "Seems like yesterday that you were a chubby little kid, and now look at you! Must hit the weights a lot, judging by your build."
"Some," I admitted, having shed the baby fat that I had carried with me during my teenage years.
"Remember when we used to arm wrestle at your folks' kitchen table?" Uncle Dan recalled.
"Yes!" I exclaimed, suddenly remembering those epic battles, when he would pretend to have to struggle to beat me. "You would always make me think that I had a chance to beat you."
"You used to get distracted by her," Dan mentioned, pointing to the now-faded tattoo of a mermaid on his still-prominent bicep.
"That's right! You used to flex your muscle and make her wiggle around, and I would start laughing, and the next thing I would know, the game was over. Not that I had a chance in the world of winning anyway," I added.
"I think the outcome might be different these days, judging by the arms you've got on you," Dan opined.
"I kinda doubt it."
"Maybe we'll wrestle later," Dan suggested, cuffing me on the shoulder while leading me down the path in the woods behind his cabin.
Chapter 3: Wrestling later?
A shiver went down my spine as my Uncle Dan said that. I had begun to develop a sense about people around that time; a sense that I had defined to a science in later years. Something in the way that he looked at me - nothing specific but more just a general feeling that he wasn't looking at me as a kid relative.
I also realized that I was looking at him a lot differently now as well. Instead of being the wide-eyed kid looking up at grown-ups, I was now looking at Uncle Dan as a man, and checking him out like I would anyone else. Admiring the broad and hairy chest and the well defined arms, and wondering about what was going on under those baggy shorts. In a way I was ashamed about what I was thinking, but not enough so that I stopped.
We followed the path down to where it ended on the tiny beach of a little pond, where there was a rowboat tied to a tree. Cutest little pond imaginable; not more than a half mile across, with a little island in the middle.
"This is beautiful!" I exclaimed as I admired the view. "Is this all yours?"
"Well, I guess it's the property of the state, but there's only a couple other cabins around here - back over around that bunch of trees at the other end, and no way for public access yet, so I guess it's as much mine as anybodies."
"Do you get a lot of fish out of it?"
"Pretty much a dead pond now," Dan said. "Guess acid rain has pretty much killed everything off, although once in a while I'll pull out something. Mostly I just swim."
"I'm glad I brought my trunks," I said, thinking that on a hot day like today, jumping in the pond would be a welcome treat.
"Trunks?" Uncle Dan chortled. "No need for trunks out here. Come in! The water's fine."
With that, Uncle Dan kicked off his sandals and dropped his shorts.
Chapter 4: Awkward moments.
Uncle Dan was wearing nothing underneath the shorts, and as he walked into the water he turned around to wave me on in. As he did, I tried not to look. I swear I did. The problem was that more I tried not to look, the dumber I must have seemed.
"No need to be shy or ashamed out here, Timmy!" Dan said.
"Easy for you to say," I mumbled under my breath as I slowly began taking off my shirt.
It was easy for Uncle Dan to say for two reasons. The first reason was hanging between his legs; a absurdly long and thick penis that rolled lazily from side to side as he waded knee-deep in the pond. Uncircumcised and as bronzed as the rest of his body, the flaccid tool was framed by a silver gray bush above and a sizable pair of balls that dangled loosely in their wrinkled sac.
The second reason was that I was not built like my Uncle Dan, or most other men. If you've read my other stories, you've heard the description. I was the boy that puberty forgot, pretty much.
Puberty started - a little late for me but still and all it started - and then abruptly stopped. "Is that all there is?" was a Peggy Lee song that was popular back in the 60's, and that pretty much summed up my reaction to my "Wonder Years".
In the end, I was left with a small dick - I used to claim it to be about five inches, but that was probably measured by my jamming the ruler into my intestines. Four inches erect is about right, and the lack of length was not compensated for by thickness either. Combine that with balls the size of cherry tomatoes, and an almost complete absence of body hair, and that's me.
This was a source of embarrassment for my during my teenage years, culminating in having my first and only girlfriend laugh at what she pulled out. This led to me crawling into a shell and hiding, until a kindly older man helped me discover that I wasn't worthless after all. Not only that, but there were a lot of men who did not find me unattractive at all. Just the opposite, and that gave me a whole new lease on life.
