Don Strong wasn't really my uncle, even though my folks had told me long ago that I could call him Uncle Don. What his actual relationship was with my family was unclear to me back in 1969, the time that the events in this story took place, and since everybody that would know all the details is dead now, I guess that's it's a mystery that will remain so forever.
This story involves me doing something I shouldn't have been doing, and the resulting consequences of my actions. It was a dreary Saturday morning in April, when it was too wet and cold to go outside, and I was bored.
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Chapter One: Snooping.
Forty years later, and I still remember just about everything that I did on that day. I had just taken a shower, and after drying off I had put on my robe and was walking down the hall to my bedroom, enjoying the rarity of having the house to myself.
My folks had taken off, heading to Montgomery Ward where they would probably be spending the day window shopping. I had politely declined their offer to tag along, but judging by the silence in the house, my Uncle Don went with them.
He wasn't really my uncle, just a friend of the family I guess, but to me he was just a pain because his only redeeming quality was his ability to burp louder than anybody in the world. I guess my folks liked him around, because he was at our house all the time, or at least every other weekend. When I was young my parents had me call him Uncle Don, and it stuck over the years.
Don was a tall and skinny guy with grey hair that he wore in a brush cut, and his arms were covered with tattoos which were mostly hidden by the billowing white hair that coated them. Uncle Don and my folks would play cards and drink beer at the kitchen table until all hours of the morning on the weekends he visited.
For some reason that Saturday morning I went down to the end of the hall, which was where the spare bedroom was. We called it a spare bedroom but it was pretty much Don's, and what I think I was really going in there for was to see if he had a pack of cigarettes around so I could steal one.
He smoked Pall Mall's, nasty unfiltered cigarettes that I hated, but any port in a storm. To be honest, I didn't even like to smoke, but did it back then on occasion when I was with my friends so I would look as cool as them. It was a habit I never really developed and dropped completely soon after this, but anyway, that was why I was in Uncle Don's room.
I didn't see any cigarettes laying around, and wasn't planning on snooping through his stuff or anything to try and find one, but something caught my eye when I went past the night stand so I stopped to see what it was.
That was my first mistake.
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Chapter Two: First exposure.
The title of the paperback was 'Sailor's Shore Leave' and it was a bit larger than the standard paperbacks of the day, a precursor of the trade soft-covers of this era. The cover had a guy in a goofy looking sailor's cap with his arm around another guy.
When I opened it up, I was stunned at what was inside. There was very little story, only a sentence or two every few pages, but what there was were pictures. A whole lot of pictures; grainy black and white photos that showed the two guys on the cover and how they spent their day.
They started out with their clothes on, but after a few pages the clothes were history, except for that goofy sailor's cap the one guy wore, but even that disappeared after a while.
I wasn't completely naive, but this was 1969, mind you, long before the Internet, VCRs and everything else. I was 18, but I think that today there are kids half as old who know a lot more about sex than I did.
The first few pictures of the guy doing things to each other, I understood. I had done these same things with my friend Tom. We had played with each other's dicks plenty of times, and as I looked at the guys I wondered whether I would dare show this book to Tommy, since the guys were a lot like we were. The guy in the sailor's cap had a short fat cock like Tom, while the other guy had a pretty big one like me.
As I continued flipping the pages, the guys started doing a lot more than jerking each other off though, and soon they were doing things to each other that I had only heard about - graphic and disgusting things that offended me so that I had to hold the book with one hand while my other hand went between the folds of my robe.
I was just about to take this book back to my own robe so I could get myself comfortable and jerk off once or twice with these pictures as inspiration - or probably spend the whole day whacking off - when the floorboards squeaked behind me.
I was just about to shoo my cat Walter out of the room when I realized that it wasn't Walter behind me. It was Uncle Don.
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Chapter Three: The jig is up.
"Getting an eyeful, Skipper?" Don asked, his raspy voice echoing in the tiny room.
"Uh - sorry," I said, setting the book back on the night stand, or at least trying to.
I picked it up off the floor and set it back where I had found it, but when I straightened up Don's long, bony hand was on the back of my neck.
"Going through my stuff, huh?"
"No," I said, which sounded as stupid then as it does now.
"Then what the hell ARE you doing?" Don wanted to know, the grip on my neck tightening.
"Just - uh - looking for a cigarette," I said.
"Then you WERE going through my stuff," Don correctly concluded. "Ever hear of asking?"
"I thought you went to Monkey Wards with my parents," I said, calling the store by the name my folks used around the house.
"Your old man is getting his brakes done, so he'll be stuck there with your mom all day. Lucky I didn't go, or else who knows what you would have done," Don said. "Probably would have shot your spunk all over my things."
"No - I was going to take the book to my room," I whined. "I was going to bring it back. Honest."
"With the pictures all stuck together, I reckon," Don sneered, and as he tried to look over my shoulder in the area my hand was now hiding, he added, "You like what you saw in that book?"
"No," said with as much indignity as I could muster. "It's gross."
"I'll bet you and your friend - that husky redheaded guy that's always hanging around here - could make a book like that," Don suggested, his grip turning into more of a rough kneading of my neck. "I figure him for a bottom. That right?"
"Huh?" I asked, not having a clue as to what he was talking about.
"When you two fuck, I'm betting that he's on the receiving end," Don explained.