Sausage Sighting of My Cousin Buster

Whenever we visited my parents' family in Indiana, I wanted to stay with my Cousin Buster, who lived in the Trailer in the Deep Woods. He was almost two years older than me, and much more adventurous, dragging me into adventures in the cornfields and patches of raw trees.  We made magic swords, dug for buried treasure, caught frogs that were really witches in disguise.

When I was little, I liked to stay overnight in the trailer, crammed beside him in his narrow bed,  giggling and talking and reading Casper comic books.  I always waited for him to fall asleep first, so I could watch his bare chest rise and fall, his eyebrows flutter, his lips purse together in a dream.

When I grow up, I thought, I'll sleep like this every night, with a boy next to me, warm and hard in the night, reading comic books.

Once we arrived late, and he was already asleep.  I slipped out of my clothes and slid into bed and put my arms around him.  He smiled.

But the last few visits, we stayed with my Aunt Nora in Rome City, who had "plenty of room," so there was no need for me to "bother" my cousin by spending the night in his bed. We just dropped in for brief visits.

I had just turned thirteen, and Cousin Buster was fifteen [all models in the illustrations are over 18].

He was built, with a hard chest and thick biceps visible under his brown t-shirt.  He a round face with thin blond hair and blue eyes.  Big hands.

We sat in his bedroom -- the comic books and G.I. Joes were gone -- and talked about classes and Adam-12 and the cute girls who hung out at the Blue Moon Drive In.

Cute girls?  What about spending the night with boys, reading comic books, cuddling, falling asleep in each other's arms? 

"I have a date tomorrow," Cousin Buster said.  "To go ice skating.  She could get a girl for you, and we could double."

I didn't want to date girls!  "Um...thanks, but we're staying in Rome City.  My parents wouldn't want to drive all the way back here to pick me up afterwards."

"You could spend the night.  Just like when we were kids."

Now I wanted to go!  I ran out to the living room to ask my parents if it was ok.

So on December 27th, I went ice skating on a frozen pond with Cousin Buster and two girls (I don't remember who drove, somebody's father or an older kid). Then we stopped for hot chocolate, the girls on one side of the booth and the boys on the other.

Eventually someone's father or an older kid dropped us off at the trailer.

 Finally the ordeal was over!  Now we could get back to our real life, the only life that made sense, two boys together, cuddling in the night.

Cousin Buster's Mom and Dad were already in bed, so we quietly raided the refrigerator for leftover Christmas pie.  Then he pulled some blankets and pillows out of a closet and made up the couch for me.

Wait -- we're supposed to sleep together! I thought frantically.  Two boys cuddling!  

But I didn't say anything.  I gamely slipped out of my clothes and climbed onto the couch.  Cousin Buster said "Goodnight" and vanished into his room.

It was a small trailer.  From my couch bed, I could see the light from under Cousin Buster's door.  I expected it to go off in a few minutes, but it didn't.

Was he reading?  Watching tv?

The light stayed on.

Maybe he was lonely.  Maybe he wanted two boys together, in spite of our evening with girls.  Maybe he wanted me to join him but wasn't sure how to ask.

I got up, walked gingerly across the bare floor, and pushed open his bedroom door.



The light inside was very bright, like a fluorescent lamp in a schoolroom, illuminating everything.  The first thing I noticed, oddly, was an open jar of Vaseline on the nightstand.

The second thing was Cousin Buster's chest, pale, smooth, with hard pecs and prominent nipples.

He was sitting up in bed, completely naked, with a magazine open in one hand and his penis in the other.

Fully aroused, straining as his hand stroked the thick shaft, easily a Kielbasa. The head was purple, glistening from the Vaseline.  His testicles bobbed up and down, round like two apples.

Our eyes locked.  He continued to work, his jaw set, beads of sweat on his forehead.

I was afraid to speak or to move.

Then he whispered "Shut the door."

Did he want me on the inside or the outside?

I took a step back, carefully closed the door, and returned to my bed.

Something that I've regretted ever since.

In the morning, neither of us spoke about what happened.

We continued to have brief, cordial chats, but during high school, my visits to Indiana became sporadic.  I was old enough to stay home alone, and often I had other things to do.

Eventually I stopped going to Indiana altogether.

I heard about Cousin Buster from my parents: working at the auto garage, moving into his own place, collecting vintage cars, going hunting and fishing with his buddies, getting girlfriends but never marrying.

He died in 1996, at the age of 38.

I didn't go to his funeral.  I couldn't afford to fly out from San Francisco on short notice, and besides, it was too late -- he was a stranger.

Grandpa Prater's Banjo

This is the second erotic story about my Grandpa Prater.

It's the day after Christmas in seventh grade;  I just turned 12.  We're visiting my parents' relatives in Indiana.  Today we drive out to the farmhouse near Garrett to visit my Grandpa Prater, my mother's father, and bring him his Christmas presents.

Grandpa Prater is 70 years old, but still big and rugged, with thick arms and shoulders and huge hands. He wears overalls, sometimes with a white t-shirt underneath, sometimes without, so you could see his hard round pecs dusted with white hair.

He moved from Kentucky to Indiana with his family in 1942, to take advantage of factory jobs during World War II.  Now he is widowed, and all of his kids have moved out except Uncle Edd, who acts more like his brother than his son.

There's no car in the driveway, and no one answers when we knock, so we figure that they're out, at the store or visiting friends in town.  We drive down the road about half a mile to the Trailer in the Deep Woods, to visit my Cousin Buster and his parents and wait for them to return.

Cousin Buster shows me the guitar he got for Christmas, and tries to play "Your Mama Don't Dance," by Loggins and Messina.  He doesn't do well.  "I should have asked for a banjo," he says. "Man, I could really howl on that box." 

"Why don't you ask Grandpa if you can borrow his?"

Somehow we decide that it would be a good idea to sneak into the farmhouse while he's gone and "borrow" the banjo.  

We walk through the woods until we come to the side yard.  There's still no car in the driveway.

We climb onto the porch and go in through the parlor (country folk don't lock their doors).

I've been there a thousand times, but never when the house is deserted.  There's something eerie, even sinister, about the two overstuffed sofas, red with clawed legs, the old console radio with a black-and-white tv on top, the picture of Jesus on the Cross that changes to an Ascended Christ if you look at it right.  

The kitchen is familiar, too.  I've been there many times.  But there's something sinister about the plate of half-eaten toast and jar of Sue Bee Honey left on the kitchen table, as if someone suddenly rushed out.  Or was kidnapped.

I've never been inside Grandpa Prater's bedroom.  

First there's an anteroom, with some coats on hooks and shoes on the floor.  Then a big oak door.

More after the break

The Gay Painting in My Grandmother's Room

Garrett, Indiana

The cold, snowy day after Christmas.  Cousin Buster and I have already played with our toys, and we're tired of sitting around the living room of Grandpa Prater's farmhouse, listening to the adults complain about hippies and laugh about things that happened a thousand years ago.  So we go exploring, hoping to find a secret stash of comic books.

The kitchen
The furnace room
A little room used as as a pantry.
A room with a pump in it.
Some bedrooms.
Grandma Prater's Room.  Locked.  Off-Limits.

Grandma Prater died in 1966, when I was five years, old, so I have only a few random memories of her:  a short, fat, brown woman carrying bags of groceries, frying chicken, telling me a story about a mouse, giving me the nickname Boomer.  She had a thick Kentucky accent.

In a small farmhouse, they could use an extra bed, but after she died, no one ever slept in her bedroom again.  The adults went in to clean, or to look around, but kids weren't allowed: we might "break something."

The door was always locked, but when we played in the house, we always tried it anyway, just in case.

Today the knob turns, and the door stands ajar!  Cousin Buster and I glance at each other in surprise, then push the door open and look inside.

It is a very bright, airy room, not at all stuffy, with two windows and blue wallpaper.  A four-poster bed with a blue comforter,  the covers turned down, a Bible opened to the Psalms, as if Grandma Prater has just stepped out and would return at any moment.

A wooden dresser with photos of Kentucky kinfolk.  A bureau.  Clothes on hangers visible in the open closet door.  A rocking chair with knitting stuff on it.


And a painting: in a lush green forest, a boy is leaning against a tree, playing a flute.  He is wild, savage, naked except for an animal skin. A round red sack hangs from his side.

I stare in awe.  I am looking through a gateway into a "good place," where boys can hold hands and kiss without anyone asking "what girl do you like?"  The boy is a fairy, a mystical sprite, beckoning me, offering a way to the secret world.

After that, on most Christmas and summertime visits, I asked to see Grandma Prater's room.  I became familiar with the bed, dresser, bureau, and rocking chair.  I picked up her Bible, read the annotations, examined her sewing, turned the photos around to see who the subjects were.

But my favorite part of the tour was the painting.

Who was the boy?  Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream?  A boy Hercules (was that a lion skin?).  I thought of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows, the painting that led to Narnia, the Road to Elfland in heroic fantasy.

And, as I learned more about my grandmother, the painting seemed more and more out of place.

She was born in 1900 in the desolate hills of Eastern Kentucky.  Although she graduated from high school, a rarity at the time, she lived in isolation and poverty.  During the Great Depression, they survived by making moonshine.  She lost four of her eleven children.  During World War II, she moved to Indiana, to another isolated farmhouse.

She believed in ghosts, haints, witches, and premonitions.  A few weeks before she died, she heard her mother calling her from beyond the grave.

She never read fantasy or mythology, or, as far as I could tell, any book but the Bible.  There was no other art in the house except for a picture of Christ on the Cross and a souvenir from Indiana Dunes.

I asked my mother where the painting came from, but she didn't know -- it had been there as long as she could remember, even back in Kentucky.

Were there art galleries in the Kentucky hills?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Grandpa Prater died in 1978, but Uncle Edd continued to live in the farmhouse until 1998, and, I assume, kept up the blue room and the painting.

 After I moved to West Hollywood, I visited my parents twice a year, first in Rock Island and then in Indianapolis, with little time leftover to visit my elderly aunts and uncles in northern Indiana.

Before I knew it, ten, twenty, thirty years had passed since I last went into Grandma Prater's room.

Indianapolis, December 2000

Yuri and I are spending Christmas with my parents.  We go into the room that they've turned into a home gym: two exercise bikes, some free weights...and hanging on the wall beside a towel rack, The Painting!

I stand speechless, staring, as memories rush back.

How did it get here?  Maybe when Uncle Edd moved out of the farmhouse, Mom claimed it.

Yuri touches my shoulder.  "Are you ok?"

"Sure...I mean...this is one of my favorite childhood memories, a picture from my grandmother's bedroom.  I thought it was a hint that gay people exist."

"Your grandmother had the Pastyr Devid?"

"You know it?"

Turns out that it was one of the illustrations in a book of Bible stories that Yuri's grandmother read to him.

"I ask for the story of David the Sheep Boy..." Yuri began.

"Shepherd?"

"Ok, David the Sheepherd.  I asked Baba to read me that story many times.  I thought he was beautiful.  Maybe this is where I know I am gay?"

A continent apart, both our grandmothers inadvertently showed us a sign of gay potential.


I looked up the painting on the internet:  it's Shepherd Boy Playing the Flute, by Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzski (1843-1902), who specialized in Biblical and classical scenes.

Leaving two questions:

1. Was Siemiradzski gay?  I don't find a lot of beefcake in his works.  There's a couple of cute guys on the curtain he painted for the Juliusz Slowacki Theater.

2. How did my grandmother get a print of a work by a minor Polish painter in the hills of Eastern Kentucky?

My Uncle Gus's Wiener

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we drove six hours east to my parents' hometown in Indiana two or three times a year.  When we visited in the summertime, my mother's family gathered for a barbecue or picnic at Grandpa Prater's farmhouse: four uncles, five aunts, two cousins, and sometimes family friends.

In the summer after sixth grade, my Aunt Lynn brought a friend.  She was only 10 years older than me -- I remembered her with schoolbooks in hand, waiting for the bus -- and cool, modern, with an Indiana accent amid the Kentucky drawls, up on Laugh-In and the Beatles, even willing to talk about comic books with us (although she preferred Richie Rich to Casper).

While the aunts placed tablecloths on tables in the side yard, and put out bowls of jello salad and trays of deviled eggs, Lynn waited.   And waited.  And leafed through a movie magazine and waited.    Then suddenly a red pick-up truck appeared.  The world's coolest car!  It zoomed onto the grass beside the other cars, and Gus jumped out.

A teenager, tall and thin, with short brown hair and jug-ears and a head that was too big for his neck, wearing a red shirt with an orange ascot and  tight white pants.  Not very attractive, and his leering arrogance made it worse.  He looked at everybody and everything as if they were his private playground.

"Hey, Gus!" Cousin Buster called "Give me a nickel."  (His actual name was Joe, but I'm calling him Gus to avoid confusion with my Cousin Joe).

Gus had one waiting in his pocket, and threw it over in a flash of color.

"Can I have one, too?"  I asked.  "And one for my brother?"

"Big family, huh?"  Gus said. He flicked two more nickels at me.  I dropped them on the grass.   Buster scurried to pick them up,  and he threw them again.  I missed again.  He laughed.

"Well, keep working on it, Bud.  You'll be a slugger someday, and all the girls will be beating down the door to get at you!"

Girls?  I definitely didn't like him.

But Gus stuck around.  For the rest of the afternoon.

December 1970

We were back Indiana for Christmas.   When we gathered at Grandpa Prater's farmhouse to to exchange presents, Gus was there again!  He and Aunt Lynne gave me a present "together": a baseball glove.  Gross!

I definitely didn't like him.

We were staying with Aunt Nora, my father's sister, and on the day after Christmas there was a constant stream of visitors from Dad's side of the family: Aunt Nora's husband's brothers and sisters, miscellaneous cousins, some friends from town.  And, at dinnertime, to my surprise, Grandma Davis, with Aunt Lynn and Gus!

Wait -- Mom's family was Kentucky hillfolk, hardscrabble farmers and factory workers, lapsed Baptists, smoking, drinking, card-playing heathens.  Dad's family was middle-class, with aristocrats in their ancestry, nice houses, summer vacations, and mostly devout, "never set foot in a theater" Nazarenes.  How woudl my Grandma Davis know Aunt Lynn?  Or Gus?

(Later I discovered that Gus was a Nazarene, the son of one of Grandma Davis' friends.  She had known him since he was born.)

Dinner was pizza, which Dad and my Cousin Joe went out to pick up. Gus asked  for "mangos"on his.  He meant green peppers.

We played a board game involving bidding for commodities like wheat, rice, barley, and oats.  When Gus's team won he threw his cards down, butted chests with Cousin Joe, and began chanting "We're Number 1!"

I definitely, definitely didn't like him.  I started imagining him tied up, like in a Tarzan movie, with a gag in his mouth so he couldn't talk.

July 1971

I was 10 years old, and Gus was now my Uncle Gus.  He and Aunt Lynn lived in a big stone house in Auburn, about 5 miles from Garrett.  So now there was no escape.  

When we visited Mom's family, he was there. 

 When we visited Dad's family, he was...there.  

Plus we made an extra stop on our circuit of relative visits just so Mom could spend an afternoon gossipping with Aunt Lynn, while Uncle Gus "entertained" the boys.  Mostly by sitting in the kiddie pool in the back yard.   


I saw him in a swimsuit: pale, a scattering of chest hair, not very attractive.  But he obviously thought he was attractive, which made things worse.

I didn't like him, and when we went to the Trailer in the Dark Woods the next day, I told Cousin Buster so.

"Oh, Uncle Gus is ok," he said.  "He gives you a nickel every time you ask."

"Can't bribe me to like him.  He's too big, too rough, too..."  I didn't know the word 'heterosexist,' but that's what I meant.

"Weren't you in the pool yesterday?  Didn't you see his best part?"  Cousin Buster grinned and held out his hands like he was measuring a fish.  "Bigger than Uncle Edd's even."

"His wiener?  You're not going to make me go through a whole big thing to see Uncle Gus's wiener, are you?  I still have a bump on my head from last time." (See: Uncle Edd's Gun).

He shrugged. "No sweat.  If you don't like big wieners, I don't care."

I suspected that Cousin Buster was putting one over on me, trying to get me into trouble by bursting into Uncle Gus's room.  But a wiener is a wiener.  And maybe he did have a big one.

July 1972

During our visit to Indiana in July 1972, when I was 11 years old, we had a picnic at my Grandpa Prater's farmhouse.  Uncle Gus was there, of course.

The farmhouse didn't have a bathroom, just an outhouse in the barn, with old Sears catalogs to use for toilet paper.  Uncle Gus was a city boy....so.....

When he got up without explanation and walked toward the barn, I saw my chance.  I rushed to catch up with him.

"You got to go too, huh?" I said.

"Yep."

"The outhouse is gross, isn't it?  I mean, it stinks, and if you look inside, it's all gross down there.   I know a better place.  Outside."

"With all these people around?" Uncle Gus said doubtfully.

"They won't be able to see anything."  I led him to the backside of the barn, where a little alcove jutted out, making an L-shape.  The red paint was scratched and stained, suggesting that generations of boys and men had gone there to avoid the stench of the outhouse.

I unzipped my pants and held my wiener out.  Uncle Gus hesitated for a moment, stood beside me and started to unzip.  But before he got his wiener out, he looked over.   Of course, I didn't actually have to go, so nothing was happening.

"Stage fright?"  he asked.

"A little, I guess."

"I can wait until you're done."  He zipped back up and walked around to the side of the barn to wait.

Grr...

I definitely, definitely, definitely didn't like him.


Thirty years later, I had a similar problem trying to get a sausage sighting of Gus's son, my Cousin Graydon.

Was Cousin Buster Gay?

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we visited my parents' family in Indiana two or three times a year, and I always wanted to spend the night with my Cousin Buster, who lived in the Trailer in the Deep Woods.

He was a year and a half older than me, and more adventurous, dragging me into mishap after mishap in the peat bog, the old barn, the endless corn fields, and the haunted House on the Hill.

At night we crammed into his narrow twin bed and read comic books until our eyes were bleary and he dozed off, and I could watch his bare chest rising and falling, and if I was very careful, reach over and gently caress him. One of my first stirrings of homoerotic desire, perhaps.

The last time I spent the night was at Christmastime in 1973, when I had just turned thirteen. I was very disappointed that he gave me the couch, although I did catch him masturbating later.

As a teenager, my visits to Indiana became sporadic.  I was old enough to stay home, I was very busy with school and clubs, and besides, it was different.  I was disgusted by my family's conservative politics and country-western music, and by Cousin Buster's macho interests in hunting, fishing, working on cars, and girls.

No more comic books.  No more adventures.  No more magic and mystery in life.  Just "I revamped the carburator, and put in a new gasket"  and "she had really big tits."


After high school, my visits became even more sporadic, and Cousin Buster was absent altogether.  His mother made excuses for why he couldn't come to family barbecues and picnics.  Fine with me: seeing him again would be awkward and embarrassing, like running into an ex-lover after a bad breakup.

I heard about him through my mother: working at an auto garage, collecting classic cars, going hunting and fishing with his buddies, dating girls but never settling down with anyone.

In August 1996, at the age of 38, Cousin Buster collapsed at work.  He was taken to the emergency room, then admitted to the hospital.  Two days later he was diagnosed with cancer.  He was moved into a hospice. He died a few days later.

I didn't go to the funeral; I had just visited my parents in Indianapolis and my friend Alan in Norfolk, and I didn't have the money for another expensive plane flight.  Besides, it would be awkward and embarrassing.  He was a stranger.

But recently I began wondering: we had so many plans as kids.  We were going to move into a house together, and have a room for comic books and a room for toys, and sleep in the same bed, cuddling in the night.  It sounds very much like two gay kids who haven't figured it out yet.  Could Cousin Buster have been gay or bi?

First I asked my only cousin from that side of the family that I was still in contact with, Uncle Gus's daughter Shelley, but she didn't remember Cousin Buster very well: "He was 12 years older than me,  I don't think he even knew that I existed."

I couldn't ask his elderly, conservative mother, who I wasn't out to...could I?

Turns out that I could.  When I was in Indianapolis last Christmas, my elderly, conservative mother wanted me to drive her up to northern Indiana to visit her two surviving sisters, and when we were visiting Aunt Mavis, I managed to steer the conversation to Cousin Buster.

"Oh, what a ray of sunshine!" she exclaimed.  "He was so busy with work and his friends, but he still took time to visit his old mother every day."

Old mother? Um...when he died Mavis was only 58 years old, still working full-time and a member of several clubs, hardly a shut-in.

"Speaking of friends, did he have anyone special?" I asked.  "Any best friends?"

"Nobody comes to mind. But just a minute -- I'll get his memorial book."

At the funeral, Cousin Buster's friends were asked to write their memories of him in a book:

"

"Interests: arrowheads, cruising, nudists, the good stuff, making jewelry, having friends."

"I'll miss you lots.  I'll miss your smile and our long talks."

"Hey, buddy, I still carry your rock with me every day."

"To the biggest pumpkin in the patch."  Huh?

"You were my best friend in all the world!"  (Two of these).

Some of the comments were suggestive.  I tried to track down the people in the memorial books, but was successful only with the "rock in my pocket" guy, Jack, now a 62-year old grandfather living in Indianapolis.

"Great guy!  I still think about him all the time."

"And his rock?"

"I still carry it with me, like a good luck charm." It was a smooth lavender agate.

Lavender?  The gay pride color?

"Another guy in the memorial book said that he was into nudity, cruising, and the Good Stuff."

Jack laughed.  "Well, I never saw him naked, and I don't know what the Good Stuff meant, but he was definitely into cruising."

"Really?"  Looking for hot guys?

"Did you see his 1972 Plymouth convertible?  Man, that was a gas."

I was tired of beating around the bush.  "Did he have anyone special in his life.  A girlfriend, or a boyfriend?"

He shrugged.  "Everybody was special to Buster.  He always acted like you were the most important person in the world.  And I guess, at that moment, you were."

I left not knowing if Cousin Buster was bi or gay, or asexual, or heterosexual.  He surrounded himself with people, male and female, young and old, and loved them all.

Who cares if he was in love with any of them?

PS: When I was in Indiana in August 2021, my Mom confirmed that Cousin Buster was gay (I think she meant bisexual).  She only just found out: her sister told her during a conversation about her transgender granddaughter.  Funny that they would keep that a secret for so many years.

Summer 1970: Looking for Uncle Edd's Gun

Year after year, summertime and Christmastime, we would visit my Grandpa Prater in the old farmhouse outside of Garrett, Indiana, and Uncle Edd was there.

He was tall and lanky, with a beard and piercing eyes.  He didn't participate much in Mom and Dad and Grandpa's evocations of long ago-events in the hills of Kentucky, or the more recent exploits of uncles and aunts.  He sat in  an old easy chair, smoking cigarettes, his face illuminated in firelight like an otherworldly creature.  After awhile, he grabbed his car keys and left without a word, driving out into the darkness of the Indiana countryside.

Was he a secret agent, off to fight evil Russian spies?  Or maybe he was a wizard, off to the cemetery to summon the spirits of the undead?

I thought he was the coolest guy in the world.

My Cousin Buster lived nearby, and saw him all the time, but he, too, thought of Uncle Edd as a mysterious, otherworldly character.  One of his favorite games was spying, hiding beneath Uncle Edd's bedroom window and trying to catch a glimpse of what he had in there.  Spy equipment?  Treasure? Magical implements?

But the curtain was always drawn.

Uncle Edd never played with us, and he didn't say much, but he wasn't indifferent.  He often brought out gifts of comic books and candy.  He sent me a Christmas present every year -- an unabridged dictionary, a world atlas.  It's just that he was the strong, silent type, not used to kids.

Later I discovered that he was a writer!  He didn't make a living off his writing, but he published some photo-journalism, and some Western stories, back when Western stories were popular.  After he died, my cousin sent me one: "My Sister Sue," about a female gunslinger who rescues the male narrator from the villain.

Coolest guy in the world!

I also discovered the reason he left during our visits to drive into the Indiana darkness.  He wasn't a spy or a necromancer after all.  He was going to work at the night shift at the foundry.  On the nights he wasn't working, he went to a tavern downtown.

Still cool.

After I "figured it out" in 1978, it occurred to me that Uncle Edd might be gay.  After all, he was over 40 years old, not married, and he had never been seen with a woman or mentioned a girlfriend.  My mother said that if he was a Catholic, he would have become a monk.

But before I could bring up the subject, my Grandpa Prater died, and three weeks later Uncle Edd shocked everyone by moving in with a widow with three teenage sons.  Apparently they had been dating for years without telling anyone, because they didn't want Grandpa Prater to feel guilty about Edd living there to take care of him.

Not gay.  Still pretty cool.

He died in 2010, leaving a library of over 3,000 books on every subject imaginable.  My nephew hauled three carloads back to his apartment.

I have a good story about Uncle Edd.

One day when we were nine or ten years old, Cousin Buster and I sneaked into the barn, planning to steal some eggs.

The outhouse gate was closed.  In the dim light, we could see Uncle Edd's pants drawn around his ankles inside.

"He's cleaning his gun in there," Cousin Buster whispered.  "An AK-47.  He shoots Russians with it.  Let's go up and look."  He pointed up to the loft.

"That doesn't sound like a good idea," I whispered.  "Uncle Edd'll get mad."

"He won't get mad --  I do it all the time. Besides, from up there you can see his peter."

I don't know why Cousin Buster thought that male nudity would seal the deal, but it did.  We climbed up to the loft, careful that the rickety wooden ladder didn't creak.

The outhouse was a little stall built where the loft met the barn wall.  It had no ceiling -- I could look right into it, down to where Uncle Edd was sitting on a bench with a little hole in it.  He wasn't cleaning his gun after all -- he was reading Photoplay magazine, with a Sears catalog next to him, to use as toilet paper.

The stench was overpowering.

But Cousin Buster was right -- I could see his peter, a gleam of white in the dim light.

I bent my head down to get a better look.

And lost my balance and tumbled down into the outhouse, crashing into the wall and onto Uncle Edd's lap.

Later, after three stitches in my head  a tetanus shot, and a lot of yelling from my parents, I was back at Aunt Nora's house, where we were staying.

"Whatever got into you?" she asked.  "Climbing onto an old outhouse like that!"

I had already explained a million times, so I just said, curtly, "I wanted to see Uncle Edd's gun."

My older cousins started laughing.  It would be ten years before I understood the joke.

Comic Books and Cocks at the Furniture Store

This story moved to RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Cousin Buster and I Get God Mad

Observant Jews often face conundrums about everyday activities.  You can't work on the Sabbath; does that include pushing elevator buttons?  You need separate sets of dishes for dairy products and meat: what about eating in a restaurant, where the dishes are all mixed up?

When I was growing up Nazarene, we faced similar conundrums.  Preachers and Sunday school teachers had to apply the law with the sagacity of a Talmudic scholar.

You can't work on Sunday.

1. Does that include yardwork?  Yes.  What about mowing the lawn on a riding mower?  Yes.

2. Does it include performing CPR on someone who has had a heart attack?  No.

3. What if you work in a restaurant where your schedule occasionally requires you to work on Sunday?  Politely refuse, and if you are forced, quit.

You can't go anywhere near alcohol.

1. What if your college roommate wants to drink in the room?  Change roommates. He's evil.

2. What about if alcohol is being served in one room of the building, but not in the others?  Don't go within ten feet.

3. Can you take a job in a drug store that sells beer, among other things?  No.

You can't dance, not even in the "guise of folk dancing or physical education class."

1. Can you watch folk dancing? No.

2. What about jazzercise, a very popular exercise of the 1970s?  No.

3. Can you just sway?  No










You can't go to a movie theater.

1. Can you go into a theater if your car broke down and you need a telephone?  No.

2. What about if it's a school field trip?  No.

3. What about a movie on tv?  No.

As a result, I was in a movie theater only a few times before college, and then always with guilt and fear as I waited for the heavens to open and God to strike me dead.

But my Cousin Buster found an loophole.

Buster lived in the trailer in the deep woods, next to my grandfather's house just outside Garrett, Indiana.  His parents were lapsed Baptists, but he went to a Nazarene church and learned the same restrictions that I did.

The summer after sixth grade, when we were visiting, he said "There's a monster movie marathon playing at the Drive-In.  Let's go."

"A drive in theater?"  I didn't remember any rule about that, but I still dubious.  There was no building, just a field, but there was still a big screen.  "You're still watching a movie."

He grinned.  "Uh-uh.  Movies have pictures and sounds.  We're just going to see the picture.  With a monster movie, it doesn't matter what they're saying, anyway."

It wasn't the building or the big screen, because we couldn't watch movies at home on tv, either.  It must be the combination of pictures and sound!

"No sound, no movie," I said.  "It might work.  But how are we going to do that?  Leave the little speaker thing off the car?"

"Just wait and see."

Buster told our parents that we were going to go star-gazing, and we rode our bikes down the dusty country roads to Route 6, to the theater.  But instead of going inside, we walked our bikes across a field of summer corn to a little knoll beyond last row of cars.  The screen was far away, but still visible, especially with binoculars.

We lay on blankets on the rough ground, shivering in the breeze, eating potato chips and watching something about Frankenstein fighting Godzilla.

And we managed to see a movie without getting God mad, unless He was miffed by the lying to our parents, trespassing, and theft.

Best night ever.

What?  You were expecting a hookup?  I did think about things other than cute guys once in a while when I was a kid.

But here's a group of cute guys to tide you over.

See also: Looking for Uncle Edd's Gun.