Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation

Rock Island, July 1970

Looking back to my childhood in Rock Island, it's hard to believe that we crammed so much activity into the 12 weeks of summer:
Camping in Michigan or Minnesota
Nazarene summer camp
Visiting relatives in Indiana
My birthday excursion
Vacation Bible School
The Denkmann School Carnival
The Pow Wow, the Celtic Festival, and the Beiderbecke Jazz Festival
Summer Enrichment Classes in astronomy, Spanish, archaeology, and music.

And when we got a free moment, swimming lessons.

When you live between two rivers, you learn to swim.  I took lessons every summer from 4th grade to 7th grade at the Longview Park Pool.

It was great.  Boys and girls classes met at different times, so my group consisted entirely of cute boys, including my best friend Bill, Greg (the vampire boy who gave me my first kiss), Craig (who joined the swim team in high school, and invited me to "get down" at his graduation party), and eventually my brother and his friends.

And the teacher was always a cute teenage boy, tanned and muscular in red Rocky High swim trunks.

Unfortunately, I never got to see them with their swim trunks off,  so no glimpses of a penis (the adults called it a shame).  We weren't allowed in the bath house (where the showers and lockers were).  After the lessons, we had to sit on towels, sopping wet, while one of our mothers drove us home.

It was fun learning to jump into the pool, float on your back, and kick against those floating surfboards.  Then the dog paddle, the breast stroke, the back stroke, and the side stroke.

But when we had to jump off the diving board into the deep end and swim to the side of the pool, I balked.

"It's over my head!  I'll drown!"

"It's easy," Matt, the hunky teenage teacher, said.  "You already know how to swim.  This is just in deeper water."

"I'll sink to the bottom and drown!"

I watched from several feet away as my friends, one by one, jumped off the diving board, sank into the bright clear water of the deep end, then rose to the surface and kicked their way across the pool to the side, where Matt was waiting to pull them out.

His muscular arms rippling in the sunlight....I wanted muscular arms around me....

But...no!  "It's over my head!"

Matt put a strong hand on my shoulder.  "Tell you what, Boomer.  I'll get into the water with you.  That way if anything goes wrong, I can carry you to the side."

Carry me?  "You promise?"

"Sure.  And even if you do drown, I know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."

I didn't know what that meant, but I liked the mouth-to-mouth part.  I climbed onto the diving board.  It felt hot in the sun, and a little wobbly.  Matt, floating upright in the water, motioned me in.  He was smiling.

With a gulp I jumped off the board.  Cold, bubbly water enveloped me.  I couldn't hear, couldn't breathe.  The surface was miles away. How could I ever get up again? It was over my head!

Springing to the surface, I yelled "Help!"

Instantly Matt had his arm around me, and with two kicks had us on the side of the pool.  He lifted us up.  I felt a surge of joy as I clung to his chest, my hands clutching his thick hard shoulders.

I wrapped my legs around him.  Our swimtrunks pressed together.  I felt the thick mass of his shame beneath.

"See?  That wasn't so bad," Matt said, disentangling me. "It was actually kind of groovy, wasn't it?"

Flushed with a weird, tingly excitement, I nodded.  "Are you going to do mouth-to-mouth resuction?"

He laughed.  "Not this time, buddy.  You're fine."

I wouldn't figure "it" for years, but in retrospect, that was a major coming out moment.

Summer 2005: Searching for Beefcake in a Slovak Water Park

One day in Levoča, Slovakia, where I was spending the summer of 2005, my friend Doc and some of the other faculty got saddled with the job of chaperoning 20 students on a day trip to Tatralandia, a water park about an hour's drive west of Levoča.and he invited me along.

"Couldn't we take them to a museum instead?"  I asked.  I'm not big on sliding down waterslides."

"It's got more than that. There's a Jungle Cove, a Wild West Town, an Adventure Cave."

"Like Disneyland?  Gross!  I lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, and only visited Disneyland once, and I hated it. Does a Slovak Mickey Mouse come out to shake your hand?"

"Tatralandia has something that I think you won't see in Disneyland," Doc said with a sly grin.  "A thousand Eastern European men in Speedos."

I never thought of that!  I had already gotten a glimpse of Slovakian endowments in Kosice. "Ok, I'm in."

Eastern Europeans love water parks.  There are three in Slovakia, and AquaPark Tatralandia is the biggest, probably the biggest in the world.

You go in through a Wellness Center, like a well-equipped gym with hot and cold spas, 16 steam rooms, massage, exercise equipment.  The ads showed muscular guys getting massages, but inside were mostly middle-aged women.

Next came water slides called The Galaxy, The Fire Slide, the Sun Slide, and the Splash, occupied entirely by children, while their parents, fawning heterosexual couples, lay on deck chairs at the Tropical Paradise.

"Um...hot guys in Speedos?" I asked.

"They are around.  Keep looking."

The little kids were occupied in a castle with a dozen water slides protruding from it, a Safari Adventure, and an Old West Mining Town, where you could mine for "gold" (I did that as a kid, too, at Mother Goose Land in the Quad Cities).

So far I wasn't impressed.  Lots of swimsuits, but little kids and dismally unattractive adults.

We pressed on past water slides called Amazonia and Niagara, a place where you could practice Free Falls, a Monkey Slide, an exhibition of paleolithic artifacts from a nearby museum, and lots of restaurants.

"Um..have you been here before?  Did you know about the lack of beefcake?"

Doc shrugged.  "Last year there were some muscular guys."

Then we turned onto a Sports Pool, where you could play water polo, and an entire university team was splashing around!  Gems of Eastern European manhood everywhere!

The northern part of the park was devoted to non-water sports: archery, shooting, tomahawk throwing, soccer, oversized chess.  And it was crowded with single men in their 20s.

It made sense: people in their 30s and 40s were often parents who had to supervise their kids, and by their 50s and 60s, they were ready for the Wellness Center.  But the guys at the peak of muscularity just wanted to play Sports.

While wearing Speedos.

My Third Grade Boyfriend

Rock Island, July 1968

When I was 7 1/2 years old, we moved from a nice house in Wisconsin, a block from the beach, to a gross house in Ill-An-Noise, in back of the grade school. Yuck!

This new world was stupid and boring, but I was determined to make the best of it.  The first thing I needed was a boyfriend.  Somebody to show me around, introduce me to other kids, point out the places to get necessities (like cookies and comic books), and the places to avoid (with mean dogs, mean boys, crazy ladies, and escaped killers).

He should be a boy, of course, around my age, and preferably both nice and cute.

In August, when school started, there would be a whole roomful of boys choose from, but that was over a month away, an eternity for a 7 1/2 year old!  I needed somebody now!

Fortunately, 1968 was the heart of the Baby Boom, the biggest generation in history.  There were 77 million kids growing up in the U.S., some in nearly every house on every street in the country.  It didn't take long to compile a list of prospects who lived within a couple of blocks.

Bill, who became my boyfriend in February, wasn't on the list -- I think he was away on vacation at the time.  Joel and Greg, who would become close friends later on, lived three blocks away, too far.

But there were a lot of boys left. You have to figure out who I chose:

1. The Little Kid, aka Mike (top photo), who lived next door.  He was a year younger than me, but he had muscles and a brown smiling face.  We ran under the sprinkler in his front yard, clothes and all, which soaked my shirt and pants and got me in trouble.

2. The Cereal Boy, a cute redhead with freckles, a year older than me (left).  He invited me to watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat cereal -- but it was Froot Loops!  I hate Froot Loops!

3. The Football Player, aka Mean Dave, who punched me in the stomach and called me a "girl," then helped me to my feet and said "I was just kidding.  You want to go to the high school and watch the football players practicing?"  They didn't have football at Denkmann, but he was playing on a summer enrichment team, and he wanted to be a football player when he grew up.

4.  The Parakeet Boy, aka Nice Dave (left), a curly-haired blond boy who had two dogs, a rabbit, a parakeet, and a hamster.  He talked to the parakeet, and made it eat a cracker out of his mouth, which I found gross.  But I liked petting the dogs and the rabbit.

5. The Old Guy, much taller than me, with all kinds of muscles.  But he was eleven -- almost a teenager!  Way too old for me, sort of like a West Hollywood twink dating someone in his 70s.  And he said crazy things, like he already knew how to drive a car and he could stay up until midnight if he wanted.  He had tons of toys in his room, plus a sticker labeled "panic button"; he said if he pushed that, sirens would go off and the whole house would shake.

I tried.  Nothing happened.  He said "It only works for me."

6. The Sick Kid (left), pale, kind of ugly, always looked like he was pain, but he had a round plastic pool in his back yard, and his Mom brought us lemonade in plastic glasses with little palm tree straws.

7. The Angel, aka David Angel (there were a lot of Davids in the neighborhood): puppy-dog cute, but  painfully shy.  When I try to talk to him, he ran to the back of the house.  When I went to the back of the house, he ran to the front.

8. The Rock Star, aka Craig (left), who wanted to be a rock musician.  He had weird hippie hair that turned me off, but he never wore a shirt, which was nice. We went into his basement and played rock stars with his drums and guitar.

9. The Indian, aka Bobby,  a year younger than me, short and slim with black hair and a bright smile.  He wasn't really from India, but he looked like Raji, the boy on Maya.   But it was hard to get close to him, since he lived on the other side of the house where the Killer lived, a crazy-evil blond boy who attacked anyone who came nearby.

Ok, which of these 9 hot guys did I choose to become my summertime boyfriend?

Answer after the break.

Two Boys Kissing at Longview Park Pool

Rock Island, July 1973

I don't remember much of what happened on that day in the summer of 1973, about a month before we visited my Kentucky kinfolk and I met the Teenage Indian God.

 I don't know why practically everybody I knew was at the Longview Park pool:

Peter, the only Asian boy in school, who would participate in the streaking adventure next year.
My best friend Bill.
Dan, the boy I met in the girls' locker room, who had dirty blond hair and a gay-coded lilt to his voice (thought I didn't know what gay meant yet)
Darry
My brother and his best friend.

It was one of those bitingly hot, oppressive days that you sometime get in the Midwest, where the heat literally sizzles in the air and you can't walk more than a few steps without getting soaked. The pool was crowded with glistening bodies, mostly high schoolers, breathtakingly beautiful although dangerous – a bounce in the step or a lilt in the voice might draw their wrath, and result in a shove at a girl or a forced swimsuit removal.  I was standing with Dan at the four foot mark, where the bottom slid abruptly into the deep end, relishing the feeling of endless space. But when I bobbed under the water for a moment, Dan was gone!

Anxiously I scanned the surface of the pool for boys with dirty-blond hair.

The pool had been noisy, with screams and laughter and fifty gossiping or bragging voices, but now it was so quiet that I could hear David Cassidy singing “I Think I Love You” from far away, maybe from a transistor radio over by the bath house, or farther afield, from someone’s picnic on the grass that sloped down the Bluffs. But the song hadn’t played regularly on the radio for years! I had a strange feeling of being unstuck in time, as if I had tripped accidentally into the past like Barnabas Collins on Dark Shadows.

I pulled myself out of the pool. The damp concrete was hot beneath my bare feet, the air thick and heavy, smelling of chlorine and suntan oil and Raid, the spray used to keep bugs off. I walked around the shallow end, past the baby pool, and then along the western perimeter, where a chain link fence looked down the Bluffs. Then I saw a churning in the deep end, like a cauldron boiling.

Some Mean Boys were trying to drown Dan!

Why wasn’t the lifeguard intervening? Or any of the adults?  Why were they all pretending not to notice?
I dove into the hot, frothing water to rescue him myself.

I don't know if the rest was a dream or not: I saw Dan's torso, his shoulders, his tousled dirty-blond hair -- he was kissing Bill!  Their arms and legs were intertwined, their bodies were pressing rhythmically together, and they were kissing!

Writhing with jealousy, I tried to pull them apart. Dan pushed me away with his hand. I head a sickening thud.

The next thing I remember is lying on the concrete at poolside, a hard-muscled guy, sopping wet, kneeling over me, holding my eye open.  He had blood on his hands.  I found out later that he was a medical student who had fished me out of the water and performed first aid.

An emergency room visit and five stitches later, I was back home in bed, eating ice cream.

They told me that I tried diving off the edge of the pool and doing a somersault, but I miscalculated and hit the side.

That makes more sense than what I remember, unconscious fears and anxieties bubbling to the surface when I didn't even know the word "gay" yet.

Afterwards I rarely went into a swimming pool again, and I always jumped in feet first -- no diving. And Bill and I grew even more distant.  The last time I visited his house was for a Halloween party in 10th grade, and I spent most of the evening talking to his big brother Mike, who used to call me "Bud" and drive us places.

A Sausage Sighting of the Mysterious Boy at the Old House

Garrett, July 1972

Just up the hill from my Grandpa Prater's farmhouse in northern Indiana was the Old House: over 100 years old, now fallen to ruin.  We could go up and play in the dusty yard, or hunt for frogs in the little pond, but we could not go inside.  Uncle Paul said that it was full of "witch's blood" that would turn us into "ghosts," but most likely it was just unstable.

We usually stayed away from the Old House, unless there were adults up there, playing horseshoes or skinning and cleaning the animals they hunted.  We didn't like the weird shadows in the upstairs windows, like dark figure moving about, or the porch swing that sometimes moved by itself.

But one day in the summer of 1972,  when I was eleven years old, the farmhouse was full of people: Mom and Dad, my aunts and uncles, and some people I didn't know, an old guy Grandpa Prater's age, some husbands and wives, and a couple of surly teenagers.  They were in the living room, the kitchen, in Grandma Prater's memorial room, even on the front porch.

They were all laughing loudly and talking about things that happened thirty years ago.  Boring!  And no kids to play with!  My brother and baby sister were out with Grandma Davis, and Cousin Buster was visiting his other grandparents.

It was noisy and oppressively hot; I had to get out of there!  I told Mom I was going to play outside.

But what to do?  Nothing is more boring than a farm with no animals on it.

I decided to go up to the Old House and throw rocks into the pond, to see if I could scare some fish.

Even though it was a bright, sunny day, the Old House seemed more sinister than usual.  I shivered with nervous excitement.

The porch swing was swinging by itself.  I heard the rusty scrape.

Trying to avoid looking in the windows at whatever might be inside, I rounded to the back yard, and and almost ran into a boy.

I yelled and jumped back.

He didn't approach.  He just stood there, staring.

He was a few years older than me, but not yet a teenager [models in the nude photos are over 18].   Tall and slim, with a round face, sharp features, and black curly hair.  Wearing a thin brown jacket, which seemed weird on a hot day.

Someone to play with!  And cute!  I thought, smiling at him.  "Do you live around here?"

"I think I used to live here," he said, still staring.

"Me, too.  We moved away when I was little."

"Do you want to go inside?  I can show you my old room. I carved my initials on the wall."

"No way...Grandpa told me to never go in there.  There's witch's blood."

He frowned.  "Ok, well -- let's swing."

We climbed on the porch swing and started swinging back and forth, until we were banging against the wall.  It felt like the whole house was about to fall down.  I jumped off.

"Let's throw some rocks in the pond," I said.

"No.  It's hot.  Let's go swimming!"

"In there?  It's all full of moss and gunk."

"No, it isn't.  When I was a kid, I swam in there all the time.  It's fun."

"Well...I don't have a swim suit."

"You weenie!  Come on, I'll race you." He started taking his clothes off.  I stopped instinctively to watch,   I saw a nice smooth hard chest.  He  turned his back to take off his shorts, but then turned back, giving me a nice view of his "shame."

A beautiful cut Bratwurst!  I hadn't seen very many at that time, but I could tell it was special, the stuff of dreams.

The boy ran and jumped into the pond with a big splash.

"Is it deep?" I said doubtfully.

But the boy wasn't paying attention.  He stood and started walking off, into the pond, like he belonged there...

At that moment, I heard my Mom yelling for me.  "I got to go," I said, and ran down the hill.

"Where have you been?" Mom asked.  "We've been ready to go for fifteen minutes while you traipsed around at the Old House."

I decided not to tell them about the boy, and get him in trouble, too.

For years I wondered about the mysterious boy.  Who was he?  Why was he at the Old House?  Was he a ghost?

I sort of wanted him to be a ghost, but I knew there was a realistic explanation.

Eventually I asked Mom, who told me that the people visiting that day were Grandpa's Cousin Crit and his family.  They moved to Indiana with Mom's family in 1942, and lived in the Old House until 1965.

"Was there a boy a little older than me?"  I asked.

"I think all his kids were my age, but let's check."  She went to get a family Bible to check.  "Cousin Crit, born in 1910.  Married Sarah, had six kids: Delmar, Ethel,  Wilkie, Alice, and Carl."

Carl, the youngest, was born in November 1943.  He would have been 28 years old.  Maybe a grandson, who lived with them?

 Mom didn't remember any, but she spent a couple of years in Long Beach, right after she got married, so she didn't know for sure.

North Manchester, Indiana, July 2006

Over 30 year later, when I was living in Dayton, Ohio, I thought about the boy at the Old House again, and tried to look up Cousin Crit's kin online.  There were dozens of people with his last name in North Manchester, including the mayor, but with a little digging I managed to find Carl.  A phone call got me an invitation to visit my third cousin.

Carl was 62 years old, a buffed muscle bear with a hefty gray beard, retired from the military and back in his home town to take care of his invalid sister (his other siblings had died).  He told me about his career: joining the army right after high school in 1961, being stationed in Korea, Vietnam, Germany, Afghanistan, always on the move, never able to find a home.    

"I remember that visit!" he said.  "It was first time I was back to the Old House since I moved away  But I don't know who the kid was."

"He said he used to live in the house."

"I don't know what he was telling you, but I was the last kid to live there.  Maybe one of my nephews stayed for a week or two.  But none of them were 12 or 13 in 1972."

I shruggd.  "I must be remembering it wrong."

"You know who it sounds like?"  Carl said.  "Me.  I was born in the Old House.  I carved my name on the wall of my room upstairs, and banged on the wall with the porch swing, and I used to go skinny-dipping in the pond all the time.  But I didn't do any of those things that day, and besides, I was 28 years old, not 13."

"Unless a younger version of you went skinny dipping with me while you was sitting in the farmhouse," I said with a laugh.  "A preteen doppelganger trying to recapture the lost freedom of his childhood."

"Huh?"

"It must have been a kid from down the road."

Carl didn't share my interest in the paranormal, and I didn't want to explain.  Or to ask him to drop his pants, so I could compare his penis to that of the mysterious boy I saw at the Old House 30 years ago.

See also: The Naked Man in the Peat Bog; Lane's Weirdest Paranormal Experience.; The Boy Hooks Up with a Fairy

My Brother Picks Up a Boy

The summer of 1980, when I was 19 years old, was awful.

June 10th: I dropped out of college, and moved out of my parents' house to follow my boyfriend Fred to Omaha, where he was getting his first church (I wasn't out yet, so I told everyone that I had taken a summer job as his assistant). 

Neither of us had been in a live-in relationship before.  We were at each other's throats.

July 20th: I threw my stuff in my car and drove crosscountry nonstop to Los Angeles, where I stayed with my friend Tom and looked for a job.

Try walking in a gleaming corporate tower on Wilshire Boulevard with a resume that's empty except for two years of college and a job at the Carousel Snack Bar.

I lasted for two weeks.

August 9th: I high-tailed it back to Rock Island.  Fortunately, I had never officially dropped out of Augustana, and my parents thought that I was coming home from a summer job.

August 13th:  Dad asked, "We're going to Wisconsin Dells this weekend.  Do you want to come?"

Wisconsin Dells?  Hadn't this summer been dreary enough already?

We already spent half our lives on the road, driving to and from Indiana, some boring cabin in the northwoods, and various school and Nazarene events scattered all over the Midwest, but recently Mom and Dad had also been taking random weekend trips to Wisconsin Dells:

A tacky middle-class resort about three hours north of Rock Island.

Water parks, golf parks, zoo adventures, a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum, an optical illusion house, tourist-gouging shops and restaurants. Gross.

I opted out.

But later my 17-year old brother Ken cornered me.  "Are you crazy?  Wisconsin Dells means water parks. And water parks mean guys in swimsuits.  Just the thing to take your mind off that idiot preacher in Omaha."  (Ken was the only one in my family I was out to).

I was suspicious. "Why do you want me to go so badly?"

He grinned.  "Well, I do have a sneaky plan. I can't stand sharing a room with Mom, Dad, and Tammy.  If you come along, we can talk our way into our own room.  That means freedom!"

"We have our own room here," I pointed out.

"But no water park boys.  And I'll bet a lot of them are homos, too.  If you want to invite one to the room to, like, try on each other's underwear or something, I can just go down to the game room and play Asteroids.  A perfect plan!"

I doubted that I would have the nerve to bring home a trick, with my parents in the next room and my little brother playing Asteroids, but...naked water park boys...so I agreed to go.

We drove in Friday after Dad got off work, and stayed at a hotel across the street from a water park called Mount Olympus, because it had a three-story slide.  It didn't open until 11:00 am on Saturday, so we visited Alligator Alley and a go-kart place, and went back after lunch.

The beefcake was not spectacular: lots of nuclear family Moms, Dads, and kids, the oldest a few years younger than me.

Not a lot of single guys.

After about an hour, I had had enough. I asked Dad if I could take the car and check out the other sights.

No, I was absolutely forbidden from using the car.  What if I got into an accident?  The family would have no way to get home.

Grr -- get into one little fender bender when you're 16...

So I started walking.  Busy highway, no sidewalk on the south side of the park.  On the north side, the less busy, tree-lined Fitzgerald Road.

Unfortunately, it curved right back around to the busy highway. 

The side street led through Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty, Culver's, Aunt Jenny's Got It All Shop, a busy cross-street, and a golf course.

Wisconsin Dells is not designed for pedestrian traffic!

I'm not a golfer,but I paid my money anyway, in case there were some cute guys on the course.

There weren't.

I was sick of the heat, the blaring sun, and the smell of sunburn and sweat, so I ducked into Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty, which I read as "cock shanty."  Maybe there would be some cute waiters, or local boys hanging out.

Just my luck. Nearly deserted at 3:00 pm, no local boys, and the servers were all girls. 

I trudged back to the hotel, took a shower, and climbed into the bed in my underwear to read my book and wait for dinnertime. 

At 5:00 pm, Ken burst through the door.

"Oh...um...were you busy?" 

For all he knew, I was naked under the covers. masturbating.   I stood to demonstrate that I was wearing underwear.

Then I saw that he had a friend with him: about my age, blond, with a slim hard frame, six-pack abs, and bulging red speedos.

"This is Kerry," Ken said.  "His Dad works for Alligator Alley.  My brother Boomer."

Kerry's eyes went directly to my crotch.  Definitely cruising!

I reached out to shake his hand, and held it a bit "too long."

"After dinner we're going to the Alley," Kerry said.  "I promised Ken to let him go right into the pens.   Would you like to come with?"

It wasn't fair.  I searched all over Wisconsin Dells for the merest glimpse of beefcake, and Ken has a cute gay guy fall into his lap!

Nothing sexual happened, but who can say no to an alligator date?

Did Swim Teams Once Compete Naked?

While researching my article on old swim team photos, I discovered an unusual sidebar of beefcake history: up until the 1960s, men and boys on swim teams competed naked!

I discovered these photos on the internet.  At first I thought it was a spoof website -- surely men didn't swim naked in the the skittish 1940s and 1950s, where male nudity was forbidden in magazines and in movies, and pants were designed to eliminate bulges.

And some of these photos seem faked.  The fonts are off, and there's no way nude photos would appear in high school or college yearbooks.

And the boys in the photos look a little old to be in high school or even college.  Maybe they are ordinary nudists, with a swim team caption photoshopped in.

Plus there are ample photos of high school, college, and Olympic swim teams of the 1920s-1950s wearing body hugging suits, with bulges but nothing else.

But I've gotten verification in legitimate magazine articles and personal reminiscences.  Men and boys in some schools actually did compete naked during the period.

Giving spectators an eyeful, even with the shrinkage.

The full article on swim team photos is on Boomer Beefcake and Bonding.