Chapter 1

I was three years old when I last saw my father. My little brother never met him. The year was 1929; a year of the Charleston, flappers, bound breasts, late Prohibition excesses, and collapsing stock markets. My father lived in that era while my mother was made of sterner stuff. Her mother, who was to become the bane of my existence as a very young boy, was a no-nonsense Calvinist. She was an American, born of Dutch immigrant parents. I am certain that it was she who bent the twig to shape the man I became and that has influenced all my relationships with the opposite sex.

They say that a child's formative years -- the first five or so -- are the critical ones. Unfortunately, mother was compelled to take a job working 10 hours a day as a department store salesclerk, leaving my brother and me in the tender care of our grandmother. Buz was a sickly baby, and I remember grandmother rocking him for hours to soothe and quiet his fussing and crying. Of course, Buzzy had not been contaminated by three years of exposure to our father as I had.

My Dutch grandmother was so concerned that I not follow in my father's philandering footsteps that whenever I laughed or did anything that reminded her of my father, she would thump me on the head with her thimble. I think she may have overshot the mark. I think she taught me to fear virtuous women and to direct my passions toward the less virtuous sort. Of course, that result didn't manifest its self until much later.

My grandfather died before we could have That Talk, and as a result, my early sex education was largely derived from a few brief experiences with Alma, our "hired girl," confirmed by careful study of the ladies' underwear pages in the Sears catalog, and later, from surreptitious reading, hidden behind the drugstore magazine rack, of "Spicy Detective," "Spicy Western," "Spicy Adventure," and a brief glimpse of Mrs. Skene.

Boy babies are capable of tiny erections, but it's doubtful whether they are triggered by anything remotely sexual. I can remember, however, when I was five or six years old, burrowing into my mothers' warm bed and nestling against her soft breast, breathing her warm body odors, that my cock almost always stiffened. If she noticed, she ignored it. In retrospect, I'm not so sure my erections were entirely innocent. I still feel a twinge in my cock as I write these lines and remember the warmth of her smells, her pink negligee and the softness it concealed. I'm sure there must be some unresolved issues here because I still enjoy reading incest stories about boys and their mothers, and between siblings of the opposite sex...

I suppose, like most curious 11 year-olds, I was eager to experiment. Buz and I shared a little white dog. We spend hours in the basement with that little dog, playing with his cock and jacking him off. We were surprised one day as Slurpy was shifting into high gear, fucking my fist as only a dog can, by our "hired" girl.

She wasn't really a hired girl in the ordinary sense. There was (and is) a cloistered little Dutch farming community about 100 miles north of Seattle. In those days European immigrants were still migrating to the US. Since grandmother spoke Dutch, every couple of years during those early days, one of the immigrant farmers would send a daughter to live with us as a maid in exchange for my grandmother's willingness to teach the girl rudimentary skills as a servant and the English language. Alma seemed grown up to us, but I suspect she was really 15 or 16 years old.

We were so intent on the dog that we failed to hear her approach.

"Vot chew poys doin' to dot poor dog?"

Oh, God! Poor Slurpy was suddenly abandoned, and we froze in fear. If she tells grandma, we're done for! "Please don't tell, please, please!"

"Vell, ve see," she said.

Buz and I lived in mortal terror for a week, but Alma was a good sport and she kept her mouth shut. However, there was more to it than that. She now had something to hold over our heads, and we knew it. For at least a week, we tiptoed around her. No doubt relishing her new hold on us, Alma began treating us as if we were her younger brothers.

One example of that treatment sticks in my memory. It was a month or two after the dog incident. Buz and I had been told to move some firewood that had been dumped in the back yard and stack it in the basement. This meant lifting the heavy outdoor doors over the steps leading down into the basement, and opening the basement door. Alma helped us lift those doors. Then she returned to the kitchen.

Buz and I streamlined moving the woodpile. He stood near the pile at the head of the steps hurling chunks of wood down into the basement while I, at the receiving end, picked those chunks up and piled them neatly against the wall. This was a sure recipe for disaster. Like most brothers, there wasn't much love between us. The most you could say is that we tolerated each other. I still think this was no accident, but as I bent down to pick up another piece of firewood, WHAM!! Buz managed to land a chunk of wood on my head.

This knocked me flat. Buz, thinking he had killed me, ran crying into the kitchen. Alma came running to see if I was still alive.

Grandmother was not home, so the job of comforting me fell to her. Buzzy, meanwhile had run up to the third floor and hid.

I don't know whether this is a European custom or if Alma, remembering poor Slurpy, thought turnabout was fair play, or if she was guided by the way she treated her little brothers to get their attention. Whatever, she was sitting on the cement floor, rocking back and forth, cradling me in her arms tight against her warm bosom, crooning a Dutch lullaby, while she unbuttoned my pants and slid her hand in through the opening. I was still too dazed to realize what she was doing, but then waves of the most wonderful sensation began radiating from my groin as she gently rubbed my stiffening little cock and began sliding my foreskin back and forth. It wasn't long before I erupted in something akin to my first ejaculation. I'd like to say I never looked back from that point on, but that wouldn't be true.

I didn't know what had happened, of course. I knew my underwear was suddenly wet, and I was embarrassed, thinking I had peed my pants. I struggled to get loose.

"Vot's de matter?" she asked.

I was too ashamed to tell her that I had wet my pants. I just wanted to get away from her. She was holding me with both arms, now, but I managed to break away. Not, however, before she reminded me of our experiment with Slurpy and extracted a promise from me not to tell.

"Ve do it again, sometime," she said. "Den you see."

Buz suffered from a serious dyslexic condition (possibly the consequence of grandmother's steely determination to change his natural left-handedness to right-handedness at a very young age). He was attending a special school because of his dyslexia. One evening, he and mother went to a parent-teacher meeting. Grandmother was wholly engaged in The Lone Ranger, one of her favorite radio programs, and I saw a window of opportunity.

Alma's room was on the third floor. I crept up the stairs and hesitantly tapped on her door. When she saw me standing in the hall, she smiled and invited me into her room. I was scarcely aware of my surroundings because I had never seen Alma when she wasn't wearing her maid costume, and here she was, breasts unfettered, wrapped in a long flowing gown.

She sat on her narrow bed and patted the bed next to her. "Come, sit. You vant anodder rub?"

I nodded and sat next to her on the bed. She tentatively touched the front of my pants. I remember that I had a raging erection as I climbed the stairs, but it was gone, and I felt suddenly very frightened; almost as if I were standing on the very lip of a bottomless crevasse. Which, of course, I was.

Alma was very matter-of-fact, almost clinical, in the way she unbuttoned my pants and reached through the opening for my soft little pecker. My fear was slowly ebbing, but I was a long way from recovering the excitement I had felt as I climbed the stairs.

Alma was clearly losing patience. Finally, she stood and opened her robe, displaying two firm globes topped with bright pink cherries. "My brudders lak to see me lak dis," she explained. "It make dem hard."

"Can I touch one?" I asked.

Alma turned and resumed her seat next to me. Then she placed my right hand on her firm little breast while at the same time groping in my pants for my cock, which by now had recovered and welcomed her warm hand. There was something almost magical about the softness and the silky feel of her skin as I began caressing her breast.

"Dot's better," she said with satisfaction, as she extracted my hard cock, and briskly pumped it, causing my little red glans to appear and disappear in rapid succession. I was not lying, half dazed, on a cement floor this time. All my tactile energy was focused on our hands and my cock. Somewhere at the base of my balls I began to feel a curious and unfamiliar ache and if her hand on my cock hadn't felt so good, I would have asked her to stop.

The pressure kept building and the ache increased in severity until my cock began to throb and suddenly erupted in her hand. I was suddenly frightened again because my balls continued to ache. The fluid didn't look like pee, but it had come from my cock.

She sensed my fear, and sought to soothe me. "Is OK," she said reassuringly, "Noding to be 'fraid of. Boy's supposed to come lak dat. My brudders do."

Taking a cloth from a pocket in her robe, she gently wiped my withered cock and scrubbed her hand dry. By this time, the ache had subsided, and I hastily buttoned my fly. That was my first, last and only visit to Alma's room. A few years later, by the time I was 14, I was masturbating at least twice almost every day. I would curse myself for the lost opportunity with Alma as I frantically examined pictures of Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, and other pinup queens of the day while pumping my cock. I'm sure Alma would have let me fuck her had I only asked. I don't know that she fucked her brothers, but my guess is that she did.

The following summer, Buz and I were sent to a small subsistence farm that bordered on a shallow Puget Sound cove. Our hosts, Major and Mrs. Skene, took in 10 to 12 city youngsters during the summer as a kind of cash crop. Major Skene, who we were obliged to call "sir," was a veteran of both the Boer War and World War I. Mrs. Skene, a tall redhead, was a good deal younger than her husband and had been an Army nurse during the first World War. She was probably in her early 40s.

We went swimming almost every day. I vividly remember two occasions when Mrs. Skene joined us in the water. After we returned, wet, cold and shivering to the changing tent on the beach to wiggle out of our wet swim trunks and dry off, we were surprised when Mrs. Skene raised the tent flap and joined us. Especially when she began to wiggle out of her swim suit.

Our modesty was forgotten as we watched her reach up and pull her shoulder straps down and begin peeling the suit off. She was very matter-of-fact and ignored ten pairs of fascinated juvenile eyes, as she released her breasts and pulled the suit down below her waist, down her hips, exposing a red bush (the same color as her hair) that concealed her pussy. Then she stepped out of her suit and began to towel herself as briskly as we had.

Those of us old enough to masturbate now had something real to picture as we flogged our little peckers. I tried to teach Buzzy to jack off that summer, but he would have none of it. In fact, he even threatened to tell mother if I forced him to join the clandestine circle jerk that involved most of us and which convened behind the barn every evening after chores.

Of course, I had told the boys about my earlier (grossly exaggerated) experiences with Alma. Others pretended they had seen their mothers naked, or that they had seen their parents fuck. Two of the boys even claimed to have fucked their sisters. When we tired of telling each other lies, we'd have contests to see who could ejaculate the farthest.

Mother moved her family, (Buzzy and I) to Bremerton in 1940. I matriculated in the local high school, but high school and I were not well suited to each other, and I began cutting classes so I could work as a caddy on the little nine hole golf course in the Navy yard. I soon dropped out of high school altogether, and began working full time in the caddy shack, as both caddy master and clerk-bartender.

Mother was not altogether pleased to learn that her 14 year old son was serving beer to the golfers when they ended their game, but she was horrified when she also discovered that I was gambling with the officers with a dice cup, double or nothing for their drinks.

Like countless legions of bartenders before me, I had found a way to make a little extra money on the house. Instead of selling the customers my own whiskey (and pocketing the proceeds) as adult bartenders sometimes do, I simply cut myself in on the profits (when there were any) from the dice cup. Thus when I lost, the house paid. When I won, the price of the beer went into the till and the profit went into my pocket.

As I said, Mom didn't care much for the direction my career seemed to be taking, and finally, shortly after my 15th birthday, she put her foot down. No more caddy shack. I spent the summer goofing off, but as autumn approached, she issued an ultimatum. I had a choice; either go to work or go back to school.

The economy was coming to life in the fall of 1941. The Navy yard was hiring, siphoning off most of the unemployed, so local service industries were beginning to feel the pinch. I saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of a neighborhood gas station, and applied for a job. I had to do a little fudging on my application form, of course, and innocently added two years to my age. I was hired on the spot, and I quickly discovered a universal truth. The junior member always gets the shit details.