Chapter 1

I walked around it, marveling that after eighty years it was still standing, even seemed to be solid. I tried the padlock, before breaking the rusty hasp with a hammer.

It was dark inside, but then it would be, We’d carefully covered the windows back then. The mismatched couches were still there, as well as the carpet covering the walls. The bandstand was still there, as well as the words Earl had spray painted behind it.

“The Love Shack”

It was at one time a country store, built in the thirties, abandoned when supermarkets and chain stores came into being. Earl’s family owned it, and he wrangled permission to use it as a practice hall. We all chipped in together and had the power turned on. We’d scrounged everything we could. I had an uncle who owned a furniture store that also sold and installed carpet, and he let us have scraps, old carpets he’d removed on jobs, everything we could scrounge. We used the carpet to deaden the sound. We could get quite loud at times.

I moved the flashlight about, every corner revealing a memory for me. I got so sick on cheap wine I puked my guts out in that corner, then had to clean it up the next morning, hung over. I got sick all over again. And that corner there, with that old love seat, is where I lost my virginity to Wanda Jenkins, one cold November night when I was two weeks past my eighteenth birthday.

I had just joined the band, the youngest member. Everybody else was already eighteen, except Earl, who was twenty-one. I hit it off with everyone but the drummer, Gordie, but he didn’t like anybody back then. It came out much later that he was gay, and deeply resented the fact that we basically screwed every girl that tended to hang with us, and he couldn’t openly do the same with his boyfriend. I think we all knew, but he was such an asshole we never got to tell him we didn’t give a shit.

That’s right, we were a band, rock and roll at its most basic. We were pretty raw back then. It took a year to get us together enough to play for the public. Earl played a mean bass, Gordie was a hell of a drummer despite his attitude, Will was a decent lead guitarist, and me, James “Grunt” Thomas, played keyboards and guitar, even a little saxophone and once in a while harmonica. It gave us a little more depth than most bands around at the time. Gordie and Earl sang lead, Will and I supplied the backing vocals. Every once in a while we’d bring the Pointless Sisters out, composed of some of the girls that hung around, just for fun.

We were all young, just discovering life, love, and sex. Lots and lots of sex. We were in a unique position. We had a place to go where we could do anything we wanted, and with Earl being twenty-one, we could get all the booze we could afford, as well as pot and any other kind of drug we wanted. I was the dealer, hooked in thanks to my biker brother. We did a little acid, some THC, but never enough for it to be a threat. If I thought we were getting too far in to it I stopped getting it, telling them my brother needed to lay low for a little. Then he got busted and went to jail for awhile, and the lie became the truth.

The building was huge; the back was actually designed as living quarters, pretty common at the time it was built. We built a little stage with material I scrounged from my construction job. We also hit my uncle up for some used couches, and he gave us the best he had, ones he’d agreed to dispose of as part of the delivery service, so we had lots of comfortable seats. A couple were even foldouts. We usually ended up crashing there on weekend nights.

We weren’t complete idiots, and when we practiced, we practiced. Oh, we might have a beer or two, but it was usually a weeknight, and we all had jobs. The parties were on the weekends if we didn’t have a gig. We’d do a song or three, then party. Jerry was our newest addition, and he ran our sound equipment and lighting. He usually had a really cute little redhead with him on the weekends, but never during the week.

Earl and I were the two serious musicians of the group. Sometimes we’d show up and be the only two there. We’d take the time to sharpen our sound. Besides bass, Earl was a pretty good guitarist. I’d play the leads and he’d supply the rhythm. Sometimes we would be acoustic, and other times we’d turn up the amps and try to blow the walls out. That’s exactly what we were doing one night when the little redhead, Bonny, showed up with her sister, looking for Jerry.

They sat down on one of the couches listening, smiling, clapping their hands. Her sister July went by Jules and had spent time in an all-girls band, and she surprised us all by sitting down behind the drums.

We played Zeppelin, Cream, Mountain, everybody we could think of. Earl liked the music of a past generation more than what was out then. He did a screaming vocal of Mississippi Queen, one of the best we’d ever heard. We were having a ball until Gordie rolled in, two hours late.

He went into a screaming rant about the bitch fucking with his kit, even though she hadn’t touched a thing. It got ugly when he tried to slap her, and I jerked his hand back. “Try that on me, motherfucker. At least she was here, and we had a drummer to practice with.”

He was high on something. “Fuck you! You want the little cunt, keep her. I quit!” He stomped out, slinging shit randomly. I followed him to the door to make sure he didn’t tear up anything major and waited as he spun out of the gravel parking lot. I turned around and grinned at her.

“Well, Jules, wanna come out of retirement?”

She did.

Having a girl drummer that could sing helped boost our following. Soon we were playing every weekend. Jerry drafted Bonny to help run sound, so she was always around. I was starting to get tired of playing on the weekend so someone else could party, so we talked it over and decided to take two weekends off and just hang out. We’d all pretty much lost our girlfriends because they wanted to go out and party like everyone else. Jules took her breakup hard, and we drifted towards each other. Nowadays they’d call it friends with benefits, but back then it didn’t have a label.

We’d gone to the local lake a few times, and I’m here to tell you both Jules and Bonny could really rock a bikini. Bonny, though three inches shorter, had bigger boobs, and they stood out on her tiny frame. We were in the water, playing, having a hell of a time when Jerry decided to go jealous on Bonny. She was on my shoulders while Gene, another friend who happened to be there, had Jules, and we were chicken fighting. Jules got a little carried away and yanked Bonnie’s top down by accident. Everyone got a boob shot but me, because I was under her. She shrieked and went backwards, pulling me with her. I thought I was gonna drown. I surfaced beside her and she was standing neck deep in the water, fumbling with her top, laughing as Jules ragged her.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, Jerry was beside us ranting at her. He was pretty drunk.

“You slut! Goddamn, giving the whole beach a free shot. I ought to slap the hell out of you! You that proud of your tits? Here then.”

Before she could move, he’d grabbed her top, yanking it off, laughing like hell as he started towards the shore. “Think I’ll gather up my buds, let’em wait here until you have to come out. Stupid bitch.”

I didn’t think. I just grabbed him from behind and got a firm grip on his long hair and ducked him under. Jules and Bonny were screaming, along with a few more girls that were there. I ignored them until he let go of her top and it floated to the surface. I grabbed it, tossed it to Jules, pulled his head up, and shoved him away.

He floundered to the shore while everybody just looked at me. I was young, big, and had muscles that could only come from a heavy construction job, and I was pissed. Nobody said a word as I checked on the girls.

Jules took Bonny home. The party atmosphere? Gone. I walked by Jerry and his friends, and while they shot me dirty looks nobody said anything. Jules came over to the store after she calmed Bonny down, and showed me her appreciation for defending her little sister. Three times. We ended up crashing on the foldout.

Earl had a girlfriend that we nicknamed Cherry. The nickname was really Cherry Picker, but we shortened it. She was the oldest in our group, twenty-four, and she had tattoos, in the late seventies, when it wasn’t really mainstream to have them. She’d run with a bike gang for a few years until they told her she was too old and worn out, and kicked her to the curb. I have no idea how she ended up with Earl.

We gave her the nickname because we still ran with a young crowd, and if she thought there was the slightest chance a guy was a virgin, she was after him so fast he never knew what hit him. It was almost like a civic duty to her. Guys caught on pretty fast, and they’d act all shy around her, and she’d fuck them before the night was out. Earl knew and laughed about it. They had a strange relationship. He’d slip off every once in a while with some slut he met at a gig, and she would just target some half-drunk guy and have her own fun. These days they’d be called swingers.

In fact, Cherry was the one to come up with the plan. She told Earl about it, and they tried it out in private. He let us get half stoned before he brought it up.

“Know what a Mazola party is?”

Of course we had no clue, so he filled us in.

“Well, you get a bunch of girls and guys together, put some padding down, cover it with plastic. Then you pour two or three bottles of Mazola out, get naked, and start slipping and sliding. If whoever you slide into is willing, you have a good time, before you slide into someone else.”

Wow. He was talking about group sex, a full-blown orgy. We didn’t have the internet back then, but we had the “dirty” magazines and paperbacks, and a few films we’d been able to get our hands on. So, we pretty much knew what it was all about.

We were pretty stoned at the time, so we didn’t really get in to it, but the seed was planted. I talked to Jules one night after we’d had some very satisfying sex. One of her random partners had introduced her to oral, giving and getting, and she was anxious to share the knowledge.

Back then girls didn’t shave their pussies, but she had a pretty severe bikini trim, so there wasn’t a lot of hair involved. She showed me what girls like, where to lick, when to lick, when to be gentle and when to be aggressive. By the third time, I had her pulling my long hair and screaming, so I figured I’d gotten it right.

She lay back gasping. “Damn, lover, if you been practicing on another bitch, point her out to me. I need to give her a big kiss. That was fantastic.”

All right, I went at sex like I did playing, stay in the basic structure but improvise when you had the opportunity. So I fingered her, pinched her nipples, and when I stuck a finger up her ass, she nearly broke my neck arching up and losing it. My face was soaked, and she was babbling. I made a mental note to investigate that avenue in the future.

We lay there until she recharged, me stroking her lightly, until she returned the favor, down to the finger in the ass trick. I nearly drowned her I came so hard. Sated, we lay back.

“So, have you thought about what Earl said?”

Of course I had. The thought of sliding into random naked women, and getting to play with them turned me on something fierce. Hey, I was eighteen, a raging mass of hormones and sex drive. I wasn’t in a serious relationship with anyone, Jules aside. And we still fucked other people as the opportunity struck.

“I have, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. I talked it over with Annette (Will’s current girl) and she likes the idea. We don’t even have to ask Cherry, her plan is to fuck all of you. Jerry will probably be in if he can find a girl, and you let him. He’s still pissed because you replaced him. As far as that goes, Rhonda and Vickie would most likely join us, if you asked them.” Rhonda and Vickie were just a couple of girls that hung around with us, semi-groupies, I guess.

So we planned. I got my uncle to give me all the old carpet padding he had to spare and scrounged some really heavy-duty plastic from the construction site. Already extremely slick, I wondered if any of us would be able to hold on once we put the oil on it.

The finished product was twelve inches high, twenty feet square, and Earl and I had worked little troughs into the sides to keep the oil from spilling everywhere. The night it was going to happen, the girls all showed up with a change of clothes, thinking ahead. I had scrounged a huge shower from work that they threw away because it had a crack in the side. I patched it, plumbed it and a toilet in the back room, and we found an old water heater that still worked. It came in really handy when we crashed on a Sunday and had to go to work on Monday. I kept my towels in a locked box, because I liked good towels, and everybody tended to use them, leaving me with the old, scratchy ones they’d brought. Apparently, I was the only one who knew how to work a washing machine, so I washed mine and left theirs laying until they were almost able to stand on their own. They just threw them away and bought more.

We stood around awkwardly until I pulled a bag of pot out, and after a few joints, the cards came out, and we played stupid games where the purpose was to get you naked and drunk as fast as possible.

Soon we were reduced to a bunch of naked, giggling lumps of lust. I knew Jules’ body really well, so I tended to look at the others. Vickie was a little chunky but had tremendous boobs, that stuck straight out, with the biggest nipples I’d ever see in my life. Rhonda seemed her natural counterpoint, tall, slender, with small boobs and tiny nipples. Still looked hot. Annette, Will’s girl, was half black, unusual for the time having a white boyfriend. She had dark creamy skin and her nipples were almost black. I wanted her, just for the racial aspect, probably. Cherry was there, of course, almost salivating. Booger, and I don’t know he got that nickname, our new sound man, was alone, but since there were more girls than boys, it wasn’t an issue. Jerry showed up at the last minute, also alone.

We almost didn’t let him in. He stayed stoned most of the time now, even had a run in with the law. Balancing sound requires concentration, and if you’re fucked up it doesn’t happen. He made us sound pretty bad twice before we fired him. Plus, we had a good thing going. If the cops ever started wondering what that junkie and his friends were doing out there in the middle of nowhere, they’d start paying attention, and we didn’t want our little playpen shut down.

The ratio of girls to boys swayed us, so we opened the door. Earl and Cherry started things going by taking a running start, shooting all the way to the other side, laughing hysterically. As soon as they got up I grabbed Jules and we gave it a try. We all had to do it after that. We probably slid for twenty minutes before it started getting sexual.

Vickie slid into me and I naturally latched down on those massive boobs, tweaking her nipples. She had her hand on my dick stroking like crazy when Annette slammed into us, knocking us apart. Vickie squealed as somebody else grabbed her. I was already hard, so I rolled Annette on to her side and thrust gently. She sighed and hunched back for two or three minutes, peaking with a little whine. Then somebody else slammed into us, knocking us off the plastic.

We jumped up and dove back on, grabbing other partners. I seriously think I had my dick in every girl there at one time or another. We only stopped to get a fresh beer now and again, chugging it while we watched the action. Cherry was in heaven, Will in her mouth while Earl was pounding her from behind, as she stroked whichever random dick she came in contact with.

It was starting to wind down when someone new came sliding into me. Bonny had come in while we were busy and stripped down. She latched on to me, whispering in my ear.

“I don’t want to do this! I thought I did, but now I don’t. Can you get me out, Grunt?”

She was tiny, so I flipped her to the outside, and started easing to the edge. Will was trying to get his hands on her, as well as Booger. It might have gotten ugly if it wasn’t for Earl.

“What the fuck, dude? You homo all of a sudden? Need me to call Gordie?”

It seems Jerry had latched onto Earl’s ass and was trying to fill it, mistaking Earl’s long blond hair for a girl’s. Earl jumped up in a rage, immediately falling back down. Some part of his anatomy managed to slam into Jerry’s dick, removing all lustful thoughts. They finally dragged him to the edge, and Earl and Booger got him by the arms and literally threw him out the front door. He rolled across the gravel parking lot, getting coated in dust and gravel from the oil. They threw his clothes out behind him, and locked the door. He was gone by the time most of us left.

It gave me the opportunity to hustle Bonny into the back room. She was shaking. “I thought I could do it! I really did. But it was just too much. I wouldn’t have even been on the floor if someone hadn’t pushed me.”

She was quivering, so I pulled her on to my lap, petting her. She finally calmed down. Then she giggled, looking down.

“How are we ever gonna get this mess off us?”

I pulled the curtain back and showed her the shower, even unlocking my box to get a couple of good towels out. I told her I’d stand guard, and she looked at me like I was crazy before dragging me in.

I’m gonna need you to wash my back, and anywhere else you think you should.”

I was doing a pretty good job, I thought, judging by the moaning she was doing. She reached down and stroked my already steel hard dick. Then she put her hands on the shower wall, arched her ass out, and said, “Do me, Grunt, but go slow for the first few minutes.”

I’d already come twice, so I lasted a good long time. Gradually speeding up, I think the only reason she didn’t fall down was the death grip I had on her ass.

She whined a little at first, but by the end she was urging me to do her harder, ramming back as best she could, squealing out my name. The water was still running, and I looked down to see blood running down the drain.

She was a virgin! The thought made me lose it and I came like a freight train. I eased out of her slowly while she moaned, then gently washed her.

“You should have told me,” I said when she winced as I cleaned her.

“Why? I wanted it, and I knew you wouldn’t be rough. How did it feel, popping my cherry?” She was lying on the towel covered couch, her naked body displayed to perfection. Besides having that killer body, she was really pretty.

“I have no basis for comparison. You’re the first virgin I’ve ever been with. I will tell you this, for a virgin you were really into it, and it felt great! I hope to find out if that was beginner enthusiasm or just the start of great things.”

She giggled as I sat beside her, and she pulled on one of the shirts I kept in my box. It covered her, barely.

“Why me?,” I asked as I snuggled with her.

“Would you believe I was horny and you just happened to be close?” She giggled at my expression. “No, honey, I wanted you to be my first. You’re a good guy. You treat all the girls with respect. Oh, you’ll play, but you don’t try to push anybody. The word is out on you, baby. Grunt can make you grunt, in a good way.

“Besides,” she said, “I’ve had a crush on you from the first time I saw you. I used to get so frustrated when Jules would come home after being with you, giggling, hair mussed, walking a little carefully. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

We snuggled and kissed for about twenty minutes before we checked on the others. I always thought someone looking like a fucked-out mess was just an expression until I saw the oil soaked bunch in front of me. They were all pretty well wiped out except Will, who was sliding into Vickie from behind. Annette was sucking one of her huge nipples, which shocked me until Earl told me he’d bet her twenty bucks she couldn’t keep it in her mouth the whole time Will fucked her. Still looked like she was into it to me. Cherry was sliding around, sucking on anyone she could grab, trying to get them up for one more go.

Jules was lying on the edge, almost comatose, leaking. We shook her a little, and Bonny helped her to the shower. They both dressed, and we left. Smoking pot and screwing for two hours sure gave you an appetite. Three huge Burger Barn specials and a ton of fries later, we were finally full.

By the time we got back, everybody had either left or crashed on a couch. I took the girls to the back and showed them the foldout I favored, complete with sheets. They took one look, stripped down to their panties, ordered me to strip to my jockeys, and get my ass in bed. I went to sleep with two mostly naked girls snuggled up to me. We were out in minutes.

The next morning we woke up alone. It took some doing, but I managed to get all of us in the shower. There was a lot of bumping, gasping, and squealing before we got clean.

Jules wouldn’t let me put my clothes on. “Not yet. Bonny told me you got her cherry last night. Now you have to show her what your tongue can do.”

She huffed, she moaned, she came three times before I let her loose. While she lay there recovering, Jules had me doing her. They didn’t seem to mind the taste when they kissed me, and as a reward, Jules taught Bonny to give head. It was a long, torturous session, because Jules wouldn’t let me come until Bonny got it right.

What can you say about an experience like that? Nothing. We showered again, separately, and went back to normal life.

Earl brought it up a couple more times, but by then I was hooked up with Bonny and didn’t want to share, and Jules had found what she thought was true love. Annette rolled up pregnant, and Will turned into an asshole by not standing by her. The band didn’t as much break up as fade away.

I married Bonny, Jules lived with her guy for a year before he slapped her, and she moved in with us for six months before finding true love again. Cherry drifted away from Earl, and he was happy to see her go.

Flash forward five years. I still worked construction and was assistant site foreman. The economy was booming and I was doing really well. Bonny and I had been married three years. She worked a part time job, and we took all my overtime money and used it to put her through the nursing program at the community college. When she graduated with honors, she got a weekend job as an ER nurse and stayed in school until she was a registered nurse, working in the operating room, and was bringing in as much or more than me. It was my turn, and I went for a degree in construction management. We also managed to bring a daughter, Joy Marie, into the world. As soon as I got my degree, we added Jason Paul.

We looked for and bought a house out in the country, and I added to it as often as I could, and when Bonny got pregnant again, an oops baby, July Jane, we sold it for more than twice what we paid for it. It got us in to flipping houses.

Not the way you see now on those shows, but conservatively, buying a distressed property, remodeling, and selling. I got a lot of the labor from the groups I worked with at my regular job, weekend work for extra money, and as soon as the kids were big enough, they learned how to push brooms and pick up trash.

When I was thirty-five, Bonny and I reviewed our finances, and I quit my job and we went into it full time. I bought some undervalued property on the edge of the town and built two hundred and forty storage units. I have six different locations now, almost a thousand units with an 80% capacity rate.

I still hung with Earl, when he was in town. In fact, we stayed a tight knit group for most of our lives. Four years after the band broke up, we all went on vacation together. Earl, his new girl, Bonny and Me, Jules and her current flame.

We were in Daytona Beach, months after the rally, and the place was fairly quiet. We had tickets to see Out Cold, a really good group in their day, but now over the hill. They had gone from a headliner in huge arenas to working the smaller venues.

They cancelled the show due to ‘personnel’ problems. Seems their bassist had gotten stoned, trashed a motel room, beat up one of the cops who came to arrest him, jerked a girl out of her car and took off. It was Friday night, and the traffic on the main drag was bumper to bumper. They literally walked down the sidewalk, yanked him out of the car, and arrested him.

He was looking at so many charges and the bail was so high the band refused to pay it. As a result, they were holding open auditions the next morning, trying to at least find somebody to fill the spot for that night’s show.

“Dude, you gotta try out. If nothing else, it’ll make a good story. What you got to lose?” We had to almost drag him to the audition. Four tried out before Earl, but only one was worth anything, and he was kind of mechanical. They handed Earl an old Fender Precision, plugged him in, and started playing. It was a song we covered back home. Earl never missed a note. We had covered the next two, and he did even better. Then they ran through two songs he wasn’t familiar with, and he missed a note or two.

There were five more guys waiting to try out, but they shut the audition down. Out Cold had a new bass player. They offered him a twelve-show deal to see if he fit and could handle road life. Three dates a week would net him more money than three months at his regular job back home.

After they were through with the business end, they asked him if he knew a guitarist who could maybe help them that night. Their rhythm guitarist was getting over food poison, and they needed someone to maybe play on three or four, to let him rest. Earl told them I knew four of their songs.

That night, I finally got to see what it was like to play for a large crowd. I was scared shitless the whole time. I’d practiced with them that afternoon, and they lumped all four songs into the middle set. I played, while the regular guitarist puked into a bucket. It seemed that was all he needed to recharge and finish the night.

I’ve got lots of pictures from my only claim to rock warrior status. Earl went on to play with them for ten more years.

He joined at exactly the right time. They had just gotten a new guitarist five months before, and he and Earl clicked as the ‘new guys’ in the band.

They roomed together, and soon they were writing music. Four of their songs made it to the next album. It restarted their career, and they were back to playing stadiums again. They made four more albums over the next ten years, and at the end put out a Best Of, Volumes one and two. One was pre-Earl and Jason, the second was mostly all them.

Booger became a financial planner, and Earl put a bunch of money with him. When the band broke up, he was worth a million seven in investments, not counting his other holdings, like the four thousand square foot house I built for him, and the acreage he’d bought from his family.

Earl married once, and it lasted about a year. She tried to make it ugly, but all the stuff he made her sign did her in. She complained she really hadn’t realized what she’d signed, which got her no sympathy with the lawyers.

The kids grew up, all out on their own, the two oldest with families. Bonny didn’t think she’d like being a grandma, but one look at the first child and she was off to the races. We kept them often, I think she would have moved them in if she could have gotten away with it.

She had stopped working when our business could support us, helping me all she could, coordinating crews, making sure we had the right permits until she knew almost as much about construction as I did. When JJ went to college, Bonny came to me with a plan. She wanted to go back to nursing. She got her certifications up to date and worked as an Emergency Room nurse for about a month.

I came home one day to find her crying on the couch. Our town was small and pretty quiet, but a couple of gangs from the big city spilled over into our area. They’d run in to each other and things went bad pretty quick. The Emergency Room was overrun. They tried to save them, but three died before they got to the hospital, and a fourteen-year-old literally died in her arms. Bonny finished her week and never went back.

The local cops weren’t very sympathetic to the gangs, making it very clear that they needed to stay out of their jurisdiction. One gang tried to flex their muscle, and two went missing, never to be heard from again. Seems the local law was like all small-town Southerners, they might fight like cats and dogs among themselves, but if outsiders tried anything they got hit with a unified front.

The national leader was some kind of computer genius, and his best model showed a takeover probability under thirty per cent, and a possibility he could lose as many as forty members to jail or worse. He did what many CEO’s would do, left us alone and went by us, gaining a foothold in the next town.

About a year before Out Cold released their last album, the band took a three-month break, to rest, recharge, and write some new material. Earl brought his writing partner home, introduced him around, and soon he was one of us. We even jammed one night. It put a gleam in Earl’s eye, and soon he had a two-night gig booked at the biggest cafe/concert hall in town. He called me to tell me about it.