Maybe I was a little maníaco because I only thought about sex during our all-male camping trips in Puerto Peñasco every Easter vacation, beginning when I was twelve. Dad would load up his white work van with a bevy of motorcycles and minibikes and enough food, beer, and soda to last a bunch of fathers and sons an entire week.
The minute our caravan parked their vehicles right upon the Mexican beach, the Oliver boys tumbled out, all of us carsick the whole way trapped in Dad’s windowless Ford Pinto panel wagon.
From that moment forward, the men absolved themselves of their fatherly duties and gave their sons free reign. All day long and long into the fire-lit night, the dads drank, smoked Tiparillos, played poker, and grilled slabs of meat. They told endless stories, laughing, spitting, cussing, farting, and scratching their balls all the while.
At various junctures, they rose from their beach chairs, the nylon webbing making checkerboard imprints upon the men’s sunburnt backs, to play cornhole and lawn darts on the sand. Lawn darts had already been banned in the U.S., but fathers in our neighborhood stockpiled them like rednecks hoard guns. On every trip, at least one of the sloshed dads sustained a flesh wound from an errant dart cast by an equally inebriated camper.
While the demon boys fleetly rode motorcycles on the dunes and decrepit streets, I spent my days gaily collecting seashells and exploring the tiny isles dotting the coast. The first supply to run out on these trips was toilet paper, so it was only Tuesday when most of the boys bypassed the nearby outhouse and snuck off alone to take their daily dumps on the archipelago. While on my expeditions, I’d often run across a pair of soiled boys’ boxer shorts, casually cast aside after being employed as make-do toilet tissue and resting not too far from a proud pile of their poo.
Now, that’s a real man.
As for me, I always hid a few rolls for my exclusive use. I enjoyed hiking up to the solitary wooden outhouse at the base of the cliffs. Only there did I have the privacy to drop a deuce into the pool of sewage below and to bust a much-needed nutt.
At last, my arm is complete again!
I needed the toilet paper to clean up both missions, but like everything in life, nothing satisfies me for long. I took to bringing a pencil with me into the outhouse so I could scrawl something nasty onto its inner walls. I was hoping to strike up a correspondence with a fellow pervy beachgoer, but no such luck was ever to be had. I recall that one of my last missives was “Cum on my tongue,” which was accompanied by my drawing of an extremely hairy penis spurting semen onto the outstretched tongue of a happy face.
After each graffiti entry, I’d push the eraser end of the pencil into my sphincter and enjoy the pleasure of it dangling there while I beat off. After I came, I’d wipe up the spillage and toss the tissue down the shaft. My lapiz lawn dart would then be released from my cornhole and sent careening down the dark pit to impale my toilet paper cum wad with an accuracy that would’ve made our drunken dads beam.
Bullseye!
Of course, our macho motorcycle jaunts to Mexico each spring were merely a ruse for the dads to get some south-of-the-border panocha. At least twice per trip, the men would vacate our camp and head into town to “buy some fresh fish” at the Crystal Palace, which they pronounced “paleese.” I instantly knew it was a Mexican whorehouse, although I never spoke about it to anyone.
Forty-two years later, I asked my youngest brother if he remembered the men going into town during our Easter trips. He immediately piped, “Oh, yeah, to the Crystal Palace bordello!”
Loren was only six when those trips began. I guess all of us boys have a sixth sense about sex, courtesy of our philandering fathers.
