Circle Of Friends - The Scoutmaster

The salesman congratulated me on my wisdom and turned me over to Paul, the Finance and Insurance man, who would extract his pound of flesh by allegedly finding me the best financing available. I had all ready set it up with my credit union so he was out of luck, but he still filled out the license and title application and tried to sell me an extended warranty.

He had a rather uncommon last name, and without giving it much thought I asked Paul if he was related to a kid I went to school with in Otis Valley.

“Joe’s my little brother.” He answered, carefully measuring and dispensing the words.

I took a close look at the name placard on his desk and was immediately sorry that I had mentioned it. I have several flaws in my character, but intentionally rubbing salt into open wounds is not one of them. ‘Paul’ was actually ‘J. Paul’, or ‘Jesse’ as I had known him forty-some years ago. I considered trying to apologize for my gaffe but instead I cowardly lowered my eyes, completed the paperwork, and drove away in my new truck.

I started the first grade with Joe and he was my classmate all through the eighth grade, after which I moved to the city. He wasn’t my best friend or anything like that, just another one of the guys I knew and liked, or sometimes quarreled with. His brother Jesse was about three years older. I also knew that their dad was down in Walla Walla doing time in the state prison. Mom didn’t like me associating with Joe, and she encouraged me to seek out other friends instead. Jesse was a little bit of a problem for me, as any insult or injury, either real or imagined inflicted on Joe would be repaid at least ten-fold by his older and stronger brother.

I was eight years old and in the third grade when most of the guys in my class joined the Cub Scouts. We dressed up in our blue shirts and caps, and carefully donned the yellow neckerchief with the magnificent brass slider every Friday and marched through the hallways everywhere we went. A couple of the guys went whole-hog and wore the official uniform pants as well, while the rest of us stuck with our blue jeans. We didn’t go camping or anything like that, but we did do arty-crafty stuff and we even slept on the gym floor in sleeping bags one night. That was hot stuff for a kid who had never spent a single night away from his parents.

Most of the guys dropped out when we got into elementary school, but I stuck with it and at age eleven was inducted into the Boy Scouts. Ray, my best friend, stayed in, and so did Joe. Jesse was already a boy scout, and he became one of our troop leaders. I stuck with the boy scouts for two years until my nuts dropped, at which time girls and social activities became more fun than camping with the guys. Another factor was that of image; scouting wasn’t considered to be ‘cool’ for a teenager, and instead was regarded as a ‘square’ activity, which was of course only suitable for little kids and adults.

I left Otis valley a year later, and was a sophomore in high school when the newspaper published an article about how Jesse had ‘assaulted’ a former Scoutmaster.

There wasn’t much detail in the article, but it didn’t really surprise me, as Jesse was sort of a bully anyway. Mr. Morris, the Scoutmaster, had seemed like an okay gut to me. He owned a service station and was well respected in the community.

A follow-up article suggested that the eighteen-year old Jesse had initiated the assault as retaliation for having been sexually abused by the scoutmaster a few years earlier. That surprised me initially, but then when I thought about it some more I kind of got to wondering if maybe Mr. Morris was a little different. He would always say something like ‘shake it more than twice and you’re playing with it’ when we stepped behind a bush to pee, and a lot of his comments could definitely be construed as having sexual connotations. Most of these innuendos went over my prepubescent head, but I distinctly remember that he always encouraged us to swim in the buff if we were at an isolated location and he always offered to personally check us all for hidden ticks after every hike in the brush, even though I never understood how a tick could get that high up between my legs or into the crack in my ass. He insisted that we all practice good hygiene and he frequently inspected us to be sure we were washing all of our parts. The last few months that I was involved in scouting, right about the time I entered puberty, he became a little more intense and seemed to offer me a lot of personal help on my projects. I brushed it off at the time, but now I wasn’t so sure about the guy.

There was a brief mention of the fact that due to the severity of the assault Jesse would be sentenced as an adult, and I think that he got something like five years for the crime. I pondered the fact that if his father was still in prison they could possibly be cellmates, but my dad assured me that younger inmates were kept isolated from the old-timers.

A rather risqué magazine ran an article about Jesse and how an eighteen year old boy had been imprisoned among hard core criminals. The expose was designed to enrage or enlighten the public about the sorry sate of affairs in the prison, but all it did for me was to make me determined to stay out of trouble, or at least to not get caught.

Jesse was still an inmate at that time, and he admitted that he was frequently used as a sex object for the older and tougher cons, and his description of the depravations inflicted on him was pretty graphic and intense. More revealing to me, however, was his frank and honest account of the events that got him sent there in the first place.

‘Mom insisted that I get involved in scouting.’ He was quoted as saying. ‘My dad was away at the time and she thought I that I needed the discipline and structuring that a good scoutmaster could provide. All of the hiking and camping were a lot of fun for a while, but as about the time I entered puberty the scoutmaster started hitting on me.’

‘His big deal was masturbation, and how evil and wrong that it was. It sort of said that in the Manuel, but instead of using words like ‘jerking off’ and ‘boning it’, they used the term ‘self abuse’. I was guilty, of course, and he knew it. He convinced me that since my father wasn’t available it would be okay for another trusted adult, such as himself, to ‘help me out’ whenever I felt the urge to ‘defile myself’.

‘I didn’t have a lot of buddies my own age, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask them if they had ever done anything like what he was suggesting, so I finally let him jack me off. He did it to me three or four times a week after that, and about the time I got comfortable with that he gave me my first blow job. He explained that it was a natural act, and that all fathers did it to their sons and that all wives did it to their husbands. I was starting to get really interested in girls about that time and I felt guilty as hell because I liked it a whole lot when he sucked me.’

‘I finally talked to Mom about it, but of course I didn’t tell her everything. She called him up and asked him point blank if everything that we were doing was okay. He just told her that we were just doing what all guys do and it was nothing to worry about, and that with my father gone I probably had ‘an overactive imagination’ or something like that. Mom told me that Mr. Morris was the best friend that I could ever have and that I should do like it said in the Manuel and ‘Be Obedient At All Times.’

I sympathized with him on that issue. Maybe you have think or have heard that if it’s dark or you close your eyes you can’t tell if it’s a girl or a guy blowing you, but the knowledge that you are engaging in a homosexual act is still there. Older boys had victimized me when I was about that age and I had the same feelings of guilt and doubts about my orientation that he was writing about.

‘The thing that seemed strange was that he never asked me to reciprocate, in fact he always kept all of his clothes on. He liked to see us boys swim in the nude but he always wore a suit. It wasn’t until near the end, when he bought a package of rubbers and told me that I had to ride him, that I ever saw him naked.’

‘That was the limit for me; I refused to screw him in his ass, even though he begged me to. I finally relented when he told me that he had taken some pictures of me and threatened to pass them around so that everyone would know that I was a queer. That was the most demeaning thing I had ever done, losing my virginity to another guy’s asshole. He let me rest awhile before sucking me hard again, at which time I did it to him again, only this time he asked me to masturbate him at the same time. Nothing that has happened to me in prison made me feel as worthless and depraved as jacking him off while fucking his ass.’

‘I’d had all I could take and I threatened to go to the Scout Council or the police if he didn’t leave me alone, but he bought me off by giving me a hunting rifle and shotgun. I should have loaded one of them up and killed the cocksucker, but instead I kept the guns and let him suck me one more time.’

‘I guess I was getting to old and hairy for him then, because about that time he started warming up to Joe, my little brother, and that was what made me snap.’

‘His wife always went to visit her sister on Saturday morning, and that’s when I went over to his house and told him that I loved him and asked him to let me suck him. We went out into his barn and when his pants were down I hit him on the head with a shovel.’

‘I learned a lot of things in Scouting, and one of them was how to tie good knots. I put that knowledge to use, and I used a different knot on each of the strong twine bonds that secured his arms and legs to four posts.’

‘I considered using my Official Scout Knife on the bastard, but instead I looped another line around his balls and hoisted him off of the ground by them before taking two bricks and crushing them. I didn’t even wait for them to arrest me, I just went to the police station on my own.’

‘I think the real reason that I’m here is that I showed no remorse for my act. They ask me several times if I really knew what I was doing when I nutted him, and each time I told them that I knew exactly what I was doing and that I had planned it for several days. The judge actually apologized to me when he sent me here, but then he added that he couldn’t have me loose on the streets after what I had done.’

With the new Toyota parked in the garage I went in and rooted around through some old newspaper clippings until I found the one I was looking for. It was from the Spokane paper, and it detailed how a young convict had been beaten and mutilated because he had refused sex to an older con. The older man had an additional twenty years added to his existing life sentence and his twenty-two year old victim had been paroled after his release from the hospital. The nature of his injuries weren’t disclosed, but I had a pretty good idea what had been done to him, and the state figured that he had been cured of his violent disposition..