For Glenn Saunders, the summer of 1979 promised to be pure hell. While his friends were enjoying the time after graduating high school doing things that 18 year old kids do before entering college or going on with life, Glenn was stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
His parents were spending the summer in Europe, and while Glenn could have joined them, he chose to stay home, the prospects of what a fun summer it would be without his parents around too exciting to resist.
"Leave you alone here?" his father said after Glenn told his folks he was happy to spend the summer at home, maybe get a job and prepare for college in the fall. "No way."
While Glenn was not a wild and rambunctious kid, especially compared with some of his friends, there had been a few lapses in judgement, most recently when he got caught drinking with his best friend Kenny in the basement.
His parents weren't too crazy about that, Glenn recalled, but they would have been a lot less thrilled if they knew that if they came home a half hour earlier they would have witnessed their only son with his lips wrapped around something other than a beer bottle.
So when Glenn was told that staying home alone was out of the question he tried to call their bluff. When his parents showed no sign of relenting Glenn changed his mind and told his folks he would go along with them, but by then it was too late because the accommodations and reservations for the vacation were all set. For two.
"You'll probably end up having a lot better time with them," Glenn's father had said as he informed him that he would be spending the summer with his grandparents, who lived about 150 miles northwest out in the middle of nowhere. "You can help out around there - do some painting and whatever else they need doing."
So Glenn went, expecting over a month of boredom. What he ended up getting instead is the subject of this tale as he recalled it.
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About twenty minutes after my parents drove away, I was already bored out of my mind. It's not that I didn't love my grandparents, because I did. It's just that when you're 18 and you've just begun to figure things out about yourself, the last thing you want is to be marooned out in the boondocks with a couple of folks on the verge of becoming senior citizens.
Grandma Betty and Uncle Ed didn't seem to mind getting me dumped on them, which I guess comes with the grandparent territory, but that didn't help much. Already I had discovered one major drawback, which was the lack of cable TV. The choices were three channels that came in pretty lousy because of where my grandparents lived.
The second setback was that they had few neighbors, although Grandma said that there was a girl my age that lived about a half mile down the road. I wanted to tell Grandma that I wasn't really interested in girls, but Grandpa came to the rescue.
"Betty, that girl is only about 12 years old, for crying out loud," Grandpa scoffed. "You want Glenn to end up in jail? He's a man, aren't you Glenn?"
"Yeah," I said, enduring the playful slug on the arm that came along with his comment.
"Time flies so fast!" Grandma clucked, and I guess that explained the somewhat juvenile Christmas presents I always got from them.
Fact was, although I was 18, I didn't look it. At 5'8" and about 130 pounds, I looked like the "before" pictures in those muscle building ads, and having a boyish face with dimples didn't make me look any older either.
My youthful appearance used to bother me, but I had recently learned that my boyish looks definitely excited some people. That realization came when I became old enough a month ago to go to the adult movie house in Troy, New York, not far from my home, and found out that the action in the seats and the parking lot was better than what was on the screen.
To think that I could have been there, getting my dick sucked while watching dirty movies instead of wasting my summer in Watertown, New York, made this purgatory even worse. The fact that it was raining that first day had me trapped even more, which was why I started exploring their old house.
I had never been down in their basement, which I thought was some kind of our root cellar or something, judging by the way Grandma acted toward it. I guess she thought it was full of spiders and mice, because she always had Grandpa making trips down there, always refusing to venture into the abyss herself.
The thought of being attacked by rats was better than listening to my Grandma humming along with some corny radio station, and since she had sent Grandpa on an errand into town, I snuck down to the cellar.
It wasn't anything like I thought it would be, with linoleum on the floor and shelves of canning jars along the one wall. Certainly nothing to be afraid of, and around the corner and under the stairs it got even better when I saw what had to be Grandpa's man cave of sorts.
Nothing fancy, just an old love seat, an ancient refrigerator with beer inside, and a television complete with one of those Beta tape players. There were a couple of tapes in cases with no titles on them, and under the shelf the player was on were a couple dozen more tapes without names on them.
We had just gotten a VHS player at home, but the tapes we played we rented from the video store, and those cases had pictures and titles on them. These tapes Grandpa had looked like the stickers had been removed. Either that or they had stuff taped from the television.
Either way, at least this was going to give me something to do. I hoped Grandpa wouldn't mind me snooping around in his fortress of solitude, but he was pretty cool for an old guy so I turned the TV set on and tried to figure out the Beta player remote.
When the TV, a decent 19" color set, came on, I must have hit the right button on the remote because there had been a tape in the machine. I had been hoping for Clint Eastwood, maybe Dirty Harry or westerns, but what was playing damn near knocked me back into the love seat.
"Grandpa!" I whispered to myself as I watched the action unfolding on the screen, where two guys and a woman were on a bed, naked as the day they were born. "You dirty old man!"
Grandpa watched porn, just like I did at the Cinema Art Theatre, and when I called him a dirty old man that was a compliment, because Grandpa Ed immediately went up in stature in my book. This was heaven down here, to have dirty movies to watch without wondering whether the guy sitting next to you was horny or a serial killer.
Within a minute I had my pants down and was stroking away while watching these two guys have sex with this woman, and it got even better when the one guy started sucking the other guy's dick while he was screwing the blonde.
There was a box of tissues on the floor next to the couch, and I grabbed one just before I started spurting. One tissue wasn't enough, and after I cleaned up my mess it occurred to me that what I just did might have been twisted, but seeing the tissues and all made me realize that Grandpa did the same thing.
That thought didn't gross me out. Far from it. A twisted thought went through my head, of Grandpa and me sitting down here late at night, jacking off while Grandma slept away upstairs, and as warped as it sounded, the idea turned me on.
Maybe because I knew it was just a fantasy, because there was no way in hell that would even happen. I put everything back the way it was and headed upstairs, happy that at least tonight when Grandpa and Grandma were sleeping, I would be down here having as much fun as an 18 year old guy could have, given the circumstances.
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