This story is fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is coincidental. Although the characters may recall their childhood, any sexual activity is depicted when they are well past 18 years of age.
The sex is between men. If that's not your gig, read no further.
I appreciate constructive criticism. It can be negative criticism if there is a point to it, so please let me know what you think.
Thanks again to LarryInSeattle for saving me from any head-clutching errors. If any remain they are my own.
*****
I have been seriously crushing on Uncle Jake for a decade now. I was crushing on him before I even realized what it was I was doing. Uncle Jake is my pop's brother, the youngest in a family of ten. They are a good Catholic family, as are most of the families in this part of Milwaukee. Pop is the oldest, eighteen years older than Jake. Scattered between them, there is a set of twin sisters and six more brothers. The twins are three years older than Jake, which is the largest gap between siblings. Even Grandma Liz admitted Jake had been an "oops". Grandpa Al referred to Jake as a "goddamn it."
I'm the oldest, and only child of the oldest child. Uncle Jake was four when I was born. We grew up interacting more as cousins than nephew and uncle.
Pop considered himself a good Catholic too, except when it was inconvenient, like when he divorced mom to marry the office receptionist, and birth control.
"Goddamn, Kieran you get some little girl knocked up and you'll be out on your ass, hear me? Before you stick it in anything, stick it a rubber, better yet just whack off and go to confession."
Pop might have sired a millennial, but he was a throwback, Ward Cleaver's upper-middleclass lifestyle crossed with Archie Bunker's social sensibilities.
Sally, the receptionist cum stepmother, was twenty-four when Pop dumped mom. Pop was thirty-two. I was a ten-year-old with a stepmom who looked like my older sister and a father who didn't find it strange to say stuff about his new wife and my stepmom like. "damn that girl's got some tits on her."- My real mom wished with absolute sincerity, the poor girl luck. She told Pop she would sleep peacefully waiting for the day his dick stopped working and he had to live with knowing the pool boy was nailing Sally. "No offense Sally," she offered by way of apology.
Is it any fucking wonder I'm profoundly grateful to be gay? I'm just not ready to tell anyone yet.
Grandpa Al did very well as a plumbing contractor. His role in the union was less clear and a not a topic open for conversation. His name may have been bandied about in the papers from time to time but unless it was in a cameo role as an "unnamed co-conspirator" he was never indicted. As a side business, he bought a small lakeside resort on the upper peninsula of Michigan; a place his friends at City Hall could go with their families for a nice vacation. Of course, he had to charge them. It would be illegal to let them stay for free, but being as they were like family, it wasn't illegal to offer them the family discount was it?
The crooked ladder to success worked the same in Milwaukee as it did in Chicago or New York. Grandpa Al's business dealings would not stand up to close scrutiny but when it came to his kids, they only touched the legit side of things. Pop might be a Neanderthal and you'd be a fool to buy a used car from him but in his hands the plumbing business was run on the up and up. Grandpa Al had made the business big enough and successful enough it thrived without the need for kickbacks or other shenanigans.
Uncle Jake was even further removed from his father's shady past. He worked in one of Chicago's larger accounting firms. True, one of the senior partners happened to be one of Grandpa Al's old buddies from Milwaukee but so what? It might have been his father's connections that opened the door but it was Uncle Jake who had run with the opportunity. Even my jealous old man grudgingly admitted, "Jakie is showing those Chicago pansies how to get shit fucking done."
Grandpa's resort was closed for business the first two weeks of August. Everyone, all ten of his children and the rapidly expanding pool of grandchildren, were expected to spend at least a few days with the family. As patriarch-in-training, Pop would spend the whole two weeks there. I loved it. It wasn't as if I didn't see my cousins and Uncle Jake all the time anyway. Weekends were a constant round robin of dinners, birthday parties and anniversaries, but being at the lake was different somehow.
That was where I found myself gravitating to my uncle. He was only four years older than me but he was the one that taught me to swim, leaving Pop free to foul the air with a stogie and nurse an old-fashioned. It doesn't take much to bring back the memory of how his hand felt on my belly and back as he helped me learn to float or how his hands felt on my ankles, standing at my feet trying to show me how to kick by swiveling my hips and not by bending my knees. I would clutch the edge of the deck, purposefully getting it wrong, turning blue with cold, just to feel his hands on my legs and never knowing why I enjoyed it so much.
I need to be clear about one thing. My uncle never took advantage of my hero worship. Trust me, when I got old enough to tumble to the fact it was more than hero worship, I searched my memories for the slightest clue that Uncle Jake might have intended his actions to reflect more than just an uncle taking care of his nephew. I was desperate to imagine that he was hiding feelings that ran deeper than familial devotion. As desperate as I was, I came up with zilch, not a thing.
Was I the only one he taught to swim? I don't think I was the only one ever to get a lesson. There was also one or two of my cousins, male and female, lined up along the dock, legs frothing the water while he shielded his eyes. Uncle Jake later swam in college; of course he gave swimming lessons. Did I get picked more than the others to ride into town after he was old enough to drive? No. Did he end up sitting by me more than the others, while we all tried to best him at Mario Kart? No. Did we ever hang together alone in a cabin, on the dock, on the boat? No, no and no.
He was my uncle. If he noticed I was behaving like a clingy little spaz he liked me enough to ignore it. That was the best I could come up with.
Pop's patriarch-in-training role took a big hit when he ditched mom. Grandpa Al liked her well enough but Grandma Liz had adopted her. The poor woman only had two daughters. My aunts were mousy things, so subsumed in the large, and mostly male, family they became as easy to over look as a lampshade you've had for twenty years. Mom was more like Grandma Liz than either of my aunts.
We weren't supposed to be listening, so of course the porch was crowded with my cousins and Pop's brothers when Grandma Liz laid into him. My uncles all felt their eldest brother took his patriarch-in-training shit a little too seriously and were more than happy to eavesdrop on their mom tearing him a new one. It was a masterpiece of verbal flaying. To this day I wished I had brought a tape recorder. What really made it ugly was Grandma Liz did the hiring. Now days she would be called the head of HR but then she was just the person that did the hiring, including the hiring of my new step mom, Sally.
Sally stopped coming to the Lake after a couple of years. Pop stuck it out but he didn't stay the whole two weeks. Grandma Liz made sure mom still came up for at least one week. By the time I was in high school, I spent most of my time with mom. Hell, she only lived six blocks away. She and Pop gradually worked out an arrangement. Mom kept the neighborhood grocery. Sally had to drive to one of the new superstores. On the other hand Pop got the bakery, and if you've ever had one of their glazed donuts you'll know what a coup that was.
They lived within spitting distance of each other and managed to never cross paths. A feat that demonstrates the antipathy they felt toward one another. I'm not an accountant, and I don't want to be, but I can do simple math. Mom always told me I was born early. Based on wedding dates and birthdates I was almost three months early. I weighed 7 lbs. 10 ounces, possibly making me the world's biggest premature baby on record. Pop's rubber rant came into focus.
Pop may have acted like it was 1950 but the divorce laws were thoroughly modern. Mom kept a share of the business, grandma made sure of that. Even after he got out from under alimony and child support mom was doing just fine.
I still enjoyed going to the lake but in high school I made new friends. Some years I would take one or two of them with me. When Uncle Jake started college in Chicago he rarely made it and gradually my attendance became more sporadic, too.
It's been three years since I've been here. The place is packed, mostly with cousins. I graduated from college in May. The job market sucks but good old Grandpa Al worked the phones and in a few weeks I'll be starting an internship in a PR firm, helping them ramp up their multi-media and social media marketing skills, or so I hope. It's only an internship but it is a paid internship. Granddad knew I couldn't afford a decent apartment on an internship salary but luckily for me he had a friend that needed someone to 'house sit' his condo while he was in Europe for two years. He would be traveling back to Chicago every few months but in the meantime the place was mine to use, rent-free, as long as I kept an eye on it.
It was lakefront with a 24-hour doorman. What I was suppose to keep an eye out for was a mystery. I tried to feel bad about it. I did feel a little bad about it but on the other hand I was going to be a twenty-two year-old with a high-rise view of Lake Michigan. I'd volunteer in a soup kitchen or something to make up for my guilt.
Grandpa Al believed in hard work. When he told me about the condo he told me not to "fuck up". I'd never heard him say more than "damn."
"Kieran, don't fuck this up, son. You're starting out on third base boy, you didn't hit no triple, don't fool yourself thinking you did. You simply got your ass plopped down on it. Take advantage of it. You get picked off standing there scratching your nuts and I'll hold your arms while your dad kicks your scrawny ass. We clear on that?"
I nodded and he stared at me long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable, like he was somehow peering deep in the closet I kept a big part of myself ensconced in. Finally, he nodded. "Good. Your dad's done well for himself, when he's not thinking with his pecker. Now Jake, he's another story. I might have made him aware of some possibilities but that kid is going to run that place before he's forty. I'll bet you my bottom dollar and throw in Grandma Liz's to boot. And he's doing it, not me. I handed the ball off to him but he's the one that's going to run it in."
"Gramps?" He grunted. "One thing." He grunted again. "Uh, triple? That's baseball right? And football is the one with the hand off?"
His wrinkled face began to color to such an extent I couldn't help laughing. Once I started it was hard to stop. He went from looking pissed to simply confused to, perhaps, a little amused.
I had been sitting on the porch floor. I used the railing to pull myself up. I wiped the laughter tears out of my eyes and gave the old bastard a hug.
"I won't fuck it up. I promise. I know how much I owe you and Pop. Thank you."
He patted my shoulder. "Get the hell off me boy and let me up. Your grandmother expects me to take her and these howling ijits to town. Let me up out of this chair or you can do it and I'll stay here and enjoy the quiet."
I stepped back. Grandpa Al smacked me in the back of the head after he stood up. It was a playful smack but I could feel there was still plenty of power in that arm. He wasn't that old and despite his wheeling and dealing, he'd worked hard most of his life.
I managed to get in one more hug as Jake came bouncing up the steps.
