“Day of Wine and Toesies” is Included in Love Under Foot

When I think of summer, I see an innocent boy of ten. He strolls along a path in the woods of Vermont. There is a reed between his teeth, releasing the essence of sweet green onto his tongue. The other end bobs jauntily in the air, eight inches from his face.

He is carefree, barefoot. His toes kick up at sunny sky. He is my icon. He comes to mind each year, about the same time the Coppertone billboards rise along the roadsides with that sprite tyke, that bottom-tugging puppy.

When I think of summer, my mind overheats, drenched in other notions. Other lotions.

Let me be your squeeze bottle icon.

Let me tell you about Indian Camp.

All these years later, let me scribble one more postcard home to Daddy.

Help me.

Share my crayons.

Pick one. Stick it in the box hole and twist.

Sharpen my colors.

Grape Green. August Tan. Cream.

Draw a full circle around the boy on the path.

Start at the reed and move to the brainpan. Press your tip to his head and tousle his sun-streaked curls. Then curve down behind his back. Be careful not to get too close. Don’t dare touch the jut of his bum. (You could get in trouble, you know.)

Come round to his rear heel now. Get right beneath it. Perfectly traverse the arch, and ride up on the big toe of his forward foot. Momentum’s with you now. Your shining trail presses hard, swings up and makes the perfect connection, a shooting arc from his upthrust toe to the bobbing tip of his straw.

Put the pressure on as you complete this circumscription. Bear down on his crazy head.

Make my bottle-top explode.

Indian Camp was an all boys’ affair.

Our bunk was called Navajo. Carl, our dense, gorgeous 17-year-old-counselor and the chief swim instructor, was more upstanding and less intelligent than the camp’s other young employees. As a result, we kids in Carl’s bunk bore the brunt of the rest of the staffers’ disdain (which was only aggravated by the jealousy-inducing fact that Carl had a girlfriend in nearby Montpelier).

“Nava-Homos,” the other counselors deemed us, and whenever Carl had his night off and went rutting, they waited for their own charges to fall asleep, then snuck in to torment us.

Flashlights—held inches from our eyes—blasted us awake, as these boys with hairy arms and attempted goatees loudly threatened us with candy confiscation, revocation of movie privileges, and banishment from cookout night should we ever speak a word of these necessary trials.

“Do I hear whining?” taunted Animal Caruso one Saturday evening as we lined up along the foot of our bunk beds. “Did one of you piglets just whine?”

“Nah,” Jerry Storch replied, producing a brown paper bag from behind his back. “I think I heard one of the little girls say she wanted to drink some wine.”

At that point, scrawny Brady Brennan, the smallest boy in our bunk really did begin to whimper.

“N-n-no! Please guys. I can’t. I really can’t.”

“Can’t what?” grunted the Animal.

“I can’t drink wine!” Brady was terrified, begging. “Our Dad went away. Mom said it’s ‘cause he’s alkolic. We don’t even have a real father now. Please don’t make me drink wine.”

“Awwww, I understand,” purred Jerry. “That really would be going too far, don’t you think, An-man?”

Animal nodded and feigned wiping a tear from his eye.

“Why don’t we give him some lemonade instead,” he gestured to Curtis Slova, the third and bulkiest of their band. Curt bent down, grabbed Brady by the ankles and swung him head over heels, sweeping the floorboards with his hair.

“March!” Jerry commanded the other five of us campers. We followed Curtis and dangling, red-faced Brady into the bathroom. Animal was taking a piss.

“I’m gonna drown!” screamed Brady as his head descended into the flushing maelstrom. The floor around the toilet was splashed with coughed-up water. As sorry as I knew I should feel for Brady, I couldn’t pull my eyes from his upside-down toes, writhing wildly, as if they wanted to braid themselves together.

“Alrighty then,” implored Jerry, releasing Brady, who scurried to cower on his upper bunk, “Does anyone else have a problem with wine?”

As it turned out, Jerry’s brown bag contained not a bottle, but a huge bunch of grapes.

“File outside Homos!” called Curtis. “Time to make some wine.”

Out front, we shivered silently in our sleeping briefs, illuminated by two lanterns that Jerry had propped on the cabin steps.

“Now,” whispered Animal, “In my grandmother Caruso’s village in Sicily, they made wine the old-fashioned way, like we’re going to. But before the work began, there was a town festival, with fun and games for the bambinos. So that’s how we’re going to start, too, piglets, with a traditional vineyard relay.”

The camp path was alternately rocky and muddy, and the prospect of running barefoot uninviting.

“Pull down your panties, girls,” said Animal. “Put ‘em round your ankles.” Anyone who hesitated got a poke in the back from Curtis, who stood behind us, wielding a broomstick.

“Now,” Animal plucked one green grape from the bunch, displayed it between thumb and forefinger then handed it off to Jerry. “Let me show you young cunts how this is done in the Old Country. C’mere Finegold.”

David Finegold shuffled over. The empty pouch of his Jockeys dragged in the dirt between his feet.

“About face!” ordered Animal.

Finegold’s face crawled with fear. His bony ribcage swelled and retracted in an involuntary wave as he felt Animal’s lacrosse-calloused hands take hold of his buttocks. Animal’s fingers reached wide to brace Finegold’s hipbones. His thumbs pressed into the soft white mounds and spread the cheeks open, like the pages of a handbook on humiliation.

Responding to Animal’s nod, Jerry stepped forward and reached down along the small of Finegold’s back, the grape pinched in his fingers.

“Ri-i-i-ght there,” whispered Animal and he released Finegold’s ass and Jerry drew back his empty hand.

Animal set his palms on our bunkmate’s shoulders and turned him back around, butt toward the rest of us. He shined his flashlight directly on Finegold’s ass; we could see a spot of pale green, shining deep within the cleft.

Curtis had placed a large metal bucket 20 yards down the path, and now, following Animal’s instructions as the rest of us squirmed in embarrassment, Finegold waddled toward it, his underpants soaking up muddy water from the puddles.

“Oooowww!” he cried as he stepped on a jagged stone, almost losing his balance in the pain.

“Don’t let it drop!” snapped Animal. “Else you’ll eat it right now and start all over.”

It seemed to take forever for us to pick that pendulous bunch of grapes down to the twigs. A dozen times each, the five of us bent over, clenched a tender ovoid, then made our ungainly way down the path, squatting astride the bucket to release the newly bruised fruit.

“I hope your mommies taught you how to wipe properly,” Curtis cracked as Finegold deposited his final grape. “’Cause this is supposed to be white wine.”

Jerry howled at that one.

I was relieved that Animal ordered us to “get your bloomers on, ladies!” before the issuing his next command. White briefs helped obscure my most unladylike reaction to the slippery, sluicing sounds of my bunkmates’ feet as they stepped into the bucket and worked their toes into the pile of glistening green. It was as if I had supersonic ears, like the bats we’d learned about in nature club, able to zone out unimportant sounds and keep focused on target. So while I’m sure Finegold and company cried “Gross!” and “Disgusting!” and “Vomitrocious!” (our favorite new word that summer), I didn’t hear them.

What I heard, amplified and converted to a sort of internalized surround-sound, was the fleshy underbubble of a pinky toe wetly pressing a grape skin, until it popped and released its pulpy guts. I heard the slow squoosh of pulverized fruit, squeezing up over knuckles, then sliding back through sticky interstices, dripping off toe-webs and leaving a sediment of must under nails.

Finally, it was my turn to step in. My heartbeat grew faster. Tiny sunbleached hairs quivered along my arms. Interlacing my fingers, I made a mask over my face to hide my ecstatic grin, my backrolling eyes, and the dart of uncontrollable tongue poking out to lick my lips. I hunched over to obscure the solid throb below my waistband, and through the gaps in my mask, I watched a sole touch down upon the warming ooze then felt myself slip under. I angled my left foot in, slowly, toes first, so the gaps were crammed full, then ball, arch and heel. I shifted my weight in a juicy rocking motion.

From below rose the fruit-drenched perfume of dirty feet and tight-squeezed cheeks…I felt oil and tongues and creamy spit, ankle deep…I heard suction, wetness, and the sweet slimy snap of toes, crawling on each other for mutual pleasure…I wanted to drink that wine…To dive in…To swim…

“It’s Carl!” Animal hissed to his cronies, spotting a flashlight moving in our direction from far down the path. He yanked me out of the bucket and kicked it under the cabin, spilling, as they rushed us all inside.

“You’re fucking lucky,” Curtis snarled as we jumped into bed. “You missed out on the homemade refreshments.”

“Are you okay?” Brady whispered to me from under his blanket.

“Yeah, they’re okay, you little pansy.” Animal flipped out the corkscrew of his Swiss Army Knife and twisted it menacingly in the air. “And you’ll all stay okay if you keep your traps shut. Got it?”

“We were just having some fun, right piggies?” sneered Jerry.

I nodded along with the rest of my bunk as the three of them climbed out the rear window, then popped the screen back into place just as Carl stepped in through the front door, being careful to make as little noise as possible.

As I did each night, I lay on the bottom bunk below Carl’s bed, watching his shorts and underpants come down, his striped tube socks come rolling off. He always lifted his nuts with one hand and sprinkled baby powder underneath with the other just before pulling himself up top, making the springs squeak above me. I would drift off in the trailing cloud of talcum and ballsweat and damp Adidas.

Carl was so good. He never tortured us like the others. He had white, white teeth, smooth, smooth skin, and lank, ash-blond hair like the boys on Flipper re-runs. When he stood on the lake dock with a whistle in his lips, the palms of his hands and the bottoms of his feet were rosy-white accents to his flawless tan. Other than the secret sub-Speedo zone I got to see each night, the rest of his body was the same milky-brown as the Kraft caramels he’d give us whenever we swept the cabin.

Sometimes, I would sweep three or four times a day. Carl would sit there smoothing Blistex onto his thick maroon lips. “Such a clean kid,” he would say, chuckling as he tossed me another cellophane wrapped cube. “You’ve figured out how to turn a broom into a candy cane!”

What Carl didn’t know was that, on some of his nights off, Animal and the gang would use this very same broom to give us Witchy-Wedgies, folding the waistbands of our briefs back over broomstick, then jamming it upward until our feet were about to lift off the ground. You could hear the elastic beginning to tear from the cotton, and feel the burn of bunched fabric cutting into your butthole and balls. On laundry day, my bunkmates and I never teased each other about skidmarks.

Wednesdays, because I had private tennis lessons, I got to skip late session archery with my bunkmates. I ran back to the cabin at the end of afternoon assembly. For a half-hour, before grabbing my racket and heading up to the courts, I was free to read my comic books and to write postcards with the 64-color crayon set my parents had sent me. I would also get to see Carl, just off of swim duties, coming back to the bunk and peeling off his vibrant second skin.

Dear Mom and Dad, I would write, transfixed by the pounding water of Carl’s shower in the background. Camp is great! All of the counselors are fun. Carl—my bunk counselor— is kind of shy, but he’s really cool too. Can you send the new MAD Super-Special and some of this stuff called Blistex, for chapped lips?”

My postcards were fantastic Technicolor creations, alternating lines of text in Peach and Flesh and Cornflower Blue.

After showering, Carl would lay on his bedspread, face down with just a folded towel draped over his butt. He would read a fat gold paperback called Nicholas and Alexandra. It looked hard and serious, but Animal said he thought there was a part in there about some Russian queen who liked to do it with a horse, so maybe it wasn’t boring. The third Wednesday of camp—I guess he realized I was a cool kid by then—Carl asked me if I wanted three extra caramels to give him a back rub before I took off for tennis.

“I can skip lessons today if you need a long one!”

“Nah.” he laughed. “I’m not getting in trouble with the coach!”

My balls went all tingly as I sat on the back of his thighs, kneading his back and shoulder blades. Carl just lay there, oblivious to me, all caught up in the adventures of Nicky and Alex. I thought maybe I wasn’t pressing hard enough, so I stretched my legs back and dug the heels of my palms into his shoulders, the whole weight of my body on my hands, like I was about to do push-ups into his ass towel.

I kept thinking he should make some noise, or roll over and run his tongue across his teeth like the Pearl Drops lady on TV, but nope.

“Is this good?” I asked him in a whispery voice. “Do you like it this way?”

“It’s fine,” he said, “But please, I’m reading. Shut up if you want your caramels.”

In the Penthouse that Jerry kept hidden under his mattress, I’d read an article called ‘The Art of Sensuous Massage’; I tried to do the Swedish Knuckle Wave on Carl.

“Hey…hey…Cut it out, that tickles!” he complained.

After ten minutes, he said I better go to tennis and that I could help myself to three caramels. The bag was tucked under his sock pile.

The next Wednesday, I was perfectly silent as I gave Carl his rub. Again, he read and ignored me. I would have been totally bored if I wasn’t thinking of the surprise I had planned. My little pretzel stick of a boner poked up against my shorts. There were two techniques from the massage article that I was particularly interested in trying out. I sprung the first on Carl just after I hopped down from his bed; he told me I could have four caramels because I did a better job this time, but instead of going over to his socks, I reached down, grabbed a bottle I’d set on my mattress and squeezed my hands full of suntan lotion.

Then, without a word, I stood on the metal bucket, which I’d upturned on the floor. I stared directly into Carl’s size 11 soles that dangled over the bar at the end of his bed. I slapped hold of them with my cream-coated palms, gripping them around the arches, like vertical dumbbells.

“Yow! What are you doing?” yelped my horizontal dumbbell.

“Just let me! I read it in a magazine. It’s foot therapy.”

“Tickle me and you start losing candy!” he threatened.

“It’s not tickling,” I breathed. “I promise.”

My thumbs dug over the sand dunes of this new terrain, pressing into muscle and tendon, vibrating in circles against dense packets of deeply buried nerve. I greased my fingers and laced them between Carl’s toes, sliding them back and forth, popping the webs like harp strings.

His back torqued, serpentine, and just over the mimicking horizon of Carl’s heels, I saw the towel start to crawl up the twin curves of his ass. I swallowed a mouthful of my own drool. There was a dull thud as Nicholas and Alexandra plummeted to the floor at the head of our bed.

“Whoa! Whoa! Stop!” cried Carl, flipping over and yanking his legs free. He curled bent-kneed on his bunk, half trembling. “That’s enough! You’ve got to go to tennis now.”

During the last ten days of camp, there were a lot of one-on-one canoe trips. Animal Caruso took me out to Deer Island and showed me the cave.

“Dude?” he asked. “You’re not gonna tell are you?”

“Tell what?” I asked.

“All the stuff Jer and Curtis and I did with the Navajos this summer.”

“It was just fun,” I said. “No biggie, right?”

Animal laughed, kind of surprised. “Right. No biggie.”

I affectionately squeezed his crotch through his denim shorts, and scrambled down the hill. “Right!” I laughed. “No biggie there for sure!”

“You’re fucked up man,” said Animal, when he caught up with me, his face twisting in genuine revulsion. “But here’s ten bucks from me and the guys anyway. We need our jobs again next summer, if you know what I mean.”

I skipped my final tennis lesson for the Needles of Ecstasy.

Since that second backrub, Carl had hightailed it out of the bunk after showering each Wednesday afternoon, telling me to sweep and take four caramels if I wanted. But this was my last chance.

“ No, Carl!” I snapped as he started to leave. “I think you want a back rub.”

“No thanks, man. I’m cool. Help yourself to candy if you want,” he flashed his dimwit grin, all those sexy Chiclet teeth wasted on such a straightedge dorkus.

“Come on, Carl. Just hop up on your bed. You know you liked it.”

“Nah, bud. Gotta run.”

“Hey, Carl,” I hissed. “What if I tell?”

I almost didn’t let him have the towel.

“C’mo-o-on, ple-e-e-ase,” he’d squealed, like pussy little Brady, begging to keep it.

He was flustered and blushing and I knew he’d lose it anyhow.

I grabbed the underpants he’d dropped on the floor and pulled them over my head to make a mask.

“Did you ever see Friday the 13th?” I asked. “Well, now you’re you, and I’m Jason.”

I treated myself to something sweeter than caramel: the winey ferment of his raw teenage feet. I poked my face through a leg hole of his crotch-smelly BVDs and pressed my nose and mouth against each sole for five deep breaths. Each exhalation drove him to writhe and whimper. Then I drizzled cool coconut lotion over his heels, letting it run down to his toes in shiver-inducing rivulets.

“Oh stop oh stop oh stop,” he squeaked as his ass bucked. The towel slid off and fell to the ground. Then, like a snake I wove my tongue between his toes.

“Oh oh oh.”

“ You love that don’t you?” I growled, hearing Jerry’s voice emerge within my own. “Piggy, piggy, piggy!”

There were no words coming out of Carl any more. Just muffled noises as he buried his shamed face in his pillow. I gave him the cream rub for a good ten minutes, smelling the heat that rose off his ass cheeks, spying the golden hair on his balls every time his pelvis arched. When I let go of his feet, they were flexing and un-flexing involuntarily, like hooked fish on a line.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted as he sat up, about to spring down from the bed. “Are you satisfied you little pervert?”

“Back down!” I growled, stepping over to the corner of the bunk then heading back to the bed, broom in my grip.

“No fucking way!”

“I’ll tell! I’ll tell! I’ll tell!” I cackled.

“So?!” shouted Carl. “In prison I’d at least have a chance to fight this shit off!”

“It’s not what you think, Carl.” I thrust the broom toward him, letting him catch hold of the handle. “I haven’t done anything to hurt you yet, have I? Now lay down, counselor.”

He did as I said. I ran my hands down the length of the broomstick beside him then plucked out two tawny straws.

The view was excellent from eight inches back, all the clenching of buttocks, all the gooseflesh rising on thighs. I pinched one end of each straw between a thumb and forefinger then barely touched the opposite tips to his feet, I drew long, slow, excruciating lines. Carl whelped, and groaned, and gurgled staccato symphonies. I traced the silk-smooth skin along his insteps, turning the merger of white flesh and tan line into a full-body network of electrical nerves. Each toe pad, in turn, was poked and circled, every exposed millimeter of sole most unlovingly and pointedly caressed.

And in the end, as Carl reached ceilingward with his perfect asscheeks and thrust a greedy hand down to his own proud whiskbroom, I thought of writing home to share one last wonderful summer memory. Carl screamed and squirted as I invisibly signed my name upon his feet.

 

© 2004 Jim Gladstone - Contributor's Bio