The Call of the Wild

    In 1970 I was twelve years old, living in Claremont, Tasmania. I was a Boy Scout and I had the opportunity (if it can be called such) of attending the Boy Scout Jamboree, which that year was held at Leppington, 55 kilometres out of Sydney. Boys and youths from all over Australia were crammed together for a fortnight, in a pungent melting pot of testosterone and sexual tension. Khaki-coloured tents were erected by everybody, working together; little rain-trenches were dug around the perimeter of each; guy-ropes were tightened. Each tent housed six boys, and each boy was drawn at random out of a hat, so that everybody was forced to mingle with people one wouldn’t necessarily piss on should they be on fire. My tent housed two tough, street-wise fifteen-year-old boys from Sydney, named Lance and Kevin; two fourteen-year-old rapscallions from Melbourne and an attractive deaf mute kid from Adelaide with wavy blonde hair and lean good looks, who was a year older than me. His name was Robin, and I was immediately smitten.      On the second night the two Sydney boys absconded from the camp and hitchhiked into Sydney, ending up in Kings Cross, where they had gained entrance to a strip club. As they had been wearing their scout uniforms at the time, this now seems outrageous, but times were very different then, and their recollections the next day, recounted as we went about our tedious task of lashing some logs together to make a pontoon, seemed so full of precise detail that they could only have been true.
“So, we sat at the table up front”, said Lance, “and this girl was dancing on the stage and then she jumped down and grabbed my fuckin’ head and pushed my face into her fuckin’ bush.” Kevin, the other boy, then demonstrated how the dancing girl had gyrated on the stage, admirably miming her large, wobbling breasts and long, flowing hair. Marcel Marceau would have been proud.      A few nights later, we all lay in our sleeping bags after an exhausting day of hiking, or rock-climbing, or whatever it might have been that day. The sky was pitch-black and scattered with diamond-bright stars. Someone inevitably began talking about girls, which alienated me straight away. I turned to the canvas wall, knowing that I would never be able to join the banter about breasts and vaginas and the like. I hovered on the delicious abyss of sleep for some time, and then I heard one of the boys mention Robin’s name. I pricked up my ears. The boys wondered how anyone would be able to wake Robin up, seeing as he could hear nothing, and therefore wouldn’t respond to anyone calling his name. Someone called out, “Robin!” Robin continued sleeping, tucked up in his bag.
     “Robin!” the boy called again. Robin slumbered on. There was laughter at this new game.
     “ROBIN!!” bellowed another boy at ear-splitting volume. There was much guffawing, now. Still Robin slept on. One of the boys got a torch from the folds of his sleeping bag and shone it around the tent. The light flashed across naked shoulders and grinning faces. One of the Sydney youths then got out of his bag and stood up, naked; with jerking movements of his arms and legs he mimed the stripper’s dance once again, his cock flopping about in the flashed light as though in some lurid discotheque. The boys all laughed excitedly. The weak beam then fell upon Robin’s face, which looked golden and beautiful in repose.
     “Aw! Look at the beautiful lickle baby!” said Lance, “Sleeping beauty.” I knew he was being sarcastic, but what he had said was absolutely correct – Robin was a sleeping beauty. 

    “Hey, I dare someone to kiss him. Who’s gonna kiss him? I dare someone to kiss him. See if he wakes up!” There was much laughter about this bizarre suggestion. But I spoke up. And god knows what impelled me!
     “I will”, I said. There was a look of incredulity on some of the boys’ gold-lit faces. But I had said it, and so I had to go through with it. It was as if I was steeled to finally reveal myself to these boys, who’s every action and conversation I was doomed to be outside of. It was therefore with a sense of enormous power that I shuffled out of my bag and knee-walked over to where Robin lay, oblivious to the drama unfolding around him. There was an expectant hush as I lowered myself to Robin’s lovely face. I kissed him quite firmly on the cheek. He stirred and I hurriedly scrambled back into my sleeping bag, trying desperately to pretend now that this had never happened. The boys were hooting and laughing in disbelief. I had certainly made an impression – but I wondered whether it was it one that I would live to regret. Suddenly, Robin was upon me. His voice cracked into almost-words and furious honks as he violently pounded my back and my head with his fists.     
    For the rest of the Jamboree I was shunned by the other boys, and left to my own devices – a situation that I have to say pleased me enormously. There was no going back, and I had pronounced my situation in the most blatant way imaginable. The only acknowledgement that subsequently came my way was when one of the troop leaders, a tubby boy named Sean, gestured over to me and said to a visitor from another camp area.

     “See him over there… you know what he is, don’t ya?” The other boy looked me up and down and said, “Yeah, I could tell as soon as I saw him.” I decided to wear this as a badge of honour.