An embarrassing tale

An embarrassing tale.

Ten years have passed since this incident. I was twelve years old and a Boy Scout in Troop 421 of the Presbyterian Church of Gilbert, Arizona (even though I’m Lutheran). Our scout troop would take monthly camping trips. Some of them were longer than others and this particular trip was going to be a three-night campout. We were going to be heading up north to a beautiful area called Sedona, Arizona and I was incredibly excited to go.

The scout meeting before the trip, which I believe was on Wednesday, myself and a few other friends of mine were all huddled in some corner before the meeting had begun.

“I wish someone would bring some porn on the trip,” the thicker, brown hair boy said.

“Yeah, me too. But who?” asked the thinner Japanese boy.

Silence.

“My older brother has some,” I squeaked.

“Wow! Really?” They both blurted out in-sync.

“Yeah…he keeps it behind his bed.”

“You wouldn’t be able to bring it with you, would you?” I nodded.


Friday night came with a howl and a drizzle as we loaded into the van of one of the thicker boy’s father. It was about seven in the evening and as the caravan of cars, trucks, and vans made their way out of the parking lot I idly stroked the blue waterproof cover of my backpack. Within this bag held my coolness.

What was planned to be a three-hour tour up the winding mountain freeways of Arizona quickly turned into a five-hour trek to figure out if we were even in the same state. Somewhere around Payson our driver had lost the others and quickly got himself lost. It was a bit scary because rain was coming down in blinding amounts and thunder and lightning was making it difficult to even hear the radio inside the car or see outside past the rain.

Near one in the morning we eventually find our way to where the camp was. Everyone else was safely within their tents, their silhouettes shining through from small lanterns inside. Myself and my fellow scouts had to put our tent together through the same blinding rain, finally falling into it exhausted thirty minutes later soaked from sock to shirt.

“Can we see it?” The thin Japanese boy asked.

“Yeah, bring it out,” said the thicker boy.

For a moment I forgot what it was I had brought. “Take out what?”

“The magazines, idiot.”

“Oh, yeah.” I pulled them out from the backpack. I had brought three; the top most of the magazines had a woman holding her breasts with something in German scrolled above it. I had no idea what it meant, but I imagined it was something of equal perversion to what was inside. Guilty of flipping through it upon discovery, I had instantly discovered this was far worse than the normal Playboy’s he had been used to seeing. The things those women were doing to themselves…

“You guys can look at them,” I said with a yawn. “I’m gonna go to sleep. Just put them back into the bag when you are done.” I’m not quite sure they heard me, so enthralled in what they were seeing within those slick pages.

The sun will come out, tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar. It was a Vegas bet, and you lose, because the sun didn’t come out that morning. I woke up to a weird slapping, scratching sound. I woke up and saw that my Scout Master had been beating his hand against our tent. I unzipped the flap and stared out, my eyes being bombarded by wild drops of rain making their way in.

“Get your stuff together, we need to leave. We’re being rained out.” Then he was gone.

Sitting back down into my bed I then realized that my two other friends and myself were sleeping in a good foot and a half of water. Articles of clothing, toiletries, my scout book, and the magazines were floating freely across the surface of the water. My skin was incredibly pale and till this day I wasn’t quite sure if it was like that because I was cold or because I had nearly escaped being caught with something that would most likely make a sailor blush.

I grabbed the magazines and shoved them into my sleeping bag, and rolling it up I began to wake my friends one by one. Within fifteen minutes the whole camp had been broken down and after we dumped our bags and other devices into the larger trailer that carried most of the bulk behind the Scout Master’s pickup truck, we were gone.

The drive home was a cold one, regardless of the heat coming from the front of the van. Not a single item of clothing had made it through the night dry and so I was now sitting in soggy sweat pants and an equally wet t-shirt.

The clothes finally dried about the time we pulled back into the Church parking lot. I stepped out of the car to see my mother waiting for me. She shooed me back into our idling Ford Explorer and went to gather my belongings. I huddled in the backseat because my brother had the front.

Opening the back gate of the SUV she shoved my stuff into it and then got in the driver’s side. She sat silent for a few moments, a tension growing in the air. I sat forward between the two front seats and asked, “Something wrong?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about some adult magazines, would you?” I gulped.

“No, of course not.”

“Are you sure? When I pulled your sleeping bag out from the trailer it came unrolled and a magazine fell from inside of it.”

“Oh no!” I had thought. In my haste to get out of the campsite tying up my sleeping bag had completely slipped my mind. I merely put the magazines in and then rolled the sleeping back, most likely thinking that I would retrieve it myself.

I would deny that I had anything to do with it until I was safely at home and away from my Scout Master. I would then admit to my mother that I had been responsible for it, and that I had stolen it from my older brother, who was angrier about it than either of my parents. My dad merely laughed at the whole thing and called me “Playboy” for the next three or four years of my life.

In taking responsibility for my actions I was forced to sit in the front row, all the way to the left, right in front of the Scout Master as he lectured us about sullying ourselves with such trash. He had threatened to kick me out of the scouts, but the other parents had voted that I showed a good initiative to at least be honest about it, even if every single parent and child was forced to see a woman in all of her glory fall out of my sleeping bag.

It worked out alright in the end though. With that single moment of idiocy I single handedly guaranteed myself a spot in history for my scout troop. As the years passed newer members would come into the troop and I would hear stories of, "someone bringing porn on a trip." I would say, "Yeah, that was me" to which the automatic question would arise, "Can you bring some more?"

"No," I would say, and never again did I.