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From: Ashley Creek <ashley42creek@yahoo.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Pair of Bullets {Will "Crash" Reuther} (MF exhib reluc [strip poker] no-sex coll)
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:10:08 -0400
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<1st attachment, "Pokrscam.txt" begin>

A Pair of Bullets 
(MF exhib reluc [strip poker scam] no-sex coll) 
by Will "Crash" Reuther 
<Ashley42Creek@Yahoo.com> 



I. 

You will no doubt have heard about Sheridan's bonfires.  

     The hazing of freshmen at C. Alexander Sheridan College has, 
in modern times, been limited to a single day.  There was no "beanie 
week" at Sheridan when I attended--although our own, historical form 
of that practice was far more onerous than anything students of the 
cold-war era at nearly any other college would have experienced.  
Rather, by tradition (and quite simply) members of each freshman 
class were--and are, even to this day--expected to wear pajamas to 
the first home football game of the year.  Between the end of the 
football game and sundown, open houses were held at the college's 
various lodges:  freshmen (i.e., those wearing pajamas) were granted 
free entry; sophomores, on the other hand, were barred from visiting 
the lodges for the entire duration of the first semester, until after 
completion of Symposium, Sheridan's equivalent of fraternity rush.  

     At sundown, though, the open houses were shut down, and a 
bonfire was lit at the center of the Commons.  If the game that day 
had been won--as it was all four years that I attended the school 
and as it had been, reliably, every year for nearly two decades 
past--the bonfire was a victory celebration, and the party lasted 
until well after midnight.  The fall after my graduation, though, 
the game was lost, and this was the bonfire that made the Sunday 
morning papers, for the tradition further demanded that the freshmen 
throw their pajamas into the bonfire.  Accounts vary in the details, 
but the popular understanding is that freshmen were dancing naked on 
the Commons all night.  

     Even in my own freshman class in the mid-sixties, when the 
student body was still exclusively of the male gender, quite a 
few of my classmates were giddily, if not openly, excited over 
the prospect of the merest possibility of being "required" to be 
naked on campus--and these most earnest freshmen chose deliberately 
to defy fate by wearing nothing else between their requisite pajamas 
and their essential skins.  It is easy, I suppose, to profess to be 
so daring when the likelihood of danger is believed to be so remote.  

     Personally, along with perhaps most of my classmates, I was 
more cautious:  I went with both boxers and briefs, as it were, 
donning a pair of "authentic" Hornet boxer shorts over my usual 
underpants and beneath my pajamas.  Those shorts were popular only 
for a short time, as far as I am aware, and you may never have seen 
a pair.  Suffice it to say they were decorated, on the front, with a 
caricature drawing of the college mascot, with its stinger precisely 
positioned so as to suggest that it is emerging from the fly of the 
shorts.  In any event, I had my options covered, for in the unlikely 
event I would be required to consign my pajamas to the flames, I 
would still be clad in something decent but bawdy--and yet I had 
been telling, even promising, myself, all week, that had my new 
friends and classmates really stripped naked, I would have joined 
in the "fun," after all.  

     I don't know whether I would have, or could have, followed 
through with this intention, had I been put to the test.  By that 
midnight, however, I knew for certain, though only after it would 
have been too late, anyway, that I was fully man enough to do so.  


II.  

Our bonfire was celebrated as the victory it was, and the party 
commenced, around the bonfire, with our pajamas still covering our 
bodies.  It was something of a mixer, too, for a large number of 
"Tawdry Girls"--from nearby St. Audrey's College for Women--had 
been brought in, so that they could meet as many Sheridan men as 
possible and, thereby, find husbands.  

     But upperclassmen, more experienced in the ways of college 
life, seemed to be monopolizing most of the young women in attendance, 
and those of us clothed in pajamas were being largely ignored by 
the lovely visitors; wherefore our attentions were distracted 
to hospitality suites that were being sponsored by most of the 
lodges, in the upperclass dormitories on the lower campus, as 
all-but-clandestine extensions of that afternoon's open houses.  
By the formal rules governing conduct of the lodges, these stag 
parties were not permitted, but they were tolerated to the extent 
they remained reasonably discrete--that is, as long as the noise 
didn't last too late and the name of the sponsoring lodge was not 
made patent to mere passers-by.  In any event, several friends 
and I, having concluded that there was little useful prospect in 
courting the visiting women in competition with those juniors and 
seniors who were prowling the Commons, made our way down campus 
to sample some of the free liquor and sophisticated ribaldry that 
were offered to us.  

     I did not know Walter very well, yet.  In my eyes he still 
was just another freshman from my entry, though he soon became one 
of my best friends at Sheridan--but he and I somehow got separated 
from our other, new friends, fairly early on.  Eventually we found 
ourselves in the Crown Suite, at the very top of the tower above 
Hawksnest Arch, which was "owned" (by virtue of retention rights in 
the annual room draw) by Manor House, the oldest and most prestigious 
of the lodges.  The suite was enormous, compared to our quarters in 
the Freshman Quadrangle:  it covered the entire floor and had six or 
eight bedrooms (perhaps more! . . . for I do not recall clearly and 
was never privileged to visit the suite again); its sitting room 
was more than twice as large as those of the standard suites in our 
freshman dormitory; and the walls of the sitting room were panelled 
in dark wood, nearly to the ceiling--in marked contrast to the pale, 
plastered walls in our own quadrangle.  

     Yet despite the overwhelming size of these accommodations, the 
sitting room was jam packed with people, for the upperclassmen who 
presumably lived in that suite were running a poker scam on gullible 
freshmen.  That is, I realized it was, or certainly had to be, a 
scam--but Walter was sucked right in.  Walter, as I discovered very 
quickly during the next few weeks, was an excellent poker player.  
The game was not the entire focus of his life over the course of 
the next four years, by any means, but I would venture to say that 
he rarely left a poker game, during his sojourn at Sheridan, more 
than a few dollars to the worse.  


I must certainly admit that this scam was particularly compelling:  
the game (save for a few variations and "special" rules) was strip 
poker; the "prize," a lovely young woman.  One senior was acting as 
an "impartial" dealer; a second senior was offering to play against 
any freshman willing to take the challenge.  The basic gimmick was 
that, while the second senior played the cards, his lovely female 
friend would do his stripping for him; but the freshman would both 
play and strip for himself.  In essence, the concept appeared to be 
that, if the freshman could get the girl naked before he wiped out, 
himself, it was promised that the girl would go back to the Freshman 
Quadrangle with him and spend the night.  Except it didn't turn out to 
be quite as simple as that:  it wasn't that the loser had to forfeit 
an article of clothing on each hand; rather, each article of clothing 
was good for the purchase of a certain number of chips.  Accordingly, 
the loser of the game would be the first to run out of chips, and, 
as it was explained, a freshman player could still win--even if he 
was already stark naked!--as long as he still had any chips left at 
all, if and when the senior went bust.  

     There were a few other quirks, as well.  The most significant 
of these (which I do not entirely fathom to this day) was that the 
winner of each hand did not actually keep the chips he had won; they 
reverted to the "bank."  I think perhaps that, by this rule, the 
seniors were hedging their position, on the theory that it would 
make it easier to recover from a lost hand.  Of course, that sword 
cuts two ways!  

     Another quirk was the seniors' declaration that, "You can't 
fold in strip poker!  You have to play out every hand, no matter 
what."  That is, each player was obliged to stake some of his chips 
on each hand, no matter how lousy the cards he had dealt might have 
been.  I suppose that this concept might be relevant when you're 
playing directly for your clothing, but I don't really see the point, 
if your clothing is only the medium by which you purchase more chips.  
Perhaps it might be seen as speeding up the play, as well, but, in 
this particular game, it turned out to be very important--very nearly 
crucial!  


It smelled as fishy as the Fulton Market to me, but I guess Walter 
figured he had nothing to lose, really--little enough, at least, 
in comparison with what he stood a chance to win.  By his logic, 
not even my comparatively sober assessment of the situation would 
have mattered--but consider it:  not only was it, quite literally, 
"too good to be true"; the allegedly "impartial" dealer should 
certainly have been expected to be anything but!  

     A rather large crowd--consisting of both freshmen and 
upperclassmen (yet many more of the former than the latter), 
as well as several of the upperclassmen's dates--had gathered 
to watch, filling the suite's sitting room beyond any semblance 
of its ordinary capacity, notwithstanding its great size.  None 
of the rest of the freshmen had persuaded themselves actually to 
PLAY the game, but they--well, we!--were all eager to see how Walter 
would fare against the young lady and her champion.  Certainly, the 
prospects were that SOMEONE was going to end up naked that evening, 
and even if Walter didn't play well enough to let us see the young 
lady in her birthday suit, it would still be amusing to see Walter 
reduced to that state himself, in her presence.  


III.  

As the game started I couldn't see anything wrong.  The dealer did 
have a flashy style and was casting himself as an expert poker player 
in his own right--which he may well have been, for all I know--but 
when it came down to dealing the cards, he seemed to be scrupulous 
in demonstrating that he was shuffling thoroughly and dealing from 
the top of the deck.  I figured that this meant only that his flashy 
moves were, as intended, distracting me from some other sleight of 
hand, but of all the other freshmen crowded into the room, no one 
else seemed to notice any bogus dealing, either!  Nor were the cards 
marked, as far as I could tell.  A friend of mine in high school 
had once shown me a deck of marked cards and explained to me how 
they worked, so I thought I knew what to look for, but there was 
simply nothing definitively suspicious that I could see--either 
about the cards or about the way they were handled!  

     Besides, at first the game was going well for Walter, and he 
managed to keep the balance of the game much more in his favor that 
I would have expected.  He lost some of hands, to be sure, but in 
short order he also succeeded, despite the fact that the girl was 
wearing more articles of clothing than he was--which was what he had 
figured to be the "catch" of the peculiar game, anyway--in revealing 
that she wore a bikini beneath her clothing.  I knew this was the 
second alarm, telling me something was definitely suspicious, but 
still I could not discern exactly what was going on.  

     It wasn't until Walter got the girl stripped down to just her 
bikini that all became clear.  The girl was very beautiful, and up 
to that point she had been standing beside the senior, right where 
Walter could watch her every movement, every time she undressed.  
She stripped quite stylishly, too (at least for an amateur), making 
quite certain that Walter--not to mention all the rest of us who were 
watching--would relish every instance when the senior needed to "buy" 
more chips.  In fact, I would have to concede, in retrospect, that 
watching the girl strip, even just down to the bikini, might well 
have been worth the price of losing the game.  She was stunning in 
that bikini!  

     Once she was down to the bikini, though, she squeezed her way 
past the crush of spectators, around the coffee table, to sit down 
on the couch, right beside Walter.  She kissed Walter, admitted that 
it looked like he was going to win, and assured him quite earnestly 
that she would go through with the bargain.  In short order she had 
convinced him that the seniors were making her do this, that she 
thought he was cute, and that she figured a night with him was much 
preferable to whatever she usually had to put up with from the senior 
and his roommates.  Walter bought it, hook, line, and sinker, and 
never caught on that, while she sat beside him, she was reading his 
cards and signaling the contents of his hands to her accomplice, 
the senior who was playing against him!  


Perhaps I should note that Walter was not all that handsome as a 
young man.  If guys had to depend on their good looks to find a wife, 
Walter might as well have gone to a real monastery, rather than to 
an all-male college such as Sheridan.  He wasn't fat, at all, but he 
was of stocky build and looked like he belonged on the defensive line 
of the football team, and both his weight and his waist measurements 
were at least half again greater than mine.  But he was a solid fellow 
in nearly every other way, as well, which has stood him in good stead 
in life, kept him well supplied with dates all through college, and 
has gained him a faithful and loving wife with whom he is very deeply 
in love.  It was just that, as a college freshman right out of high 
school, when a beautiful young woman in a bikini actually told him she 
was looking forward to spending the night with him, he was incapable 
of believing that it was anything but the truth.  

     I couldn't tell HOW the girl was signalling Walter's hands to 
his opponent, but she certainly had the opportunity, and I have no 
doubt it was happening.  For the tide of the game turned at once, and 
very soon Walter was down to the powder-blue boxer shorts he had been 
wearing (along with a white tee-shirt, just cashed in for more chips) 
under his pajamas.  

     As they say, "Then a miracle happened!"  

     When cheating at poker, even if you know the contents of your 
opponent's hand, it does not mean you will win every deal.  You must 
understand that knowing what cards your opponent holds only allows 
you to adjust your betting, so that you can win big, lose small, 
and fold when there is no chance.  But remember that folding was not 
an option in this particular game!  The two seniors--the dealer and 
the player--certainly must have understood the essential strategy 
and tactics of cheating; the girl apparently did not.  

     For it just so happened that Walter was dealt an unbeatable 
hand, wherefore the senior found it necessary to buy more chips, 
himself--and the girl was obliged to give up her bikini top.  She 
had not anticipated this, and she was pissed!  

     Optical daggers flew back and forth across the coffee table, 
between the sanior and the girl, as the various other gentlemen 
in the room waited with bated breath for her to show her bosom.  
We speculated later that she could probably have conceded the 
game and gone home with Walter without revealing her bare breasts 
to everyone in the room; but she had not, truly, bargained on 
that, either.  I could see the girl's face, and I understood what 
was happening--whereas Walter, who could no longer see her face 
very well, was preoccupied with the game.  Though Walter could 
not manage to figure it out, I was able to interpret the looks 
that passed between the girl and the senior.  She didn't want to 
take her top off, but they were in a bind, and the senior tacitly 
assured her, with an intense, fixed stare, that he would still win, 
easily, in the end.  The girl was downright sullen as she undid her 
bikini top and let it fall, but, in the uproar that ensued over the 
appearance of her bare breasts, Walter was oblivious.  And all of 
this transpired without a single word's passing between the player 
and his sexy moll!  


But the game changed again.  Either the girl stopped giving the 
signals or she started giving false signals--I couldn't tell 
which--but the senior got angry as soon as Walter showed his 
cards on the next hand.  By sheer luck, the senior had won, anyway, 
but Walter's cards hadn't been what he had expected.  Now it was 
the senior who was fuming.  He couldn't say anything without giving 
away the scam, but consistently with the role he was playing, he 
managed to pretend to be irked over the way the girl was flirting 
with Walter, while conveying a quite different message to her.  The 
look on his face asked her what the hell she thought she was doing; 
the look she returned, which Walter could not see, was to the effect 
that, if she was going to get screwed anyway, it might as well be 
the freshman who got to do the job.  

     The senior glowered at her and apparently decided to let her 
suffer the consequences of her own treachery as Walter began to regain 
some advantage.  The senior did keep winning some of the hands, as 
fortune would have it, for he was a good player anyway, and at least 
he seemed to have enough scruples--or perhaps only enough pride--not 
to throw the game out of spite.  Yet Walter, already down to his 
underwear, now was to the point where he needed still more chips--as 
the girl showed two faces:  to the senior, her look was "Fuck you!"; 
to Walter, though, her look was "I can't wait for you to fuck me."  

     Walter, caught up in the fever of the immediate possibility of 
actually winning the game, was nonetheless something of a gentleman:  
he politely asked the girl for her permission that he remove his 
last article of clothing.  The half dozen other women in the room 
were, by this point, playing their designated role to the hilt, 
applauding and whistling and cheering for Walter to go right ahead 
and expose himself, in balance to the raucous approval the men had 
expressed when the girl had made her own sacrifice.  It was obvious 
that the other girls were primarily mounting a parody of the boys' 
behavior, but they did a good job at it--enough that most of the 
guys joined in expressing their opinions in favor of the proposition, 
as well.  

     Meanwhile, the girl beside Walter was not only assuring him 
that it was nothing more than she had bargained for all along, but 
doing her dead-level best at seducing him to believe she was more 
eager than ever for him to do whatever was necessary to win the 
right to take her to bed that night.  In such circumstances, Walter's 
boxers weren't concealing much, anyway, so he cashed in his shorts, 
summoned just enough gumption actually to stand and take a blushing 
bow in response to the reaction of the spectators to his brash nudity 
and upstanding condition, and sat down again, to resume the game 
with nothing more than his wits about him.  


But at this point, Walter's wits must have deserted him as well.  
In essence, he forgot what he was doing--he forgot how to play 
this particular game.  It was all pretty much up for grabs at 
that point (assuming, of course, that the girl was no longer 
signalling Walter's hands to the senior):  he only had to win 
enough to force the senior to buy chips one more time--which 
would have claimed the girl's bikini bottom and gotten her naked, 
too--and then, with just the chips remaining, after that, hold his 
ground.  But if he ran out of chips himself, first, he would lose 
the game!  Moreover, looking at him, sitting naked on the couch 
beside a beautiful, bare-breasted woman, it was perfectly obvious 
that he was physiologically incapable of bringing all of his 
intellect to bear on the problem at hand--winning the damn 
poker game!  

     I watched it all happen.  Walter played his hand too 
conservatively, too soon, when he should have pressed what 
little advantage he held!  I watched carefully; I saw the 
cards.  When it came right down to it, at the end, had Walter 
drawn just ONE more card, he would have won the hand and forced 
the senior to cash in the girl's bikini bottom--for although that 
next card (which went to the senior when he took two) didn't do 
the senior any particular good, it would have won the hand for 
Walter, even against the pair of bullets the senior had been dealt.  


IV. 

Walter was dazed by having lost so suddenly, but as soon as the 
senior claimed the hand, the last of Walter's chips, and the game, 
one of the other upperclassmen in the room quickly tossed the girl 
her sweater, and she was into it so fast I hardly saw it happen.  
Covered again, she turned and kissed Walter sweetly, making him 
understand that she was SO very sorry he had lost the game, and 
then she excused herself and calmly retired into one of the bedrooms.  

     The girl returned no more than two minutes later, fully 
dressed.  She still wore the same sweater, but her chest no 
longer wobbled beneath it, as it had when she had left the room, 
and she was wearing blue jeans now.  In the meantime, Walter had 
been bargaining, to no avail, to buy back his clothing.  

     Several of us offered to donate our own pajama tops, in 
exchange for something Walter could wear to get back to the Freshman 
Quadrangle, but the seniors adamantly refused.  The rest of us had 
not bought into the game, they steadfastly and unanimously insisted, 
and what Walter had lost, now was irredeemably their property.  


With a wistful look at the girl he had lost, Walter finally allowed 
me to escort him from the scene of his fleecing.  I got him all the 
way downstairs and outside, into the quadrangle, still naked as a 
jay bird, before I finally took pity on him and gave him my pajama 
top, which he managed to wrap ineffectively about his loins, covering 
his genitals but leaving his ass in as precarious a condition as 
a patient in a hospital gown.  (Due to his girth, of course, nothing 
else of what I wore would have fit him, at all!)  I teased him, 
all the way back up campus, about how he would have been in the 
same condition, anyway, had the football game been lost.  (It was 
convenient to ignore the boxer shorts he had worn under his pajamas.)  

     "It's not the same when you're the only one!" Walter grumpily 
objected.  

     At the same time that Walter was struggling to keep himself 
barely decently covered, though, I was noticing how sensuous it felt 
to be walking through the campus bare-chested, on a pleasantly warm, 
late-summer night.  The only feasible route to the Freshman Quadrangle 
was across the lower end of the Commons, where the party was still 
in full swing.  As Walter endured the taunts of everyone who noticed 
that he had been conned out of his clothing (and actually seemed to 
begin to enjoy having his bare ass sticking out in public!), I took 
a fancy to a group of young women who were casting one sort of look 
in Walter's direction and a different one in mine.  I excused myself, 
abandoned Walter to get back to his room on his own with the tops 
of my pajamas, and invited one of the girls to dance.  

     I danced with three of the girls that evening.  The first two 
were reasonably pretty and let me know, in return, that they thought 
I was reasonably handsome, but they didn't really engage my interest 
as we danced.  The third girl, although rather on the plain side in 
comparison with the other two, was different.  It was a slow dance 
the band happened to play when her turn came, and she folded herself 
delightfully into my arms.  She was at least a full head shorter 
than I, and the way her hair brushed against my bare chest, as 
she leaned against me, produced a reaction in the nether portion 
of my body that even the three layers of fabric still covering 
my loins could not conceal from her.  She looked up at me, 
smiled, returned her head to rest upon my chest, and gave me 
to understand, implicitly, that with proper care and attention, 
she could, in due course, be seduced.  

     I was entranced, but as soon as that dance ended, the 
announcement was made that the buses would be leaving, almost 
immediately, to return to St. Audrey's.  This didn't mean the 
party was over, nor did it mean that ALL the Tawdry Girls left, 
by any means--but those unwilling either to accept the penalties 
for signing in late or to spend the night at Sheridan, had to 
leave.  The girl in my arms was a freshman, like me, and either 
had not yet figured out the quirks in St. Audrey's rules or 
had not yet committed herself to the price that, she must have 
understood already, ordinarily goes with getting a Sheridan 
man's attention.  


But she had MY attention!  

     "I have to see you again," I told her, and I kissed her, to 
prove that it was true.  

     She gave me her name--Annie--and her telephone number, and 
I strove diligently to remember that number as I handed her onto 
the bus, watched the buses depart, and then dashed back to my room, 
where I could write the number down.  Even when I got back to my 
entry, I was nearly waylaid and destroyed by the crowd that had 
gathered to hear Walter's third retelling of his evening's adventure.  

     I didn't care about Walter, at that moment, for I had witnessed 
his adventure first-hand and understood it more fully than he did, 
yet, himself.  I returned to my room and waited alone beside the 
telephone, calculating carefully how long it might take for the buses 
to return to St. Audrey's and for Annie to return to her room.  On 
my third try, she answered her telephone at last, and I invited her 
to the next football game and whatever party I could get a pass for 
that evening.  Annie accepted the date, and she became one of my 
dearest friends in college, even though I was not the Sheridan man 
she ended up marrying.  


V. 

As it happened, I did not have a chance to talk with Walter alone 
until late Sunday afternoon, for truly I neither wanted to diminish 
the attention his story was still garnering him nor wished to 
embarrass him in front of our other classmates.  He still had 
not figured out what had actually happened to him, though, and 
once I explained patiently to him that the girl had been reading 
his cards while she was sitting beside him and pretending to seduce 
him, he was flabbergasted.  

     "Was it worth it?" I asked him, once he got over his rage at 
being duped so easily.  

     His demeanor changed entirely, as he considered my question 
calmly.  "Yes, by damn, it was!"  

     And I agreed with him, for we had been initiated, at one 
stroke, into the culture and attitude of Sheridan College:  we, 
mere freshman, with but one week of classes under our veritable 
belts, had seen a beautiful, bare-breasted woman, live and in 
person!  Only just that Saturday afternoon, we had been freshman 
boys, marching off in pajamas to our first football game; by the 
stroke of midnight, we had become college men, privileged to witness 
some of the beauties of womanhood.  

     It was a momentous beginning to four wonderful years.  We 
learned a lot by the time we graduated--and our formal education 
has served us well, too!  


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