From 2006.
As
you may have gathered, the barbecue joint is, among other things, a
salon of higher culture and erudite discussion of the arts. Before
coming in to work today I perused the items at a local stoop sale, and
among the many books I found a charming volume of erotic art for two
bucks and figured it would be fun to share with the staff and the
regulars when my shift began. As predicted, the book was a big hit,
covering all manner of fleshly ground from centuries-old engravings to
Japanese shunga
prints with the colossal genitalia to contemporary gallery works, and
while checking this stuff out I realized that at some point this sort of
material was probably some unsuspecting kid’s first exposure to the
world of osh-osh as a somewhat prurient form of entertainment. It’s a
universally visceral, fascinating and somewhat scary experience to say
the least, for both young males and females alike.
Excluding the rather innocent stuff like PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE, my own
first glimpse at such material was a rain-soaked copy of SCREW magazine
found at my bus stop when I was ten years old. The tabloid literally
dripped with filthiness and while I knew what a girl’s equipment looked
like — thanks to a little girl who lived across the street when I was
six; you have my eternal gratitude, Terri! — I was horrified by the
unbelievable talents of one Honeysuckle Divine, a cute blonde who used
her sacred reproductive orifice for purposes that it was never meant to
perform, such as individually spewing out greasy-looking matzoh balls.
Sadly, I left this treasure where it was because to have it found in my
possession at home or at school would have meant certain death in ways
that Torquemada never imagined.
Later that same year an uncle gave me a steamer trunk full of rather
“weathered” dirty magazines, an act more or less fully endorsed by my
mother in an effort to prevent me from becoming “an artsy fag;” you see,
in her book anyone with even the slightest interest in the arts was
destined to have nuts bouncing off his chin in no time at all and that
she would not allow, by God! So porn was an approved part of my library
from very early on. Little did she realize that I already had the fever
for girls, but any way you cut it, it was a win/win situation.
In the two minutes it took for me to get the trunk to my room, I swiftly
managed to riffle through the smut and find most of the really foul
stuff — including the now-infamous issue of HUSTLER that included a
scratch-and-sniff center-spread — before my mom could pick and choose
what was kosher for me to keep. I stashed the toxic material in a hidden
panel behind the bookcase in the walk-through closet that connected my
bedroom to my bathroom (this was at the palatial first house that we
lived in from 1972 through early 1980 in Westport), and then spent hours
engrossed in the images of naked womanhood splayed across my bedroom
floor.
Shortly after this a succession of babysitters discovered my illicit
collection and were even more fascinated than I was, each eagerly
devouring page after page of pink. I was particularly enamored of a pair
of twins who used to take care of me and had an extensive critical
knowledge of the genre thanks to raids on their brother’s closet. These
two girls were the first to make it plain to me that girls enjoyed
naughty stuff just as much as guys did, and that was a mind-altering
revelation. Ever since, I have appreciated the female porno fan.
As I reminisced on my own tender corruption I was intrigued to find out
what other people recalled of their early exposure to pornography, and
since I have no shame whatsoever I asked all within earshot. Here’s what
I got:
“A PENTHOUSE found in the creek bed behind the local elementary school in Lexington, Kentucky!”
-Big Mikey
“A PLAYBOY found in a drainage ditch in Texas.”
-Scott M.
“It
was a tape called NAKED AEROBICS found in my dad’s back drawer. It was
kinda pathetic, really, since it was just two women with that
early-1980’s Jane Fonda workout aesthetic, doing regular aerobics, only
naked. And making it even cheesier, there was this mirror/kaleidoscope
effect that multiplied the image of the two women into a legion! When my
dad died, I inherited all of his adult material, sort of a porn legacy,
if you will. The tape, and a bunch of softcover books about dirty nuns,
and the like.”
-Tracey McT.
“I
like to call any porn found outside somewhere ‘feral porn;’ I mean, you
can be in the middle of the fucking woods and find a porn mag! My own
feral porn was a OUI magazine found on the fire escape at St. John’s,
the local Catholic elementary school.”
-Frank T.
A nudie playing card on the muddy banks of the stream that ran through our neighborhood.”
-Jeff P.
“I
was in fifth grade, babysitting with a friend, and we were flipping
through the channels while the kid we were looking after was asleep. We
found some kind of softcore something or other on HBO, and we were
fascinated but too embarrassed to admit that we wanted to watch it, so
we kept switching back and forth, but always kept landing on that flick.
And my lower half started to feel really weird… And then I was hooked!”
-Lauren A.
“I
was in fifth grade and I went over to my buddy Colin Riley’s house,
where he showed me his dad’s copy of INSIDE VANESSA Del RIO.”
-Dan E.
"I
was in fourth grade and went riffling through my parents’ stuff when
they weren’t home, and saw one of those “365 Ways To Do It” manuals; I
guess they were trying out something new each day… Anyway, when I lifted
it out of the drawer there was an issue of HUSTLER beneath it, and I
was blown away to see that the center-spread was signed by the girl in
the picture, telling my dad how nice it was to meet him in Vegas and
inviting him to 'cum again.'”
-Rob R.
“I
think I was eight or nine, and soon after it lead to masturbation at
age ten. It was PLAYBOY, of course; my dad had some, and my older
brother found them.”
-Tim L.
“I
was probably, like, ten and I totally found it on a wildlife walk,
between the junior high school and the national elk refuge in Wyoming.
Some random sleazy trucker mag or something… No, wait… I was in second
grade, seven years old, and a friend who lived in a trailer park invited
me over to see the bunnies that his folks raised; his dad would kill
them with his bare hands and his mom would cook them, so I was already
kind of traumatized that day. Anyway, since we had nothing else to do
after the bunnies, my friend asked me if I wanted to ‘look at some
pussies.’ I said okay, having no clue what the kid was talking about,
and my friend broke out some porn mags that his dad had thrown away, and
one of them was called THE BEST PUSSY IN THE WORLD CONTEST. The cover
didn’t even have a picture of a woman; it was just a picture of a pussy.
So he pulls it out and we start flipping through it, and every single
page was, like, four crotch shots! Crotch shot, crotch shot, crotch
shot, crotch shot! So I didn’t know what the hell I was even looking at!
I didn’t understand that this was part of a woman’s body; I just
thought that it was something…animal. And I couldn’t imagine why he’d
want to show it to me. So I went home and my mom asked me what I did
over at my friend’s house, so I matter-of-factly stated, ‘we looked at
pussies.’ My mom was horrified and called my friend’s mother, after
which my friend never spoke to me again. I didn’t figure out why until I
was, like, fourteen or something.”
-"The Blank" (a regular who was too much of a pussy to be identified for this post)
“When
I was around seven years old my family went from South Carolina to
spend Christmas with my aunt and uncle, and when I went to use their
bathroom I found a book that I’m sure belonged to my uncle. It had,
like, a picture of a farm on it. Yep, I learned really young about
bestiality… I don’t remember who the characters were, but they were
visiting a farm and I’m not sure about most of the animals, but I think
they were cows. There was also a woman who put something on herself to
get a dog to lick her, and she even got off! I didn’t know such things
existed when I was seven years old! So every time I went to the bathroom
at their house, I’d look for that book. My mom and my aunt would knock
on the bathroom door and go, ‘Debra? Debra, what are you doing in
there?’ My dad also used to hide his PLAYBOY stash on top of the
freezer, and I eventually discovered them. There was a day when my folks
came home early, so I hid the PLAYBOY that I was checking out under my
mattress. Now my dad got up really early the next morning and must have
gone to look at the issue I borrowed, of course not finding it where it
was supposed to be. That afternoon when I got home from school, he
laughingly asked me, in front of a friend I was with, ‘So, did you enjoy
my magazine?’ I sneaked out of the house, rode my bike past a stretch
of road where they were building houses and got rid of the PLAYBOY in
the woods, because if it had reappeared my dad would have known for sure
that I had it.”
-Debra S.
“When
I was sixteen I knew a girl who’d stolen her father’s VHS copy of DEBBI
DOES DALLAS and she invited a bunch of us over to her house to watch it
while her parents were away. So there I was, surrounded by a room full
of high school girls, watching one of the classics of old school porno;
now up to a certain point the film has plenty of nudity, but then the
real sex started and the girls were horrified. They all started
screaming, but I thought it was the greatest thing ever!”
-Chez P.
“I
live in West Palm Beach in Florida, and I had these totally white trash
neighbors who had fifteen kids — for real — and a duck named Chirpy who
they’d feed cat food. They had this huge yard and they’d chuck porn
mags all over the place for no apparent reason. It was like a graveyard
of porn.”
-Madison P. (age 14, daughter of Chez)
“For
me it happened when I was eleven, and my brother and I found a magazine
wrapped in black plastic in the mail. It was an issue of PLAYBOY
addressed to my father, and he claimed that they had just sent him a
free sample. Yeah, right, but considering how whipped he was, I mean, my
mother would never have allowed that!”
-Jayne P.
“I
was ten when my great-grandmother’s husband died, and me and my cousin
Junior were cleaning out Pops’ bedroom when we found all of this really
ancient porn. Like pre-PLAYBOY stuff, and we thought, ‘this is hot! This
rocks!’ And then we threw them all away.”
-Lee G.
“I
don’t know how old I was, but I was really young and I was snooping,
you know, like kids do. And my dad had a drawer in his dresser next to
his bed that I opened, and I found this postcard of a woman on skis,
stark-assed naked. And she had the biggest, hairiest bush I’d ever seen!
But I didn’t know if that was just my perception, or if she really was
that hairy because I didn’t know what was supposed to be down there. And
that’s my story.”
-Joy A.
So what’s your story, dear reader? Remember: sharing is caring!
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