Yearbook

by Seth Rogen

  The blackberry bushes were trapping us, so there was nowhere to go but back the way we came, which would mean turning around and running for about a block and a half, which seemed like a bad idea. I’m not sure why it seemed like a bad idea, it just did. Maybe turning our backs on them seemed scarier than knowing where they were? It’s like with wild animals. They teach you that turning and running is bad, which I guess I believe to an extent, but eventually there HAS to be a point when it’s better to run. Like in The Revenant, there was a moment when Leo would have for sure been better off if he’d run. How could he not have been?

  Smokey was rightfully terrified, and so were me and Fogell.

  Smokey: Oh shit. That’s Harris. He’s Yael’s brother. He wants to fucking kill me, man.

  Me: Oh shit is right. They’re fucking coming.

  Fogell: Fuck! I knew we shouldn’t have walked back with you!

  Smokey: Why not?

  Me: Because of this exact shit!

  Smokey: Should we run?

  Fogell: No! That’ll make it worse. Maybe this is a test. Like, to see if you actually are worth beating up or not?

  Smokey: My instinct is that I am!

  Me: You never know. Maybe running proves your guilt?

  We kept walking toward one another. We were maybe forty-five seconds away from contact.

  Smokey: If they want to fight me, will you help me?

  Me: No.Fogell: Absolutely not.

  Smokey: Why the fuck not?!

  Me: Fuck you, that’s why! Harris is insane!

  Smokey: But we’re friends!

  Me: Sort of!

  Fogell: Neither of us have, like, ever been to your house before.

  Me: Yeah! I’ve never even met your parents!

  Smokey: You wanna come over tonight?

  Fogell: No! Too late! We’re not that good friends! Not good enough to get fucking killed!

  Smokey: PLEASE!

  Me: …Okay. We’ll try.

  Fogell: Yeah…okay.

  Our two groups collided, and they absorbed him like a swarm. Me and Fogell didn’t even break stride. We just kept walking, afraid to look back.

  Me: We really pussied out of that one.

  Fogell: Sure did.

  Me: Smart choice.

  Fogell: I don’t regret it one bit.

  I finally glanced back to see Smokey being flipped onto the hood of a parked car, his feet sticking vertically in the air before slamming down with a crash. We saw him later that day—black eye, ripped shirt—telling a bunch of kids in the hall how Harris and five of his friends had kicked the shit out of him on the railroad tracks.

  I was happy for him. For that moment, he was actually the coolest guy in school.

  This chapter is about pornography, but at no point will I get into masturbatory details, so you don’t have to worry about that shit. Anyhoo…

  I think a lot about those little sea turtles that you see on TV—the ones that are born on the beach, instilled with a natural and unwavering instinct to find the ocean, and eventually they do, but they struggle. That’s kinda how it was with me and pornography. I wanted to see it. I wanted to enjoy it. Yet I could not find it.

  There was no Internet, and when we finally got Internet, it was really slow and only on the family computer, which was in our living room, so it was hard to access, pornographically speaking. But we had “Superchannel,” which was the Canadian version of HBO, and it played a lot of movies. I noticed that some of those movies had nudity. So, like many twelve-year-olds at that time, I got a blank VHS tape and slowly, over the course of a few months, made sort of a sex scene/nudity mixtape. It had a scene from the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege, where a woman jumps out of a cake topless; a clip from a sex scene in the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Double Impact; the naked woman beating up Gary Busey in Point Break; and an intense sex scene with Lorenzo Lamas from a film called C.I.A. II: Target Alexa, which he also directed, so good on him, I guess.

  Around that time, I was skateboarding with my friends one day, and we noticed that the convenience store nearby had a Playboy in the magazine rack. There was only one option, which was to steal that shit. A plan for a heist was hatched. I would purchase a bottle of Jolt Cola, shake it up too much, and open it in the store, making it spray everywhere, creating a diversion. My friend would hide the magazine behind his skateboard and leave while I was wiping up. It worked like a goddamn Oceans movie, and by that I mean so flawlessly there’s no dramatic tension in any way, shape, or form.

  We ran to a park to look at our loot: a Playboy that featured a fifty-four-year-old Nancy Sinatra, which was…surprising? It wasn’t bad, per se. It just wasn’t really what we were expecting. She was a solid fifteen years older than our parents at the time, so I guess it wasn’t hitting the notes we’d hoped it would. Also, it was a Playboy, and therefore rather tame.

  When I was thirteen, it all came together, which is the grossest way I could have said that. I did a play that was being put on by the Chinese Cultural Centre in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which in 1995 was a pretty rough neighborhood. I was standing outside, waiting for my mom to pick me up on a rainy day, when I looked down into the gutter…and there it was. A porno magazine that for some insane reason had been discarded in a pile of wet pages. I looked up the block and saw my mom’s SUV turn onto the street. I reached down and grabbed a handful of sopping pages and shoved them in my coat pocket as my mom pulled up. I hopped in, feeling like I’d just found a briefcase full of gold. I hope whoever’s that was doesn’t come back looking for it! I remember thinking.

  When we got home, I ran up to my room and carefully tried to salvage the remains of the magazine. It was like the scene in the movie Titanic where Bill Paxton handles Jack’s drawing of Rose after fishing it out of the ocean. I used tongs and tweezers to pull the ball of wet pages apart, and I laid it all out on my bed to dry.

  Over the next few hours, the pages cured into sort of a porn jerky. They were brittle like potato chips—you really had to be careful. Not only were they precious, they were delicate, which only added to their overall mystique. To this day, my brain intrinsically links fragile ancient documents with sex. The Indiana Jones franchise is very stimulating to me. Don’t even mention the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  What’s odd is I actually have known a lot of people over the years who have found porn on the street, in parks, things like that. I knew a kid in high school who found a garbage bag full of porn on a baseball diamond near his house. Who is doing this? Who is taking huge amounts of porn and dumping it in playgrounds for kids to find? Is this some unspoken paying-it-forward cycle that has happened for years? Do porn companies do it to get kids hooked? Is Larry Flynt just tossing wet Hustler magazines out his window into gutters as he drives around Canada? ’Cause if he is, that would be some smart shit, because it got a lot of people I know invested. It personally sent me on a long road.

  Before Internet porn became a thing, I basically engaged in “trading circles” with friends, where we would all share whatever porn we had so everyone got more variety. A side effect was that you got a slightly too intimate look at your friends’ sexual proclivities and preferences. Also, sometimes you just got some weird-ass shit.

  Once in early 2002, my friend gave me a DVD titled Cum Dumpsters 2. I had not seen the first Cum Dumpsters but felt like I could probably pick up the story. I was a little nervous to watch it, but I figured what the hell.

  I’ll never forget what happened next….

  I put the DVD in my Compaq laptop and waited for the movie to load. The screen went black, and then the image of an American flag, waving in the wind, slowly faded in. Then, in elegant cursive, appeared the words:

  Dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11th.

  And then the opening credits for Cum Dumpsters 2 started, which
was a startling tonal shift to say the least. I like to imagine they really just wanted to do something in the wake of 9/11 and that was their only outlet. They were like, “We can’t let people watch Cum Dumpsters 2 without knowing that we, the filmmakers, understand the climate that we’re in and that we’re sensitive to it! Otherwise, the whole Cum Dumpster franchise will just seem tasteless!”

  The “see your friends’ taste in porn” effect has been multiplied by a billion with things like Pornhub, because you can easily see what global proclivities are—and they are fucking weird. A LOT of people seem to want to fuck their stepsister. It’s insane. It seems to account for the storylines of, like, 90 percent of produced porn. Maybe it’s because I never had stepsiblings, but I just don’t get it. If you ever run into me on the street, and you have insight into why someone might want to fuck their stepsibling, please, for the love of god, do not talk to me about it. That would be a horrible conversation to have with a stranger.

  Another thing about porn is that it seems like one of the last bastions of outward racism when it comes to the titles and categorizing of its movies. The use of the word “oriental” is still rampant. It’s like my grandfather named the clips. I get that fetishes are fetishes, so you gotta get specific, but have some sensitivity.

  The comments on porn sites are incredible. They’re actually nicer than the comments on most corners of the Internet. I guess people who are jacking off are generally in a good mood, but the comments are so supportive and complimentary.

  “What a great dick!”

  “Her butthole is so pretty!”

  “His load is dope and ropey!”

  It’s so nice!

  I have no judgment of sex workers whatsoever. I honestly couldn’t be more grateful for them, and over the years I’ve found myself working with them regularly. We don’t have a ton of nudity in our films generally, but there is some, and early on we realized that a lot of “mainstream” actors are not incredibly psyched about getting naked on camera; it’s more just something they’re willing to do for a particular role.

  We found that if we have a role that requires some sort of nudity, we should hire porn actors. The dynamic is completely flipped. They’re generally super-thrilled to be on the set of a mainstream movie, getting to do something funny, and whatever we’re asking them to do is definitely gonna be one of the least intrusive things they’ve been asked to do that week. It’s a win-win-win. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stormy Daniels, Jenna Haze, Nautica Thorn, Bambino, and a lot more.

  One of the peaks of my porn-related endeavors happened in 2003 when I went to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas, which is like the Oscars of porn, mostly in that it’s fucking long as fuck.

  There were ninety-four categories, each announced live, and they got VERY specific. Some were:

  Best Three-Way Sex Scene

  Best All-Girl Sex Scene

  Best Oral Sex Scene

  Best Couples Sex Scene

  Best Solo Sex Scene

  Best Anal Sex Scene

  Best Foot Fetish Sex Scene

  Best Ethnic-Themed Video

  Best Non-Sex Performance

  Best Specialty Big Bust Video

  Best VHS Packaging

  Best Vignette Series

  Best Tease Performance

  Most Outrageous Sex Scene (Something called Love in an Abbatoir won this, which sounds fucking gross and appears to be misspelled in the actual movie.)

  The show itself lasted about five and a half hours, and in a lot of ways it was like any other award show but with a slight porn-y twist. You know how at, like, the Golden Globes and shit, Halle Berry will make some deep comment, and they’ll cut to Tom Hanks nodding thoughtfully, which appears on a big screen to the side of the stage? At the porn awards, they did a similar thing, but whenever they cut to someone in the audience, that person would see themselves on the screen and pull out their breast and start licking their own nipple or something like that. It really split focus.

  Another takeaway was how genuinely moved the winners were. I’ve been to the Academy Awards a handful of times, and I can say with absolute certainty that these porn performers were more emotional while accepting their awards. They would cry hysterically as they gave their speeches.

  “I can’t tell you all how deeply moved and touched I am to be given the award for Best Anal Orgy….This just…this just means so much to me!”

  And it should! They really deserve these awards. The winner of Best Anal Orgy worked harder for that statue than Meryl Streep ever has. Sure, she learned to talk like Julia Child, but can she stick nine dicks in her ass while keeping good light for the cameraman? This is not a rhetorical question. Can she??!!

  I’ve watched a lot of porn on the Internet over the years, a point that was really driven home recently.

  About five years ago, my wife and I bought a house in Los Angeles that has a distinct water feature behind it. And a few months ago, I was scrolling through an obscure C-grade porn site when, among the dozens of thumbnails filling the screen, one caught my eye. It appeared to be the water feature from my new backyard.

  I clicked on the thumbnail, and there it was: our new house, with four Russians having a very uncircumcised orgy in our water feature. The clip seemed about ten years old and only had a couple thousand views. I had a lot of thoughts in that moment, but the most prevalent was I did it. I looked at ALL the porn there is on the Internet. It’s the only way to explain the statistical improbability of me finding this clip. The truth is, if you live in a house in Los Angeles, odds are some porn has been shot there, and if you live in a house of any kind anywhere, somebody has definitely fucked in it, so the presence of cameras doesn’t really make a difference on a sanitary level. At least I got to see some of the people who fucked in my house before I lived in it. Odds are you didn’t. I consider it a gift.

  I grew up in a perfect-storm-type situation when it comes to being someone who developed a love for weed. I’m from Vancouver, which is and always has been one of the most liberal cities in the world when it comes to weed. Also, I loved hip-hop music, which, aside from a few odd lines here and there, was pretty much telling me to smoke weed all the time. And finally, I was (and still am) a white person, so statistically my odds for really getting in trouble for using it were (and still are) small.

  When I was thirteen, I desperately wanted to try it. Yael Folk had tried it with her older brother, and I was so jealous.

  Me: What does it feel like?

  Yael Folk: It burns your throat like crazy.

  Me: …Awesome.

  I had a will but no way. But once I was in high school, the floodgates opened. A few weeks into eighth grade, Steven Glanzberg, Josh Corber, and Saul Moscovitch came up to me in the hallway.

  Steven Glanzberg: We got some.

  Me: You got some? Some what?

  Saul Moscovitch (whispered): Weed…

  Holy shit. It was on.

  Josh Corber: After school, we’re gonna go to the ravine, and we’re gonna smoke it.

  All day, I was freaking out with nervous excitement. I really had no idea what to expect other than a burning throat, and that’s probably because being stoned from weed is actually really hard to explain.

  We went to the ravine, which is…well, a ravine, with a walking path running through the bottom and nice houses along the ridge. It’s a few blocks from our high school and seemed like a good place to smoke in an isolated environment, which was generally the goal. We stopped at the 7-Eleven for free Dixie cups of water, which would help combat the inevitable throat burn that we had coming our way. Moscovitch got two cups. When we got there, he pulled out a nug of weed in a small Ziploc bag. It had been in his backpack all day, and because it was particularly fresh and sticky, it had been smushed into a flat little panc
ake about the size of a nickel.

  My only visual experience with weed up till then had been in movies. Cheech and Chong. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Breakfast Club has a weed scene, but I didn’t know that until I was around nineteen or twenty. The copy I had as a kid was taped from TV and the weed scene had been cut. Not until years later when I saw the unedited version did I understand that they’d smoked weed, which made the ending with them all being friends make MUCH more fucking sense.

  All this is to say that all the portrayals of weed I’d seen were basically giant bags full of dry oregano. Not a tiny bag with a moist little squished nug in it.

  Me: What do we do with it?

  Saul Moscovitch: We smoke it.

  He reached into his backpack and produced a twelve-inch green plastic bong that he’d bought from a piercing shop downtown. He poured one of his two little cups of water into it and pressed the bud into the bowl. After around thirty attempts, we got the lighting-sucking timing down, and we’d worn away at the nug enough that it actually started burning. I got a big, huge, gigantic hit. I felt the weed’s fingers start to tickle their way into my brain and then I exploded in a coughing fit.

  “Here.” Glanzberg handed me a little water cup. “Have some water. For your throat.”

  I had some. Then Glanzberg, Corber, and Moscovitch each got one giant rip from the bong before the bowl was cashed.

  I was high. Very super-duper high. I remember thinking time was acting funny. One second would take ten seconds; then two seconds, then five seconds would go by in one second, which was a not-normal thing for time to be doing. My vision was processing everything in steps rather than fluid images, as if I were seeing a flipbook of reality. Like I said, I was high. And I was enjoying it—that is, until Moscovitch opened his mouth.

  Saul Moscovitch: Alright. Now we just gotta go back to school so I can stash this bong in my locker, and we’re cool.