1982

by Jian Ghomeshi

  Of course, things are very different today. Today, everyone can watch porn on personal computers. You know it. Now you can watch extreme hardcore porn even when you don’t mean to. Now you might type “light bulb” or “squirrels” or “nice pond” into your computer and you will be transferred to a hardcore adult site. You don’t even have to search for “porn” or “sex” to find porn and sex, even though that might be easiest. Now everyone has seen everything. There is porn that includes ankles or headbands or triple penetration or aliens or bearded men. And you can be a teenager and watch all of this and be exposed to all different kinds of sex. But we didn’t have that in the 1980s.

  To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all fourteen-year-olds should be watching all cyber-porn. Hardly. There is material that really should be seen by adults only. But the option exists now, and it’s easily accessible. And if you watch it, you may learn some tricks about how people have sex. Possibly. I can tell you, I didn’t know much about this stuff when I was a teen. My sexual skills were embarrassingly novice. And outside of some well-meaning but ineffective sex ed. classes, I had little help in understanding the mechanics of it all. I remember wondering how I was supposed to contort my body in order to get my penis inside another person. It was all very confusing. In the absence of more graphic sex ed., at least some pornography could have helped me with some visuals to consider.

  Having said all this about porn, some manner of dirty images did exist back in the day. We may not have had helpful hardcore materials on video and online, but we did have Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler magazines. Or at least, Benny Travers did. And he would share some of the best of it.

  Benny Travers was a freckle-faced redhead who lived on our street in Thornhill and was one of the more prominent kids in our scene. He was in Scouts and had gotten lots of badges, because his father and brother and other brother had also been in Scouts. He had acquired a bunch of old Hustler magazines from a retired neighbour who had been selling them on his driveway as part of a garage sale. Word had spread about the old neighbour who was liquidating his stock of adult magazines, and we all took turns visiting the garage sale and getting a glimpse of the dirty materials lying plainly on a table next to some used cups. Only Benny had the courage to ask the guy if he could buy the porno magazines, and for this Benny was our hero. He told us the retired garage-sale man had chuckled and given him all the dirty magazines for a couple of dollars. That was a good deal, even in the late ’70s. Benny was two years older than me and already the leader of the kids on the street. But now he had elevated his status. Benny also claimed two Penthouse books when he made his garage-sale acquisition. Benny became a high roller with important commodities the rest of us wanted. And thus began an odd ritual amongst the boys in our area in the summer of 1978.

  A couple of times a week, a number of us would gather at Benny Travers’s house to sit for readings from one of his Penthouse books. It was called Sex Takes a Holiday. Toke, Davey Franklin, Pete Hickey, and me—and sometimes more guys from the area—would form an audience while Benny sat on the stairs above us in his parents’ home and read the Penthouse stories out loud.

  You probably think this sounds ridiculous. And I am aware that this must sound comical to any kid now. It must seem like some ancient, sad, horny/awkward ritual from another time. And it was. And it’s entirely true. We would gather, and Benny would read these stories to us with thespian-like verve: “Ohhh … harder … do it to me hard … unnnn … I’m coming …”

  Benny was a thirteen-year-old reading this stuff to a bunch of eleven-year-olds. I never quite understood what I was supposed to be experiencing when I listened to Benny read tales from Sex Takes a Holiday, but I know it was exciting. It was also illicit and somehow very wrong. That made it more exciting. Benny was royalty for a while in our circle as the proprietor of the used Hustler and Penthouse collections.

  By the 1980s, we were much smoother about these things. We had gotten older and had graduated to watching nudity on TV thanks to Baby Blue Movies on Friday nights. Baby Blue Movies had originally begun in the 1970s as a publicity stunt for the independent Toronto TV network called Citytv. We also knew it as Channel 79. The visionary behind this new TV station, Moses Znaimer, had embraced the notion that late-night sex on television could be popular. Or at least that it would bring notoriety. The idea was that late on Friday nights, Citytv would air soft-core porn. It worked. It brought the station some attention, and the practice carried into the ’80s before it was discontinued.

  The possibility of seeing these movies on TV was not lost on us kids. Starting in 1980, I would host sleepovers at my place on Friday nights. I’d invite some of the boys over, and we’d lay sleeping bags on the floor of our family room and tell my parents we were going to sleep. Then we would turn on our console TV with the volume very low and quietly watch the movies on Channel 79 in our sleeping bags. Sometimes there was snickering. Sometimes there was silence. Sometimes there were other sounds. But the practice was clearly rewarding enough for us to do it on a few occasions. I really don’t know who Baby Blue Movies was aimed at. The movies weren’t very explicit, and the storylines were abysmal. In retrospect, they were probably for boys like us. I still don’t know if my parents knew what we were doing. I assume they did. Sometimes my parents had the sense to let boys do their thing.

  In 1981, a new and very unique film called Quest for Fire got wide release in theatres. It was an interesting, quality movie about prehistoric tribespeople discovering a source of fire for the first time. It was shot and performed with an attempt at cinematic authenticity, including grunting, hunting, and the skimpy outfits prehistoric people wore before we had Calvin Klein. All I knew about the film was that there were naked women in it. That’s because in prehistoric times people ran around naked. I convinced my father to take me to see Quest for Fire on the giant screen at the University Theatre on Bloor Street in downtown Toronto. I was thirteen, and well equipped with arguments to sell my father on the idea.

  “But what thees film ees?” my father said.

  “Dad! It’s a film about how the world started, and about fire and people in the beginning of the world!”

  “Thees ees good film you want to see?”

  “Yes! Yes, Dad. It’s about history. You know how you like me to learn about history. It’s like a documentary.”

  It wasn’t a documentary. My father relented and took me to see Quest for Fire at a weekend matinee. I will not forget the feeling of my father glaring at me in the theatre when the first nude scene came on. I kept looking straight ahead. I could feel my father’s anger. Or bemusement. I’m not sure which. I avoided making eye contact with him.

  Either way, it was titillating to see Quest for Fire. Then again, it was also terrifying to anticipate what my father might say after the movie ended. We didn’t speak much on the way home. Later that night at family dinner, my mother asked what the film was like. “Thees film ees full of the naked woman,” my father replied. My mother said “Vah-ee” and gave a disapproving wave of her hand. I may have been a bit embarrassed, but I was glad I had experienced my first full-on, big-screen nudity.

  Traditional ideas about what was sexy and my alternative cultural tastes didn’t always match. For all the excitement, I found it difficult to reconcile mainstream “sex culture” with my New Wave aspirations. As much as soft-core movies and dirty magazines informed me about what I was supposed to consider desirable, I had trouble with some of the orthodox examples of what was sexy. Don’t get me wrong, the first time I saw Ann-Margret in a rerun of the Who’s Tommy, I was sold on sexy. That scene with her and the beans is mandatory fodder for excitable youth. And I don’t remember a time when I didn’t consider Brigitte Bardot or Farrah Fawcett attractive. But much of the pop-culture stuff never made sense to me. I didn’t understand why Bo Derek had to put those beads in her hair. And I couldn’t figure out why Jessica Lange acted so flakey when she was being sexy in the new version of King Kong when I was a kid. And
when I went to see the movie Grease with my mother and sister when I was eleven, I was quite convinced Olivia Newton-John was much prettier before she got a perm and wore the black leather pants. All of this was the opposite of what I was supposed to think was sexy according to magazines and dirty movies.

  Who knows what I would have considered “hot” if I hadn’t been bombarded with pop culture throughout my youth. The idea of what you find attractive and what you’re socialized to believe is sexy changes as you grow. When I was a little kid I used to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island, and I would wonder what all the fuss was about Ginger, the sultry actress on the island in the ball gown. Mary Ann was always more attractive to me in her little shorts and red shirt. Then, when I hit eleven or twelve, I started to understand the appeal of Ginger as the sex kitten. Mind you, I will forever have a thing for Mary Ann.

  Even further, by the time WKRP in Cincinnati finished its run on TV in September 1982, I understood why everyone considered Jennifer Marlowe, the receptionist, to be a sexual bombshell. Loni Anderson played the role of Jennifer on WKRP, and she had bleached-blond hair and giant bosoms and tanned legs and high heels. But by my mid-teens, I was much less interested in Jennifer than I was in Bailey Quarters, played by Jan Smithers, who was a more peripheral character. Bailey was a brunette who wore glasses, and she was smart and quirky. If I were to fantasize about anyone on that show, I was more likely to focus on Bailey. She wasn’t New Wave, but she was less mainstream and predictable.

  I have made a short list of qualities that made Bailey Quarters, the reporter and ingenue on WKRP, sexier than Jennifer Marlowe:

  nerdy

  journalism grad (summa cum laude)

  Diane Keatonesque

  hard working

  intelligent

  environmentalist (Bailey even campaigned against nuclear power in one episode!)

  As you can see, Bailey was quite impressive. And you might think I’m trying to take the high road by saying I liked the intelligent girl better. I’m really not. Bailey was very pretty, too. If you don’t think so, you haven’t seen the episodes where Bailey really lets her hair down and takes off her glasses. It’s just that I always imagined I would have more in common with Bailey, and that made her particularly sexy. Similarly, I could look at the hot, blond Jennifer Marlowe cheerleader types at Thornlea and recognize that they were very attractive but be more drawn to the New Wave girls or brunettes or punks like Dani Elwell and Wendy. They were more in the category of Bowie, after all. And a girl named Paula Silverman was somewhere in between. Paula Silverman also helped me learn about sex.

  I met Paula Silverman in typewriting class in Grade 9 at Thornlea. Between theatre and music and history classes, all of which happened on the second floor, where I was most likely to see Wendy, I would head downstairs to the lower floor of our high school to attend instruction in core subjects like typewriting. I’m not making this up. Typewriting class really existed.

  We learned to type in typewriting class. Now you learn to type when you’re two years old. But in 1982, we didn’t have computers for everything. We had a separate class for computers. That’s where we learned how to use a PET computer. The Commodore PET was first released in 1977 and discontinued in 1982. But not before we were taught to try to use it at Thornlea in Grade 9. It wasn’t clear what we would ever be able to do on a PET computer. It was bulky and black and white and riddled with code and seemingly quite useless. But we knew it was important to learn. It was the future. On the other hand, in typewriting class we were taught where to place our fingers and how to type words without looking at the keys or the paper we were typing on. This was so we would be able to use typewriters until computers became useful. Then we could type on computers. It was an odd time of transition.

  Paula Silverman was a very cute brunette girl who could type very quickly. That was impressive. She was one of the stars of typewriting class in Grade 9. But what was even more impressive to me was that she wore very short shorts to school each day. Sometimes she wore those flannel types of shorts that would bunch up and become even shorter short shorts. Paula Silverman was small and had nice tanned legs. Only one floor away but worlds apart from Room 213 and the New Wave crowd and Wendy, there was Paula Silverman in typewriting class. I was always very attracted to Paula Silverman. She was also a year older than me. She was somewhere between Bailey Quarters and Jennifer Marlowe.

  You might want to know what exactly Paula looked like. You might be curious as to how I defined “very cute” in Grade 9. But I don’t really have any pictures of Paula handy. And that’s because we didn’t take photos in 1982. Well actually, what I mean to say is, we didn’t take photos of everything in 1982. And that includes Paula and me. Now everyone takes photos of everything. You’ve noticed this, right? Maybe you haven’t because it’s just become so ordinary. Now we all shoot photos of everything because virtually every gadget we own takes photos we can collect or delete or augment or send. So now everyone has become a photographer and everyone is eager to show photos on Facebook. Now people miss experiencing an event because they’re busy taking photos of experiencing an event. Now people will take photos of entirely inane and uninteresting things because it costs nothing to do so. But that was not the case in 1982. We barely had photographs in 1982. Photos were an occasion and a situation and an aberration. We were too busy doing stuff to take photos. And even if we weren’t too busy, photos usually required too much money and patience.

  The 1980s may not have been that long ago, but photographic documentation was a century apart from now. If you wanted to take photos in Grade 9, you would have to start by owning a good camera. Not a camera that was part of your mobile device (we didn’t have those either) but a separate camera camera. For this camera, you would have to buy film. The film might come in rolls of twelve or twenty-four shots, and it was expensive. Then, upon loading the film, you would have to make each photo count, given the expense and the limited number of exposures on your roll. After shooting the roll, you would take the film to a processing shop and pay more money and then wait a couple of weeks to see the photos. You would say things to the guy in the processing shop like, “Will these photos be ready by Wednesday?” And then the guy would say, “No … they won’t be ready for two weeks.”

  This is not a joke. Two weeks. Sometimes more. People would have aged by the time their photos were printed from their latest roll of film. That’s how long it took. Men would grow beards in the time it took to develop film and get a set of prints. Then, inevitably, when you finally got the pictures, nine of the twelve photographs you received would be dodgy or blurry or ugly or unusable. So as you can see, it just wasn’t an economically sage adventure for a kid in Grade 9 to be running around taking photos. Who had the time and money for that whole process? That’s why I can’t show you any shots of Paula Silverman.

  But I can tell you that Paula was pretty and she wore makeup and she wore very short shorts. She also chewed gum all the time. Paula chewed gum the way those girls who speak while they’re chewing gum chewed gum. It was a little annoying. But on the other hand, if you ever needed gum, Paula Silverman could supply you. And she was tanned. She was another white girl who always had a tan. Sometimes, she would tan so much she was dark brown. If my mother had been Paula Silverman’s mother, she would have told her to stop tanning because she might become “black.” But Paula wasn’t Iranian, so it was okay to be “black.” And she looked good with her tan.

  Paula Silverman helped me learn the ropes when it came to some mutual sexual exploration in Grade 9. By “learn the ropes,” I mean she allowed me to grope her. And she groped back. I don’t know how it began, but about halfway through the school year Paula and I began meeting in a downstairs back lobby under the stairway at Thornlea. Our meetings would take place each day after school. The back stairway was where the rockers and stoners would generally hang out, and there was a giant rock outside the door so it was called the Rock. Paula and I would meet at the Rock at the e
nd of school each day and make out under the stairs. We wouldn’t really say that much to each other. And we weren’t really close friends outside of our daily meeting. But we were both committed to our rendezvous at the Rock. And we didn’t just make out. Paula would unzip my pants and fondle me while I made my way into her short shorts with my hands. With Paula Silverman, I learned what touching the inside of a girl feels like. This was a tremendous thrill. It went nowhere more than that. But it was genuine excitement.

  But it wasn’t enough for Paula. After a few weeks of our daily meetings, she wondered why we weren’t having a relationship. It was a fair question, and she was a nice girl and she deserved an answer. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I couldn’t really tell her I was unavailable because I was interested in an older New Wave girl who looked like Bowie and rarely talked to me. That might seem odd. So I didn’t really give Paula an answer. When Paula asked me if I would consider having sexual intercourse, I said no. I just wasn’t ready for it. In retrospect, I was probably much too scared of the possibility. After a few weeks, devoid of a relationship or intercourse, my dalliances with Paula came to an end. But not before some education was found underneath a stairway at the Rock.

  BY THE LATE SPRING of 1982, I had a new ambition to go with asking Wendy out and becoming New Wave. There was a film I needed to see. This film represented the intersection of two of my greatest interests in Grade 9: sex and Bowie. It was called Cat People, and it was definitely considered cool.

  I first truly learned about the movie with the release of the Cat People soundtrack featuring Bowie’s song “Cat People,” written with producer Giorgio Moroder. It starts with a foreboding slow beat and then breaks into one of Bowie’s most powerful and intense baritone vocal performances ever. When he starts with the haunting first line, it’s as though his voice is going to burst out of the bottom of your speakers. It was a single that got some play on alternative radio.