At school, we would do weird things for the sake of being weird. We’d go sit in a class that wasn’t ours until the teacher would look at us, puzzled, and then ask us to leave. While walking down the hallways, we’d sometimes fall to our hands and knees and spastically crawl several feet before getting back up on our feet, our facial expressions flat and muted, as if nothing goofy was happening at all. We would get in fake fights and then run away from each other, pretending to cry. If someone from Yearbook was taking photos, we’d try to get in the picture and point at something outside of the frame, sometimes with a look of glee, sometimes with an expression of horror.
We were friends for a couple of years, but something odd started to pull us apart. I really wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t sure if I could hang out with Pat Kennelly and be cool. Plus Maurice would make snide remarks about Pat and how much we were hanging out. Not that Maurice was any cooler, but sometimes it’s easy to be swayed by fear, and I was afraid I would lose Maurice as a friend. We’d been friends for a long time and we sometimes talked about living with each other when we got older. I think when you’re a teenager and you start making plans with your friends in regards to living together or going to a college together or hunting for Bigfoot or whatever, you really get excited. Because it’s the future! And it’s without your parents!
I’m sad I wasn’t Pat’s friend for longer. I’ve looked through all my high school yearbooks and I don’t think he even signed any. There is one funny scrawl that takes up a half page in back of my sophomore yearbook. It doesn’t have a name signed to it, but it says in part:
Kevin,
Guilty! Where is the fish? Dance with the flame! The yellow man inside that egg is in love with Big Leggy! Vegetables!
I’m pretty sure that’s from Pat.
Trespass
Once, during a snowy winter break, Maurice and I were jonesing to play basketball, so we walked over to our high school to see if any of the doors were open. Sometimes there were doors left open near the gym because there were teams practicing or a janitor working.
We got there and found the doors unlocked and the gym lights on, but no one else around. No sign of a janitor. We had our boom box with us and plugged it in at courtside. We had some sodas and a bag of chips from the store. It was like we had set up camp for the night.
We shot baskets on the beautiful hardwood floors and listened to Kurtis Blow and the Bar-Kays. About an hour into our private practice, three cops appeared. Two of them were up in the stands, walking around as if we had hidden bombs somewhere, and one of them approached us on the court. “What are you guys doing here?” he asked. Maurice turned the music down and told him we were just shooting baskets and that the doors were open and that we were students of the high school. They took our names and phone numbers and made us walk back home in the snow.
When school started again in January, we were called into the office and told we were to do Saturday school for two weeks because of our “trespassing.” The school narc gave us each a police report and told us to have our parents sign them. Maurice and I went home that day, nervous that they had called our parents. They hadn’t, so we forged the signatures on the reports and served our two weeks of Saturday school without our parents knowing.
Big Gulp
For most of my junior year of high school, I developed a strange dietary ritual. Before school, I would start my day with a package of Hostess Donettes (usually the waxy chocolate-covered ones) and a Big Gulp of Pepsi. Once at school, I’d put the Big Gulp in my locker and use it for quenching my thirst throughout the day, even past the point when the melted ice took over the cola flavor. My locker partner ridiculed me.
It was almost like an eating disorder. I put inexplicable pressure on myself to finish the drink before my last class of the day. I threw up a couple of times.
If I wasn’t eating Donettes for breakfast, then cereal was the usual replacement. I was a very picky eater. If I woke up early enough, I took a couple of pieces of my dad’s bacon. For dinner, we had very typical meat and potato kind of meals. We rarely ate out but when we did it was usually at Skipper’s on Friday nights or, on rare occasions, if the parents were feeling flush, Sizzler. At the end of these meals, Dad, too embarrassed to ask for a doggy bag, would wrap his leftovers in napkins and stick them in his pockets.
Suitcase
When I was fifteen years old, I had a suitcase full of porn. It was greenish blue—the aged color of flat turquoise. Square and heavy. Two metal latches kept it shut. Two buttons popped the latches. I kept it in the back of the closet, behind the clothes, and next to another suitcase that didn’t match. We were a poor family without nice things.
The suitcase, for me in the eighties, served as a “best of” fantasy portal. Whereas now, most adults—and yes, even fifteen-year-olds—keep their “best of” porn in a folder on their computer. Who needs all that paper anyway? I could do without all the wordiness of Playboy and Penthouse. I wanted skin. Photos. Pictures. Images to fill my eyes and mind. So two things happened—I started to find magazines that were almost entirely photos, and because I was accumulating too many magazines to hide, I started to cut out just my favorite images. It was like clipping coupons.
I had various ways to get these magazines. I had friends with cars and the knowledge of a specific Dumpster. I had an older brother who had his own place. I had a cousin who hid porn in the closet. Those were my sources.
The cousin was the most interesting. She was young and married. Her husband had a mustache and drove one of those Snap-on tools trucks around (I’m not sure why that seems significant, but it does). When I was younger, even before puberty, I remember wanting to kiss her knees, to touch her legs. But my incestuous urges were pushed aside by childish angst whenever she talked to me in condescending baby talk. So it was most satisfying when I found her “marital aides.” Not only was there a box of magazines and erotica books (bedtime reading, I presume), there were also films. Not videos, but actual plug-in-the-projector-and-loop-it-to-a-reel films. This was on a night when she and her husband were out and Matt and I were having a sleepover at their house. We found the projector and tried nervously to snake the film through it. We found a blank wall to shine our jittery smut on. The grainy color film was upside down or backward or maybe both. It was confusing but it was the first moving sex pictures I’d seen. We put everything back before they got home, but I managed to slip two magazines—smaller, Reader’s Digest–size ones with foreign words on the cover—into my sleeping bag.
Later, at home, behind the locked door of my bedroom, I looked through one of them and tried to follow a story just by the photos. The language was strange, maybe French. I couldn’t make out anything. But the images gave me an idea: A young man working at a grocery store helps a woman out with her shopping cart. She has poufed-out red hair and wears a short skirt. Her legs look smooth and strong. She also wears a loose blouse that looks slack and thin over her cleavage. As the boy starts putting the bags of groceries in the back of her minivan, she climbs in the back and feigns to help him, making room and crawling on her knees in front of his face. He reaches up her leg and she looks back at him and smiles. He glances around the parking lot before climbing into the van. Her clothes come off quickly and he eagerly covers her from behind, his pants around his ankles. I put my own translation into the captions around the photos. I think the woman probably talked to him as he touched her but I couldn’t fathom what she might be saying. Maybe it was just heavy breathing. Heavy breathing is the same in every language. When I cut those photos out of the magazine, I kept some of the mysterious language in there. It was a reminder of something I couldn’t explain. I used those pictures, that story, over and over, for my own foreign pleasure.
Pee-Chees
Before the suitcase, there were Pee-Chees, folders usually reserved for keeping schoolwork in. Illustrated with images of football players, track runners, baseball hitters, and pom-pommed cheerleaders, I filled
them with my favorite clippings of naked women. This was also done because of space issues. With magazines, sometimes I’d have to find more than one image to look at. I’d spread open magazines all across my bed, but that seemed so arduous. One fateful afternoon, I snagged some scissors from my mom (she often sewed in the room next to mine). I waited for everyone to leave the house and then proceeded to scavenge through the stack of magazines. I’d been keeping my stash in the ceiling of my room. It had those big suspended tiles and all I had to do was stand on a chair and push one of them aside to sneak stuff in and out. But I was getting worried about the weight and girth of my porn. It actually took me a few days to go through it all with the scissors. I had to determine which images turned me on and which ones didn’t. I found that I wanted a little of everything: big breasts, small breasts, skinny, chubby, blond, brunette, black, white, Asian, purple, short hair, long hair, big bushy hair, glossy red lipstick, clown makeup. It turned out that I wasn’t too discerning. Of course, I was also a virgin.
These Pee-Chees replaced the magazines in my ceiling. I took a Hefty garbage bag full of discarded magazine scraps and walked them over to the Mayfair Market’s Dumpster after dark. I was filled with a sense of relief, like a drunk coming out of detox. I could sleep at night now, knowing that fifty pounds of dirty magazines weren’t going to break through the tiles above me and pummel my face. I was comforted with the thought that only “the best” was up there. Nestled together in their Pee-Chees. Three of them. Overflowing with women reclining, leaning, jumping, pouting, posing, and playing. Sometimes I could just stare at the ceiling and I’d get hard. My focus and concentration were impressive. Above the Pee-Chees was nothing else. No roof. No sky. No God.
But I couldn’t stop it there. I couldn’t quit going to the porn Dumpster. Or stealing Playboy and Penthouse from the Mayfair. What I really wanted was a girlfriend, someone who would welcome my smothering affection, but I was nervous, insecure, and acne-ridden. I remember my friends who somehow attached themselves to girls and learned their rules and protocol. I tagged along with them to the park sometimes and they’d make out inside the play structure or smoke cigarettes. I waited on the swings, making myself sick. I saw Beth stick her hand down Scott’s pants. It looked like she was punching him. When she took her hand away, it looked so small. Her fingernail polish was dull and sloppy. I was so horny I don’t even think I could bear to hold hands with a girl.
As my Pee-Chees swelled further that year, I began to worry about my ceiling again. I didn’t want it to start sagging, so I found the old turquoise suitcase and piled my stash inside. I imagined what it would be like to dress up in a suit and walk around with the suitcase like a businessman. I wanted to paint it black so it seemed less suspicious. The color was odd and kind of garish, like it was announcing itself as a vessel of smut. Even the old 1950s shape of the thing seemed pervy. My family never went on vacations or trips though, so it was a safe and unassuming place.
Joan Jett
I bought the Joan Jett cassette called Album (I admit I had a crush on her even though I was also scared of her). I listened to it a few times in my room, rocking out on my mushroom chair. At the end of side two was a secret unlisted song that had a chorus where Joan sang the lyrics “You’re a star fucker star fucker star fucker” over and over. There was also a part about a clean pussy and giving head to Steve McQueen, but I didn’t really latch on to those.
Dad charged into my room while I was listening to it and told me to turn it off. Then he ejected the cassette, pulled a bunch of the tape out, and put it on the ground. He lifted his foot high and then stepped on it. He took the cassette box from my hand and looked at the yellow cover art of Joan jumping in the air with her guitar. He said through gritted teeth, “I should just burn this crap.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said, “Sorry.”
“I don’t care for any of this stuff that you listen to,” he said.
He ground his heel into the plastic cassette and into the carpet. The ribbon of the tape surrounded his foot like dead baby snakes.
Dunk Contests
When we were in high school, Maurice and I would sometimes go to my old elementary school and play basketball on its court. We liked it because the hoops were made for little kids and were only eight feet tall. We mimicked our favorite dunkers (Dominique Wilkins, Julius Erving) and had dunk contests. I liked how the nets were made of chain. Each jump shot, each jam, sounded like a slot machine paying out. Once I dunked so hard that the metal backboard lost its screws and crashed to the ground. Those were good times, sweaty and dreamlike.
We played a lot of playground basketball during that time and we started a rivalry with Jeff Jones and Tim Sanders, two of the stars from our school basketball team. We beat them in a game of 2-on-2 once.
I found a book called The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, which was all about playground basketball. It had a section where they talked about all the good courts to play on around the country. Instead of hunting for Bigfoot, I started to dream of this adventure instead. Pulling off the highways to play pickup games in every state, the sun casting our darting shadows. We played until the ball got too slick and then we cooled down with a Slurpee or a Big Gulp.
The one thing I didn’t like about Maurice at the time was that he was a Lakers fan. My favorite team was the 76ers and I suffered through many postseason heartbreaks around that time. Their championship season in 1983 made up for all of that though. They swept the Lakers in the finals and to celebrate, Mom took me to Burger King.
Echo
Maurice and I found a pile of discarded basketball jerseys at a sporting goods store on Clearwater Avenue. We assumed they were from some small town school that we had never heard of—perhaps a school from Moses Lake or Wenatchee. They said ECHO on the front, with the number underneath. We found the numbers that we thought were the coolest (he was 8, I was 21).
As we rode the bus home (public transportation was new in the Tri-Cities at the time), we decided that we needed a story to go with our new jerseys. Instead of saying “Echo,” we would say it was pronounced “Ee-cho.” It was decided that this was not the name of a school, but rather the name of another planet. A planet that we were from, and a planet where everyone wore Converse shoes, because we had a stout devotion to Chuck Taylors. We thought our enemy planet should be Lovetron, a fictional planet that backboard-shattering basketball star Darryl Dawkins often talked about. On Lovetron, everyone wore Nikes. We refused to wear Nikes. In fact, to this day, I have never worn Nikes.
We called ourselves the Duo of Doom.
Licorice
Maurice and I hung out at this record store in Pasco called the Licorice Donut. We used to buy all our records there. This was when we were really into funk. During the school year we’d even go home for lunch just to watch Video Soul on the BET (Black Entertainment Television) station.
Every time we went to the Licorice Donut we’d buy something different. We bought our first hip-hop records there (Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, various Sugar Hill and Def Jam releases) and later we’d have him special order punk rock for us too.
Maurice and I took a Radio/TV class our junior and senior years of high school. It was at the Vocational Center, where kids from other high schools also came to take specialty classes. Our class had a production room where we would record our own raps using the B-side instrumentals. We were supposed to be taping promo spots for the student station. We hung out with these two black kids from Pasco High named Richie Rap and Ronnie Rhyme. Richie dressed like 1984-era Michael Jackson with the red multizippered jacket and black parachute pants (also zippered more than needed) and he always had girls after him because of that. He did well in that regard. He had a nice personality and his rap style was probably the smoothest of all of us. Ronnie was a more awkward guy. He looked too old to be in school and had a slouch. He made the most mistakes with his raps, getting off rhythm, flubbing words, and stepping on others’ lines. We managed to record thr
ee or four songs during junior year.
That summer, Maurice and I got a job spinning records at a bowling alley where they had a weekly break-dancing contest. It was strange how being a DJ made it easier to talk to girls. My habit of mixing in New Wave songs with hip-hop eventually cost us the job.
Lionel Live
In 1984, my brother Mark drove Maurice and I across the state to see Lionel Richie at the Tacoma Dome. We had an extra ticket so he went to the show with us, even though he was a stoner and preferred Blue Öyster Cult. Tina Turner opened for him, but it was just before her big comeback and I didn’t really care about her. Even though I had seen a couple of bands in smaller settings, I still consider this my “first big concert.”
About halfway through Lionel’s awesome set, it looked like Mark was about to cry. He was singing along, cheering, and shouting “We love you, Lionel!” between the songs. When Lionel played the old Commodores tune “Brick House” my brother danced the funky chicken. It was like witnessing a religious awakening.
When we got back to Kennewick, Mark wore his Lionel Richie T-shirt unflinchingly. Maybe it was the power of pot, but I’d like to think it was the power of soul.
Big Momma’s
My first job after I turned sixteen was at a family-run pasta place called Big Momma’s. I was hired as a dishwasher/busboy but was promoted to waiter within a week after the waitress quit. There was a small dining room with a bar in the back. Most of the time it was just the bartender, the cook, and me. On the busy nights, I got some help from Tonya, the owner’s daughter, who was a year older than me and had the biggest breasts I’ve ever seen on a teenager. But she was really bossy and spoiled and I enjoyed seeing her more when she wasn’t in the kitchen yelling at someone.
A Common Pornography: A Memoir Page 6