The Moose in the Closet: Porn, Puberty and a Lack of Respect for Personal Property

Robin and I had a nice, romantic night. She wasn’t expecting anything, she is in class until 10PM, I’m in class until 7PM and we hardly see each other on Mondays. But last night I had the bath going, some bubbles, a bath-bomb from Lush, flowers and candles all over the bathroom, cake from Heidelberg Pastry and Al Green going on the radio. Fucking smooth.

A far cry from my developmental years, I’ll tell you that. I was a horny as fuck kid when I first hit puberty, all boys are. For some reason I think I was especially bad, I really have no evidence to back that up but it just feels right.

I was into skating when I was 12/13, we used to skate all over Brooklyn and Manhattan – fond memories of CS Skate Day and The Banks. I sucked, though, but it was a good scene. Tight knit. But with the skating came that rebel mentality, especially in 1990/91, and part of that rebel mentality led to an illegal hangout where no adults would go. For us it was this alley along the side of the Phase II Condominiums on Columbia St.

This wasn’t really an alley, it was someone’s lot. The guys who owned it parked a car there or something but never went back. There was a wooden fence that blocked it off but that shit was never opened, we simply hopped the fence.

We set up a whole thing there, we had a mattress for sitting (and yeah, it was fucking gross), tires for sitting, a makeshift milk-crate basketball hoop and a shelter made of broken wood and pieces of metal for when it rained. Looking back now, it’s really funny that we had all this shit on someone’s private property.

Anyway, the shelter also kept our porn safe from the rain. We had a collection of porn that everyone contributed to. Stolen Playboys, Hustlers and just shit you find on the street. Everyone contributed to this stash except me. Whenever I stole porn or found it on the street I hid it in my room. I even stole shit from the shelter occasionally.

I had this strange affinity to this one item. It was a moldy, crusty box to some uber70s porn movie. The back had this guy facing these two girls with nothing on but some Le Tigre shirt or some shit and the two girls are naked and screaming. That image is forever engraved in my mind, mainly because I stared at it many nights. To this day I still wonder, “Why are they screaming? Is he that large? Did he just surprise them?” I’ve tried to recreate the scene with various girlfriends but none of them ever screamed. So, you know, it couldn’t have been the large dick theory. Anyway, the box always had this weird smell to it, the smell is catalogued, I can easily pick it out of a smell line-up. It was a mixture of mildew, porn cardboard and…bodily fluids. It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing that I ever touched every night for a year straight.

My quest for porn got ridiculous. I knew where every friend hid his secret stash. If I was over his house and he went to the bathroom, I would sneak a quick peak. I even knew where most of my friends’ parents hid there porn.

For a month straight I ordered Spice TV skin flicks on the cable. For some reason I thought my parents would never know. They got a bill for a few hundred bucks. I denied knowing anything. They claim they fought the charge, maybe to save me from embarrassment, but there’s still to this day a block on their pay-per-view, and you need to call in an order. I think this is the first time I’m confessing ordering all that shit – even though I’m sure they know. Maybe now they’ll ask me to pay them back, however.

I was bad. I was recklessly bad. And then I got a job at the video store at the age of 13. It was all down hill from there as porn just became a lot easier to get. And it’s been easy ever since and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten much better. I just don’t sneak around alleys anymore stealing it.

Interesting side-note, one day we accidentally set the alley on fire. Firemen came, guy that owned the lot was pissed. He assumed it was us but never really did anything about it. He was probably afraid of getting a skate-truck to the back of the head. That really wasn’t our scene but the stereotype had its advantages.

read a book, fanboy: Things Fall Apart

turn off the metallica, fanboy: Things Fall Apart

Things are just falling apart, I guess.

Labels: mitc

Porn, Puberty and a Lack of Respect for Personal Property

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

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