It did not take
long for me to grow bored with the October 1988 issue of Playboy. Every curve of a breast, every thatch of pubic hair, every
smooth, airbrushed buttock became as familiar to me as the location of the warp
zones in Super Mario Bros. I began craving variety. I continued the methodical
search of my parents’ bedroom whenever I could, and I discovered another half
dozen or so issues of Playboy in my
Dad’s closet; I committed each and every pictorial to memory. By the time I was
finished I had become an expert on breasts. Previously, I had never imagined
that they came in so many varieties. Nipples too. There were large round breasts,
small droopy breasts, tennis ball breasts and banana shaped breasts. The
nipples on these breasts had circumferences ranging from the size of a dime to
that of a coke can; length wise they ran the gamut from a half-gnawed pencil eraser
to a drinking straw. After a while though I began to develop breast-ennui and Playboy just didn’t titillate me the way
that it once had.
It
was about a year later that I made my next great discovery.
Like
many of the greatest discoveries, this one was an accident. I was downstairs in
the computer room, playing California Games on the Apple IIc, when, because I
kept wiping out so quickly during the surfing challenges, I decided to try and
find the instruction manual. I began looking through the cabinets above the
computer desk; they were filled with instruction manuals and software
packaging, along with many of my father’s business publications and Army
magazines.
I
was shuffling through the manuals when a magazine fell on the desk. “Penthouse”
it said on the cover. Up to this point I had been under the impression that the
hierarchy of adult reading material went as follows: Sears catalog, Victoria’s
Secret catalog, Playboy. It had never
crossed my mind that it got any better than that. Penthouse, I would soon learn, makes Playboy look like Dr. Seuss’
How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
I
randomly opened the Penthouse to a
page in the middle and was filled with profound confusion about what I was
looking at. In front of me was a full-page image of some type of exotic
blossom, or maybe it was the mouth of a starfish. It looked fleshy,
frightening—perhaps alien. Half disgusted, I studied the photograph for quite
some time, trying to understand why I also found it so enticing. I turned the
page and saw a photo of a woman sitting on a beach with her legs spread wide
apart, and suddenly everything made sense. The missing link in my anatomical
knowledge had been uncovered.
In
addition to inspiring young men everywhere to pursue degrees in gynecology,
another way in which Penthouse
differed from Playboy was its
articles. Whereas Playboy publishes mostly pseudo-highbrow articles on cigars,
muscle cars and home-brewing techniques, Penthouse
magazine has a section called “Penthouse Forum.” This is comprised of letters
allegedly written by readers of the magazine, though underneath every letter is
written the message “name and address withheld by request.” These letters
presented a world in which movie theater employees were having sex with patrons
in the projector booths, college students were having sex with their professors
after class, men and women would meet each other at the supermarket and duck
into the public bathroom together, for sex, without even learning each other’s
names, and women were constantly having sex with anyone who showed up at their
door with any kind of a package. Each of these letters began roughly the same
way, with some variation of the phrase, “you’ll never believe what happened to
me, but…” Well, as a young man undergoing a sexual awakening, I chose to
believe every word printed on those pages. I found them inspiring, and I looked
forward to the day that I would be able to write my own letter to Penthouse, and I wouldn’t request that
my name and address be withheld either.
As
I progressed through middle school I learned that the hierarchy of pornographic
magazines did not end with Penthouse.
If Penthouse makes Playboy look like Dr. Seuss then Hustler magazine makes Penthouse look like Shel Silverstein. Hustler is among the most obscene
mainstream adult publications available on the newsstand. It shows photos of
men and women engaged in all types of sex acts, and regularly features a ‘human
oddities’ section featuring photos of women with labias that hang down to their
knees, and other women whose vaginas are stretched so wide that they can fit
their entire forearm inside. It’s difficult to imagine anyone being courageous
enough to purchase an issue of Hustler
magazine from the gas station or pharmacy without fear of being judged as some
sort of sexual deviant. None of my peers would have dared to keep a Hustler hidden in their houses. This is
why there were several issues of Hustler
buried at various locations in the woods, and on the old train tracks,
throughout my town. Nobody knew who buried them, or why. Whether they were
hidden outside out of fear over them being discovered, or it was some sort of a
gift passed down from an older generation will never be known. There were a few
of my friends who knew where one of them was buried, and passed the information
on to me.
At
this point in my life I was obsessed with sex, and hormonally driven to possess
as much smut as I could get my hands on. I decided to do something that, to the
best of my knowledge had never been done before: dig up one of the Hustler magazines and bring it home. The
magazine was buried beneath two or three inches of dirt. It was half worm-eaten
and there were maggots in it. At least three quarters of the pages were so
filthy and weather worn that there was nothing recognizable on them. I brought
the entire magazine home and spent the afternoon with a tub of water and a blow
dryer, cleaning and drying every salvageable page. I stapled them together and
hid them on the top shelf of my closet. At the time I considered this to be one
of the great accomplishments of my life.
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