A Common Pornography: A Memoir (10 page)

After we got
our first VCR, I started using it to record my favorite videos off MTV. VH1 had started during my last year of high school as well, but they mostly played boring adult contemporary music. I would spend hours watching music videos with the VCR remote in my hand, ready to record whenever something cool came on. Videos were so fresh and fascinating at the time. The pop star dreams I had as a little kid were even bigger as an MTV-watching teenager. When no one else was around, I’d watch some of these compilation videotapes that I made. I’d work the pause button with great skill while watching videos by Madonna, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, and Robert Palmer. Eventually, I got a membership at the nearby video store and started watching movies on the VCR. Maurice or Darren or some other friend would spend the night and we’d be watching a movie in the front room of the rebuilt house. Sometimes, late at night, Dad would come out wearing long johns and a ratty T-shirt. He would do two things: he would tell us to turn down the volume and then he’d say, “This isn’t one of those rated-R movies, is it?”

By the time
I was eighteen, I had my first real girlfriend. One who would kiss me in front of people and tell me about her periods. It took two months for Pam and me to have sex. She wasn’t a virgin like me. (Okay, I wasn’t technically a virgin either, but did my first time really count? Emotionally I still felt like a big virgin.) She lost her cherry, she told me, when she was fifteen, to a nineteen-year-old who used to babysit her. I didn’t know what a “cherry” was exactly, but her announcement gave me a stomachache. One of the dirty magazines I sought out heavily at that time was called
Cheri
. It was sleazier than most of the others. In one pictorial, a group of women took turns on a giant chocolate dildo to see who was the blow job queen.

Some of the other magazines I grew bored of. I had heard cautionary tales about porn being like a drug. That I would start to need harder, stronger, more dangerous forms of pornography. A few years later, Ted Bundy mentioned having this problem. Many people thought he was trying to blame pornography for his sick crimes, and I constantly wondered if something was wrong with me as well.

The day after I lost my virginity with Pam, I thought I could get rid of the suitcase. I thought I would want the real thing from there on out. Not only could I have sex with Pam but I could play my Commodores albums for her and she would write me love notes with big bubble letters and heart-shaped happy faces with wide-open hug arms and Flintstone feet. I thought I’d be happy.

We met each other at the Vocational Center where I was taking the Radio/TV class. She was taking some kind of retail class where the students ran a small deli-style store for all the students in the building. I’d go in there and buy Skittles and we’d pass notes to each other. If I didn’t go to the store during each break she would think I was mad at her and she would write a note and have someone give it to me. She was both insecure and bossy. She went to Kamiakin, which was the rival high school in Kennewick.

For most of that senior year, I left the suitcase to fester in the closet. It just sat there, barricaded by the shirts and
Miami Vice
–style jackets my mom made for me with her constantly running sewing machine. I thought that Pam would somehow notice a difference if I masturbated during this time. I thought it would be cheating.

Right before graduation, I went to Pam’s place to surprise her. It was down a long, unlit, winding road in the deserty terrain behind the Columbia Center Mall. She lived in a trailer kind of thing. A big, flat rectangle of a structure with a couple of tires on the roof for some reason. She wasn’t there, so I sat on her front porch talking to her younger sister for a long time until a fancy old Mustang pulled into the big lot in front of their house. This car sat idling in the dark for a few minutes. The windows were tinted. The engine finally turned off. It was the old babysitter boyfriend, Pam’s sister told me. He was in town visiting.

Maybe he saw me sitting up there, waiting. Maybe they thought of pulling out, going somewhere else. Or maybe they didn’t care. It seemed like a long time and I wondered what was happening in that car. My thoughts ran wild and my gut clenched. Pam’s sister knew something bad was happening and she went inside so I could figure out how to “handle it.”

Finally the Mustang started again and Pam stepped out. The car rolled through the loud gravel before getting back on that twisting road. I walked down from the porch to meet Pam, but she pushed me away and went inside.

The next day, I called her and listened as she described to me what had happened. I felt hollowed out and lightheaded. I pulled the suitcase out of the closet and locked my door as I heard her tell her side of things. I wanted to interrupt her and tell her about the suitcase, to make her jealous of the photos and how much I liked them. About how fantasy was sometimes better than reality, which was how I wanted to feel when the heartache went away.

I went out
with Pam for about nine months. She was the kind of girl who still slept with oversize teddy bears, wrote in huge loopy cursive, and whose favorite food was pancakes. I often went to her house after school and we’d make out in her room. She lived with her mom, who had a British accent for some reason, and didn’t seem to mind if Pam locked her bedroom door while I was there. Her younger sister lived there too, and she was much more attractive than Pam.

After we had sex for the first time, I went to school the next day feeling like a new person—the excitement of the sex, and the promise of more sex to come, made me feel like I was neon-lit from the inside.

On the back of Pam’s school photo (her hair parted in the middle and wind-swept back, her baby blue sweater with the shoulder pads, her ill-fitting blue jeans) I took a pen and drew a mark. A few days after that, another mark. I’m not sure why, but I felt the need to document, to count, the times we did it. I never told Pam I was keeping track. Perhaps I thought I was going to keep track forever, with every girlfriend, every crash-and-burn monthlong failure, every one-night stand. When other people talked about how many people they’d had sex with, I could tell them exactly how many
times
I’d had it.

Once when I was at the mall with Pam, we were paying for food at Orange Julius when her photo fell out of my Velcro wallet. She noticed the marks and asked me what they were and I told her it was the number of records I’d bought that year. Cassettes and records, I had to tell her.

At some point, I told a friend of mine about the count. Since none of my friends liked Pam, it was only a matter of time before this friend told a few others. To embarrass me at any time they’d ask, “How many times has it been now?”

When my relationship with Pam ended bitterly, the count was over. The final number was sixty-three. Eventually, after I started seeing other girls, I felt disgusted by the number. Sometimes, just to put me in my place, a friend of mine would still smile and laugh and say to me, “Sixty-three times.”

Even though I
seemed immune to pot, I found other ways to alter my consciousness. It took a while though, as I had to get over the ingrained fears of brain damage and eternal damnation from a Catholic God. Sobriety was something I took pride in as a teen. There were other kids in high school who were infamous drunkards and potheads, but I kept a safe distance from them.

The first time I gave in to drink was a couple of nights before my high school graduation. I went over to Deanna and Jim’s apartment after work.

Their place had that uncomfortable decor that happens when an older guy hooks up with a younger girl. Teddy bears and angel imagery mingled with mirrors that had whiskey logos on them. High school yearbooks from the early seventies sitting next to ones from the mid-eighties.

That night we sat in beanbag chairs and drank sweet mixed drinks (like cheap vodka and Squirt) through straws. Jim started telling really crude sexual jokes and I could tell it was making Deanna really uncomfortable. But the more I drank, the more I laughed along with Jim. I drank myself into a spinning night of sleep on their couch and woke up with a furry blanket on top of me. I was hot and felt sick. I looked at the clock and saw that I was late for my graduation rehearsal. I got up and slumped outside.

I looked around for my car and then realized I had left it at Big Momma’s. I had to walk about twenty blocks to my high school. My hangover made me not care so much about being late for the rehearsal. Maurice was probably the only one who would notice I wasn’t there anyway. The heat was getting to me and I did that thing with my T-shirt where you pull the front up over your head but keep the sleeves around your arms. Suddenly I felt the sickness come up and I heaved the sour throw-up next to a tree in someone’s front yard. I wiped my mouth with a leaf and kept walking in the direction of my school. I started to feel self-conscious, speed walking with my shirt up like that, my face melting like a sick drunk’s. People were driving by me on Garfield Avenue, probably wondering why I wasn’t at school. A couple of blocks later, my legs buckled. I rested on one knee and quickly vomited between a
STOP
sign and a storm drain. Before I reached the school, there was one more retching moment between cars in a church parking lot.

Maurice looked at me harshly when I finally got there toward the end of rehearsal. He could somehow tell that I’d been drinking, but instead of lecturing me he said that he too was going out to get drunk that night. I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of reverse psychology on his part. Maybe he was jealous because I didn’t get drunk with him. Nonetheless, it made our graduation night stressful. Maurice was probably my only true friend in my class and now there was tension.

On graduation night, there was a big Las Vegas–themed party in the high school gym for us, the triumphant Class of 1985. Maurice told me later that it was really fun and it lasted until three in the morning. I went home immediately after throwing my graduation cap into the air. I locked myself in my bedroom and listened to music on my headphones, wondering what to do next. My mind was blank.

One day I
wore an especially effeminate shirt that Mom had made for me. Dad saw it and freaked out. It didn’t help that I had recently pierced both my ears (by myself, using the potato method
*
) and constantly ratted my bangs too. “Why don’t you just go ahead and turn him into a girl?” Dad said. Some of my guy friends I hung out with were worse. A couple of them actually did wear skirts.

At the time, I was really into paisley. Mom made me dress jackets that looked like they came from Prince’s wardrobe if he were on the show
Miami Vice
. Some of my friends even asked me if she could make jackets for them. It was like I had my own personal designer. (Red Carpet Reporter: Who are you wearing? Me: This is from the Mom collection.) I loved Mom for that.

One time my friend John, who was fairly normal looking compared to the rest of our friends, was over at our house. When he left, Dad shook his head sadly and said something about John wearing mascara. But John didn’t wear mascara. He just had pretty eyes.

That summer, after
graduation, I started to hang out at this place called the Bingo Palace. A couple of my friends actually worked there, calling out numbers and letters to the weeknight gatherings of oldsters. I thought it was a cool job and I was a little jealous. But the coolest thing about the Palace was the Friday night all-ages dances. After the brutal breakup with Pam, I decided that I had had enough self-pity and disgust. I was finally feeling confident about who I was, and besides that, it was a good place to show off my fashion sense.

About a hundred or more pimply minors would go there every week, and it wasn’t just Kennewick kids. You’d see the Richland punkers and preppies and the Pasco jocks and break-dancers hanging out too. The dance floor used to be a skating rink, so it was pretty big. Around the perimeter of that was a carpeted area with four big mushroom-shaped seats where each clique claimed their space. The far back corner was where all the New Wave kids hung out, stuffing their trench coats under the mushroom and filling the air with clove smoke. Since the different cliques of people didn’t mingle, there were never any fights. But many of the jocks and a lot of the Wavers were weekly regulars and they would sometimes exchange dirty looks or sarcastic comments. The DJ would have to play a wide mix of music to please everyone there. Whenever songs by Love and Rockets or ABC came on, the floor would belong to the Wavers. Then Def Leppard would signal the return of the jocks and everyone else. Sometimes the DJ would slip in Anita Baker or that love song from
Footloose
and the floor would fill with anxious and nervous slow dancers.

The Friday night dances became the highlight of my week. I met many of my longtime friends at the Palace that year and I discovered a love for dancing. I even thought to myself: Dancing is my life! I live to dance! Maybe dressing up and dancing to my favorite songs was as close as I would come to being a pop star, so I went for it, and I felt euphoric afterward. I was starting to really feel myself physically in the world, self-conscious in a good way. Living in the moments of music. I remember being at the Palace and thinking about how sad it would have been to be somewhere else. All those people at home. All the people at work. Anyone, anywhere else but here—I felt sorry for them.