A Common Pornography: A Memoir (13 page)

Before I moved
to Spokane, Pam came over to my parents’ house to see me one last time. She said she saw my car in the driveway and wanted to say hi before I moved. We went to my old bedroom and I tried to figure out what it was she wanted. She said she heard that her little brother had beaten me up at the mall and that she was sorry.

I got angry and defensive and told her that he didn’t beat me up. In fact, I forgot it even happened that summer. He saw me at Columbia Center and stopped me outside the Bon Marché. A few of his friends were with him and he was obviously putting on a show for them, acting cool and tough. He said something about “fucking over” his sister and then threw a wild punch at my neck, which I barely felt. There was an angry surge of heat in my head, but I chose to walk away. He and his friends stood there laughing.

Pam sat on my bed and started to cry. I said it was no big deal. “Don’t you want to kiss me?” she said, and then she started kissing me. I kissed her back but didn’t say anything. It had been almost two years since that night she sat in someone else’s car and saw me waiting for her on her porch.

It was dark in my room and even though my parents were home, I locked my door and let Pam get under the covers with me and we took our shorts off. She was on top of me like a wrestler. She had me pinned. She put me inside her and I felt a sad regret. The last thing I ever wanted to do was accept any form of apology that she offered. She would probably feel like we were even now.

The bed was thumping, but I was trying to be quiet. The one thing that would make me feel worse about this whole scenario would be for Mom and Dad to think Pam and I had made up. My doorknob jiggled and then Dad said from the other side of the door, “Does Pam want to stay for dinner?”

“Hold on a minute,” I said.

Then the door opened and Dad stuck his head in, his eyes adjusting to the dark. “You shouldn’t lock your door,” he said. He lingered a moment as Pam and I lay there frozen. I waited for the door to close, but it didn’t. I waited to hear the sound of his feet move back down the hall, but they didn’t.

The first time
I lived in Spokane (1988) was pretty brief. I found a cheap apartment next to an old office store that specialized in staplers. It was exciting to live by myself for the first time, but the place got depressing quick. The tiny kitchen had a warped floor and there was a permanent smell of old hamburger. There was a small dirt lot behind the apartment where people from the other seven apartments parked their cars. No matter where I parked, one guy from down the hall would always leave me aggressive notes of complaint.

The radio class that I signed up for at the Ron Bailey School of Broadcasting was only a nine-month course, but it cost about $8,000. I thought it was only a matter of time before I’d be starting a long and interesting career in radio. I dreamed of the day when I could play whatever songs I wanted and everyone would understand how great my taste in music was, like my days as a kid cranking 45s out my bedroom window.

It was the first time I really tried hard in a school setting. I had perfect attendance and my efforts soared above those of the dozen other students. The instructor was a fifty-something guy with the kind of body language that suggested thousands of hours of overnight DJ shifts and a few divorces in his past. No matter how many cups of coffee he slurped, he still seemed in need of a nap. He wore jeans and denim shirts, like the Marlboro Man. I’m guessing that his bushy mustache hid many frowning wrinkles. But he was kind to me and had a smoky smooth voice. After just a couple of weeks, he pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to start working weekends at the local AM country station.

I was the first one in class to get a job, though it was mostly pushing buttons and reading the weather and call letters once an hour. During the week, I worked as a parking lot attendant.

My old high school friend Maurice called me one day and asked if he could come up and stay with me for a couple of weeks. Ever since graduation, things had been weird with Maurice and me. After being so antidrug, antidrinking during our high school years, Maurice had somehow become a total souse, drinking cheap beer all the time and always passing out or getting sick. I felt like I had to let him stay with me. Maybe it would help to mend our relationship.

Maurice mostly stayed on my couch those two weeks, drinking Stroh’s, his cheap brew of choice. He would stack the empty cans on the windowsill and never clean up. I drank with him a few times but he always drank faster. As he got more drunk, he got more mean. Even though he had little experience with girls, he would say the worst things about my old girlfriends, especially Holly, who he called a fat cow.

One night, INXS was playing at the Coliseum. It was the height of their popularity and Darren came up from the Tri-Cities to go with me to the show. I had an extra ticket for Maurice, hoping that a nice gesture would make his stay more tolerable. I almost begged him to go with us, even just to get him out of my apartment. “No,” he said. “I just bought some beer. I’m going to enjoy myself just fine.” He stretched out the last two words sarcastically.

Darren and I walked down to the show, barely speaking a word. I looked at the extra ticket in my hand and couldn’t believe that Maurice had elected to stay home and drink by himself. There was a strange sad mood in the night air, like a close relative had just died.

On the very
last day of broadcasting school, I wasted no time getting out of Spokane. I decided I was going to move to Seattle, where a few of my Tri-Cities friends had moved. There was a Ron Bailey school there too, so I thought they could help me get a radio job.

I packed up my car with the few things I owned at the time (the furniture stayed—it was a “furnished apartment”). I gave the place a quick clean and left my key on the kitchen counter. It was just after midnight, but before I could leave for good, I decided that I would finally leave my own message for the guy down the hall, the one who always complained that I was parking in his spot. I took a bar of soap and wrote some nasty things all over his car. I did it quickly and nervously. I scrawled something like:
COME SEE ME! APARTMENT
4. And then I quietly rolled out of there with my headlights off. When I pulled into the street, I turned on my headlights and eventually began to laugh to myself as I got on the freeway to Seattle. I was having some sweet revenge. Too bad no one else could see it.

When I first
moved to Seattle, I was living with about five other guys in a mess of an old house. I didn’t have my own room so I slept in my friend James’s room, in his walk-in closet. I was seeing a girl I knew briefly from Spokane. She had worked at a vintage clothing store where I bought a leather motorcycle jacket on layaway. I must have gone through a phase where I had crushes on anyone who looked like a famous actress—this girl looked like Rae Dawn Chong. Her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she wasn’t allowed to see me, so we snuck around. One night, when her parents were out of town, I went to visit her. She was living with them until she could afford her own place. I was nervous the whole time I was there and kept waking up through the night. There was religious stuff everywhere and photos of the family. Her large black father and her humorless-looking white mother sneered at me judgmentally. I couldn’t deal with the stress and eventually broke up with her.

One night, while I was out on a rare barhopping night with friends, I met a girl named Erin. She was skinny and boyish and we joked around a lot, her whole mouth opening with every bright laugh. She was nineteen but had a fake ID that looked nothing like her. Her laid-back hippie demeanor intrigued me and made me feel like I didn’t have to impress her—at least that’s how I perceived it, being someone who never knew any real hippies. We danced to Fun Boy Three and then went home together. She played Cat Stevens the next morning and made coffee on a stove. I stayed wrapped in her blankets, on the futon on the floor.

I felt right away that I could openly express myself with her and I cried the first morning we spent together. For a while there, I would cry at anything. Songs. Letters. Movies.

(My crying jags would become an initiation for any girl I dated for the next ten years—we’d get to know each other, sleep with each other, and then I would start using her pillow as a handkerchief.)

Three months later, I moved into an apartment with Erin and her best friend, Mary. I had a scooter at the time and Erin and I would ride around at night when we couldn’t sleep. She was a very restless sleeper. She even had a strict rule for us in bed. She didn’t want to feel my knees touching her, my feet touching her, or my butt touching her. She said the sensation of those body parts felt cold and foreign, like they were dead fish or something. This rule simply became: NO KNEES, NO BUTT, NO FEET (NKNBNF). But I was not annoyed by this. I was charmed.

I also learned that she became easily jealous. She made me burn a pile of some of my old photos one night. We precariously made a bonfire of my past girlfriends on the ledge of our window. She blew the hot ashes into the air as the images melted away.

After a year
in Seattle, Erin and I moved back to Spokane so she could finish some credits at Whitworth College. I wasn’t excited about going back to eastern Washington but I knew I had to go somewhere I could get a radio job. The only DJ job I had in Seattle was with a mobile music company. I’d get hired every other weekend to play records at high school dances, receptions, birthday parties, and old folks homes. Besides that, I worked at a 7-Eleven and then waited tables at an oyster bar in Pike Place Market.

A career in broadcasting meant you had to work your way up from smaller towns to bigger cities, so even though I didn’t like Spokane the first time around, I tried to see it as a stepping stone in my radio career. My brother Matt had finished college by this time and he was about to move to Columbus, Ohio, for a sportscaster job after being the sports anchorman in Kennewick for a couple of years. Later, he’d get jobs in Seattle and then Houston—that’s how a broadcasting career was supposed to go: small market, medium market, and then big markets. I was hired again at the AM country music station and began filling in sometimes on the FM Top 40 side of the building too. I worked at a record store most of the time though.

Just a couple of months after moving to Spokane, Erin found out that she was pregnant. Although our relationship was serious, we decided we were too young to have a baby. We solemnly arranged an abortion at a clinic on the other side of town. I drove her there but she didn’t want me to go inside. We sat in the car and, without saying a word, we both stared at the building and cried. One of her girlfriends was going to come back and pick her up and take care of her. She needed to be with another woman for that part, she said.

I sat in my car for a while after she went inside. I imagined the uncomfortable waiting room. I imagined everyone trying slyly to catch a glimpse of the other women there. I wondered if that helped each woman, to see the others and for a moment think that at least they weren’t alone. I wondered if there were any men sitting in there.

Later, Erin told me how it went. The nurse took her in and weighed her and measured her. They said she was two inches shorter than she is. Erin was unusually bothered about this and argued with the nurse about the two inches until the doctor came in. They got her into position and gave her something to knock her out. “And then I was having a really peaceful dream,” she said. “I was walking through a forest and I found a pool of water. I put my hands in the water and was making little waves, like a kid playing. I cupped my hands and lifted some out and watched it drip through my fingers.”

Something happened after
that day. I had a sense that all the fun was gone. I was falling out of love and I didn’t know why. There was nobody else I was interested in. It was one of the few times I’d ever been monogamous, but I was losing interest.

One night, we were talking about something trivial—a TV show or a band or something—and the conversation suddenly changed. I told her that I thought we should break up. Erin looked at me in disbelief and realized I was serious. “I just don’t think we should be together anymore,” I said. I didn’t have a way to communicate my reasons. We didn’t speak much for the rest of the night. She asked me questions and all I could say was “I don’t know.” Neither of us left that night and we slept one last time in our bed. When we woke up, we had sex, knowing it was the last time.

I went to work and left her at home to make plans for herself. She called me before I got off work and told me that she had taken most of her stuff and had driven to Seattle. She was dropping out of school and staying with her dad. I went home and found a bunch of my clothes and things thrown around. I had a large collection of records and cassettes and it looked like she had thrown a bunch of them against the wall. I spent all night cleaning up.

I couldn’t figure out what I was doing after that. I missed Erin, but she was not coming back. I felt like a zombie but I had to put myself back together enough to find a new, cheaper place to live. I couldn’t stay in that apartment much longer. Andrew, a friend from the Tri-Cities who lived in Seattle, called me and told me that Erin and a couple of her friends had stayed in his apartment on New Year’s Eve. He said that Erin was with an old boyfriend and that he could hear them having sex while he was trying to sleep. I went out that night and found a sex shop with those little movie booths in the back. This was the start of a habit that lasted a few years.

This part of the store was dark, with only some small red lights over each station that was being used. One man lingered in the corner, like he was waiting for someone. I walked over to one of the empty booths and paused for a second and looked at him before going in. I left the door unlocked and took out some dollar bills. I heard the man try the doorknob and then the door opened and he snuck inside with me. The rules posted in the store started with “1. Only one person per booth.”

“Can I watch?” he asked. He didn’t say what he wanted to watch, but I knew.

I was nervous and I couldn’t get the machine to take the first dollar. It kept sliding back and forth like a tongue sticking out at me. I could hear the man breathing behind me. Finally, the dollars slid into the machine and the TV screen came to life. I pushed the button to change the channel until I found one I liked. I had my pants undone and so did the man.

“Can I touch you?” the man asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He was standing beside me now and I looked back and forth between the man’s hand on my dick and the screen. I reached over and held his cock in my hand and starting moving it. I felt something strange so I looked closer at him. He was skinny and slightly hunched. His face was thin, with high, almost feminine cheekbones. There was no hair anywhere on his cock and he wore a leather thing around it. A cock ring, I guessed.

We didn’t say another word until we were done. He left me there and slipped back into the dark hallway. My time was not up yet. I stood there, surrounded by cum on the floor, watching the TV, flickering with moans and skin, until it shut off.