A Common Pornography: A Memoir (9 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 three 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.

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.

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.

There was also a really nice waitress named Deanna who was nineteen and treated everyone like she was their mom. She was going out with Jim, the main cook. Jim was tall and wiry, with shaggy hair, a big nose, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He must have been ten or twenty years older than Deanna. We had a cassette player in the kitchen and we took turns playing music on it. I would bring in tapes by groups like Cameo and Midnight Star and Jim would play Judas Priest or, oddly enough, James Taylor.

Jim and Deanna were a good couple though, and they lived together in a cluttered apartment close to my high school. They invited me over to their place a few times and Deanna even set me up on a blind date with one of her friends. The friend was cute, like Valerie Bertinelli, and I was thrilled when we chose to go to a haunted house. That meant my date would probably get scared and grab my arm or even hold my hand. Of course, that’s exactly what happened, but I probably blew any chances with her when I tried to kiss her later in the 7-Eleven parking lot.

One of my favorite people at Big Momma’s was Joan, a frizzy-haired bartender who would sneak into the kitchen several times each night and fish the biggest chunk of Roquefort out of the blue cheese dressing. I thought it was gross at first, mainly put off by the stink, but I learned to love it soon enough. Each night I worked with Joan turned into a blue cheese fishing battle.

By the summer of 1985, after I had graduated high school, I was dressing a little more strangely than most Tri-Citians. I would wear double-breasted dress jackets that Mom sewed for me, combined with stretch pants, Beatle boots, earrings, and shiny broaches. The boss eventually called me to the back and hinted that I was going too far, and without giving me a second chance, they fired me. When I got home that night, I tried to feel good about not having a job but I ended up on Mom’s lap, embarrassed and crying.

I wouldn’t say
I had a prostitute obsession, but when I was sixteen—just old enough to drive my Chevy Malibu—Maurice and I would cruise around east Pasco, looking at any cheap hooker the streets had to offer. We did so in silence, an unspoken pull toward what our small town had deemed “the ghetto.” The first few times we trolled this area, we just looked around, our imaginations coloring in details about every abandoned building and the discarded pieces of torn clothing that littered the cracked sidewalks in front of them. We eventually got comfortable enough to wonder aloud about how much the women charged for their services. We’d pull over and ask them sometimes, careful to strike some sort of balance between businesslike firmness and nonthreatening friendliness. The girls humored us, talking dirty and sometimes letting us touch their breasts. We must have looked out of place on those streets, two puberty-wracked white boys—me with my pimples and braces, Maurice with his red hair and freckles. Both of us were still reluctant virgins posing as street-smart kids.

There was one thrilling night when we actually let two of the girls in my car. They wanted a ride to a hotel that was on the other side of the tunnel that separated Pasco from east Pasco. Maurice and I listened in on their conversation during the ten-minute drive. They talked about clothes, cigarettes, and carrying guns. When we let them out, they walked to our windows and kissed us like we were their pimps.

This was around the time I started working at Big Momma’s, where I made anywhere from ten to thirty dollars a night in tips, which I carelessly spent at the record store. I hadn’t had a girlfriend yet—in fact, I had barely kissed a girl. But I was eager to have sex and had, coincidentally, been training for such an event for at least two years, masturbating regularly with my mom’s back-rubbing vibrator, timing the seconds it took for me to ejaculate, like some perverted scientist.

I had no prospects for girlfriends. I was shy and anxious and probably a little gross. But the prostitutes were hardly out of my league. Most were not pretty at all and actually rather unhealthy looking. If they were better looking, they probably would have been working in Seattle or Portland or even Spokane. That’s what I came to reason. Still, they were women who had sex a lot and, I imagined, could show me a thing or two. I wasn’t picky. I was desperate.

My sexual yearning came in two dominant fantasies: One was romantic love. I listened to sappy love songs by the likes of Lionel Richie, Peabo Bryson, and Luther Vandross and I cried my eyes out, wondering if I could ever experience the depth of love in their music. When they sang about happiness or heartbreak, I felt that happiness or heartbreak, minus the actual presence of a female. The other fantasy was simply fucking. As in, fucking anything that moved. Humping, screwing, boning. You get the picture.

I began forsaking Maurice and going out by myself. He was my only real hanging-out friend at the time, so it was hard to pull off sometimes. I’d get off work and call him to tell him I was just going home or had to work late. It felt a little like I was cheating on him.

One night I decided I’d had enough of my virginity. I hit the gloomy streets of Pasco, my Malibu crawling at a steady twenty miles per hour. There was no one out. I stopped at a taco stand and ate something disgusting, killing more time and shaking with nerves. That’s when I saw her, coming around a corner a block away. I jumped back in the car and drove over. For some reason, I couldn’t just walk down there. I had to have something to hide behind, a getaway. The car would make me feel like I was somewhat guarded and safe.

As I got closer to her, I realized I didn’t have a choice. She was the one. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I rolled my window down and asked her the question. She gave me a couple of options, like a menu or a list of the nightly specials. Fifteen dollars for a hand job, twenty-five for straight sex, and fifty bucks for a suck and fuck. Apparently, it was a bargain night. I told her I wanted what she called “straight sex,” which sounded like a good introduction for a beginner like me. She got in my car and gave me directions to a motel. She was probably in her midtwenties, short and a little chubby. Her dark hair was styled unattractively and she looked bored. If this were a girl I saw at a school dance I wouldn’t have looked at her twice. Her name was Greta.

When we got to the motel, she opened the door to her room and went immediately to the bathroom. She told me to take out the money and get undressed. I took off all my clothes except my boxers and socks. She came out of the bathroom, wearing a bathrobe, and walked to the bed. She gave me a condom and told me I had to put it on. She lay on the bed and opened her robe, letting it stay under her like a beach towel. Her body was unfit and slack. More like a trucker’s body than a prostitute’s. I didn’t feel any hot sexual vibe from her at all, more like a “Can I smoke my Marlboro yet?” kind of vibe. I started to have second thoughts and wanted to renegotiate the price. I told her I was nervous because it was my first time, maybe hoping for some sort of discount. Her demeanor softened a little and she started cooing warm sentiments to me as she touched my penis with her hand to make me hard. I struggled with the condom, afraid I’d lose my erection if I didn’t get it on fast enough. I had experimented with a condom just days before, putting one on and jacking off with it. My hand smelled bad for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t help instinctively sniffing my fingers when no one was looking.

I got on the bed and fell on top of her. I could barely feel myself inside her. I wasn’t really certain I
was
inside her. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands or if I was allowed to kiss her. I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss her. I touched her breasts, they seemed saggy, unloved, the huge dark areolas looking like sad raccoon eyes. She said something strange to me, like, “It’s going to be all right” or “Move down a little.” I can’t really remember what was said but it was very little. As I tried to get into a comfortable position, a position where I could feel something, I noticed that she was looking over my shoulder. I heard the hum of a muted television. It was mounted, hospital-style, near the ceiling. She was watching something on TV while I tried to make her come alive. I kissed her neck and her shoulders to see if I could regain her attention, but she stayed focused on the screen. I still wasn’t sure if I was inside her. All I felt was air. I moved my hips carefully, so I wouldn’t cum before I even felt her. But I was already getting to that point. If she would have grunted once I’m sure I would have lost it in a second. I tried to focus on the fact that she was a woman and we were naked and she was underneath me in a bed and that this was what I had seen in dirty magazines and in late-night fuzzy pay-channel movies. For a moment, I removed myself from what was happening and tried to imagine what it looked like in a magazine or on a screen. Greta, this naked woman I was trying to have sex with, was still watching the TV above us. I compromised in my mind and imagined that she was watching us having sex. That thought was enough to get me thrusting. I ejaculated quickly and unceremoniously. I tried to keep going but she asked me if I was done. I got out of the bed and thanked her.

As we left the motel, I felt embarrassed and gypped. She asked if I could drop her off at her corner. As we drove I thought she might say something about doing it again sometime, but she didn’t. She simply got out at her corner and slammed the door.

I drove home that night, not feeling changed at all, like I thought I might. I wasn’t about to tell Maurice about Greta and I didn’t feel like driving around those dark streets with him ever again.