I’m kicking a dead horse, I know, but all this talk of youthful male non-procreative solitary sexual expression reminded me of how, when I was a kid, it was complicated to get a look at a n*ked lady.
I’m just tired of all that google traffic so I’m using asterisks, okay?
When I was young, like 13, there was this older kid in the neighborhood who had a large aquarium, and when he wasn’t home all the other boys in the neighborhood around my age used to go over to his house and ask his mom if we could look at his cool aquarium. She’d let us in and we’d all go look at his betas and neon tetras and snails and catfish and, when she left the room, at his Playboy collection in the cabinet underneath the aquarium.
I remember, in junior high school, this one girl, in the library, showed me a b/w photograph, torn out of some magazine, of a couple actually really doing it. For a minute or so, all electrical activity in my brain stopped, the first, but not last, time that’s happened to me.
Once, around this time, I was on a beach in Hawaii and saw a big wave come and wash off the bikini top of this old lady about 30. That image is forever burned into my brain. We flew home the next day, and she was on the same plane!
I also remember how embarassing it was to buy dirty magazines at the Seven-Eleven.
Excuse me, telephone…
Ok, I’m back. That was a colleague asking how to spell the word “fifteen”. Where was I?
Anyway. I only tried it once or twice, because too many things could go wrong – there could be other people in the store, or a girl could be working at the cash register. This is how it was done: you went into the store, waited until no other customers were near the cash register, but tried to act innocent so the cashier wouldn’t think he was being robbed. Then you went up to the cash register with a couple unrelated items like a roll of tape and a can of nuts and a can of pop.
Cashier: “May I help you?”
Customer: [Just remembering...] “Oh, and a copy of ‘Lasses with Glasses,’ please.”
Cashier: “Here you go.” [Looks curiously at roll of tape]
Customer: “Excuse me, this is ‘Classy Asses,’ I said ‘Lasses with Glasses.'”
Cashier: [Meanwhile, a line of customers has formed] “Well, you’re mumbling, sorry.” [Switches magazines]
Customer: “Eh, this is ‘Shrinkwrap Girls Over 40′. Look, forget the magazine, just give me a Slurpee.”
Cashier: “Which flavor, lime or cola?”
Customer: “Um, lime.”
Cashier: [Makes Slurpee] “Here you are.”
Customer: [Notices it's a cola Slurpee] “Thanks.” [Pays and leaves]
[Poignant conclusion goes here]
I can remember one of the few times I tried to buy a skin mag was in a small french “librairie” (not a library but rather a combined book and magazine store, a library is a “bibliotheque”) and the owner’s wife and kid were helping him out in the otherwise empty store. He noticed me shiftily looking at the top shelf publications and sidling towards them real cool-like and bundled his wife and kid into the backroom before coming over and recommending several different titles.
You know, in my neighborhood, I’m not sure it ever occured to us to try to buy one. Theft was considered the proper method of obtaining a skin mag, either from the 7-11 or from somebody’s perverted dad.
Those dads could take a lesson from the gun control lobby: “He hid his porn so well, it took his son eleven years to find it.”
At the risk of shutting down this exchange and being the last comment, your recollection about the ‘old lady of about 30′ made me think: I remember when I was about 15 or 16, one of my buddies and I suddenly realized that a mutual friend’s mom wasn’t an old lady at all. In fact, she was (then) younger than I am now. It was embarrassing for him ’cause she was really attractive and yet his mom at the same time, we were his friends and he was supposed to pissed but also not insult his mom while admitting we were right.
I think he’s a Psychologist now.
That just begs for a poignant ending narrative involving a slurpee and a forgotten, now superfluous Wichsvorlage. Brrr.
I grew up pre-playboy, so the National Geographic and lingerie ads in Sears were about it. Really. According to report, condoms could be bought from a machine in a gas station 30 miles away. (At drugstores they were sold from behind the counter by someone who always knew your parents). It’s interesting that without safe sex lectures, guys and gals still really wanted to have sex without pregnancy, and they knew how too. Law and custom were the problem (the responsible people). As a result, teen pregnancy was higher in the idyllic 50’s than anytime since. That’s fallen into the memory hole. In my small high school (250 kids in 4 grades) every year one or a few girls would disappear. (I met one of them at my 25-year reunion — she married the guy and was doing fine).
this soon-to-be-30-year-old lady’s got your poignant ending right here. *drops dress*
well that got my undivided attention. of course, it adds a troubling new dimension to the adoption proceedings.
just call me “soon-yi”