I had a strange internal geography growing up. I knew, intellectually, that the USSR and Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia were real places (unlike, say, Greece, which I believed was a myth until I found it in an atlas one day). As a child of Cold War media, though, it was difficult for me to imagine that they existed on the same plane as the United States, however many times I saw Ronald Reagan on TV with the latest in a series of soon-to-be-dead Russian leaders.

In this half-imaginary Eastern Europe I’d created, the Iron Curtain was a tangible object – not the harshly-lit barbed wire fence I only recently learned was a feature of the Czech countryside, but a tall, solid sheet of gleaming steel, undulating across the landscape. Later, I learned that the Curtain was metaphorical – and I assumed that the Berlin Wall must be, too. I’d seen the checkpoints in films, of course, but that didn’t translate, in my mind, to a great concrete barricade, covered in graffiti and subject to being, quite literally, torn down.

But then, on a no-doubt chilly November morning, Jan was late to class. Jan was a German exchange student, and Jan was never late. This morning, though, he was, and when he ran, breathless, into Mr. Augustin’s Mythology class, his English had all but abandoned him. Mr. Augustin listened to his broken attempts to communicate his excitement to the rest of us, then spoke to him in German. A moment later, he said, “The Berlin Wall has been torn down. Jan’s parents called to say they’re arranging to meet members of the family who were trapped on the other side the night it was built.”

No televised image, no classroom discussion, no Hollywood movie could have made the Wall real for me the way Jan’s flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes did. And if the Wall was real, then so were the people whose lives had been affected by it. And if they were real… Then so were all the other people I saw every night on the news. I don’t know if I’m articulating this well – I’ve never tried before tonight, and sometimes it’s still hard to wrap my head around it.

Jan, wherever you are, thanks for that. You opened up my world that day, though it took me years to realize it.

Photo by abhijeet.rane on Flickr. The painting reminds me of Pyramus and Thisbe, though I’ll hope this one had a happy ending.

Tags: Berlin Wall, Germany, High School Stories, I'm Such a Dork Sometimes, Laramie, Things I Thought I Knew

I couldn’t wait to leave my hometown.

It took me years to do it. Twice, I left and came back. Once, I planned to leave it for an even smaller town.

I was clearly insane.

When I moved to the Bay Area, though, I knew that I’d escaped. I’d visit, yes, but I’d never move back home.

Wyoming, as I’ve said more than once, is a lovely place to be from.

There are things that I miss, though. Lilacs. Oh, how I miss the lilacs in the Spring. (And never mind that Spring may not come until June – the lilacs are worth the wait.) The old brick buildings downtown. People who stop to help if your car breaks down. (Seriously – eight years of driving an old Bug in LA, and only a few times has anyone stopped. Once in Santa Monica, when I was trying to push my car up the California Incline; once just a few blocks from my house; and twice in Topanga. The time I ran out of gas on the 101? The Highway Patrolman who pushed my car into the breakdown lane didn’t even bother to ask if I had a cell phone before he disappeared.)

And when I’m stressed, I want to go home.

This morning, Sara, who camped across the street from us our first year at Burning Man, tweeted that she and Frinetik had “Just passed happy jack road and is stopping to look at the floating head of lincoln.”

“Hey,” I told her, “You just went through my hometown!”

And then I went to look at the Prexy’s Pasture webcam, on the University of Wyoming campus.

That statue in the middle is by the same sculptor who carved Lincoln's head.

And surprised myself by bursting into tears.

Today, I just want to go home.

Tags: I Get Homesick Sometimes, Laramie, Los Angeles, Not Really a Burning Man Post But Kind Of, Oh Whine, Prexy's Pasture, Wyoming

I started to tell this story over on LA Metblogs, in response to a post by The Eight Track Kid (a.k.a. Be the Boy) called “The Best Deal in Porno History,” but as it got longer, I decided it made more sense just to post it over here.

I worked at a book/video/hobby store in my home town (which was sadly driven under when a mega-chain came to town – though that might not have happened had the woman who owned it not been quite such a dragon) that had an excellent selection of porn mags (this is where I first saw both “Barely Legal” and “Perfect Ten”), an oddly dated selection of porn flicks (I think the owner stopped buying them around 1985), and, at one time, a very broad selection of porn novels (they were gone by the time I worked there, but one of my friend’s mothers had a trunkful of them).

Anyway, it was a small town, and occasionally, something would happen that would make the owners twitchy about the porn selection. (Actually, the old lady never mentioned the porn. The old man was in charge of the porn. They were both Mormon. I’m not sure if that’s relevant here.) Years before I worked there, for instance, someone smashed the front window and stole all the porn mags as a protest against pornography. (Seriously!) The police recovered them, but of course they had to hold them as “evidence,” and they never made their way back to the store. During the subsequent media flap (as much as you can flap a single newspaper that rarely ran more than 30 pages, including the Classifieds), everything but “Penthouse” and “Playboy” came off the shelf.

The old man told me this story while he was clearing the shelves again. This time, a major local kerfuffle had erupted over a local bar’s decision to bring some (*gasp*) strippers up from Denver. (Yes, we had to import strippers.) Some stick-ass who’d walked past the bar during the show claimed he’d seen them grinding their naked naughty bits and insisted that something had to be done. (Never mind that the windows of this particular bar were covered in blackout paper even when there weren’t any strippers inside. Either he was lying about seeing them, or he was lying about seeing them from outside.) The city council heeded the call of their outraged constituency, and drafted an anti-obscenity statute which was justly ridiculed for outlawing not only those filthy out-of-state strippers, but also artistic nudes, theatrical nudity (I’m sure the university’s theatre department was thumbing its nose at them when they mounted “Equus” a few years later) and teenaged boys’ boners. (It quite specifically stated that no man could appear in public, clothed or unclothed, in a “discernibly turgid” state. Of course someone immediately printed up t-shirts that said “Discernibly Turgid.” The bear at the Fireside wore one for years.)

The measure was eventually defeated, but meanwhile, the old man took most of the more “interesting” magazines off the shelves and moved the entire stock of porn flicks to the back room. A few customers asked where they’d gone, and we’d explain they were just hiding out until the city council decided whether nudity was to be allowed in the Gem City of the Plains. Most of our customers, though, were far too shy to even mention their absence. Not Our Very Best Porn Customer, though. Our Very Best Porn Customer came in almost every day to get his fix. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were two-for-one (and oh, how I did love tormenting those blushing college boys who could barely bring themselves to rent a porno from a girl, by telling them they could get another for the same price), and so every Tuesday and Wednesday, without fail, he’d rent two and sometimes four porn tapes. Now, as I’ve said, the owner hadn’t bought anything new in quite some time – and you mustn’t think he’d bought a lot when he was still buying. I don’t think we had more than 100 pornos in the whole store. One of my coworkers figured it up once and realized that Our Very Best Porn Customer had seen every porn tape we had at least four times, and he’d seen his favorites much more often. During the great porn drought, he still came in almost every day, asking if the porn was back, and consoling himself with R-rated movies that might at least give him a bit of boob.

After a few months of this, the old man finally made his decision. All of the magazines went back on the shelf, but the porn tapes – the porn tapes had to go. Our Very Best Porn Customer was first in line. He nearly staggered under the weight of his purchases. Star 85. The Italian Stallion. (So well-loved that its original cover was long gone – it lived in a plain plastic box with a xeroxed picture of Sly Stallone stuck to the front.) All of his favorites, many of his stand-bys, and a few he said he’d never even watched. (So much for my colleague’s math skills.)

And that is my two-for-one porn story. What’s yours?

Tags: Friends, I Get Homesick Sometimes, Laramie, Politics, Porn, Story Time, Wyoming