Art of the Odd

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?

A Unique Alias told a story yesterday about something stupid he did with a pellet gun when he was 17. I told him my husband has a similar story, but I’d let him tell it. (Novy, would you like to tell the story here, or over at Direct Current?) After saying that, though, I realized that I have my own story to tell…

From the time I was maybe 12 or 13, all the way through high school, I made some extra money in the summers shooting gophers in the horse pasture. Mom would pay me $1 a head for killing the squeaky little menaces, and never asked to see the corpses. One lovely, sunny morning, I was out in the eastern half of the pasture, near the road, when I spotted a gopher to the west of me. I fired. My aim was a bit low, and the bullet skipped off the hard-packed ground and ricocheted through the double pane of plate glass in the bow-fronted window of the house.

I didn’t realize it had happened until I came in and my father offered me the bullet. It was only a .22, so it hadn’t gotten far after punching through both panes of glass. He’d found it on the window seat. “Lucky for you that didn’t keep going and hit your mother’s china cabinet,” he said. “And that you hit the house, instead of one of your mother’s yearling foals.”

“Dad,” I said. “I would never aim toward the horses.”

Guess I shouldn’t have aimed toward the house, either…

I still have that bullet somewhere. Someday, I’m going to make a navel jewel out of it, like the dancer in The Man with the Golden Gun.

I wrote my first short story when I was six. Maybe younger. I have it here, preserved in the neat, feminine handwriting of a teacher whose name I’ve long since forgotten. “If I were a butterfly,” it begins.

As far back as I can remember, I was complimented on my writing. I basked in the praise, and I loved to write. I slept with books instead of with toys. I bought my first Writer’s Market Guide in elementary school, and I pored over my family tree, picking out pseudonyms based on the names of my ancestors. But I had a secret. I wasn’t really writing.

I started stories. I rarely finished them. Sometimes I didn’t get past the first paragraph. Sometimes I didn’t get to the first sentence. I wrote reports for school, and I resented these pieces of required writing. “If only I didn’t have to write these book reports,” I thought, “I could be writing books instead.”

I kept a journal from 4th grade to… Well, I kept a journal. I found it recently. It’s clear I wanted it to be a record, someday when I was famous, of the little girl I’d been. I imagined generations of readers, long after I was dead, lining up to read my journals. As though I were Anne Frank. As though I were Anais Nin. It didn’t last long. I got bored with my own prose and put the diary away. I thought about it from time to time, though, and sometimes I looked at the locked diaries at the drug store. “Maybe if I had the right kind of diary,” I thought. “But not this one, the lines are too wide. And it’s got these spaces for dates at the tops of all the pages – what if I want to write more than one page one day, and less than one page the next? This will never do.”

In high school, I started journaling again. And I started writing. I carried a notebook. I wrote songs, poetry, scenes from fantastic stories. And then my friends found a description I’d written of a shattered field under a charred sky, and they pulled me out of a movie theatre (I don’t remember the film) because I’d scared them so badly. I stopped writing. My mother read my diary, and I ended up in therapy. So I stopped journaling, too.

Later, I started writing letters, letters that were never meant to be sent. It was a different kind of journal. One of my friends found one and ridiculed me for it. My future ex-husband found one and accused me of adultery. I stopped writing again.

I wrote more letters in law school, some of them addressed to friends, others addressed to the universe at large. But this time I was smart. When I’d finished them, or when I’d run out of time, I’d rip the pages from my notebook and throw them away. I wrote in cursive, rather than my usual print, and always I discarded them in a public place, at school or in a coffee shop, somewhere no one knew my handwriting, somewhere they wouldn’t be recognized as mine.

And through all of this, I wanted so badly to write. I started stories. I rarely finished them. In their place, I read books on writing. “If only I had the right tools,” I thought. “The right notebook; the right word processor; the right desk chair.” I wouldn’t write at home because I wanted to write in cafes. I wouldn’t write in cafes because I wanted to write on the computer. I wouldn’t write on the computer because I wasn’t alone in the house. I talked about writing, I dreamed about writing, but I refused to write.

Slowly, I’ve begun to see the patterns. The fear of rejection. The fear of being read. The fear of being dull. I know the critic for who she is, and if I can’t shut her out all the time, at least I can muffle her voice long enough to get a few words onto the page. I’ve begun to write.