A Dumb Idea #11
My father, step mother, and step brother lived in an apartment for awhile before they moved to Kansas when I was younger. There wasn't as much to do when I visited my father on the weekends in the apartment as there was when they had a house.
My step brother and I were up on our tetanus shots, so we figured diving into smelly dumpsters full of broken glass, rusty scraps of metal, and the occasional discarded cutlery set wouldn't do lasting damage. Pirates risked life and limb for their booty; why shouldn't we have followed their lead?
Based on the quality of pornographic magazines tossed away in the apartment complex, we probably should have been more worried about the people living nearby than the dangers of rummaging around big dumpsters. We found some pretty gruesome magazines!
The most extreme magazines seemed to be tossed out with regular garbage, and even if we had wanted to add them to our collection, they were all too wet to even open.
That's not to say we were all top shelf with our magazine collection. We had some magazines that, just by looking at their covers, we knew we didn't want to look inside. Sometimes when my step brother and I dragged these magazines back to our secret hideout, we dared each other to look inside.
We usually wished we hadn't.
I was amazed at all the strange things adults were into. I knew how the whole sex thing worked at a young age--my mom explained it to me when I asked where I came from when I was five or six. But the stuff in the magazines definitely cast the whole sex thing in a different light. It was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It was also very confusing.
Had I trusted the scratch and sniff magazines we pulled from the dumpsters, I'd have thought the nether regions of a woman smelled like stale beer, coffee grinds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and cigarette butts to this day. (Fortunately, that's not the case!) Sure, my mom explained how things worked when we had our talk about human reproduction, but she sure as hell didn't discuss "Chicks with Dicks!" And it never dawned on me that if I could come out of that orifice, things just shy of a bowling ball could go back in.
We had pictures to prove it!
We ended up looking at the more tame photos, we loved the cartoons, and yes--we even read some of the articles. It wasn't so much that we wanted to look at all the magazines we found; we simply wanted to see how big our collection could get. Stacked end on end, the collection was probably taller than me!
My dad's best friend discovered our secret stash. Maybe my step brother and I boasted to one of his sons who let the secret slip, or maybe he saw us carrying armfuls of magazines to our hideout one day. Had I been Catholic, I'd have probably thought he "just knew," and that no amount of confession could cleanse our tainted souls. I really wasn't so much concerned with how he found out because I was already building up my defense when confronted by my dad.
"I've seen your Easyriders and Penthouses, so don't get mad at me!" I'd say. I'd push it all back in his face.
But it never came to that. My dad's friend made a deal with us. "How 'bout this," he said. "I back my car up to your hideout and you put all those magazines in my trunk? I'll keep your secret and you'll keep mine."
It was a deal.
My step brother and I grew a bit older that season. Even though we could have replenished our collection in a matter of weeks, we never hit another dumpster. We had more knowledge than your average nine-year-old and eleven-year-old. But it was more than that.
At a young age, I realized adulthood wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and when I thought about all the lonely, messed up people living in those apartments just outside of Chicago taking care of business to images that would make Larry Flynt turn his head, I knew that was the kind of adult I would never become.
My step brother and I were up on our tetanus shots, so we figured diving into smelly dumpsters full of broken glass, rusty scraps of metal, and the occasional discarded cutlery set wouldn't do lasting damage. Pirates risked life and limb for their booty; why shouldn't we have followed their lead?
Based on the quality of pornographic magazines tossed away in the apartment complex, we probably should have been more worried about the people living nearby than the dangers of rummaging around big dumpsters. We found some pretty gruesome magazines!
The most extreme magazines seemed to be tossed out with regular garbage, and even if we had wanted to add them to our collection, they were all too wet to even open.
That's not to say we were all top shelf with our magazine collection. We had some magazines that, just by looking at their covers, we knew we didn't want to look inside. Sometimes when my step brother and I dragged these magazines back to our secret hideout, we dared each other to look inside.
We usually wished we hadn't.
I was amazed at all the strange things adults were into. I knew how the whole sex thing worked at a young age--my mom explained it to me when I asked where I came from when I was five or six. But the stuff in the magazines definitely cast the whole sex thing in a different light. It was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It was also very confusing.
Had I trusted the scratch and sniff magazines we pulled from the dumpsters, I'd have thought the nether regions of a woman smelled like stale beer, coffee grinds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and cigarette butts to this day. (Fortunately, that's not the case!) Sure, my mom explained how things worked when we had our talk about human reproduction, but she sure as hell didn't discuss "Chicks with Dicks!" And it never dawned on me that if I could come out of that orifice, things just shy of a bowling ball could go back in.
We had pictures to prove it!
We ended up looking at the more tame photos, we loved the cartoons, and yes--we even read some of the articles. It wasn't so much that we wanted to look at all the magazines we found; we simply wanted to see how big our collection could get. Stacked end on end, the collection was probably taller than me!
My dad's best friend discovered our secret stash. Maybe my step brother and I boasted to one of his sons who let the secret slip, or maybe he saw us carrying armfuls of magazines to our hideout one day. Had I been Catholic, I'd have probably thought he "just knew," and that no amount of confession could cleanse our tainted souls. I really wasn't so much concerned with how he found out because I was already building up my defense when confronted by my dad.
"I've seen your Easyriders and Penthouses, so don't get mad at me!" I'd say. I'd push it all back in his face.
But it never came to that. My dad's friend made a deal with us. "How 'bout this," he said. "I back my car up to your hideout and you put all those magazines in my trunk? I'll keep your secret and you'll keep mine."
It was a deal.
My step brother and I grew a bit older that season. Even though we could have replenished our collection in a matter of weeks, we never hit another dumpster. We had more knowledge than your average nine-year-old and eleven-year-old. But it was more than that.
At a young age, I realized adulthood wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and when I thought about all the lonely, messed up people living in those apartments just outside of Chicago taking care of business to images that would make Larry Flynt turn his head, I knew that was the kind of adult I would never become.