My First Porno

The first time I ever saw pornography I was a very small child. I know this because I found it while I was sitting on a toilet, and my legs were so short they couldn’t touch the ground.

The magazine was sticking out from behind the shower stall in our basement bathroom. I grew up in the same house my dad lived in while he attended University, and he’d claimed the basement, painting the bathroom a dark blue. The basement shower was his shower. And the magazine pages were peeking out from behind it.

I remember hopping off the toilet to retrieve the rolled-up magazine. I shuffled over with my pants around my ankles, pulled it out and hopped back on the toilet. Hustler.

I opened the curled up pages and saw so many curled-up photos of boobs. So many women with big hair and lipstick and giant boobs. This was my nirvana. 

I love boobs, I thought as I flushed the toilet.

Sitting on the shower bath mat, I flipped through the pages upon pages of boobs staring back at me like eyeballs. I nodded, somewhat understanding. This magazine made sense to me, because who wouldn’t want to look at a bunch of ladies' boobs?

But something was curious to me. Why wasn’t this Hustler magazine upstairs with the other magazines? Vogue and Vanity Fair were surely not as cool as this magazine. This magazine needed to be with the others, although its wear and tear were much, much worse than the magazines upstairs. Bent pages. It was a shame.

I tried to flatten it out the best I could. I went up to my room and got out an encyclopedia, the M because it was pretty heavy. I laid the M encyclopedia on top of the curled magazine and then I stood on top of the M. The M that contained Machete, Moons and Mortar. I bounced on top of it, hoping to flatten out the boobs like a mass mammogram, also under M.

When I was pleased with my results, I carried the magazine upstairs and dropped it with the other magazines on the coffee table and went about the rest of my day, which I cannot recall because it was certainly less exciting than finding a book of bare breasts.

When I next passed the living room, the magazine was gone. I searched everywhere. Under the couch, under the table, in the TV room. I ran downstairs to see if it was back behind the shower and it was not. I’d lost my boobs.
It then occurred to me that the magazine had actually been hidden. And boobs probably should stay hidden.
And the next time I sat on that toilet, legs sticking out, an empty spot behind the shower where that magazine had once been, I thought, you fool, you should have left the boobs. You’d still have them.