Knockin' on heaven's door

When I was 13, my best friend The Slug lived on a farm. He wasn't a farmer, nor were any of his family farmers -- they just happened to live in an old farmhouse that had been converted to apartments. There was a lot to do on the farm, and I liked to go over there. Mostly this was because at my house, my mother always made it her business to know what we were up to. When I would go over to his house, we were pretty much unsupervised the entire time. The farm was the kind of place where you could get killed pretty easily if you weren’t careful.

Case in point: There was a dilapidated barn that had a couple of old basketball hoops nailed to the opposite walls on the upper level, and you were fine as long as you remembered to avoid the gaping three-foot-wide hole in the middle of the floor during the full-court press.

Most of the other things we did to amuse ourselves revolved around dares of one sort or another.

These dares always started out with a simple idea that rapidly went south. Here’s an example:

Me: “Hey, did you ever touch the electric fence?”
Slug: “Yeah, you can’t hold onto it for very long. It’s a pretty strong shock.”
Me: “What’s your longest time?”
Slug: “I dunno. 20 seconds, maybe.”
Me: “I dare you to touch it now.”
Slug: “No way. It rained this morning. The ground is soaked.”
Me: “I’ll bet I can hold onto it longer than you.”
Slug: “What’ll you bet?”
Me: “Whoever loses has to kiss elephant girl.”
Slug: “OK, on the count of three. 1…..2……3…..GRAB!”

Then after about ten seconds of us jerking around like retarded marionettes -- and a best-two-out-of-three -- we would decide that nobody could really be expected to kiss elephant girl.

Me: “Man, that hurts.”
Slug: “Yeah, my arm is killing me.”

A pause.

Me: “You ever pee on it?”

You get the idea. But just in case you don’t, I offer these other examples of farm-related dare-contests:

The “touch the bull on the ass” dare. This involved:

• Jumping the fence into the bull’s field.
• Sneaking up on him from behind.
• Getting about halfway there before the bull noticed you.
• Running madly in the opposite direction as fast as you could, zig-zagging to avoid the giant cow pies that were pretty much everywhere, while your friend shouted out play-by-play "how-close-are-the-bull's-horns-to-your-ass" commentary at the top of his lungs.

The “visit the cow graveyard” dare. There was a certain section way in the back of the field where the farmer just dragged the dead cows and left them to rot. The stench was a physical thing, like getting hit in the face with a wet towel, and it got on you and stuck in a very similar way. The object of the game here was simple: The first person who puked lost. If neither of you puked, then the object of the game was to see who could “bang the drum.” And by this I mean throwing rocks at the thin, dry skin stretched over the skeletal rib cages of the oldest ones, in order to get that classic John Bonham bass drum sound to ring forth.

Anyway, this was a very long and drawn out way of saying we didn’t have a lot of supervision.

While lack of supervision wasn’t a problem for us, there was something else we didn’t have a lot of, and that was a real shame, since this something else went hand-in-hand with being unsupervised. That something was quality porn.

As a couple of red-blooded, American 13-year-olds, our porn search was pretty much unending. No matter what we were doing, there was always some sub-conscious mental process working on how to get porn. Waking, sleeping, it didn’t matter. It was a perpetual subroutine stuck in an infinite loop, and it pretty much governed our lives.

Why was it so hard to get porn, you ask? Well, we couldn’t buy it, because we had no money, and besides, the store owners wouldn’t sell it to us. We couldn’t steal it, because we were basically good kids, and were afraid of getting caught. My father never had any that I knew of, and Slug's father had some, but he hid it pretty well and we could never reliably find it. This meant that we were relegated to finding the odd soggy, mildewed playboy magazine in the woods. Remember, as hard as it is to believe, this was before the internet, and before sex education, so this was the biggest mystery on the face of the earth to us. Sex. What it was. What girls looked like naked. How to do IT, and what, exactly, IT was. This was big stuff. Unless you had a generous older brother (neither of us did), you were pretty much out of luck.

Every once in a while we would find a penthouse or playboy in the woods and the inside pages wouldn’t have been too badly deteriorated, and we’d rip out the pictures and put them in plastic baggies and hide them or bury them in the woods. We treated them like treasure.

We were, for all intents and purposes, Pirates of Porn.

This all changed when Slug happened to notice his next door neighbor opening his mail. There was a certain magazine-sized black plastic package that showed up every month, and Slug had caught a glimpse when his neighbor was opening it one day.

He was pretty sure that porn was actually being delivered to within 30 feet of his house.

He shared this news with me, but neither of us could figure out a way to get it. This was the closest we had ever been to fresh-off-the-press porn, and we were obsessed. We thought about stealing his mail, but we could never time the delivery right. Besides, it’s not like he wouldn’t miss it. And we were pretty sure that stealing mail was a crime, even if it was just a skin mag.

After coming up with nothing plausible, we forgot about it for a bit, and just let the subroutine loop.

One other game we used to play on the farm was called manhunt. Sometimes it involved a bb-gun, but sometimes it was just more of an elaborate game of hide and seek. There were plenty of places to hide and explore and we knew all of them. During one game, we were running around in the basement where the storage units were, and Slug's next-door neighbor happened to be down there putting some stuff away. The storage units were nothing more than a bunch of separated areas where everyone stored their off-season junk, but Slug's next-door neighbor had an actual room with a padlock on it.

We weren’t really supposed to be down there, but for the most part, nobody cared. Slug's neighbor snapped his padlock on the clasp, nodded to us, and then was gone. I looked at Slug, and he was standing shock-still, staring at the door.

“What?” I asked.

“Did you see that?” he said, dazed.

“See what? I didn’t see anything,” I said.

“What he had under his arm. What he put in the room,” Slug said, whispering like he was afraid he would be overheard.

“No, what was it?” I asked.

“A stack of playboys,” he said with awe. “Tons of ‘em.”

“No way,” I said under my breath.

We stood there for a while, both of our porn-acquisition programs suddenly running full speed in the foreground.

Finally, my brain processed something and spit it out.

“We could take the door off its hinges,” I suggested.

“Duh. The door opens in,” Slug said, quickly dismissing that idea.

Bing! Another idea popped out. “We could try to pick the lock,” I said.

”It’s a Master lock,” he said, annoyed. “You can shoot bullet through those and they won’t open.”

Then we both saw it at the same time. It was like a sunbeam from heaven had reached down and illuminated the padlock in a golden light.

Whoever had installed the padlock clasp on the door hadn’t done it correctly.

The screws holding the clasp to the door were accessible.

We waited until the next day, and when Slug’s neighbor went to work, we went to work too. We headed directly to the storage basement with a screwdriver and a flashlight.

4 screws later, the latch fell to the side, the dangling padlock still connected to the door frame.

The Slug pushed open the door and we walked in. He stopped dead in his tracks, and I practically walked into him. We looked around, and I don't think either of us could breathe.

We were surrounded by shelves full of indexed and labeled boxes, and in these boxes sat the biggest collection of T&A we had ever seen. Ten full years of Playboy magazines. A 15 year run of Penthouse. Uncountable copies of Club, Swank and Hustler. It was all there, alphabetized and cataloged by issue and year.

It was porn heaven, and we felt like Gods.

We immediately set to work. We took one back issue from each box, and got out of there as fast as humanly possible. We put the screws back in the padlock clasp, and then went to a different area of the basement where someone was storing some old furniture and appliances. We stuck the balance of the magazines in the bottom drawer of an old electric oven, and sat down to peruse our ill-gotten treasure. It was an unforgettable moment.

For the next 3 months, we overloaded on porn. We would sit down there for hours, reading the articles and looking at the pictures. Sometimes we wouldn’t say two words to each other from the minute my mother dropped me off to the time she picked me up. We would read porn for 6 hours straight, break in again, put the old mags back, get new ones, and read for 4 more hours. Basically, we were addicted to crack, except it was a different sort of crack and we had free access to our drugs of choice and it didn’t cost us a cent. Penthouse forum ruled my young world, and my head was exploding with forbidden knowledge.

As all good things must, it finally came to an end.

One day we went down to the basement and our oven stash was missing. We went over to porn heaven and there was a new clasp on the door – installed correctly. So that was it for us. I don’t know if they ever figured out exactly who it was who was breaking in, but we never got in trouble for it. I suppose it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to walk over to your neighbor’s house and accuse their kids of raiding your gigantic porn stash.

We went cold turkey, since we had no choice. From skin-feast to skin-famine, from boob-rich to boob-poor, From enjoying the finest close-up glossy renditions of beautiful women-parts of all shapes and sizes and colors, to damp, mildewed, faded pictures that had been rained on for a week before we found them.

It just wasn’t the same. We didn't even pick them up anymore.

We went back to taunting the bull, but our hearts weren’t in it. We were haunted by the ghost of porno past, and it would take more than an angry bull to fill that void.

We learned a lot about the ways of the world that summer, and I'll never forget it. I’m sure much of it was inaccurate, but goddammit, it was fun while it lasted.