The Golden Age of Porn

When I was 7th grade the closest thing I ever came to breasts were when my mom cooked chicken. So of course, being a normal, horny, curious 12 year old I had to resort to porn. The internet was still a few years away, so getting porn was a task in itself. Every porn shop will kick a 12 year old right out. And unless you had some sort of connection, a small videos store, with an adult section in the back, were also out of the question. You had to be a little more clever back then. I remember once walking a couple of miles with my friends to Texaco, because the rumor was that they had dirty magazines and videos in the back, and would sell to anyone. The big joke that night was that the girl in it looked like Elaine from Seinfeld. There were others around that time too: The Dan Marino guy, the Pat Riley guy, and of course, the fat guy in every porno (Ron Jeremy). Little did I know at the time I would one day graduate form the same College as him (Queens College, although for some reason, they only tell you Seinfeld and Romano went there in the brochure).


My friends and I would all pass porno around to each other. We would get a tape, do what we had to do with it, and then trade it off. You were out of the loop if you didn’t have anything good to trade back. To this day I still have the Jenny McCarthy playboy tape. After watching Singled Out every night on MTV, I didn’t want to give it back.


One of my friends we dubbed the Macgyver of porn. He always had the best tapes, always knew where to get them, and how to hide it. This one time he even brought a Hustler to school for us to all look at during lunch. Only he cut off the cover of a Video Game magazine and used that over it. That is borderline genius for someone in 7th grade. Macgyver also had this scheme where he would sign his cds as if the band signed them, and then sell them to this borderline retarded kid in the grade. Guns and Roses, Appetite for Destruction was signed, “From Slash, Have a great fucking summer.” Macguyver also made me buy porn off him once. He had some videos he was tired of and tried to pawn them off on me. When I expressed by uncertainty about wanting to buy the tapes, he quickly said, “What are you gay, why would you not want to see naked chicks?” Rather then him think I’m gay with his illogical asshole method of salesman ship, I bought the shitty porn off of him. How this kid isn’t rich now, I don’t know.


Eventually there came a time when we realized our dads had their own porn stashes and it was just a matter of finding them. Raiding their closets we would find tapes of HBO’s Real Sex and other gems. Nothing could have ever prepared us for what my friend Luis discovered. Upon digging in his uncle’s closet, he found a box of magazines and videos. He thought he had hit the jackpot. He popped in one of the tapes and much to his surprise it was a bestiality tape. When he called me at 10 am the next morning, I didn’t believe him. I remember saying to him on the phone as a naïve 12 year old, “Yeah right, why would a woman have sex with a horse? When I saw the tape I was in shock. There were women doing horses, dogs, chickens you name it. The color of the tape was physically green and would be referred to as the barnyard tape. It was the grossest things I had ever seen. I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. In one scene the dog tried to run away, and it didn’t help that the lady looked like my aunt. I had to rationalize to myself that my aunt doesn’t a dog, so it couldn’t have been her.


I remember working at a video store years later and never caring about selling teenagers porn, even though, the management told me I wasn’t supposed to. Teenagers should be able to watch porn; there is nothing wrong with it. Besides, I know that it was going to make there weekend. Well, unless some chick is doing a chicken, then that would ruin their weekend.