I’ve been sitting on a link from my friend Dan Lyke for Dirty Found magazine. It’s the naughty cousin of Found magazine (which, BTW, is a hit in my daughter’s college art community. She is, in fact, currently working on a sound art piece that relies in part on found items.) As I looked through the magazine’s on-line content, it reminded me of two dirty found experiences from long ago. Each story’s a tad long, so I’m going to recount them in separate entries.
The first incident happened when I was nine or ten. My family was living in the rural woods of northern Connecticut and my best friend lived about a quarter mile down the road. We didn’t start out as instant best friends — if anything, our friendship began as an odd tug-o-war and our opposing grip on the rope loosened only after several months of bonding over shared experiences. What did we bond over? Horses, tomboyish outdoors-manship, and porn.
Yes, porn. She knew not only where her father’s stash was but her older brothers’ as well. Mind you, this wasn’t the hardcore of today, but girlie magazines of the mid-60s. They didn’t inform us about sex per se, but they did tell us what would someday happen to our bodies — and that men uniformly admired those changes.
Returning home from an afternoon visit, I was cresting the hill between our homes on my bike when a car sped passed me. A raucous cluster of young adults filled the car and, as they barreled by, they threw several magazines at me and taunted me with laugher.
My immediate reaction was one of humiliating embarrassment, but when I looked down at rested at my feet, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, on pages caught by the breeze, were photographs of naked women. I can still remember how hard my heart beat that day at the discovery that my humiliation was, in truth, a boon.
I hid the magazines under a rock, rushed home and called my girlfriend. The find was so much a fortune to me that I swallowed my chagrin and told her the entire story. And having a stash to bring to her was a momentous thrill for me. In every neighborhood I ever lived in, my father became the only Puritan parental figure to my girlfriends. I never had a porn stash to show them — never found anything in my dad’s possession — yet every girlfriend I ever had had one to show me.
But at that moment, I had cache. My friend and I arranged a hasty rendezvous, retrieved the porn, and took them to her barn. There, we scoured the three magazines.
I have a vague memory of my girl friend discounting the magazines for having too many black and white photos. And I faintly remembered some of the photos non-explicitly showed men and woman together. No groping or fucking or sucking, and, now that I think about it, maybe they were nudist magazines. Regardless of its shortcomings, we hid our treasure amid baled hay, intent on returning to them in the future.
Unfortunately, the stash was not long in our possession. Our visits to the barn, my girlfriend claimed, had made her mother suspicious, which frightened my girlfriend into action. Our porn went into the trash.
I’ve never forgotten the disappointment I felt when she revealed our loss to me. It puncture my happiness and left me with a sense of injustice. We’d been robbed, not in the traditional sense of having something of value stolen from us, but in a way that reminded me that we were girls and not entitled to the things of men.
I never forgot that incident and its implied message. Nor did I forgot my girl friend’s utter fear of discovery. She never gave a moment’s rational thought to the possibility of finding our porn a new home. Instead, she was overcome by the irrational fear of being caught with it. But I did understand why she felt that way. The shame of discovery was not unlike my humiliation the day those magazines were thrown at me.
Ten-year-olds rarely belabor matters. For us, there were horses to train and ride, sleep-overs and late-nights movies to enjoy, and the daily bus ride to school where we had claim to the all-mighty backseat. Besides, we still had her fathers’ porn stash, and, all too quickly, we fell back on familiar habits and let go of our loss.
So it went.
