Dad Porn

Before the age of the internet, growing up in the suburbs as an adolescent teen there were basically four types of pornography in my life.

1) Scrambled HBO porn. This was for those of us who’s parents that didn’t want to pay for those cable channels that showed the good stuff late at night. It was different back in the day, not like now. Nowadays, if you don’t pay for a channel, it’s just black when you try to go there. Back then it was scrambled. Which meant that you could hear it, but couldn’t see it…except for that occasional shot of what might have been a scrambled nipple. Back then, that was enough. But who are we kidding, back then a slight breeze was enough.

2) Woods porn. A time honored tradition of finding dirty magazines that someone, usually the older kids, would leave in some hiding place in the woods. Near my house, that hiding place was in a hollowed out log in the small patch of forest by the end of my street. That’s where I saw my fist copy of Oui magazine, pages all stuck together from what I hope were just the elements. I don’t know if I’m ashamed or proud to admit that when I grew older, I carried on the tradition of woods porn, by leaving some selections of my own in that same hollowed out log.

3) Friend’s older brother’s porn. Everyone had a friend who had an older brother. And that brother had porn. You know who you are, and you know what it was. Miami Spice II.

4) Dad porn. This was the ultimate myth. The legend that your dad had porn hidden somewhere in the house, which, if you could find it, would be yours to enjoy. I know in some cases this was true. In the case of my own dad, it either wasn’t, or his hiding spot was too clever. I know this because I searched for it one day.

I searched high and low, all over the house. In the workroom, behind the boiler, in the closets, under his bed. And then, in his nightstand drawer, a discovery! No, not porn. But for a teen of that age, something almost as interesting: a gun.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. My dad actually had a bunch of guns. Some rifles, and a couple pistols. And to be honest, I’d grown up with and shot most of them. But this was a gun I didn’t know about. I’d never seen it, and that made it exciting. For the most part, all his other guns were locked up in a gun closet, with the ammunition locked up in a lock box in another room. He was extremely safe about things like that.

Mostly.

Because this was also the man who would shoot at the squirrels on his bird feeders with a BB gun from his bedroom window. Also, the same man who shot me in the leg with a BB gun. On purpose. As he sent me out on a Boy Scout rifle range to put up some targets, I suddenly felt in my leg what felt like the Mothra of bees stinging me in the leg. I yelped and turned around to see him lying on the ground, pointing the gun at me. “I’m just testing the range,” he said.

The range was perfect.

You’d think that a man who was OK with shooting his own son would be kind enough to leave him some easy to find slaps around the house, but no. I had to walk all the way down to the woods at the end of the street. Because back in the day, that’s just what you had to do. Nowadays I imagine that if that same log is still there, and still being used for the same purpose, it’s by kids with a laptop and some stolen WiFi, and they probably don’t even realize they could be sitting on top of a cache of magazines so weathered by time and the elements that the most they might hope to see is a scrambled nipple.

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