“Don’t Get Caught”: A Memoir of Porn

As small children in the early 1970s, my little brother Joey and I were immersed in the extensive pornographic collections of magazines, albums, and films of my stepfather, step-uncle, and step-grandfather. No. Not Playboy or even Hustler. Gritty stuff like swinger mags with names like Oui, Cheri, Beaver Hunt, and Swinger! It wasn’t our fault. Everywhere we looked, we found the stuff. We pointed and sniggered at the secret things hidden by strategically black rectangles or fuzzy images. We understood the importance of a long rectangle versus a short one, a thin one versus a thick one. We cottoned on to the idea behind the triangles, too. We figured out that folks clearly thought about the dimensions of a particular black rectangle or triangle, pondering its relative proportions and what they would imply or would not imply.

The first thing I ever strained to read as a second grader was a kitschy sign hanging over the stinky sink in the dilapidated kitchen of my step-grandfather, Fritz. The sign, now with clarity of literacy, proclaimed “NATIONAL SEX WEEK. GIVE TILL IT HURTS.”  After learning the alphabet and their sounds at Woodburn Elementary during the week, I practiced my new phonetic skills during the weekend at Fritz’ house, where I strained to parse the first word.  The other words were easy. But that first word eluded me for weeks. My young mom rolled her eyes as I asked, “Is it pronounced 'nat-ee-o-nal?”  Two more weeks of phonics and I figured it out. Although I could read it, I remained baffled by what it meant.

I no sooner figured out its meaning when a new puzzle arose: why would Fritz hang a sign like this in his kitchen –especially when his even older mother purportedly from the “Old Country” lived with him as well as his young daughter, Anita, who was long ago abandoned by his trampy, boozing ex-wife. Step-great grandma Weber spent far more time than Fritz straining over that kitchen sink under that sign to make various dishes that frankly scared the living shit out of Joey and me. We did everything to avoid her culinary offerings. They were just that awful…or more appropriately offal.

Step-great gramma Weber was feisty and boisterous, and her body odor was redolent of rose water and hot, splattered lard. Her speech was incomprehensible, which I assumed was because she was German. In fact, many strange things were quietly attributed to the fact that “You know…she is German.”  It bugged me that she could not say “fish” with a short vowel. Rather, she would announce that she was “fixin feeeeeesh” for supper. I once made the error of asking her what “feeeeeesh” is, mimicking the forever time it took her to say this one-syllable word. And you never knew with her what she would be frying in that cast-iron skillet, which could easily double as a weapon. She looked down at me as if I were a half-wit and growled “You know damned well what feeeeeesh is. Stop being a wiseacre before I light up your ass with a switch.”

Step-great gramma Weber was the stuff of nightmares with her sallow skin, her lumbering gate, her towering height, gravelly voice, and a fearlessness that hick women have and embrace. She picked things from her expansive garden to eat or alternately to dry in the cellar. Sometimes, as a punishment, an irate adult would banish me to that dark and dank dirt cellar until someone remembered I had been dispatched to the dungeon, festooned with every imaginable creepy-crawling thing.  She’d dry or pickle just about anything that grew or had limbs.  If she could catch a varmint roaming in her garden or woods, she’d kill, skin, chop and cook or pickle it.  On one particular Sunday evening, we learned, after the fact, the “fried chicken” we ate was the rabbit we were admiring in the back yard just hours before consuming it. If she was using a pressure cooker, odds were pretty good that a squirrel was in there. Joe and I were horrified to learn that the very delicious “Salisbury steak” she made one Sunday supper was actually “Salisbury cow heart,” which could not under any circumstances be called a “steak”—Salisbury or otherwise.

            Despite the eccentric smells and peculiar visual aids at Fritz’s house, I was enormously fond of him. He was a ceaselessly jolly and burly old man with a beard Osama Bin Laden would have envied. He often sported a flannel shirt, grimy jeans, and suspenders.  Belts were never long enough to accommodate his expansive girth. Alternatively, he could be seen in a flannel shirt with grubby overalls.  I don’t remember him ever being young or not brawny or even beardless. His mustache curled up like a bicycle handlebar or a British soldier in nineteenth-century India. I later realized that this sort of thing doesn’t happen on its own: it requires a special glop and effort to coax the hair into this shape. Like Mike and John—his two sons—Fritz also had a hilljack afro.

At the age of something careening well into his 90s, Fritz still went to the VFW to cruise “broads” –albeit geriatric broads who sported orthopedic shoes and polyester-clad camel toe.  But you had to admire the enthusiasm with which he threw himself at the bespectacled, long-ago widowed ladies.  They bewitched him with their bedazzled jackets and their “diabetic pumpkin cookies,” which were quite popular in Rome City in those days. Most likely, they caught his attention because they still had more-or-less functioning vaginas. 

Who knows? But I do know this—because he told me so—Fritz’ secret for picking up the finest senescent ass from the Rome City VFW was the simple fact that he could still drive. And he had a pickup truck, which is apparently an aphrodisiac in most of Indiana and surrounding states. What works for boys when they are 16 also works for men when they are 96.  In his later years, he had Polly, a sassy rat terrier who rode shotgun with him in that truck everywhere he went. In the end, Fritz died as he lived: a gentle, kind, fun-loving—but ultimately horny—old man with an implacably perverse sense of humor and insatiable appetite.

As young, mildly ill-behaved youngsters, Joey and I were forced to spend countless hours at Fritz’s house on most weekends.  His old lake house was creepy and smelled of fungus and the old lady, likely due to the afore-mentioned peculiar odors of his mother and the various things drying—and dying—in the subterranean oubliette.  His house was located on Sylvan Lake, named after the forests which surrounded it back then.  Joe and I played in the lake or stomped around the trees. We’d attempt to build teepees with large sticks and brush we gathered, often in abject failure. We’d pick wild onions to see if the step-great gramma would cook them. Ditto with mushrooms. Sometimes we played with the toothless Cummins kids who lived next door to Fritz.  The entire family was morbidly obese, mustachioed (even the women) and olid.

Sometimes, Joe and I rifled through photo albums of Fritz as a young man when he drove through Latin America. He was unrecognizable in his U.S. Navy uniform.  It seemed incomprehensible that Fritz had a life before being step-grandpa Fritz. In those days, long before we knew him, he was known as Francis. He looked nothing like a Francis, and in fairness, I did not know what a Francis would look like as I had never met a Francis previously.

I was mesmerized by Fritz’ stuffed deer ass.  He once snorted “Every Tom, Dick and Harry gets the rack mounted.” Fritz wanted to buck that trend by having a doe’s ass mounted instead. He enjoyed explaining to those beholding it that the taxidermist was an artist “because he had to hand craft the doe’s asshole from resin as deer assholes just don’t come prefabbed like eyes and noses.” The deer ass—which must be thirty years older than I am—now hangs above our upstairs bathroom to the bemusement and horror of houseguests.

When the adults were discussing things like car accidents, aunt Carol’s bankruptcy, step-aunt Anita’s predicament (which is how they described her being knocked up by her older, pothead boyfriend), Joe and I quietly perused Fritz’ ample porn stash. It wasn’t even hidden; rather piled up behind the couch and underneath a rather gaudy, oversized, marble chess set, which tended to draw attention to the naughty cache rather than obfuscate it.

Fritz liked the afore-noted genre of swingers’ porn. We flipped through the pages with the same enthusiasm that children in more normal environments might look forward to perusing the latest fuzzy and scented edition of a Winnie the Pooh book. Of course, swinger porn is anything but appealing except in the same way we watched Quincy MD rev up his spinning saw to open hapless cadavers. We learned incredibly young that svelte, attractive people are not likely to dispatch beaver shots to Swingers! or Beaver Hunt in hopes of finding kindred spirits. The women in those magazines tended to be strung out, had long, stringy hair, and ample armpit hair.  The men had combovers, mullets, or long stringy hair as well. Most of the people in the photographs seemed to be either corpulent or alternatively emaciated, which my older self ascribed to beer and heroin, respectively.  Given the pastiness of their skin, it seemed the only light they saw was the glimmer of the bursting flash bulbs from the photographer’s camera. Each page looked like a black and white, pornographic version of Hollywood Squares. Every once in a great while, a reasonable-looking woman with well-kempt trusses of armpit hair might stare up from the pages of Swinger! only to have the image ruined by the visage of her sloppy male companion with a comb-over wearing only a large lapelled disco shirt, unbuttoned to showcase his man pelt and large black rectangle propped up against his hirsute stomach.

Oddly, none of the adults around us seemed to care that we were engrossed in Fritz’s porn stash. They knew we weren’t playing chess because no one in our family played chess. We were a checkers kind of family.

Fritz had two sons, Mike and John, from his one true love, who died tragically young. And Fritz had step-aunt Anita, whose mom was a woman he apparently hated and who was such a lousy mother that the state of Indiana awarded Fritz custody of their young daughter in 1972. When it came time to have the awkward discussion about the “birds and the bees,” Fritz explained to his post-pubescent daughter that “One day you’ll have an itch in your pussy, and you’ll want a man to scratch it. When that happens, come to me and we’ll get you on the pill.”  This is likely why she got knocked up at the age of 15. It also made the task of my mother telling me “the birds and the bees,” which struck me as a totally insipid euphemism for this uncomfortable discussion, much easier.  Mom simply said, “If you let a boy put his willie inside of you, you’ll end up like Aunt Anita.” That worked for a long time. Until college, to be precise.

 John was my first step monster, and Mike was…well, step-uncle Mike. As far as uncles go, they didn’t come weirder unless they were pederasts or zoophiles. Murderers, which we also had in our family, seemed more normal than Mike because you were expected to have at least one murderer in a big family in those parts of the country. Mike returned from Vietnam and lived with us for several years, which were measured in dog years.  He did drugs. He drank. He liked to be nude at inappropriate times and places. No woman is too young or too old for his creepy advances. He would hit on our 13-year-old babysitter, Colleen, and he would offer her alcohol from the airline-size bottles of Jim Beam, Southern Comfort, and Wild Turkey my mother used to decorate our living room by placing them carefully upon delicate wrought-iron wall-shelves. When Mike began to babysit us, he taught us to develop the pictures he took from his various nude beach escapades. By the time we were 9 and 7 respectively, we were well-versed in the frequenters of Indiana’s finest nudist beaches. Mike had a more conventional porn stash than his father. He was more likely to have Playboy, Hustler,

One day, Mike cut off my cat’s whiskers on a bender. My mother reciprocated by putting fingernail polish on his scrotum when he was passed out in a moment of over-exposure.  He never molested my cat’s facial hair again, and apparently, the nail polish escapade resulted in a trip to the emergency room. My mother concluded that it was not her problem how he accounted for a mauve shade of Maybelline nail polish coating his nutsack to the attending physician at the VA.  

Incidentally, Only a fool would fuck with my mother. She was wily and she had very peculiar skills and methods with which to resolve disputes and retaliate.

My stepfather, John, was the opposite of Mike. He was truculent, ill-tempered, and outright mean as hell. I never called him dad. He was a hateful son-of-a-bitch whom I called John, or under my breath, “That Fucker.” However, John—like his dad and brother—was also a porn enthusiast. John worked at General Electric, and he apparently had a coterie of similarly concupiscent co-workers.  Every few weeks or so, John would host “movie night” at our house in Woodburn,, Indiana.  I presume that his colleagues reciprocated the favor on alternate weeks.

On these nights, mother actually prepared food.  Typically, this entailed a jar of chipped beef, cream cheese, and dill pickle spears.  She smeared the cheese onto the beef and rolled it up around the pickle spear. She then cut them into small bites, each secured with a frilled toothpick. Other specialties included deviled eggs with a dusting of paprika splayed out on a brand-new Tupperware plate made precisely for such eggs. Sometimes John made his notorious pickled beef tongue. Inevitably, ham with American cheese squares would bedeck a Ritz cracker. The cheezball was the star of the card table. And mom would make her signature fruit punch in a faux-crystal bowl with matching cups that only ever served a concoction of fruit juice, Miracle Whip, and rum. Among the many jobs Mom had, bartending was among them. Sloe-gin fizz and grasshoppers were her specialties.

On those nights, Mom would banish us to bed early. But when you tell kids at the age of 7 and 9 to go to sleep at 6 pm, you should expect that they will attempt to discern what the fuck is going on.  It was always the same. First, we heard the adults assembling. Their voices seemed mostly male. We never saw them. We only heard them. As we tried to figure out how many there were, the music would start. “NUTS, HOT NUTS. You get ‘em anywhere you can. NUTS, HOT NUTS. You get ‘em from the peanut man. Now see that girl dressed in pink…she’s the one who made my finger stink. NUTS, HOT NUTS. You get ‘em from the peanut man…” And this song went on and on with numerous stanzas, each more colorful than the last. “See that man sweeping with a broom, his nuts are so shrunk up, they look just like a prune. Nuts…Hot Nuts.”  When “Hot Nuts” was done, a rousing chorus of “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” crooned throughout the house.

As the guests were settling in, presumably with their chipped beef, cream cheese, and dill pickle pinwheels and quaffing however much of my mother’s punch they could endure, we strained at the door to hear weird sounds.  Amidst the “clack, clack, clack” of the film reel, we definitely heard sounds that faintly resembled the noises Mom and John made on the extremely rare occasion when Mom was not sleeping on the couch. We listened to the sounds until we drifted off to sleep.

My mother worked the first shift, and John worked the third. This meant that for much of the day, we were unattended by a sentient parent. Joe and I would peruse John’s lavish porn stash and sometimes impress Joey’s friends with it. Once we even surreptitiously taped the infamous album “Doug Clark and his Hot Nuts.” I played it over and over and over and over again on my cassette player to the amusement of my brother’s friends.

During the summer after the second grade, it occurred to me that I could turn a profit from that porn given the many hours during which we were left to our own devices. I had all of the necessary items. Critically, I had a clubhouse, which my mother insisted on getting in hopes that I would play house or have tea parties with my friends. But I was a pudgy, bespectacled kid with wild hair and no friends, and thus never had a single tea party. However, I liked the playhouse and sometimes I would go there with my cat, Smokey, to escape the fuckery of that life. It was comforting to have a place to go when the house got too nutty. With a quasi-private space, access to a notorious and extensive porn collection, and an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to make friends of my own, I turned my clubhouse into The Woodburn Pornography Library.  My patrons were the neighborhood boys who paid a quarter to gander at the offerings. John’s ample collection allowed me to rotate the inventory often to maintain the interest of my small base of clients. Mom was curious about the source of the petty change I mustered to buy a new trilobite at the Ft. Wayne Flea Market. I explained nonchalantly that I found these coins on the street, to and from school or in the couch cushions, which I cleaned diligently as she asked me to do. It seemed to work. As long as I wasn’t stealing it, she didn’t care about the providence of the loot.

All was going swimmingly well until I got greedy. Mikey Puker wanted to take a magazine home. After pondering the wisdom of this, I relented. But I charged him a dollar. It was a huge mistake. Mrs. Puker found it. Upon interrogating Mikey, he ratted me out. Mrs. Puker, grabbing her son by his shoulders, marched him up the street to our house. She banged on the door until my mom answered and explained that her innocent Mikey got porno mags from her daughter, Chrissy.

Mom went inside, grabbed me by the arm and dragged my ass out onto our front lawn on our peri-rural cul de sac. And removing her belt from her jeans, she spanked the sass out of me. It was important that this whooping transpire in public so that the entire neighborhood could see that, yes, my mother took discipline very seriously. All the while, she hollered, “What do you think Mrs. Puker thinks of us?” I retorted, between gasping sobs, that “Mikey Puker killed a bunch of puppies and Mrs. Puker should worry more about that.” Unsurprisingly, this did not lessen Mom’s rage and only made Mrs. Puker more indignant, mostly because it was true. Mikey Puker had in fact slaughtered, with a hacksaw, half a dozen newborn puppies that his own dog whelped. He’s probably in jail right now because that is what happens to 9-year puppy murderers when they become adults.

After that performative public shellacking, Mom turned me towards the door and literally kicked my ass repeatedly until we were in our home. She was not going to let that 12 feet of performative whooping opportunity go unused.

But once inside, her face softened into an actual smile, and then she actually drew me near in what seemed like a hug. She told me that she was proud of me. She awkwardly explained that she always found my nerdy disposition, my love of fossils and books, to be a bit unsettling given her own wild ways. It disquieted her. She was relieved to learn I, too, had a wild streak. By no means did she want me to abandon my newfound entrepreneurialism; rather, she wanted me to up my game. Tenderly, she explained that she wasn’t mad about what I did; rather, that I got caught doing it.  She explained, “Once Mrs. Puker found out, I was in an embarrassing position. I can’t have the neighbors thinking I’m raising a baboon. I had to whoop you in front of those gawking neighbors, understand?” In fact, I understood her predicament. 

I tried to keep that lesson in mind as I swiftly converted my modest clubhouse into a pawn shop.