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| One of my good ol' swing tantrums, circa 1988. |
I'll kick off this tradition of storytelling with a bang. No pun intended, as you'll soon find out. This story begins with a look inside Dad's closet.
A few years after the above heinous photo was taken, my brother Jeff and I were hanging out. Our childhood home was austere. There was no abject suffering, it's just that things were pretty fucking lame at our house. We used to dream about having visitors. No kid in their right mind would drop her Barbie Corvette collection and Lunchables snack pack to come to our house to play with frayed paper dolls and eat old green bell peppers.
Jeff and I got bored with making wall shadow puppets or collecting pebbles or doing whatever other activities we could think of that were free. I thought it might be fun to snag my dad's brand spankin' new camcorder (remember
these monstrosities?) and record some VHS footage of Jeff's sweet dance moves. Mom and Dad weren't at home. We peered inside Grandma's room. She was zonked out in her armchair, and The Young and the Restless was on at full volume. There was never a better opportunity for shenanigans.
I slid the closet door open. I glanced at the floor. Just shoes, no camcorder. I ran my hand across what might have been a hundred brown paisley ties. Still nothing of interest. Frustrated, I parted the row of suits. Behind the row was a big shelving unit with about 6 large indented shelves. Oddly, though, there were sheets of white blank paper taped to and covering the contents of the shelves. I tore them off. Only to find...
PORN. So much porn.
I didn't know what porn was at that time, so naturally I was intrigued, disgusted, and honestly pretty scared (you couldn't possibly think that the girl with the paper dolls had cable. My parents didn't subscribe to basic cable until I got to college). One thing was for sure, and that was that my dad had a deep respect for a large sweaty tan guy who always rocked a Jheri curl and eyeliner. Behold the illustrious Ron Jeremy, hallowed be thy name.
Each shelf was completely stocked with VHS tapes that were arranged first alphabetically by title, then chronologically. We took out a tape and watched it, just glaring at the screen. Jeff and I were so confused. We had no idea what to make of this. A few days later, my parents were out again and my brother's friend came over (guess there was even less to do at his place) and we showed him one of the tapes. His friend- a precocious kid, obviously- looked at us like we struck gold. A day or two after that, Jeff's friend invited a few friends over along with him. Before we knew it, there was an entire gang of little hood rats in our living room, eager to see boobs on TV for the first time.
And then, the first spark of my fledgling entrepreneurial spirit illuminated a thought: what if I charged all these idiots an admission fee? Bingo. I priced the filth at 10 bucks a pop for a couple of hours (or however long my parents were gone), and my juvie clients were more than amenable to part with their allowances for such a grand opportunity. Well, our parents kept going to work, Grandma kept nodding off, the little pervs kept visiting, and Mama (that's me) was made one very rich pre-teen (I had enough dough for like, 3 Bedazzlers and a Skip-It). I'd even mess around with my poor brother because he didn't know any better- we'd split the earnings, but I'd give him two fives and keep a twenty dollar bill and tell him that he had more money because he had more pieces of paper. I was such a gem.
But, like a good porn, this arrangement came to an explosive end. One day my parents came home from work earlier than we expected (how dare they!) and there were like 7 dweebs parked on my couch, settled in for the gang bang matinee feature. I panicked, understandably. There were tape covers all over our kitchen table. I slid open the back door to our den and gestured to the dweebs to get the fuck out. I didn't have to say much, because they filed out the back door like marines jumping out of a helicopter during the Tet Offensive. I screamed at Jeff, who was still small and nimble, to run to the kitchen, grab all the evidence off the table, run out the back of the house, and throw it all into a nearby sewer.
Problem: Jeff didn't do well under pressure. And he sure as shit didn't know how to follow instructions. He had every intention of executing my orders, but instead of grabbing the illegal stash off the table, he grabbed a cantaloupe and ran out the front door, not the back. So when Mom pulled into the driveway and saw my brother bolting out the front of the house cradling a melon and then ferociously kicking it into the adjacent sewer, she knew something pretty weird was going on. Whatever it was, though, she assumed that it was my fault. And she was right. I sighed, thinking about how close I was to realizing my dream of having both a Pretty Crimp N' Curl AND an Easy Bake Oven.
Ron Jeremy once said that "Sex is simple. Love is painful." Fair enough, but I'll amend that to read, "Crime is simple. Punishment is painful."
My sentencing: no green bell peppers for a month.
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