In the summer of ’78, with our ’round the clock bombing of Dick Franz in full force, Jeff and I received intel from one of our child soldiers about their teenage brother having a secret hideout in the woods near our house.
We were scared of the teens in our neighborhood.
They posed a real danger to our little empire and frequently threatened to make us look weak in front of the younger affiliates we controlled. If we saw them congregating at the end of the street, we turned around and went the other way. If they tried to talk to us, we engaged with extreme caution. If they approached us while we were playing a football game in my front yard, we unilaterally ended the game and told everyone to go home, before the teens could join. They were a serious bummer, but avoidance gave us an imagined buffer of safety.
Jeff and I had one non-negotiable rule for street sports: we always had to play on the same team.
Sometimes that meant Jeff and I would play against ten younger kids, just to make it remotely even. The rationale behind this was to never do anything that would jeopardize the blood oath we’d made to each other about our friendship. Games– especially football– had a way of escalating tensions. We couldn’t afford that. On a couple of occasions when we were younger, the teens– like POW Camp comandantes– invaded our street game and forced Jeff and I to play on opposite teams. From that point on in life, we managed all competitive sports in our neighborhood and rigged every game to always be on the same side. If we couldn’t control the game, we quietly went home with the ball.
On one of countless Boring Lessons that summer, we ventured into the wooded area where our source had told us the big kids congregated. I’m still amazed at the chutzpah this enterprise required. It didn’t take long for us to find a couple of ragged lawn chairs and scattered cigarette butts deep inside the shade of some towering loblolly pine trees. We looked around and the coast was definitely clear. It wasn’t much of a secret hideout. Jeff and I were a lot more conscientious and inventive about our own undercover operations. The teens seemed not to care. They were reckless.
Under one of the chairs was a sheet of splintered 4X8 plywood, covered in pine needles. As we walked over the plywood, our footsteps echoed beneath us. Jeff and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. We swept the branches and needles away and pooled our strength to slide the semi-rotted sheet of wood to the side. Lifting this trap door revealed a hand-forged crypt– roughly two-feet deep– which held two large, black garbage bags tied at the ends.
We looked around nervously and ripped into the bags, only to find stacks of gentleman’s magazines. Just like the ones we regularly eyed with curiosity behind the counter at 7-11 or Utotem. Our experience with nudie mags, was strictly limited to fragmented pinup shards we had discovered once or twice on the side of the road. Usually “found porn” was mangled by the elements, almost beyond recognition, and required a robust imagination in order to fill in the “blanks”. Of all the fuzzy, found pieces we had in our collection, I still wasn’t entirely certain what was going on with the female anatomy.
But as we looked down at the stacks of pristine volumes, my heart did a Pete Townshend windmill-n-scissor kick combo. All mystery was about to be dissolved. There were intact spreads of all flavors — Oui, Penthouse, Playboy, High Society– all certified, by our estimations, to be in near-mint condition. Our little minds so reeled at the unveiling of that glory, that I remember being frozen in awe for several seconds as I hovered over the gleaming treasure below, my jaw slack.
“No wayyyyy!” Jeff gasped.
Yes way.
We took our visual drink of the oiled 70’s pinups, until we were dizzy and the woods around us faded into nothingness. How long we were there, I can’t say. But in an astounding act of self-control, we promptly put everything back into the bags, the way we found it, and allowed our brains to adjust to our surroundings again. We slid the false door back over the Centerfold Sarcophagus, and split… in a hurry. We were afraid that the teenage Cole brothers and their deranged hippie friends would find us plundering their vault and kill us.
Those woods had long-held rumors of Satanic rituals and Black Arts. Just a few years after the events of the Summer of ’78, a big kid named John Roberts died on his ATV in those woods. The neighborhood legend held that he stumbled upon something sinister and in his high-speed frenzy to escape pursuit, flipped his bike and died. The convenient scapegoat for anything unexplained in the woods back in those days, was always “devil worshippers”. So the snowballing narrative was that Roberts had encountered a coven or some ritual sacrifice, tried to escape and been unsuccessful. Regardless, his death was ruled “suspicious”, which was all our active imaginations needed to confirm that those woods belonged to powers beyond this world.
So, the porn stayed in its tomb. With the Keepers of the Forest.
Despite this inherent fear of the woods, we returned to the off-limits hideout repeatedly that week. Crisp stacks of High Society and Oui magazines will do that to a boy. Our visits became progressively longer. Our research more focused.
At some point during one of our multiple return visits, we both agreed that the treasure trove of magazines was better served in the safety of our private collection, than out in the wild, exposed to the harsh elements in that teenage, stoner crypt. We both agreed that the all-powerful “finders-keepers” clause, superseded any right of ownership by those teenage bullies.
One late afternoon, as the sun was setting and creepy shadows started reclaiming the miles of pine forest around us, we dragged both bags to Jeff’s house. As I recall, we rode with them saddled on our handlebars. Every single scrap of smut in that hideout was now ours. We laid out all the booty on Jeff’s bedroom floor– nearly two dozen magazines in total– and divided the spoils evenly between us. It was an obscene amount of riches for a couple of nine-year olds. The trickiest part wasn’t re-locating the stash to our houses, it was figuring out where to hide it. My mother, in particular, was a real contraband detective. I was certain her sensors could detect smut from a hundred yards away.
Jeff showed me some good places to hide them in my room–under the mattress, inside an old Fisher Price castle and sandwiched inside old, dusty books on my shelf. One of the most ingenious locations was inside the shell of my two chest of drawers. He pulled out all the drawers, placed them on the floor and then stuffed the magazines inside the hollow framework. The drawers were then carefully loaded back in and the Oui and High Society magazines could not be discovered, unless one took the drawers completely out– something my mother never did.
That first night, with my room packed to the gills with stolen 70’s nudie mags, I was inexplicably anxious.
I stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I second-guessed taking the entire stash. Maybe I should’ve just grabbed one. I then questioned whether even looking at naked women was something a kid like me should be doing. I was not only a thief, but now I was smut collector too. I had somehow crossed a line.
My Mom used to get positively maniacal about smut.
I had a kind of rapid-onset phobia that she was going to find out and send me to confession with Father Mekras. Or worse, send me away to military school. Maybe smut was some kind of familiar object that carried an evil spirit, requiring exorcism, I thought in the darkness of my bedroom. Also, the older kids were going to find out it was us that took their stash and beat us to death. This whole heist suddenly felt like a lot more trouble than it was worth. What use to me were all these magazines anyway? I knew what the vagina looked like now, but I still didn’t really know what sex was. And now my room now had bad mojo. What had I done???
Fortunately, these grave apprehensions quickly dissipated once we realized that the hideout spoils could be used as currency among our peers. We quickly found that pictures of naked women were exceedingly valuable at school or around the neighborhood. We also learned that you could tear entire sections out of the magazines, cut up the photos, and stretch your “money” a lot further, especially among some of the younger kids. A single magazine could be chopped up into about 15 or 20 pieces and those images could get you quite a few packs of Now & Laters, Astropops or Bubs Daddy’s on the 108th Avenue black market.
Tradus Interruptus
Butch Ingram was this older kid who lived two blocks behind us. To me at the time, he seemed like a grown man. He was technically one of the scary older kids, but because he was a slightly overweight loner, he seemed non-threatening. His nails were always embedded with grease and he was perpetually tinkering with mechanics– rebuilding lawnmower engines and constructing his own BMX bikes from spare parts he’d found at the bottom of Hidden Lake.
Butch unwisely told me when I was about seven, that if you ran an electrical current through an ordinary screwdriver, it would magnetize the metal. He even displayed a couple of items from his makeshift toolbox that had been magnetized in this fashion. Supposedly. To this day, a half a century later, I have no idea if this is actually true, but I know for certain that 1) I tested this theory in my bedroom with the electrical outlet under my window and 2) never dared try it again.
Because of our three or four-year age gap, he was already a teen by the summer of ’78. At this juncture, he had virtually nothing to do with Jeff or I. One day, right after the heist, he rode over to our block on a sputtering mini bike. Apparently, it was another one of his builds.
He rode the coughing scooter in circles, at the intersection of 108th avenue and 114th street and I stood on the corner, admiring. Eventually, he pulled over to the swale area and turned the motor off, which seemed to entail just allowing it to idle for a second without throttling.
“I can build you one!” he offered. A mere fifty bucks was gonna get me an Ingram Special. Just like his.
“My Grandpop gave me some money last year and I have a little left over. I can give you $10”, I low-balled.
“Nah”, he cut me off.
“15?” I tried again.
Butch blasted air between his lips in ridicule.
“Maybe a go-kart is more your speed”, he suggested.
A light came on and I remembered the Fort Knox of boobs and bush in my chest of drawers. I also had a 5-dollar bill handy. A deal was quickly brokered.
I would give him the five and two whole mags for a go-kart frame he had with no engine. He would show me how to install a lawnmower engine on the back so that I could have my very own 108th avenue hotrod. An old edger with a Briggs and Stratton engine, had been sitting on my back porch, just growing rust, since the days when my Dad lived there. That engine still worked! I was gonna build my own hotrod! Butch was convinced he was getting the better deal and he probably was. But two whole magazines was nothing for me. He wheeled the greasy, motorless frame over to my carport that very afternoon and I slipped him two rolled-up, relatively pristine Oui magazines in a brown lunch bag.
A couple hours after this back alley transaction, Mom burst into my bedroom with eyes ablaze.
“Whose go-kart is in our driveway?” she exploded, with equal parts heat and hysteria. My eyes suddenly got wide with fear. Mom spooked me when she had her finger on the “rampage” button, and I could sense in her tone that she was close to pressing it.
My vocal cords tightened and my instrument went up an octave. “It’s mine! Butch gave—“
“Oh no!” she violently cut me off. “It isn’t yours!”
“But Butch said I could have it!” I protested.
“Number one–nothing is free! Number two– you’re lying! Number three– no.”
It was as if the bullet points had been sitting in her valise for years, just waiting for this moment . Any rebuttal felt like rice paper hanging in the wind.
I was momentarily off-balance, as my lying brain scrambled in every possible direction for some avenue of self-salvation.
“Butch found it at a junkyard and said he didn’t want it anymore“, was the first alibi my flimsy apparatus landed on.
She was on me like a crocodile to pork shoulder. “A LIE!” she screamed, as a brittle finger of judgment flashed through the air.
Every synapse in my upper chamber threw sparks. Basic language escaped me.
“Look at me”, she commanded, while my eyes fluttered and attempted to focus on her. “You’re never having a go-kart!!! NEV-AR.”
“It’s only a frame!” I argued, my eyes filling. “You can’t actually ride it!”
“That’s correct. All the more reason to take it back to Butch’s house right this minute”, she concluded, as she turned and walked out of the room.
Mom was opposed to any motorized transportation that wasn’t a Pontiac or a Cadillac. She was always quick to toss out some anecdote she’d supposedly heard once, about some mythical go-karting kid who’d been decapitated by a car bumper or crushed into Folger’s crystals under a dump truck. “No one can see you that low to the ground!”
Mom, of course, had no idea that Jeff and I had become the neighborhood’s smut kingpins and that I was literally sleeping on a bed of skin mags , but she sensed instinctively that something was seriously amiss about the whole transaction.
“Get it out of our carport before dinner” her casual voice echoed from the kitchen. The demon of psychosis had left her body and she was back in her right mind again. I sat in my room, staring at the terrazzo floor and cried.
I had to drag the go-kart frame two blocks behind our house, to the Ingram residence. A humiliating task for any kid who just two hours earlier was under the delusion that he was soon going to be doing donuts in the middle of 108th avenue, in his new ride.
At first I sat in the spray-painted purple frame and used my feet to skoot myself along the sidewalk. That was going to be too exhausting, so I climbed out of the thing and just pushed it from behind the seat. I sheepishly knocked on his door. His Mom answered with a cigarette in her hand. Butch popped out from behind her with a mixed look of concern and irritation on his face. “You know this kid?” his mom asked him. The door closed behind him and we walked out to the go-kart parked back on his lawn.
“What are you doing, man?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
“My Mom said I can’t keep it”, I whispered.
“That’s not my problem”, he hissed, repeatedly looking back over his shoulder into the house. “Get that thing out of here, man!”
“If I bring the go-kart back home again, my Mom is gonna come over here and talk to your mom!” I warned him. Of course my Mom never said that, but I knew enough at that stage to trot out the threat of interoffice memos, whenever I’d reached an impasse.
“”Fine”, he shot back. “Leave it!” I stood there waiting for my refunds.
“I’m still keeping the mags, though”, he jabbed. Then in a sudden turn of ugliness he said “And the cash too”, as he walked back inside. “A deal is a deal”, he reminded me.
I recall mouthing the words back to him silently in unbelief. “A deal is a deeee…?” as the Ingram front door closed.
Once again, I was robbed by one the neighborhood’s teenagers. These guys were out of control.
I took the long way back home, with an ache in my throat. I thought briefly about enlisting Jimmy Joe to help balance the books, but that was going to get complicated. Jimmy had recently found out about Jeff’s stash and had drilled him harshly about it. “You’re too young to have those Jeffery!” he blasted. Jeff carried this admonition back to me, privately. “I think we’re too young to have these magazines”, he repeated to me. I nodded silently, but I really didn’t care. I was never letting go of my stash.
Instead of using my Fixer and taking revenge on Butch, I took comfort in the obscene stockpile of wealth that was still buried in the vaults of my bedroom.
An Errand Boy Sent By Grocery Clerks
“Hey guys”, the 6-year old blonde-haired child soldier said, as he pulled into my front yard on his bike, “my brother knows you took the magazines and he wants them back!” The soldier was a kid named Joey and the brother was a weird freak named Robert, who hung out with the neighborhood’s dope-smoking, devil-worshipping faction. An intimidating guy.
Jeff and I looked at each other with a combination of deep concern and incredulity. How dare he speak to us this way? We were entitled to respect. After all, the kid worked for us.
One of the central tenets of our juvenile blood oath was “Deny Everything”, a mantra which served Jeff and I well in childhood, but would eventually have diminishing returns throughout junior high and high school.
Jeff turned to the young affiliate with the calmest voice and said “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Joey”.
We both shrugged our shoulders in solidarity. No. Idea. He said this to the kid– as God is my witness– while literally holding one of those magazines curled up in his long tube socks, under a ripped pair of corduroy jeans.
“I’m just telling you what my brother said”, the kid replied, as he climbed on his Huffy bike and pedaled back home. “He says he’s gonna kick your asses.”
I tried to play it cool, but I was genuinely afraid. Perhaps we’d been a bit greedy, in plundering the entire porn cache and then reselling chunks of it on the neighborhood black market– back to kids whose older brothers wouldn’t immediately recognize the fragments as belonging to their club hideout. Karma was circling around us and beginning to swoop down.
One afternoon, I went for a ride around the block alone. I was a couple streets down and as I turned a corner, I ran headlong into a group of about seven or eight teens who were congregating on the sidewalk next to a large Surinam cherry bush, smoking cigarettes.
“Look who it is!” said Mark Cole, the oldest of the group and the obvious ringleader, as he grabbed the front of my handlebars and brought me to a halt. Mary Drake was there with them. So was Joey’s brother, Robert. They quickly closed ranks around my bike. When you’re nine years old and in this kind of predicament, your brain tells you “This is how you’re gonna die!” It was a mortal dread, compounded.
Mary Drake, who was the biggest bully of all, clenched her bony fist and immediately slammed it sideways into my shoulder. “This kid is a punk!” she informed the others.
“Are you the one who took our stuff?” Mark quizzed me with a cigarette hanging from his peach-fuzzed, freckled puss. I tried to push my bike away and he pushed back.
With a voice that sounded like I’d huffed from a tank of helium, I attempted to respond in the negative. Whatever I said, made the circle tighten a little closer around me. Robert, behind me in a red white and blue headband, grabbed the back of my bike seat and gave it a tug. “What kind of faggot bike is this?”
“Shawn,” Mark said to his slightly younger brother, who was also behind me, “do me a favor and go inside and get Dad’s shotgun!”
“You bet!” said Shawn as he ran directly across the street, back to their house.
With a guttural desperation erupting within me, that was one part end-of-life whimper and one part fight or flight rage, I torpedoed my bike to the side and into the busy street, as Mark lost his grip on my handlebars. I started pedaling faster than I ever had in my life. The entire group took chase on foot, and were on my back tire for at least a block until they gave up. “You’re dead!” Mark hollered down the street as he faded behind me.
As I turned the corner on 108th Avenue, my executive confidence returned and I was able to slow up and look back over my shoulder.
Just as I figured.
Those pussies didn’t have the guts to follow me into my territory.
