Childhood can be a tricky subject to write about.  There are some stories that are great, but they may not necessarily be the kind of thing you’d want everyone to know about.  Either that or they involve people who you may still be friends with, who may not be too thrilled about having those stories told.

Maybe there are ‘secret’ stories that nobody else ever knew about, like the first time you pulled your pants down with someone, or the first time someone touched you in an intimate way, but you were still young enough that it never occurred to you to go any further.  These are the kind of things my friend and I were talking about in a phone conversation today, and we were laughing like hyenas the entire time.  Since then, I started compiling a list of stories, so that I can be thinking about how to tell them in a way that isn’t just gratuitously prurient. . .or TMI.

Here’s one that should be a good sort of segue.  If you’re reading at work, or if R-rated subject matter isn’t something that interests you for whatever reason, I invite you to stop reading now, because this entry is about to take a distinct turn for the worse.

My dad used to collect porno magazines, and he had a few books as well.  He made no secret about it, and he kept them all catalogued in boxes in the bedroom.  My parents also owned the book The Joy of Sex, and as a matter of fact, I don’t remember them making a big deal about it if my little brother or I snuck a peek at that kind of stuff occasionally.  I guess their feeling was that the more we learned on our own, the less they’d have to actually teach us themselves.

My dad mostly gravitated toward soft-core stuff like Playboy, but he had a few issues of Hustler floating around, as well as a couple of harder things like High Society, all of which was not a big deal to my brother and me.  He had one that we both distinctly remember, though, which was called Shuttlecock.  The idea behind this one was that a man and a woman would be in their yard playing badminton, and before long their clothes would start coming off, by which time they’d start getting it on.  My brother and I wouldn’t have thought twice about this magazine either, ordinarily, were it not for the hilarious captions that were on a few of the full-page pictures.  They were sayings such as, ‘They would fuck for a while, then she would suck his enormous cock.’ That kind of stuff completely cracked us up.  I remember asking, as we were looking at the magazine, “Is this supposed to be sexy?”  I’ve tried to find pictures of that for a while now, because I thought it would be funny to send to my brother, but so far I’ve come up empty-handed.

My dad also had a book in his night stand [Edit:  I just now remembered the name of it:  Pissing in the Snow] that was full of antiquated naughty stories and songs.  For example, there was one about a guy who would ride around town in his horse-drawn carriage and pick up women he saw on the street.  They were just bizarre, and we couldn’t figure out A) why our dad was into them, and B) why anybody would find them arousing.  I also remember a golf-related book that was called Dead Solid Perfect [I can’t believe I remember these names!], that involved a lot of swearing and sex.   It also prominently featured these brothers who would dress like nuns, unzip their habits and pee in whichever conspicuous location they found themselves.  They’d also stop people on the street and say, “Can you point me in the direction of the nearest bar?  I’m just aching to get a hold of a nice warm dick.”  So. . .um. . .yeah.

The worst and funniest occurrence happened when I was about fourteen, long after my parents had split up, and my dad had remarried.  LittleBrother and I were visiting for the summer, and we had a friend over.  We wanted to show the antiquated naughty book to our friend, so we walked into the bedroom and said, “You have to see this.  It’s right in his night stand.  Wait. . .what’s this?  Oh, pictures.  Pictures of Dad. . .and that’s our. . .stepmom. . .AAAAAUGH!”   We had inadvertently stumbled onto their stash of polaroids, and the images burned themselves into our impressionable little brains in a way that the magazines never could.  I wish there was a way to excise them, because seeing explicit pictures of your parents having sex is too much to process.

To this day, neither of us is into porn.  I can’t speak for my brother, but I know that I can’t help but think of dumb stuff like Shuttlecock every time I think of porn, and it just makes me laugh.

The moral of all this, I suppose, is that if you have kids and you have porn, you have to either get rid of one or the other.  I’m assuming that unless you have a serious problem, you’ll choose to get rid of the porn.  If you have it around, the kids will find it, no matter where you think you’ve hidden it.  Also, it’s probably not the greatest idea to take pictures of yourselves and leave copies of them in an easily accessible place.

Hopefully this was a good read, and hopefully it falls within the parameters that I set for this little endeavor.  I’ll keep thinking of more stories that I feel I can share.  In the meantime, for God’s sake, keep the porno away from the kids.