When we last left our hero, her temporary-while-her-house-was-being-built best friend was teaching the young and impressionable about rhyming and stealing, and then got pasted by a car. It’s Ratso Rizzo coughing up blood all over again. I hope you didn’t think that ended my career as a tiny hooligan. Once you get a taste of the naughty life, it takes a lot to come back from that.
As I said, I got thrown into the sticks. Since I lacked retail opportunities, I turned on my own. When I was nine, I started rifling my parent’s drawers for anything I could find, after realizing that was one place in the house I had never been. If someone would have told me not to do that, I probably wouldn’t have. Probably. It just didn’t occur to me that it was an uncool thing to do. And the thing was, I knew my stepfather was rifling through my stuff already, because I was always “up to something.” That’s true. I was. Who wants a kid who isn’t, though? Sometimes I think they might have been happier if I spent six to sixteen staring at the wall and drooling.
So I discovered the world of porn then. For some reason, little kid foolishness I guess, I took a couple of copies of the magazines I found back to my room, to be peeped at under covers with a flashlight. I should have just looked at them during the day. I was a little angry then, because I realized at nine there was this whole adult world I was not privy to, or welcome in. I started realizing in a big way that people had secrets, and that anyone I saw around me could have them. Serious, kind of weird secrets. It felt like a blow to the chest to know how much I was being left out of.
I kind of got the porn, though, and why people would want to look at it. I think, in a really roundabout way, it helped me to figure some things out about myself. I had an indication at a really early age that I liked girls (thank you, Bananarama). So instead of just being all, “Ew, vag/handcuffs/goats” or whatever, it gave me some time to think about what I was looking at, and if I really liked women.
The men, however, were another story. That was fairly “Ew, wristwatch/hair/tubesocks.” No confusion there.
I remember when my stepfather confronted me about my appropriation of his porn. He called me down to the basement where he was working on one of his coin-op machines.
“So, um, you know it’s wrong to go through other people’s, uh, things, and um, take them, right?” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Okay, good.”
Wow. Good talk, Dad. Especially good since he spent the next seven years looking through and taking my things, under the guise of “looking for the scotch tape.”