Walking around today, I’ve taken to jotting down notes with the speech-to-text thingie. Had a whole bunch of memories of details to fill in the “CUNT” story. In particular I remembered why the Pia Zadora photo spread was such a sensation at school. It also explains why I did not remember actually seeing her … stuff. Hah, I feel safe using the word “cunt” in certain contexts of this story but if I am talking about another woman’s vagina I do not think it is OK to throw that word around.
The reason I did not see it in that photo spread, and the reason everyone at school was talking about it, was because she was not in a porn. It might have been something as mainstream as Life Magazine, or People. Whatever it was it was in a magazine at the school library, and for days there were mobs of guys gathered around whoever was lucky enough to request the magazine. I should be able to look up what the magazine was, and the issue. Would have to have been from 1982-1986, probably on the earlier side of that span.
The fun did not last long. The head librarian withdrew it from the magazine rack, saying that our use of the magazine, not the magazine itself, was not in keeping with Christian values.
Before it was taken away I remember how distressed one of the librarians looked any time someone requested it. She was a nun in her 60s clearly not pleased at handing out borderline porn to a gleefully bonered student body. I don’t think it was Life or People, I think it was some random title that none of us would ever think to ask for. Not Good Housekeeping but something similarly heterosexual-Christian-teenage-male. If that’s not even true then I might change the story around to make it so. Hah, the power of the pencil.
The removal of the magazine from the library shelf was the stuff of a minor scandal, representing CENSORSHIP as it did. But being a private school it was something the administration was within its powers to do.
It was the Geometry teacher who made a comment that I wonder if others besides I remember. I also wonder if others would challenge the teacher on it given a chance. He said “All women have the same equipment.” Nonsense, I think, but spurious nonsense.
The Pia Zadora incident led to a schoolwide mini-crackdown on pictures of scantily-clad women that some guys put in their lockers. Fr. Kidwell went from one locker after another, a tremulous look of murder on his face, clawing the pictures off the locker doors like some kind of beast reaching to gouge out your eyes.
As for the Hustler incident, well, if I had any 6th grade notions about what constituted a beautiful woman then she was not it. But it led to my pre-pubescent infatuation with the CUZ 007 woman. That was her license plate number. Taking the same route every day it was not surprising to see some of the same cars and drivers. I looked for her every day, and most days she was there in her Camaro, low to the road and seeming to be several feet below where I sat high above on the school bus. She wore sunglasses, and she smoked, both of which seemed all too cool to me. But it was not the smokes, and it was not the shades. It was the short, very short shorts she wore. I would be reminded of her years later when I read a joke credited to Bob Hope: “Women are wearing their bikinis so short this year they’re going to have to get two haircuts.” I looked at that place between her legs, not completely certain why or even what I was looking at or what I was looking for. I was 12.
I don’t know if the story should evolve all the way to the first time I actually encountered it in the flesh… hah, if ever there was an appropriate use of that cliché. ** found a way to get some special characters but not that a with the carat for Flaneur. ** There are some people who would know exactly who I was talking about. But I could get away with sparing the memories of it and just talk about how I got down there and did not know what to do. No one had instructed me on anything to do with sex, save for one humorous classroom lecture from a high school wrestling coach. But that lecture seemed to assume we all already knew the generalities of sex. I guess I probably did but cunninlingus was never spoken of, nor (as far as I understand) was it as commonly done in the 1980s as it is now — not that it’s exactly universally done now, either.
So there I was, in the promised land, and all I had to do was figure out why I wanted so badly to be there. All I had was instinct. Animal instinct. I figured it out.
That might be for another story, though. Or no story at all. I could out-Bukowski Bukowski with that one.
Another memory of the Hustler incident was how the guy who had it was sitting next to his girlfriend. She appeared to be acting like the gatekeeper of access to seeing the thing. She looked at her boyfriend with something that appeared to be pride. Sure wish I knew their names but I have no idea.
I want to write more but something interesting is happening here…
