It’s a library visit I dreaded, but which somehow felt necessary, and harmless, given its mere availability. Since youth a series of images had haunted me. It was the first pornography I ever saw. On a school bus. Age is somewhat guesswork but I’ll give myself as having been 11 or 12. One of the older kids had a copy of HUSTLER magazine, and he was showing it off while sitting in one of the back sseats. I heard dudes whispering the word “cunt” over and over, saying it in a tone that struck me as reverential. “Lookit that cunt,” I remember one kid saying over and over. Others called it “pussy” but at the time I thought they were using the word as a joke of some sort. I don’t know what I was thinking, and I knew less about what I was even looking at. All the hair down there and one photo in particular in which the woman held her hand down there with a look on her face that said “You want this?” No, i twas not a question. It was a statement of fact: “You want this.” If that is what she was trying to say to me her message was received as clear as her wetness. Even then, without fully understanding what I was looking at I knew I wanted it. I sat down in my seat and looked out the window. I don’t know if it happened the same day but there would be a woman driving a Camaro who I’d see almost every day. She wore the shortest shorts possible, smoked a cigarette, and as the weeks and months passed and I saw her almost every day my mouth would wwater and my cock would feel funny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that is not the story of the moment. The story of the last few daysa is that I came as close as I ever have to reserving a supervised visit to the NYPL where I would pore through copies of that magazine, HUSTLER, which the library has in it stacks. The exact era of the late 1970s and early 1980s is there. All I had to do was book the appointment. I was one click away from doing that when I decided to give the Internet another try. I last planned to make this visit just before Covid. At the time I found no trace of that era of HUSTLER online. It may have been there on pirate sites but if it was anywhere to be found it was lost on me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leave it to the Internet. In the years since I last contemplated this matter the complete 1980s and a lot of the 1970s era of that magazine are now freely available at archive.org, and I do in fact believe I found the photo spread that had lingered in my mind for all these years. She was not as nasty looking as I remembered, but that look, and the gesture, “YOU WANT THIS” remains as prescient and true as ever. It seems evrything will eventually be regurgitated to the Internet. I don’t know what made me think this title would be an exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s too bad, really. As much as I dreaded and felt ill at ease about requesting pornography from the NYPL I kind of wish I’d followed through. But the ease of access online is so much more efficient than leafing through page after page of the print copies. Aside from the photos spreads the magazine had cartoons and articles, almost all of which I found impossibly boring and ungainly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scenario of requesting hard core pornography at the NYPL reminds me of one of my first weeks in NYC, when I purchased a copy of “SCREW” magazine. I did not know it was pornographic, as the cover of that particular issue made it look more like a political tome. The newstand vendor asked me if I wanted a bag for that magazine. I nonchalantly said no, but remembered later that somewhat serious stare he gave when asking the question. I sat down at a diner and opened the magazine and was like what?<\/em> Boobies everywhere. Welcome to New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n The woman I’m imagining myself connecting with was not on the subway today. The schedule seemed slightly off and I don’t know if she’s a regular on Fridays. I walked to the subway today imagining how easy it would be, the conversation, it would just start with a hello and glide like a river run. Will it be anything? Will I ever even open my mouth to begin with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n My schedule now is 4 days of work and 3 days off. I go into those three days with ambitions of greatness and achievement but almost all I ever do is walk. 16000 steps yesterday. I did the HUSTLER research, if you could call it that, and I managed to get a little further along in learning the intricacies of Stable Diffusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I had made a thing of giving stuff away through a local “BUY NOTHING” group but that’s turned into a chore. I naively imagined that this would be a way to make friends or at least acquaintances in the neighborhood but the transactions have been so brief I am certain I would not recognize any of these people should I ever see them again. One person was borderline rude. So for now I give stuff away by leaving it at the community refrigerator, where people also leave clothes and whatever else they don’t need anymore. I left a pair of pants that fit me like something like a clown would wear and some old Snoopy shirts yesterday. There are other things I need to get rid of. Crutches from a long-ago toxic relationship. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a library visit I dreaded, but which somehow felt necessary, and harmless, given its mere availability. Since youth a series of images had haunted me. It was the first pornography I ever saw. On a school bus. Age is somewhat guesswork but I’ll give myself as having been 11 or 12. One of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-cjP","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}