Kiddie Porn

Terry Johnson has been my best friend since junior high school. Like any good friend, he mailed me a VCR movie of his knee surgery.

Without introduction (which is to say, without warning), the movie opened with his raw kneecap surrounded by pulsing red and cream meat. A magnified pair of tweezers and two gleaming silver picks were rearranging this tendon and that, as one might pick through a plate of spaghetti.

It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing was not the overhead shot of a cooking show. TJ is proud of his knee.

I share that to explain how I felt when, in the fifth grade, Greg Kreitzer pulled a folded photo out of his pocket and showed it to me. It had been pressed into a curve by his humid wallet. The magazine ink was beginning to smear from being sat on. He opened it delicately, its fold lines worn white.

Such a cherished document — a treasure map? It took me a few seconds to orient, to make sense of the bright spotlight glare on the greasy body hair and sweat.

Greg grinned, as if he carried the golden ticket to eternal friendship. Greg was creepy anyway, even creepier now.

I responded with an uncommittal "Dude…," before walking away. This was exactly the kind of thing I always got caught doing when it wasn't my fault.

Porn and I were not well introduced, but I got the hang of it, so to speak. I stumbled across images here and there, and I'd tear out the ones that intrigued me. Eventually, I had a little private collection of clippings. I shared a room with my brother but I could never admire my photos around him, because I knew he'd rat me out just for the fun of watching me run for my life. When I wanted to view my collection, I'd fold them up carefully and creep into the bathroom, the only room in our house with a lock. With two parents and six kids, visits to the single bathroom had to be judicious.

I've since wondered how the person reacted who walked into the bathroom the day I accidentally left my photo collage behind. I didn't realize it until the next day. The obvious choice for my parents would have been to beat my older brother, because they never accepted that I was old enough to do the things I did. I was eighteen before my dad realized I had a driver's license. But my brother showed no signs of punishment. Nor did he reveal any hint that he found the photos himself: no smirk, no long trips to the bathroom. If my sisters had discovered them, there would have been screams. Perhaps God intervened and whisked them away, to everyone's relief.

I got older. I collected whole magazines. There was an abandoned school stadium near my house where my friend Harold and I stashed our contraband. Old magazines acquire a unique smell when they are stored in dank places. To this day I think antique stores smell like porn.

I don't remember how I got the magazines, and I don't remember where they went. Probably they were discovered and stolen by younger boys, who like me acquired a very insufficient education.

Barbie and Ken were surprisingly plain under their disco duds, given their exaggerated proportions everywhere else. Smooth, featureless skin, and nothing to their nethers but the joint of their legs. I know that some families paraded around naked all the time, but my family was a buttoned-up bunch, so I had to learn anatomy the hard way.

My first hands-on experience provided little revelation. I was with a boxy Mexican girl I had just met, who wanted my class ring. Was my hand under her bra, or wasn't it? She felt like Barbie. Something wasn't right. It took me a while to realize she had Band-Aids over her nipples. A hundred reasons raced through my head before she explained that her mother made her do that, and it was another decade before I understood why.

Two years later, to everyone's surprise, the small town theater booked an X-rated film. A high-school buddy swore he could get us in with fake IDs. As we gathered up the suavity to saunter into the lobby like we were regulars, I noticed my ID was for a 45-year-old Hispanic man who was a foot shorter and forty pounds heavier than I.

I looked up from that painful ID to discover that the ticket-taker was my next door neighbor. He eyed me me, looked at my ID and said, "You gotta be kidding." I was dead. "Welcome, Mr. Rodriquez," he rasped, rolling his eyes and waving me in. I was reincarnated.

The movie was about as sexy as The Three Stooges, but not as funny. The more I saw, the less I wanted to learn.

The first drive-in movie of each season was usually a racy one, and I knew if I rode my bike down a certain street, I could watch over the fence. I surmised that the plot centered around an enormously endowed woman who suffocated her suitors. It was hard to tell without the metal car-window speaker.

I don't know what became of leering little Greg Kreitzer and his folded up photos. Maybe he became a pornographer. Or a knee surgeon.

Brain Pain

I can't remember a time in my life when a muscle or bone didn't ache. I just healed up my right shoulder, and now my left one sprung.

I didn't do anything to it. It just started hurting. A lot. Maybe I brushed my teeth too hard, or slept funny.

I've always had aches, bruises and dings. Tall, bony and clumsy, I constantly bump my head, stumble down stairs, fall off my bicycle or tumble down a ditch on wayward skates. Those bonks and twists were earned honorably, a badge proving I was doing something. I'm far less tolerant of aches that just show up on their own, like uninvited guests.

My shins never had any meat on them. Only skin. It is a deformity. They're as bumpy and raw as a tree branch. You can read every woody detail of my shin bone like the rings of a tree, or like that clear plastic Invisible Man we played with in elementary school, the one with realistic organs on the inside and one missing on the outside, the one we had the most questions about. During a softball game I once took an errant pitch to the shin, and from the sound everyone thought I got a hit.

In the middle of the city park near my childhood home there was a cylindrical building that housed some mysterious industrial function. We couldn't figure what accounted for the droning hum that came from inside because, although we could climb the walls, we couldn't see clearly through the dirty windows. The outside had a rocky facade rough enough to get a toe-hold, a natural scaling wall up to the tempting flat roof with its castle-like edge.

My friend Eric scampered up the side of the building like a gerbil. "I did it, you do it!" he crowed, a phrase that has taunted countless children to their deaths. Scared of heights but more afraid of being an outcast, I slowly worked my way up, wiggling over the square roofline like a fat raccoon.

The view was heady. Squirrels were eye-level. I studied the clouds to see if they were closer.

Going down was a lot scarier than climbing up. Eric, his face scrunched in concentration, worked his way quickly. Eric was small, nimble and lithe, the kind of kid who could get away with teasing you because, wily and slippery, you could never get a good enough grip on him to pound him. I was as graceful as a can of Pick-Up Sticks. Barely able to breathe, I managed to work my way over the edge, fingernails digging into the rock, and down to the first ledge. It took a while. Mindful of the setting sun, I gave up and jumped the remaining twelve feet or so. I felt (or heard) a ringing in my feet as all the cartilage melted into jello. I held still, afraid to walk or lay down, that my feet might lose their shape.

"If you're not going to do it, get off." This was another magic phrase Eric uttered impatiently. I psyched myself up to prove I could do a back flip off the park swing at the height of its arc. The feat would be no harder than letting go of the chains, but I had to convince my hands. I wanted to rehearse it in my mind a few more times, but at the sound of Eric's nagging I kicked my head back into the the roll. My hands did not let go, not until the swing began returning to Earth with me no longer sitting in it. I rotated too far before finally releasing the chains, landing on my back with a dull huff! The next day Eric and I returned to the spot to admire the impossibly angled imprint of my  arm and palm in the dirt, my broken wrist now in a thick, heavy cast. I hit him with it, and his head resonated like a ripe melon.

My nose looks like my dad's, long and curvaceous with a preference for the left side of my face. His was broken in the Navy, by the first punch of his first boxing match. But one does not inherit a broken nose.

"Dad," I asked, "did I ever break my nose?"

"No, I don't recall anything," he replied after a thoughtful, eye-wandering silence.

"Then how did my nose get so crooked?"

He thought some more. More eye-searching. "Well, there was that one time when you were three, and you walked in front of a kid with steel-toed boots who was swinging on the swing," he recalled. "When he hit you, you did a back flip and landed standing up."

Yeah, Dad, that might have done it.

Or maybe it was Plunger. Plunger was among the pile-on games we played in the park after school. I once heard Bill Cosby refer to it as "Buck-Buck." Kids on one team would form a human wall-chain by lining up, then bending over and wrapping arms firmly around the waist of the kid in front of them, who did the same. It looked like a mule train or a woven rope. The front-most kid would secure himself by wrapping his arms around a tree. Then the other team would run up one at a time and jump on the fortified mass, using their compounding weight and relentless impacts to knock the wall team over. To protect the tree-grabbing kid's collar bone we'd insert the littlest kid as padding in between. He was the Plunger.

I only recall playing the game twice. The last time, while I was in the middle of the wall team, we held up a record number of our opponents before the entire matrix of kids collapsed on top of my nose.

Nose blood is vivid red, rich with oxygen. The other kids ran home. I retired from Plunger.

As I get older my injuries continue even though I play less. I scratched a cornea when I picked up a basketball and didn't notice the juniper branch in front of me. I turned my head to look as I backed up the car, and sprained my neck.  I pulled a muscle in my shoulder by sleeping funny.

It's as if my body is accustomed to feeling injured, and repeats it out of habit. As if it says to itself, "Say, it's about time for a pulled tendon, isn't it?"

"No, tendons are Monday. Today's Thursday. Cramps day."

"Foot cramp?"

"Sure."

Oww! What did I do?

The Wrap Artist

Just days before Christmas
Foul weather is pending
Rain into ice into snow neverending

I try to wrap presents. For hours I linger
Could tape stick to anything else but my finger?
Of all of life's mysteries, I want to know:
To save our own lives, why can't men tie a bow?

I tried to find presents creative and neat
That I'm almost done isn't any small feat
Just things here and there for a last minute run
An LED Frisbee and Daisy air gun

But what to my wondering eyes should appear?
A blizzard forthcoming! Must get in high gear!
Is everyone shopping? What is this rat race?
Is it too much to ask for, just one parking space?

A sharp elbow here, a karate chop there
And I finished my shopping, just hours to spare
I got what I went for, my mission undaunted
A Daisy air rifle, like I always wanted!

My hands wrapped around it—it felt so much bigger
Than I had imagined. I fingered the trigger
And Blam! How should I know the damn thing was loaded?!?
The dog barked, a glass broke, the lightbulb exploded

The cat screamed and leapt and clamped onto the dog
Who squealed like a pig as he spilled my eggnog
With puss on his ass he dove under the tree
Where the cat got entangled and couldn't shake free

The Christmas tree trembled, it shivered and quivered
And teetered and tottered before fate delivered
The final Ke-Bash! And before I could get her
Down came the ornaments, tinsel and glitter

We stood there agape after all of that riot
A clatter, a tinkle — and then all was quiet
The dog licked his wounds as he glared at the cat
Who pointed at me and said "That's who did that!"
Then both turned to me through the mangled-up muck
And eyed me as if to say, "Dude, WTF!?"

I only intended to give it a tryout
It ricocheted back and damn near put my eye out
But all I could think as it lodged in my tuchus
Was what if I'd got one of those toy bazookas?

Routine Maintenance

It's freezing in the room. I get out of my warm bed; the dog stays behind. He used to jump up whenever I budged, following my every step as if I had bacon for feet. By now he has figured out I'm just going to the bathroom and that I'll be back to get dressed. He knows there's no point in following me until I venture downstairs, where he'll hover on the chance that I might drop a crumb of toast.

I have become routine. He and my cats know everything I'm going to do. As I shuffle barefoot into the kitchen, my cat Spekky is already there, waiting. She knows she'll be fed a moist pâté of ground fish out of a can within the next three minutes. She begins to meow at 1 minute 30 seconds just to go along, but it doesn't change anything. The dog stands by wistfully, knowing the cat bowl is off limits. But what touches the floor is legally his.

They weave between my clumsy feet with the agility of egrets picking food from a hippo's mouth. Their choreography requires that they know exactly where I'm going to move next. They do.

People say days go by faster as you get older. I know one person who is certain that time literally is going faster, and although he says it with scientific authority, his theory still smells as if freshly pulled out of his ass.

It's more likely that as we get older we become more routine. It gets harder to distinguish one day from the next. When you're a kid, every day is unique. Your brain is an empty pan. As you age you start developing preferences, then favorites, and soon your patterns start to cement. I can barely read a newspaper if I don't start with the front page.

The last remarkable day you remember may have been months ago. "Why, it seems like 4th of July was just last week!" When days are identical, time condenses them into one.

I just had lunch with a friend, and he was off to get a new tattoo.

"Of what?" I asked.

"I don't know."

He's not new to this.  He already looks like an ad for the tattoo parlor.

"You're getting a tattoo that will last your whole life, and you haven't made up your mind yet?"

"I had some space to fill."

As tattoos go, I am a blank slate. I can't commit to anything for fear I'll change my mind about it later. Even the classic "Mama" is chancy—she could turn on me any day. Maybe she was just being nice because I was little and she felt sorry for me, and now she's just waiting until I'm old enough to hear what a pain in the ass I was.

"Each tattoo reminds me where my life was at the time I got it," he explains. "It's not the design itself that's important, but the memories it stirs up." He is a walking scrapbook of unconnected imagery: a wagon wheel, an eagle, a sheriff's badge. I don't ask.

To shake up my life I try to do something unique every day. Maybe I'll get a tattoo when I'm 90 and there's not enough time left to change my mind about it.

I cringe when people get engaged on Christmas, or have birthdays on New Year's Eve. I know I'd forget one event or the other. When I plan a celebratory occasion like an engagement or wedding, I'll look at the calendar and pick the longest stretch of time between two existing holidays, and stick the new event right in the middle. My goal: when I'm 90 years old, every day will be a unique holiday, and time will stand still.

I usually write a story for this blog every Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. Whoa, baby—look at me shake it up.

That's Snow Biz

A blizzard was coming. I was waxing up my old sled, the red paint on its metal runners rubbed off by dry patches. My mother was looking at my thin tan jacket, the sleeves closer to my elbows than my wrists after another growth spurt. "We need to get you a new winter coat," she pronounced. I was generally oblivious, but when she pointed it out, I concurred. She sent me out into the blizzard with Dad.

This was an event. We weren't poor, but there were six of us kids and we didn't get a lot of new stuff. The snorkel-hooded parka was the latest fashion, and Dad bought me one. It had sleeves that covered my whole arm and a fur-trimmed hood that rolled out long and narrow to protect my face. I was afraid to say "Thank you," fearful that even a blink might mess up my lucky streak.

I buttoned its buttons and zipped its zippers, then walked out into the storm and stood straight.  White razors of snow cut across my tunnel vision, but I didn't feel a thing. This was what Eskimos see looking out the door of their igloos, I thought.

I was liberated. I grew up in a smallish Nebraska town. (Yes, they all are.) Planted randomly on the flat prairie like a salt shaker on a tabletop, the town took the full brunt of storms that built speed across the bald landscape as if rolling downhill. The next morning the wind stopped and the sun burned through vivid blue skies, a blinding reflection off two feet of heavy snow. The town bogged to a halt, silent as a blanket except for the whining of spinning tires.

Harold Smith had a snorkel parka too, so we grabbed shovels and headed out to rule the world. We got ten dollars for each sidewalk we shoveled. Digging out a stuck car usually got a $5 tip. It was the best money I ever made. Any money you make as a kid is a lot, because someone else is cooking for you, paying your rent and taking care of your utilities and clothing. If you make ten bucks, you get to keep all of it.

I thought shoveling snow for $10 was a goldmine. The reason I don't do it now is because I have learned that kids will do it for $10.

Playing in the snow evolved. I went from snow angels to snowballs, which took some practice because my mom knitted me mittens, and yarn attaches to snow as if it were gum. It is demeaning to hit someone with a snowball and then have to trudge over and ask for your mitten back.

I moved up to a runner sled, handed down from my brothers and for all I know from my dad before that. It was an old wooden one with a T-bar you used to steer it by warping the skinny metal runners. My friends made fun of it, richer friends who always had the latest plastic snow sled invention. But they always wanted to borrow mine after I blew past them on the hill. Because it was wood and metal, it never broke like the rich kid sleds did, and so I never got a new one. Eventually I grew far too long for the sled, but it we couldn't throw it away because it was still perfectly good. My family doesn't throw away much.

I graduated to throwing my dad's Datsun B-210 into wild spins, something I stopped doing after I bought my own car. Then I took up cross-country skiing. I tried it once in Colorado but I broke through the snow's crust and found myself waist deep, unable to move my feet. The forest was so quiet I felt as if my head was expanding. I took out a pad and pencil and wrote an entire song while I was stuck there. It's a pretty good song, but no matter how I analyze it, it has nothing to do with snow. Still, I thought it would be a hit, because nothing generates interest in a musician like being found frozen to death.

Today I went from snow forts to snow cannons. Preparing for an upcoming blizzard, I broke my little 17-year-old snowblower trying to get it prepared, and had to rush out to get a new one. Everyone else must have broken theirs an hour before I did, because the only ones left at the store were bigger and more expensive than I intended to get. it's hard to dicker with a salesman when there's a rush on snowblowers, a huge storm six hours hence and a line of impatient buyers fidgeting behind you. I swallowed hard and bought one.

It has an electric starter, but you have to plug it in to use it. It takes longer to plug it in than to pull the starter rope, but I used the electric start anyway because I paid for it. The behemoth belched to a manly purr at my finger's touch, and nearly drove through the garage door.

It has a cannon turret you adjust with a crank, rotating it like a tank barrel to avoid hitting people, or to hit them on purpose. It has two speeds just for reverse, so it can run over you fast or slow.

I couldn't wait to get my testosterone all over it. Unfortunately, it is so big that the job was over quicker than I expected. Reluctantly, I followed it back to the garage, feeling funny just loitering around blowing snow on stuff. I was cold too, and that surprised me. Usually I work up a good sweat. But I just followed this machine around, pointing it toward the real work as if I were a union boss.

Something was missing.

Something fun. Something to tie to the back of the snowblower. I had to dig around a little bit, but I found that sled.

Fly Free!

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The Boxer

Boxed wine used to be the equivalent of "cheese food product." What it lacked in edibility, it made up in volume.

There has been an ongoing evolution in wine packaging, not always for the better. For starters, they tried replacing the cork, offering a whitewash of disparate reasons:

1. "Cork is natural. Harvesting natural things is bad for the environment."
2. "Plastic corks are more stable and protect wine better."
3. "Screw tops create less waste and provide a better seal."

First, cork is not a living thing. It is the byproduct of a living thing. Trees miss their cork like my bathtub misses the hair in the drain.

Plastic corks are indeed more stable: they can survive in a landfill for 20,000 years. And they make wine taste like plastic corks.

Screw tops make complete sense, except that they are inextricably linked to Boone's Farm Country Kwencher. I liked Country Kwencher just fine as a kid, but even then I was bothered by the spelling. If you are marketing to hicks, why not go all the way: Kuntry Kwencher? (Okay, I see why.) You find Boone's Farm proudly displayed in convenience stores that don't sell wine, which is an ominous give-away: although it is in a wine bottle, Boone's Farm is not wine. It is a "malt-based beverage," which is to say it is wine-flavored beer. This is the poster child of screw top bottles.

Wine connoisseurs claim they can tell by the taste of a wine the region from which the metal screw cap was mined. This distinct taste is referred to as ferroir.

Yes, corks go bad. Yes, they can spoil expensive wines. Yes, they often crumble into the bottle. Or break in half, leaving an irretrievable plug. With wine, that is the whole point. If everyone could open a wine bottle, what would be the fun of being a snob? The pageantry and fussy corkscrew are part of the fun, despite the gnawing awareness that it would be more easily accomplished using safety goggles and a cordless drill.

A cork may give clues of what's to come. You don't sniff the cork, like they do in the movies. Just look at it. Is it moldy? Is there foul gunk on the end that is nowhere near a wine color? This is not esoteric. You use the same procedure when buying a loaf of bread: if it is green or covered with fur, you put it back. You don't need to sniff it. While adopting a kitten you happen to notice that its anus is crusty and miscolored, you pick out another kitten. Perhaps this is where we get the word analogy.

Today, box wine presents tempting advantages. First, it gives you four bottles of wine for the price of, and in the space of, three. What comes out of the box tastes very much like wine. There is no cork or screw top to complain about. There is no top at all. And this brings me to my favorite part about box wine: it comes out of a spigot.

The empty package is cardboard, more recyclable than glass. But it is hard to fold flat. It is sealed together with the same inseparable glue they use now to seal a bag of chips, the kind that makes you look stupid when the entire bag explodes, leaving you holding only the intact sealed edge.

The bladder-like bag inside a box of wine is recyclable, although unsightly. They claim this collapsable bag helps wine last longer, because no air gets in while you drain it. This is a boon to those mythical people who don't drink their wine all at once.

As I remove the plastic bladder and notice how much wine is still slopping around in its wrinkly folds, my Scottish roots compel me to squeeze it out, which is about as charming a maneuver as wringing a placenta. But the result is an extra half glass of wine, which I consider my reward for bothering to recycle.

The only downside to box wine is that, like the giant 12-pack of toilet paper, it is embarrassing to buy. But once you get it home, it's wine-on-tap. And if fussy friends come over, you can always fill that decanter you never use.