A Common Pornography: A Memoir

house. It was nice, and big, with a pool in the backyard. I would pick her up and we would drive around and then make out somewhere. Her breath was always unpleasant, and she had stuff on her braces like she never brushed her teeth. Still, I went out of my way to spend time with her and was jealous once when she told me about an ex- boyfriend, an eighteen-year-old who had his own apartment, where he wanted her to suck his dick once. It was a story she told me with an “I can do anything to you” tone of voice.

Another time, when her parents were gone, we were in her basement. We took our shirts off on the couch. I ran my fingers over her small chest, feeling the nipples, no bigger than pimples. We stood up and slow-danced to a radio song. I picked her up and put her on the pool table. We stared at each other. “Do you want to know something I haven’t done before?” she asked. I asked her what it was. “I’ve never had anyone kiss me upside down,” she told me. She kicked the cue ball off the table.

Hiding Places

When we were getting our house done enough to move back in, Dad asked me if I wanted to pick out a ceiling for my bedroom. We went to a home decoration place and I picked out the kind that was divided up into squares. The square tiles rested on a metal framework so it kind of looked like a checkerboard. The metal part was black and the tiles were a bumpy white texture, like on a globe where you can feel the mountains.

After getting my room all set up and living in the house for a year, I realized it was weird to have that sort of ceiling, that it was usually seen only in offices and fancy modern buildings like city hall. I stood on a chair one night and pushed on one of the tiles. It moved up and slid over. I could put my hand up there and feel a couple of feet of space. I started hiding my dirty magazines up there. It seemed perfect, and it was. Dad was a snoop and would find them if I kept them under my mattress or in a sock drawer like my friends.

Years later, after I moved out, my bedroom was converted to a sewing room for Mom. My stash was gone by then, hidden somewhere in the basement. I’d still find myself looking at the ceiling though, imagining those naked women above Mom’s head as she sewed.

Troubled Girl

Whenever I went to Fruitland Park to shoot baskets, I noticed a girl sitting on the porch of a house across the street. I thought she was really cute, but couldn’t tell how old she was. The Karate Kid was my favorite movie and I’d seen it six times in the theater. She looked a little like Elisabeth Shue—I liked the scene in that movie where she had on the tight sweater and they went to the amusement park.

She started to come over to the courtside benches when I’d show up. I was nervous as I talked to her. She told me she lived with her cousins because her parents were murdered in Chicago. Nothing ever happened with this relationship, not even a kiss. She gave me Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. for Christmas. I never listened to it. We drifted apart that winter, partly because it was too cold to play basketball.

Five years later, I lived in a different town and was in my twenties. I’d visit my parents for holidays, and one time she called. I met her in a grocery store parking lot and we sat in my car. The steering wheel of my car seemed enormous, almost as if it were growing in front of me, as she confessed that she had told me lies about her family. She said she was married but had always loved me. I almost wanted to kiss her but was nervous again. She said her husband beat her up sometimes and that she had a baby boy. His name was Kevin. I thought about how long she would have to live with that.

My Friend Pat

In tenth grade, I started to embrace my weirdness a little more, thanks to one of my new friends, Pat Kennelly. He was this short kid with curly white hair and glasses. He sort of looked like an albino. He lived with his family in a pretty big house a couple of blocks from the high school. We had a couple of classes together and even though I really wanted to be popular (and Pat was like a poster boy for Not Popular), Pat cracked me up and I realized we had the same kind of weird humor. We both liked Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the movie Airplane!, and Devo.

I started to hang out less with Darren and Maurice. I hung out at Pat’s house a lot and spent the night there on most weekends. We stayed up late and watched Night Flight, an assortment of music and comedy that took over the USA Network on the weekends.

At school, we would do weird things for the sake of being weird. We’d go sit in a class that wasn’t ours until the teacher would look at us, puzzled, and then ask us to leave. While walking down the hallways, we’d sometimes fall to our hands and knees and spastically crawl several feet before getting back up on our feet, our facial expressions flat and muted, as if nothing goofy was happening at all. We would get in fake fights and then run away from each other, pretending to cry. If someone from Yearbook was taking photos, we’d try to get in the picture and point at something outside of the frame, sometimes with a look of glee, sometimes with an expression of horror.

We were friends for a couple of years, but something odd started to pull us apart. I really wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t sure if I could hang out with Pat Kennelly and be cool. Plus Maurice would make snide remarks about Pat and how much we were hanging out. Not that Maurice was any cooler, but sometimes it’s easy to be swayed by fear, and I was afraid I would lose Maurice as a friend. We’d been friends for a long time and we sometimes talked about living with each other when we got older. I think when you’re a teenager and you start making plans with your friends in regards to living together or going to a college together or hunting for Bigfoot or whatever, you really get excited. Because it’s the future! And it’s without your parents!

I’m sad I wasn’t Pat’s friend for longer. I’ve looked through all my high school yearbooks and I don’t think he even signed any. There is one funny scrawl that takes up a half page in back of my sophomore yearbook. It doesn’t have a name signed to it, but it says in part:

Kevin,

Guilty! Where is the fish? Dance with the flame! The yellow man inside that egg is in love with Big Leggy! Vegetables!

I’m pretty sure that’s from Pat.

Trespass

Once, during a snowy winter break, Maurice and I were jonesing to play basketball, so we walked over to our high school to see if any of the doors were open. Sometimes there were doors left open near the gym because there were teams practicing or a janitor working.

We got there and found the doors unlocked and the gym lights on, but no one else around. No sign of a janitor. We had our boom box with us and plugged it in at courtside. We had some sodas and a bag of chips from the store. It was like we had set up camp for the night.

We shot baskets on the beautiful hardwood floors and listened to Kurtis Blow and the Bar-Kays. About an hour into our private practice, three cops appeared. Two of them were up in the stands, walking around as if we had hidden bombs somewhere, and one of them approached us on the court. “What are you guys doing here?” he asked. Maurice turned the music down and told him we were just shooting baskets and that the doors were open