Communication
Repost from old blog, 2/23/2008
Around fifteen I realized that I could use the internet to order porn films. This had the advantage of bypassing the usual age verification at a store as well as saving myself the embarrassment of trying to purchase it face-to-face with an actual person.
I ordered a tape to my house and spent many queasy afternoons waiting to see if I could pluck it from the mailbox before my parents did. The anxiety was heady, but the tape came unlabeled, unremarkable – nobody took the slightest notice. However, the fear had been too intense, and I knew I couldn’t go through it again. I was ready to order more porn, and I needed a different plan.
It came to me in a flash of inspiration – a post office box. Of course, I’d need to get it in another town, since my former best friend’s father, Tom C—–, was the neighborhood mailman and knew everything that passed through.
I rented a box in a town twenty-five miles away. The box came with a little golden key that I kept in a small container in my closet. I commenced ordering tapes to it immediately.
I would drive my parents’s car a half hour just to check that box, sometimes three or four times a week. Usually it was empty. It was no bigger than the space taken up by a loaf of bread. A small gray door in the midst of hundreds of other gray doors. When you opened it and looked through the back, you could see people walking around in the mailroom.
That box was a secret, private place of my own. Even at night, I imagined, in the dead silence of the empty post office, it was there for me. If I could have crawled into it, I would have.
In time, another use for the P.O. Box presented itself.
Once, my older brother told me that some of his friends had been out in the woods, and had found a small wooden shack. Inside the shack was a dirty gray mattress. Stuck to the walls were Polaroids a man had taken of himself putting different things up his ass. Things like a billiard ball and a pool cue – even his own dick. Written on the photos were messages in ballpoint pen: “Would you like to fuck this ass?”
The guys who found it stole the photos. My brother saw them but I never did.
In time, that shack became an image that I could not shake. I was convinced that it was in a particular set of woods off of the railroad tracks, as far out along the tracks as I had ever traveled. I had no idea if the shack was really around there, or whether I’d invented the location. I’m not even sure about the details of the interior of the shack, I may have made those up as well.
I searched for it, this place I wasn’t even sure existed. I wanted to know what went on in that shack, I wanted to know the man who used it.
I created a flyer that said “Who are you? What are you doing?” and that invited the reader to share his story anonymously in a letter that would be kept confidential. I listed the address of my P.O. Box. I printed about fifty copies of the flyer and laminated them. The plan was to put them up in the woods where I thought the shack would be, as well as in other places – places where people weren’t normally supposed to be – in the hopes that somebody there would communicate with me, would tell me their secrets.
I suppose I thought that by hearing the secrets of others, my own wouldn’t seem so bad. Maybe if we could all share our secrets, the light that was shed would help us to illuminate each other.
Nobody ever wrote.
8 Comments
Feb 24, 2008 @ 16:53:00
That is so fucking cool. I am considerably older than you. There was no such thing as the Internet when I was 15, and I think I’m better off for that. I did, however, subscribe to a catalog called Ah-Men that was ostensibly a clothing catalog, but also offered coffee table books of male nudes and an outrageous selection of underwear modeled by wickedly hot guys. I’m not sure how, or if, I got away with that act of boldness.
Feb 24, 2008 @ 17:33:00
I looked up the Ah Men catalog. Incredible! Featured Paul Barresi and Jack Wrangler as underwear models!
My budding sexuality had to make do with the occasional errant International Male catalog that found its way to our house.
Then came the internet and the Nifty Archive. I had stacks of printed-out stories in a locked trunk in my room, alongside stacks of floppy disks – each of which held about 20 images I’d get from the “M4M PIC4PIC” chat rooms on AOL…memories…
Feb 26, 2008 @ 08:23:00
Finding stacks of playboys and sex shacks, wtf kind of place did you grow up in? lol.
Feb 26, 2008 @ 18:59:00
The sex shack – I’ll grant you – was weird. But didn’t everybody experience “woods porn”? Maybe it’s a Western Pennsylvania thing…
Jan 07, 2009 @ 19:32:00
Although my two pages would undoubtedly put you to sleep, I wanted to say that I have found your two pages illuminating. Thank you.
Mar 22, 2011 @ 11:19:45
When I was 17, there was a guy in our area who listed his services in the classified for “massages for men, by men”. The guy even put his address down there: I guess he was desperate for business. I was so turned on thinking that this was happening in my sleepy town that I wrote the guy and told him about all the lewd things I thought he’d be getting up to. I jacked off while writing the letter. I mailed it but I never gave a return address. I wonder what he thought of it.
Mar 22, 2011 @ 11:47:09
Wow, Chester, that is really cool. Just last year I was moving and had to get rid of a bunch of my old gay porn magazines. I bagged them up then went to a street where there is a bunch off-campus college housing, and left them on a random porch.
Aug 13, 2011 @ 11:18:43
Sweet and touching anecdote…I remember coming/cumming across M2M jackoff magazines in a well known gay cruising park in Toronto, (David Balfour). At the time I figured they were from lonely guys who had no other outlet, came to the park in vain hope and instead jacked off instead, before going home to the wife and kids in the suburb. I felt it my duty in solidarity to donate my 5/6 spritz worth across those pages in support. Other times in that park in broad daylight, were some of the greatest particpatory orgies I have experienced in or out of a bathouse….good times!