The Mall
Repost from old blog, 1/28/2008
Breath shallow, feet taking me to my destination, I would enter the warm light of the bookstore and duck the imagined glare of the clerk. I might browse the science fiction section for a minute, but inevitably, I’d go to where I really wanted to be: the “Relationships” section.
There is one of these in every chain bookstore in every mall in America, so perhaps, right this instant, there is a pre-teen boy whose parents are shopping at K-mart, oblivious, while he leafs through the gauzy, vanilla-flavored naked bodies pictured in The New Kama Sutra, the book jacket worn and torn at the edges – a book for browsing only, a book that nobody buys.
I had discovered the motherload – over ten paperback volumes of the Letters to Penthouse anthology, some of which, crucially, contained a section of stories titled “Boy Meets Boy.”
I would read them crouched down low, my knees and ankles beginning to get sore, my palms sweaty, my quivering little hard-on pressing against the inside of my jeans, one eye always on the lookout. I didn’t know if I could get in trouble for looking at this stuff and I didn’t want to find out. Just the act of reading it was shameful enough.
On my second or third trip, I noticed the book displays at the entrance to the store, placed right at the threshold, so that one could pick up a book and browse it while standing, technically, outside of the store.
As much as I wanted to take home my favorite volume of Letters to Penthouse and get to understand it on a more intimate level, purchasing it was not an option. That would mean owning up to my desires, even if it were only to an anonymous Waldenbooks clerk.
Instead, I experimented with covertly carrying it around, inching ever closer to those exterior book displays. Soon I was standing outside of the store, the book still clutched in my hand. No alarms were going off. Nobody was watching me. Technically, I reasoned, I was already stealing, so why not just take a few more steps, down the hall, out of the mall, to my car where I’d be safe and free and full of the promise of porn.
I walked away without consequence. I did it on subsequent trips, again and again, until I had about five volumes of the series. I never got caught. I would walk through the mall with my heart racing and the paperback cupped in my sweaty palm, tucked underneath my sweatshirt – a pervert, a thief, a homo at the mercy of his dirty little secret.
3 Comments
Oct 14, 2010 @ 21:39:13
Love you, you pervy, thieving homo.
Oct 16, 2010 @ 10:06:59
I remember that time in my life.
A teenager cruising the magazine rack at Walgreens. Browsing magazines I had no interest in so that I could “casually” check out some soft porn … Exercise For Men Only, I think was my target.
The camera in the plastic bubble on the ceiling supposedly watching for shoplifters when I knew it was really there to catch the queers looking at mostly nude hunky male bodies … like me.
Putting the mag in my basket with half a dozen other items I really didn’t need but were there just to draw less attention to my quasi-homo selection.
My heart beating so fast as I got home with my purchase and in the privacy of my own bedroom flipping through until I found the guy who would be the object of my fantasy for the moment.
Thanks for this.
Oct 17, 2010 @ 18:54:07
“Exercise for Men Only”! God I loved that magazine. I wonder if it’s still produced? Last I checked the sleazier muscle mags (such as that one) were being pretty blatant about their audience, including ads for muscle worship and outright gay videos in the back pages.
Your story reminded me of buying my first porno mag when I turned eighteen. I bought an issue of Playgirl and included an issue of Playboy, just to confuse and draw less attention from the clerk. Hilarious!