A Goodbye to Porn

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I will not go as far as to make the outrageous claim that sometimes fiction is based on real events.  Nor will I, as a middle-aged, respectable professor, admit to having anything but a theoretical knowledge of pornography.  But….

But let’s assume for a moment that there is a boy—let’s call him George—who when he is young stumbles upon a stack of magazines in his father’s underwear drawer, and, being visually stimulated in the manner of most male homo sapiens, decides that he likes what he sees.  Later George, out on his own now, will collect these magazines, though he will also be involved in relatively healthy relationships with young women, women whom he will talk to and listen to and have sex with.  In his mind the pictures of naked women that he likes do not impede or compete with his partners, but merely offer occasional variety.  He will continue to look at these pictures throughout his young life, feeling a little seedy maybe, but never experiencing any sense that he is being disloyal.  That will not happen until one of these young women convince him that the hoarding of pictures of naked women is indeed a bad thing, and though he is never entirely convinced of this fact, he does come to understand that this women who he is with feels this way, and, since he cares about her, he does not want to hurt her.  And so our George will undergo a rarely-mentioned ritual of American manhood: he will move beyond (through?) pornography.  He will say goodbye to porn.

* * *

Now let me back up and be very clear here.  As a tenured professor, I believe that George, porno-lover that he is, is a very bad person.  You bet: he is icky, non-P.C., and I wag my finger at him.  No, I do not like George, not one bit.

Having cleared that up, I should mention that my wife, Nina, is a writer.  When her first book of short stories, Of Cats and Men, came out, she wrote a story about a young man named Jack, who, in his love of pornography, was a little like our George.  (“Apparently Playboy was little too tame for Jack,” she wrote.  “His collection consisted almost entirely of Penthouse.”)  As a good fiction writer, my wife understands the rules of genre and she never borrows anything from real life, preferring to make things up whole cloth.  For instance, this Jack of hers was nothing like me.  While I was a writer and ultimate Frisbee player who traveled around the country to tournaments, this Jack was a writer and rock climber who traveled around scaling peaks.  We were very different.  That much is clear.

Anyway, in the story Jack takes off winter camping one weekend and while he is away his girlfriend, Eve, finds a box containing pornography in his closest.  Eve goes through the magazines and discovers that the models look surprisingly un-human, particularly one named “Shana,” whose “lips curled and sneered” and whose boyfriend didn’t mind that she was posing in Penthouse—“though he did worry some other man might try to ‘put out her fire.’”  Eve, though appalled by her discovery, manages to control her anger for a couple of days after Jack returns, until one night when Jack is relaxing in a hot bath after a fight they have had.   Then Eve recovers the box of porn and charges back into the bathroom, tossing the magazine into the hot water.  I’ll let Eve take it from here:

Jack stared at me up from the tub, resolved to quietly take his punishment, however inequitable.  I plucked Shana off the top of the stack.

‘What do you think, Shana?’ I shook the magazine open and asked the centerfold, who glared provocatively from beneath her fireman’s cap.  “Do you think I’m being irrational?

‘What do you know?’ I said to Jack.  ‘Shana’s not talking.’  I tossed the magazine into the tub.

Reflexively, Jack pitched forward to rescue Shana from her watery grave, but in sudden deference to me he pulled back.  It was touching and athletic gesture—the instant recoiling, snapping his hands back, allowing Shana and her firefighting paraphernalia to sink heavily to the bottom of the tub, newsprint smearing her face like runny mascara.  Sacrificing her to spare my feelings.

I was not so moved that I didn’t query Desiree, Samantha, and Nicolette.  Each silent, vacant-eyed response was rewarded by a scuba diving trip into our bathtub.  Finally I dumped the entire stack, which fell with a flutter and a glug—while Jack sat with his knees drawn in to his chest, trapped in the ink-muddied water.

* * *

As I say my wife is a very strict fiction writer and never bases her characters on anyone.  But if she did base Jack on a real person, then I think that that real person might consider themself more lucky than violated.  After all, not everyone has their goodbye to porn immortalized.