Serendipitous Porn: A Timeline
1989
Over lunch recess, a schoolmate at Carleton Heights P.S. finds a paperback-sized porn magazine behind (or in) a dumpster on an adjacent lot. Brings it to the far end of the schoolyard, where we all sneak a quick look at it. The photos are all black and white. Many are captioned with cartoon voice bubbles, and every section seemed to feature the same two women and mustachioed man. The print was ‘zine quality and infused with ads for prophylactics and mail-order schemes. Nobody gets to hold the magazine for more than a few seconds before a recess monitor scattered the pack. The mag was shoved down a pair of jogging pants, and was never seen again.
1991
Walking home from the corner store, a scrap of pink-kissed paper catches my eye. It’s a page from a magazine, depicting a “France Fuck-Fest”. The page is wet from the rain. 1-976 ads on the back side. I put it in my pocket, but chicken out when I get home, and stuff it down a sewer grate.
1992
On a bike ride with a friend around the military base area of South Ottawa, on an unused road in the middle of a construction site. A crinkled Swank magazine next to a plastic bag. Inside the bag are two tubs of margarine. We are aware of what that margarine might be. Undaunted, we take the magazine to a nearby sandpit, where we sit in the wilting sun and pass it back and forth, studying it like it’s on loan from the research library. The sandpit is infused with the warm stench of skunks, and grasshoppers buzz amidst the wobbling weeds. Jamie, an older kid from the neighbourhood, finds us, and wants to take a look. “Awesome,” he says, “you guys found porno. Hide it in here, OK?” We stuff it into a plastic bag (not the margarine bag), and tuck it under a log. Getting late, so we go off on our bikes quickly, silent with excitement. Jamie takes one more look to make sure it’s safe. This was big.
1992 – same summer
Away at a summer camp, one of the other kids in my cabin gets his hands on a magazine, another Swank, but this one from the 1970s. He also gets cigarettes somehow. The origin of these two items is mystery to this day, but my suspicion is that an older brother brought them as gifts during Family Day. The magazine depicts the carefree hazy lazy dazy 1970s in all their wide-lapelled, big-haired glory. Hot tubs were the new thing it seemed, and porn was just becoming an industry. There were ostensibly sexy captions. “I don’t even wanna know your name…I just wanna fuck you.” Early pornographers honing their craft, perhaps. The magazine is so-so, but I am entranced by a woman in a leopard-skin suit with an Amazonian porn name who would, in my estimation, still be considered quite attractive by today’s standards. Sometimes we take the magazine to a sunken platform of moist terrain right below a huge cedar tree. The space offers a beautiful view of Lake Vernon, and a chance to smoke without getting caught. We hide the magazine in a crumbling log away from heavy traffic, but a few rainfalls later and it starts to disintegrate, and by the time we got back from our three-day group excursion to a nearby island, it was gone.
1995
I find a High Society amidst my collection of old computer, hip-hop, and wrestling mags, with no idea how it got there. I suspect a neighbourhood kid who had last been allowed in my home three years prior, after my mother caught him sneaking around in the top drawer of her dresser, where the jewelry box was.
2000
On my way back to university from Xmas holiday, in side pocket of luggage, two Playboy magazines, and a Post-It that says “Enjoy — Dad”.
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(4 comments)
Serendipity is certainly the appropriate term here. I was there on that hill in 1989!
Isn’t it odd that a friend you met in University also happened to be there that day at Carleton Heights, looking at the porn behind a grassy knoll on the south side of the school? We didn’t know each other then, you being in French Immersion and I being an English-speaking, Frog-hating Indian boy fresh off the boat from Arabia. Years later, we meet again at University 560kms away, through our mutual blogs, bonded over beer, porn, & music as we graduated from penniless students to interesting adults.
Would our lives have turned out differently had we known each other then? Probably. Do I regret it? Non, c’est la vie. Chalk up another one to the Muse of Serendipity.
If that is Carleton Heights in Ottawa, I went there too. ’93-’96. No porn for me though. Only Pogs.
The very same, Septima. No porn? Clearly you did not get the full Carleton Heights experience!
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