Friday Firesmith – My First Porn

When I was ten or eleven I found a Penthouse magazine in a ditch and my life changed forever. First of all, I knew that getting caught with such material was an executional offense. My parents had never told me not to pick up photos of nearly naked women but at the same time that was during the days of hit first and reason it out later. That which was not mandated was entirely taboo. I knew getting caught with this magazine meant death and I knew if I showed it to my friends they would eventually say something to someone and the Gestapo that was the group of stay at home moms in our neighborhood would finally track down who had found the magazine and not reported its existence.

The hormones hadn’t really started kicking in yet but I knew there was something likeable about females. I had no idea any of them looked like the women in the magazine and I must admit that something deep and primeval stirred within. I hid the magazine under a piece of plywood in the woods and vowed never to get near it except when there was no one else around for miles and miles and miles, which was nearly never.

I finally devised a better hiding place by going with the “hid in plain sight” plan which would also add to the list of suspects if the parents discovered the existence of my secret magazine. Now, remember, this was the early seventies and Penthouse was basically a T&A magazine that was very mild by today’s standards. But this was something I had heard of but never seen and certainly never experienced firsthand, no pun intended. I hid the magazine in my neighbor’s garage under his stack of National Geographic. I was an avid reader and was forever going over and browsing through his stacks of stuff. Risky, yes, but there was great risk in all of this for me.

Now, here’s the weird part, if it could get even stranger; Penthouse Forum was an alien concept to me. Reading those stories was akin to reading Satanic writings on the walls of Hell itself. There was a story about a young man who was trying to get a push mower out from the rafters of his garage and he became entangled in a water hose just as the mower slipped and fell. Well, there he was, on his back in the rafters, his hand secured by a water hose and his best friend’s mom came over and caught him in this compromising position and compromised him.

I mean, damn.

This blew my mind. People did this? Wow! I mean, where did these people live that this could and did happen? My brain was totally fried. I eventually shared the magazine with my friends, and in that small group of very naughty boys we discovered that someone’s father had a collection of these magazines and after that, it was on.

The weird thing about all of this is for some bizarre reason I thought about that story last night. It has just now occurred to me, forty years later, that no one would store a push mower in the rafters of a garage.

Take Care,
Mike

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit

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