Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Blokes

Horatio writes: A lot of you have written to us about that great swordsman, Owen Wilson. Tears of a Clown. We will end the week topically with a similar cautionary tale from Jim Hawkins of Long Island:

Do you guys do obituary tributes? I would like to throw one into the hopper. The vivid fantasy life I now possess was somewhat threadbare at the age of eleven. The only trick I had in the bag was to lock myself in the toilet and focus like a fiend on my idea of the perfect woman. And the only one that came to mind was Ms. Dana Plato, Kimberley Drummond on the magnificent Diff'rent Strokes. Perky, sophisticated, caring, and as pert as a guard outside of Buckingham Palace, Dana Plato was wife material for hundreds of thousands of eleven and twelve year old boys across the nation. What a keeper. And progressive too. Whatever statements on race ABC may be cooking up with their Cavemen sitcom will be weak retreads of the heavy symbolism of the Drummond home, the sitcom equivalent of the Black Power Salute at the 1968 Olympic Games. Dana Plato was our generation's Rosa Parks. And what could be more sexy than that?

In my mind I was transported from our bathroom behind locked door straight to the Drummond house, only to find it unusually quiet. Maybe Mr. Drummond had taken the boys out to the park to play ball. No one to be found in the living room. Heading upstairs, I would find Dana on her own. Lying on her bed, reading some Judy Blum, looking sassy in her stonewash jeans and some Ton Sur Ton, with Keds perfectly white. She would beckon me over to sit with her on the bed. What happened then is between me and Dana. I am not one to kiss and tell. Truth is, I had no experience to draw on so I did not have a lot left in the hopper to imagine -- I would think about some grinding, some tongue rubbing. And if this did not do the job, would quickly switch scenarios to the Drummond house being totally empty which gave me the perfect opportunity to open Dana/Kimberley's knicker drawer and have a panty huffing fiesta.

Dana Plato's demise is well documented. She did a Playboy spread in the late '80's which I think a lot of guys in college owned multiple copies of. But it just made me sad remembering what we had and what we had lost. To those who feel the same as me, here is a treat for a (real) quick one.

Looking good, Billy Ray! Feeling Good, Louis!

One of the central challenges I faced when I learned how to do the act was to work out what to focus on over the six or seven minutes it took to get the job done. In those days, I had seen very few breasts. In fact I had a working knowledge of just two pairs: my mother's, which were like any mother's -- functional and instructional. And a those displayed by an African American extra during a party scene in the first video I ever rented, the magnificent Trading Places. The actress was a woman of wonder who lifted her arms above her head while dancing to Sylvester's Do You Wanna Funk? enabling a pair of small black breasts to slide clean out of her sequined silver boob tube. Jamie Lee Curtis may have also flopped them out in the film -- several times in fact -- but the party scene was the one I loved. It was less the breasts, and more the actress's nonchalant demeanor that thrilled me. I sat up into the early morning, astonished and excited by her blasé attitude and total lack of shame, rewinding the delicious moment over and over until the videotape began to crackle.

The Crust of My Lust

Horatio writes: We are fascinated by the small details of the act. Like this, from Guy Regan of San Francisco:

My Mother did all my laundry and I, considerate son that I was, wanted to avoid having to make her consistently wash my soiled sheets. That's how it started.

Lying in bed alone, post coitus, wearing only a sticky hand and a guilty smile I came upon the idea of leaning out of bed and drying myself on my pale yellow carpet. My sheets were still clean. Genius.

As the days, weeks and months wore on I had to lean further and further out of bed to find a spot on the carpet that hadn't dried into a dark yellow crusty matt. An ever increasing semi-circle of my self-love. But my sheets were still clean.

At the other end of my room, another crusty circle was growing where I used to sit with my back against the door for daytime lovemaking. This went on from the ages of 14 to 18 till I went away for a year to travel the world and see how other cultures lived. In some countries they use tissues, hankies or items of underwear.

On my glorious return, my mother was pleased to tell me that she had taken advantage of my absence to "redecorate" my room. There was a new wardrobe and a fresh carpet, cream this time.

Thanks to my travels and worldy education, this carpet was never sullied.

My mother and I have never discussed this. Not even a single thank you for all those years of sperm-free bedlinen.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wanker

When I was little my dad, a lawyer, won a decent case and we moved into a fancy house. Not crazy fancy, but cozy enough that the fellow who lived there before us built a secret closet in the master bedroom to stash his stuff. To the unaided eye, this closet was nothing more than a built-in bookshelf. But to the hundreds of kids my brothers and I shepherded inside over the years, it was a club house fit for a teenage James Bond. One pull on the middle shelf and the bookshelf swung open, revealing a cramped, closed-off space that was once a hidden passageway to a bedroom on the other side of the house.

The musty closet was used mainly for storage and contained such items as pleather suitcases, toasters, alarm clocks and anything else the local bank used to entice customers to open a savings account. It also, as my friends and I were delighted to discover one summer afternoon, housed a quite exhaustive collection of 1980's Playboys. If the three trees on our front lawn that formed a natural baseball diamond hadn't already made me the most popular kid in the neighborhood, these titty-filled treasures put me over the top.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In this case our demise was literally brought upon by our own hand. Evidently, the almost daily pile of soggy tissues in the trash can outside the bookshelf was a case even my scatterbrained mother could solve. Under the cover of night, the magazines suddenly disappeared, and so did my reign as most popular kid in 8th grade.

THE HALL OF FAME IS OPEN

Horatio writes: Every school had one character who was the stuff of legend. A player’s player. A pioneer, the fastest gun in the west, a master of porn, or a technical whiz kid. Tell us about them and ensure their achievements are rightfully added to the historical record.

Submitted by Matt Carney of New Jersey:

Porn came into our school in fifth grade. The sole supplier was a kid called Andy Pye whose father was on the vice squad in Newark. Pye Sr. made sure that the streets of Newark were free of illicit magazines and VHS videos. Pye Jr. cycled them back into circulation via my classmates. He was a short, snub nosed boy with a bowlhead hair cut whose personality was captured by the much envied pair of Reactolite Rapide spectacles he proudly sported. Designed to darken in the sun, under the overcast skies of the Jersey winter, his silver-rimmed frames were perpetually smoky grey, which reinforced the aura of smut he naturally emitted.

Pye's contribution to civilization is that he, alone, taught three-quarters of the boys in my class how to masturbate, offering literal "hands-on" tutorials in the toilets behind the school changing rooms. I discovered this fact when kid who was the closest thing we had to a eunuch, a snotty boy called Jon Ogden, rushed up to him as we were all waiting for the bus home, desperately blurting out, "I went home and rubbed it like you showed me for half and hour but nothing happened." Pye patiently took Ogden aside, calmed him down, and then enthusiastically demonstrated several grip adjustments that would make all of the difference. Here was a boy who kept his eyes on the prize. Like cell phone providers offering free handsets to any sucker willing to sign a multi-year service contract, Pye knew the more people who he could get hooked on wanking, the more money he could make from his porno mag rental operation.

And what an operation it was. As with much of high school, there was a clear cut hierarchy. The cool kids got to rent the new magazines – whole copies of Oui, Parade, Penthouse that were practically unused. These were then passed down to the majority of us who would fight to receive them as hand-me-downs – crumpled, and with crusty pages oddly stuck together. The really desperate freaks, like Ogden, would be left to rent plastic bags full of fragments – what was left of the magazines once they had been to thirty or forty homes over the period of a month or two – scraps of stained, torn pages. I would love to know where Pye was today. He was every bit the budding porn entrepreneur who knew his market intimately and was quick to take advantage of the desperate – the cool kids only had to pay 50c a night for an intact magazine. The school freaks were charged twice that – one dollar for the bag of soiled scraps. When I close my eyes, I can picture him as if it was yesterday. Going about his business gripping a big bag of coins tightly in one hand while dishing out the porn mags with the other, cheerily dispensing advice to all for free, "Try doing it with your left hand tonight Josh. It will feel like someone else is banging you off."

Spring Awakening

Horatio writes: Have social scientists studied what first makes a boy, a man? And if not, why not? We would love to hear tall tales of your early days and the forces which first inspired you. This one from Dave K. now of New York City, but born and bred in London, England:

"I got my first hard-on at the age of six watching Carry on Camping – part of a classic British slapstick comedy movie franchise of the Benny Hill variety. There was an actress called Barbara Windsor in it. A short, stacked, saucy blonde. In every movie she was in, her shirt was guaranteed to get caught in the door of a vehicle about to speed off, removing the garment and leaving her for a second standing there, with those fleshy orbs exposed in the light of day. I would bet that Barbara’s were the first pair of breasts seen by 70% of the boys who grew up in the seventies in England."

See Babs in action for yourself. The grand unveiling occurs exactly a minute into this classic.

Watson in Hand, Crick in Neck

My C-5 and C-6 vertebrae are fucked up. They're crooked and they hurt. I know the former because I've had multiple x-rays. I know the latter because I wake up in pain almost every morning.

It would be easy to chalk this injury up to years of competitive tennis and soccer, but like I said, that would be easy. Unfortunately, I believe the real explanation is much more complex and depraved. It goes a little something like this:

As I reported in a previous posting, my teenage years were graced with a giant satellite dish that provided 24-hour porn from all over the world. The dish was connected to a receiver in the basement which in turn was connected to one of those pre-modern, 60", flat screen Mitsubishi TV's that literally weighed close to a thousand pounds. The layout of the basement was such that to access this temple of filth one had to walk down the stairway, pass through the laundry room, and then walk through a door-less entrance way. This is not unnecessary reporting. The fact that the TV could only be viewed once inside the final antechamber is in fact the nexus of this story and in all probability the reason for my injured vertebrae.

You see, for all the hours I spent pleasuring myself down here, I lived in constant fear of being caught. And so I devised what seemed liked the perfect plan: Draping my lap with a blanket, I positioned myself in a lay-z-boy directly in front of the TV. With the remote control in my right hand and my swollen adolescence in my left, anyone entering the basement would be easily detected and I could change channels before they could enter the room and see what was on the screen. It worked gangbusters. From ages 13 to 23, I must have pleasured myself (365 days in a year, multiplied by ten years..) 13,457 times?

Time went on. I moved to Ann Arbor to New York to Atlanta to San Francisco to Los Angeles. I got married, had kids, even grew up a little bit. I left a lot behind. But not everything. To this day my masturbation posture remains exactly the same as it began: right leg bent at 45 degrees, left hand on my purple mushroom top, and always with a pronounced lean to the left. Always. For 23 years I've been beating off with my spine and neck sloped downward and to the left. For over two decades, often twice a day, the most delicate track of bones in my body is unnaturally contorted. Not from playing too much tennis, or rough housing with my children, but because I lack the self-restraint to keep my hands off myself.

And so I ask you— When the pain in my neck became unbearable and I finally went to the doctor for help, shouldn't I have shared the aforementioned details with him? Surely he would have found them beneficial in making a proper diagnosis. Is this really any different from a repetitive stress injury a computer programmer suffers from in their wrist?

Lord knows I've tried to correct the problem on my own. Alternating knees, switching hands, lying on my stomach, etc. But it just isn't the same. I'm a creature of habit and my habit is touching my creature.

Crookedly yours,
A.G.

Breakfast of Champions

Horatio writes: Does the posting below represent desperate measures for desperate times or genius acts of improvisational creativty? You be the judge.

Submitted by Lesley Batty in St. Louis, MO

For want of material to perform the act to, here is the list of the materials I used in the 1980’s and early '90's to focus my thinking and perform the act. Any of the below were used at various and multiple times:

1. Sears clothing catalog sent with the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Bras and knickers section

2. TV Guide feature on Charlie’s Angel Kate Jackson

3. Mary Lou Retton’s gold medal winning performance in the Los Angeles Olympics

4. A Wheaties box featuring figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi

5. Sheena Easton photograph in Rolling Stone. Prince was also in the shot. I used to cover him over with one hand while performing the act with the other.

Great Advances in the History of Technology, Part III

Horatio writes: This was told to us by a friend of ours from Montreal who does not normally dabble in one-upmanship, but this tale is a fine counter to the tennis loving Texan, Kevin Avon.

At least Kevin Aron was aided by electronically generated televisuals in his efforts to visit his "happy place." Mine were far more primitive. I had to view my next door neighbor's knickers hanging out to dry on the washing line which I would spend hours examining in excruciating detail, thanks to the magnifying power of my grandmother's binoculars. Though heavy, I could manage to hold them with one hand and go to work with my other, whilst staring at the polyester knick-knicks gently wafting in the wind. The hardest part? Putting the fact that the binoculars had that musty smell peculiar only to my grandmother out of my mind.

The Blue Blanket of Sin

When I was fourteen my dad installed a satellite dish on the roof of our garage. This new NASA-sized antennae brought in exotic shows and channels from all over the globe. From Australian Rules Football to fiery sessions of Russian Parliament, our basement, where the receiver was housed, instantly became the de facto after-school bunker for every teenage boy in the neighborhood. At first, we gorged ourselves on unlimited viewings of "Hawk the Slayer," and "My Bodyguard." But it wasn't long before we discovered the stations in the 8000 range. Porn. Hard-core, butt-thumping, ball-banging porn. We were disgusted, revolted, and utterly hooked. If a time-lapse film of my adolescence was covertly shot, no one watching it would believe I ever left this room. My friends and I instantly traded in football scores for dirty whores. We spent what felt like weeks on end in that basement, with pillows and blankets draped nonchalantly across our laps to cover our dignity and soak up our discharge.

Late at night, sooner or later, everyone would have to leave, and I would be alone, blue blanket on my lap. Threadbare, this piling and faded powder-blue relic had been in our household as long as I could remember (had mother once swaddled me in it?). Left to my own devices, and making sure the coast was clear, I pleasured myself to no end, always leaving the traces of my love directly into this decaying heirloom. Day after day, I pummeled my blue buddy with the imaginary love of a thousand women. If the super sleuths from CSI ever descended upon my basement with their blue lights, the evidence would have been insurmountable. I would have been arrested for loving too much. Fortunately, thanks to the thoughtful installation of a dehumidifier, the basement was never overly humid and the blanket would always be dry by the next day. On occasion, I would not get to its familar folds first. Some days I would wander into the basement and find one of my friends hiding his bulge in it until it was time to leave. Chad, blissfully unaware he was covering himself with the crusty remnants of my desire, or Brian, falling asleep with his head nestled on top of my glazed and dried boy glue. "Male Bonding" at its best...

Fifteen Love

Horatio writes: A lesson to us all from Texas that there is always someone worse off than you. If you have any tales that top this, we would love to hear them.

Submitted by Kevin Avon, Houston,TX:

Allow me to inject a small dose of reality into this debate, without diluting an iota of its importance. But all you gentleman who think they were hard done to for coming of age before the internet in terms of the fight they had put up to aquire porn. Bite me. Where i grew up, we did not even know porn existed!!! And so, come aged twelve, when gripped by the same urges that the rest of you were overcome by, we turned to the next best thing. Women's tennis. Thank you Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong (nee Cawley), Tracy Austin, and Gabriella Sabatini. I, who have never hit a tennis ball in my life, watched your games obsessively with the same passion as your most dedicated fans. The only difference being, I made a point of watching with my pants around my ankles. One of the toughest matches I had was the 1985 Australian Open Final between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. I believe that "Martini" won. But that was besides the point. Making the magic happen to Chrissie when the camera insisted on cutting away to Navratilova every other shot was delicate, demanding and nuanced work. Some of my finest to that point. By the end of the match, which went to three sets, I was as exhausted as either of the ladies. If you post this, I would like to give a shout out to all those at Virginia Slims who promoted the womens game of tennis for so long. And to Hannah Mandlikova, Betty Stover, and Andrea Jaeger for retiring.

Lesser of Two Evils

Horatio writes: This one was told to us by a dear friend in San Francisco. Porn as the ultimate decoy.

And they say lightning does not strike twice. It did for me. I discovered the dual charms of masturbation and pot at pretty much the same time. The true Californian experience of self -pleasure and self-enlightenment. The two quickly filled my life, emotionally, spiritually and physically. They also played off each other in the most practical of ways. This web site is no doubt being inundated with postings from those forced to hide their porn mag stash in the most James Bond-esque of ways... false bottomed trunks, fake floorboards, Hollowed out tree stumps etc. I kept mine in the boys bedroom equivalent of the plain light of day -- at the very top of the drawer in my bed side table. Right there -- three copies of Penthouse Letters and half of a OUI magazine. Brazenly placed in the very first place my Mom would look when she was hunting around my bedroom under the premise of "tidying up" while I was in class. "What on earth was I thinking?" I hear you ask. Fear not dear reader. I knew that the lurid magazines with the covers of women grinding in ecstasy would be guaranteed to make my mother recoil and slam the drawer shut in horror, thus failing to find my stash of pot which lay quietly just underneath. Young readers out there, read and learn. This porn mag switch and bait worked for me for seven years.

Channel 100

Back in the mid 1970's, acquiring porn wasn't nearly as easy as it is today. You see, before the advent of cable as we know it, and such groundbreaking shows as HBO's "Electric Blue," it was each boy for himself. Unless, of course, your dad happened to be a gadget freak and the proud owner of the country's first cable box: Channel 100. Started in San Diego in 1972, Channel 100 became the first cable company to use the optical system arrangement. I'm still not sure exactly what that means, other than we were now treated to two movies a week! Kind of exciting, but still not porn. Fortunately, the pervert gene doesn't fall far from the tree, and it wasn't long until my brother and I made the discovery of a lifetime. Late one night, when he thought everyone else was asleep, we saw our father, in his skivvies, wedging a grape-stained popsicle stick into the rotary dial on the cable box. What the hell was that madman doing? And suddenly, in a flash, we witnessed a modern day miracle. LIke Moses before god, or Aristotle before Socrates, we were about to receive the gift of a lifetime. Porn! Sweet, glorious porn! My dad, in all his filthy genius, had just discovered and unlocked one of the divine cheat codes of the universe: a popsicle stick properly wedged between channels 99 and 100 would open up a channel of porn! Previously masked by ugly static, it had been there since the beginning! Like Oz from behind the curtain, the truth had been revealed! Unfortunately, so had my dad's now swollen Johnson, and my brother and I booked out of there like Shaggy and Scooby. The secret now revealed, it wasn't long until we returned with popsicle sticks of our own. After many failed attempts, complete with splinters and broken sticks, the students soon became the master. For the next few years, we were treated to porn on demand. And then, miraculously, the porn gods saw fit to bless us once again as my dad came home one evening with the country's first satellite dish!...

Black Snake Moan

Anonymous in Providence writes:

My early pornographic memories were made in the basement of my childhood home, where my dad saw fit to gift his three boys with satellite television and a "black box" that gave us unlimited access to amazing channels like Spice. Spice had a regular cast of characters including "Black Snake," a muscular, well-oiled, man who was not surprisingly quite a hit with the ladies. Sometimes Spice's pornsemble was superseded by special non-Spice content intended for a specialty audience. "Life in the Fat Lane" for example; think hairy little men spreading apart mounds of flesh in search of an opening. This gem, which my older brothers subjected me to by fast-forwarding through the fascinating dialogue right to the money-shots, created some unfortunate associations in my impressionable pre-pubescent mind. This might partially explain why I was a late beat-bloomer, along with an ignorance of the benefits of lubrication, and an apocryphal story about a neighborhood kid (last name Peterson) who got his dick stuck in a bottle while using it inappropriately.

Sadly, it wasn't until I was twenty-one years old that I beat off successfully while fully conscious. My therapist found this impossible to believe. It was only after I explained the lubrication problem that she stopped scribbling notes (liar? severely repressed sexual deviant? pathological guilt?). I don't know why my ignorance of lube was such a plausible explanation. It can't be a common problem, at least not for seven years, but for me, friction was an insurmountable obstacle until at the age of twenty-one I confided in my older brother and he told me, "skin on skin is no good. You need lotion." After that, with the help of a few magazines I brought back from Brazil, vegetable oil (an innovation born of need) and memories of a Brazilian prostitute who showed me what is possible in life, I started to make up for lost time.

A college roommate of mine that year had very strange sleeping habits. Most days, he would take around five very brief naps. Of course this was suspicious, so one day when he was gone I checked out his room and was delighted to find a shoebox full of lesbian VHS tapes. I put one in the VCR, and immediately it was clear why he needed to take so many "naps". Sitting on his bed, dick in hand, enjoying the spectacle of a giant 69-style circle of cheerleaders, I heard someone come home. I was nearly finished, and I wasn't about to stop now.. no, I wouldn't even stop when that someone knocked on the door.. but, why, why didn't I say "don't come in" or "just a minute"? I don't know, there was the intensity of the moment, and I thought the door was locked, and I thought he would just go away. But the door wasn't locked. It opened and my roommate looked at me in shock and quickly shut it. When I came out a few minutes later he asked me why it wasn't locked.

As a teenager who was not yet familiar with the pleasures of self-pleasure, no locked doors were necessary. My friends and I sat in the basement with pillows discretely placed on our laps watching the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue "Making of" video over and over (was there ever another reason to buy Sports Illustrated?) hoping to capture in slow motion the elusive single frame where Ella MacPherson accidentally pulled up her bra to reveal nipple. I'm not sure if that frame ever existed, but it did in my mind.

A Byrd in The Hand

Horatio writes: At last, our first Robin Byrd name check. The Cal Ripken of public access whose impact on our generation is akin to that Lance Armstrong has had on today's:


Anonymous in NYC writes:

Like thousands of others no doubt, I used to beat off to Robin Byrd late night in New York City. If the Yankees were playing in the evening on the west coast, I would sit there with my pants open watching Robin, and flicking the channel backwards and forwards to catch the score of the game. If I touched myself accidentally when the baseball was on, I would agonize for like a month afterwards that I was subconsciously gay.

Everything I know, I learned in...

Submitted by Reuben Kane from New York:

It is fascinating to ponder the extent to which kids are spoiled for porn today. Thanks to the Interwebs they don't just know which websites they prefer, they have defined the exact fetishes they lust after. Think eleven year-old kids who already know they are into asian dwarf action or footplay. Back when I was thirteen, I had just aquired my first magazine. The way i came upon it was unremarkable. What is more interesting for the purpose of this project is that it remained the only magazine in my possession, and hence my sole source of information on the fairer sex, for the next three years. If you consider the fact that i "perused" the magazine's content between two or three times a day during that span, you can begin to appreciate the massive impact those 120 pages have had on the rest of my life.

The magazine, an English one called PARADE, was a mix of photographic spreads and the written word. The photos were rather explicit, especially for the neophyte I was back then. The pictorials were of sloppy, dolled-up women dressed as nurses treating a patient or drivers being pulled over by a policeman. The premise was but a detail as clothes were shed quickly and limbs were soon splayed over a nearby desk or car seat. By no stretch of the imagination could these women be deemed attractive. Many had acne coating their ass cheeks -- a similar looking form to that which crusted my adolescent face. It did not take long for me to decide that I was more of a stories kind of guy. Thankfully there was a lot of written material -- both fictional essays and letters, purported to be sent in from readers. Both types covered the same terrain: a fabulous bed breaking sexual encounter occurring mostly when the particpants least expected it -- in the workplace, whilst shopping, or while trying to fix a blocked drain. All of these masterpieces covered the material with the same graphic, thrilling rhythym. And it was from this material, and from this material alone, that I learned about the intricate labryinth that is a woman's mind. To wit:

1. All Secretaries live to bang their bosses:
Let's face it. Filing is a chore. And these women, whose life achievement is to take dictation from a mid-level manager at some sales office in an industrial outpost in the North of England quickly become irresistibly enamored with their boss. After weeks of arousal signalled by the wearing of ever more plunging necklines and skirts which end an inch or two above their pubic mound, unforgettable sex is inevitable. Failing that, all store rooms with a photocopier in them have the power of the most potent aphrodisiac.

2. All women LOVE to give head, all of the time:
A couple of the stories were written from the female point of view. To be honest, I cared little for them, saving them as a last resort on those literal rainy days when I had too much time on my hands and needed some variety. The one line all of them shared came at the beginning of the sexscapdes, when both partners were still relatively well-clothed. The woman would drop to her knees, unzip her partner d'amour's pants, and use her mouth to ready him for the orgasmic action that was guaranteed to follow. The interior monologue was always the same. A line to the effect of "I love to suck cock. What woman doesn't?" I made a mental note and kept reading.

3. Working class men get laid. A lot.
Growing up in a suburban milieu, the expectations for my future were clear: Lawyer, Doctor, Investment Banker etc. But these professions did not feature too prominently in the pages of Parade magazine and gave me pause for thought about my career options. Most of the story scenarios were about random, unexpected encounters between bored housewives (was there any other type?) and the men in their lives who were not their husbands. The plumbers who came to fix their faucet, the pizza delivery man who came to provide sustenance, the mechanic who fixed the car. Real men, who saved the day, and wore overalls that could be quickly and easily removed. These men lived lives that seemed to be rollercoasters of anonymous yet incredibly satisfying humpy pumpy in which the payment they received in non-monetary fashion far outstripped the riches apparently on offer to the white collar worker.

4. Most women love nothing better than to be thrown over a waist high object, forced to spread their legs and then made to look back at their partner with the kind of snarl Billy Idol perfected on the White Wedding Tour.

5. Nothing is sexier than a Loser
What connects the nervous warehouseman who drunkenly confides to the office receptionist that he has not been laid in years to the virgin college sophomore who stumbles into the room in which his best freind's mother is tanning herself on a sunbed naked or the bookish librarian who helps the divorcee find a book deep in the stacks? Women love a man who plays the incompetence card. They love to kiss a frog and find a prince. Need I tell you that in the case of these stories, all of the above turned out to be expert swordsmen who knew how to blow a woman's mind? All they lacked was the opportunity.

I want the world to know that the fact I did not get laid till I was 21 has nothing -- Nada -- to do with any of this. Actually, it probably does. But those acne ridden ladies amd the writers -- neigh bards -- who created that single edition of Parade magazine gave me so much pleasure over an extended period, that given the chance to start over and do things differently, I would not change a thing.

House of Perversity

Horatio writes: Magazines were most often a gateway drug. And videos -- Betamax or VHS -- were rarely far behind. This post from LA is classic. We are are eager to hear your tales of classic scenes, thesbian performance, and even, great lines that are burned in your memory.

Submitted by Jeff Holt, Los Angeles:

My prize possession -- my equivalent of the Willy Wonka Golden ticket -- growing up was the one VHS porn video I was able to buy off a class mate. I watched it so many times I can remember it intimately. It pretty well defined everything I knew about women and about sex between the ages of eleven and sixteen. It was called HOUSE OF PERVERSITY and was dubbed into English from another language – for some reason, I always thought the women looked French. The plot line was about a mansion in which the lord and lady would take it in turns to proposition their staff who were always game to put down their brooms or cooking implements for little lip locking action Lady Chatterly style. The movie began with the two ladies of the house – one blonde and one brunette – having breakfast whilst being waited on by their butler, a large black man with a fake looking moustache. Whilst he was pouring their tea, the women idly discussed who they “would have” today. The blonde one suggested “Tom the Gardener.” An idea the brunette nixed because “I had him yesterday.” They then proceeded to exhaust a slew of other ideas – from Henry the gamekeeper to Trevor the driver before the blonde had a eureka moment fir for Archimedes himself. She looked at the man serving them and said with a giddy salacious tone, “What about Clyde the Butler?” Clyde giggles nervously and subserviently, looking down with shame, managing to squeak out “Oh no ladies, I have work to do…” but both ladies stand up, and a tinny funky soundtrack replaces the pastoral harp music which had been strumming discretely in the background to this point. And as it does, Clyde put down his silver tray and unzips his pants pulling out his manhood with the immortal line delivered in the deepest Jamaican Patois… “I hope you ladies like the taste of Chocolate.” The last word was drawn out so it seemed to consist of an endless amount of syllables… “cho-ck-ow-la-ay-te.”

Filthy

Horatio writes: More on the desperate struggle for magazine aquisition, fused with with an entrepreneurial flavor that was often inextricably connected to magazine ownership back in those days.

Submitted by N. Jones, Connecticut

As a kid, nothing was harder to come upon (pun intended) that good, grade A porn. My dad's personal stash was under lock and key. My friends and I spent our days fruitlessly scheming how we could steal the latest Playboy from the local 7-11. One day, out in the woods (isn't it always out in the woods?), I stumbled upon a half-buried Playboy. Dog-eared, rotting, and reeking of moss and piss, it was love at first sight. So filthy was this treasure, that I came back with a garbage bag and tongs. Once at home, the preservation process began. Like a pimply faced, teenage Louis Leakey, I put on latex gloves, lovingly removed each page and inserted them into glad bags and re-bound the pages with Elmer's glue. After a solid month of studying my excavation in private, I sold it to a high-school junior for 5 bucks.

Special Delivery

Horatio writes: Lets kick this beauty off with a story of discovery that showcases the core issue that faced all of us -- the top shelf of the newstand was both high and embarrassingly in plain view. The fight to get hold of adequate materials often depended on acts of God.

Submitted by S. Rye, New York, New York:

I can pinpoint the precise second when my adolescence began. I grew up in the suburbs of Westchester, New York and spent a major part of my youth marauding around, finding the rare green areas that existed between houses – you know the kind of glade with grass uncut or heavy foliage that feels like you are in the middle of nowhere even though in reality you are merely yards away from the nearest McMansion. I would go with two of my friends and we would hang out and throw stones, and set fires and generally behave like suburban Huck Finns. One day, in an empty lot, we found an abandoned US Postal Service van. The back of the truck was open, and there was mail everywhere. We jumped in the back and ripped open a few envelopes completely oblivious to the concept of Federal offenses etc. The first couple we opened were uninspiring. Direct mail. Personal letters. And then we struck gold. In a package tied with string we found a neat stack of magazines… Playboys! The moment we opened them, our lives were changed for ever more. Mind you, up until now, these types of magazines were merely the stuff of legend. We'd all caught fleeting glimpses of our dad's, but never had copies of our own, to pore over and study with an intensity our studies never knew. We sat in the back of the van looking at these parts in utter silence, like primitive man upon first discovering fire. For years, we had taunted each each other on the school yard for years, calling each other “beaver,” “snatch,” or “tithead” but had never seen actually seen what they looked like before… we divvied the packet up and all ran home as quickly as possible. I kept mine in a shoe box at the base of my wardrobe and would pull it out and study it for hours. What I found most engrossing were the ads at the back for a variety of aids like pocket vaginas, and blow up dolls and arab straps – a shocking world of creative invention and danger.