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."