Be Kind Rewind

Horatio writes: Over the past couple of weeks we have collected a slew of "first encounter with porno video" recollections from pee-wee Christopher Columbuses across the country. Hard to believe from the perspective of our Youporn era in which video is so easily accessible, but our generation's first encounters with moving images of the sex act variety were often more terrifying than erotic. T. from Brooklyn told us how he first watched a friends video at aged 13. It was a piece of Swedish erotica featuring a gent in white pants being orally pleasured by a nurse. "I looked on aghast, amazed by the special effects that were being employed in a movie that had an otherwise shoddy aesthetic. At first I thought she was faking it. Employing that trick we all did with a plastic sword -- you know the one where you mime swallowing it whilst actually sliding it down the side of your cheek. But then they cut to a frontal angle where it became clear that no, this was actually going right down her mouth like some kind of David Copperfield illusion. And I sat there horror struck at this act of sheer violence."

Michael from Brooklyn had a different problem. At fourteen years of age, he uncovered his Dad's Beta video stash -- four movies -- when his mother and father were away for an anniversary weekend and spent two days in a kind of 18 rated version of Home Alone rewinding and fast forwarding through the footage. He remembered it this way, "I spent the first day getting familiar with the story lines and the peculiar rhythms of porno films, and the second 24 just rubbing my penis raw. I absolutely pummeled my crotch. I was unfettered and free. My parents were away. The only challenge I faced was that the video player was really old school... one of those huge top loading clunkers with a remote control that was attached to the actual machine by a thin plastic pipe. And I would sit there frantically fast-forwarding through to my favorite scenes, beating off with one hand whilst trying not to get my hard-on caught in the
wire emerging from the remote control I held in the other. "

Brave explorers. Please send in your stories today. We would love to hear them.

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.