A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [29]
As we left the motel, I felt embarrassed and gypped. She asked if I could drop her off at her corner. As we drove I thought she might say something about doing it again sometime, but she didn’t. She simply got out at her corner and slammed the door.
I drove home that night, not feeling changed at all, like I thought I might. I wasn’t about to tell Maurice about Greta and I didn’t feel like driving around those dark streets with him ever again.
Late Movies
After we got our first VCR, I started using it to record my favorite videos off MTV. VH1 had started during my last year of high school as well, but they mostly played boring adult contemporary music. I would spend hours watching music videos with the VCR remote in my hand, ready to record whenever something cool came on. Videos were so fresh and fascinating at the time. The pop star dreams I had as a little kid were even bigger as an MTV-watching teenager. When no one else was around, I’d watch some of these compilation videotapes that I made. I’d work the pause button with great skill while watching videos by Madonna, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, and Robert Palmer. Eventually, I got a membership at the nearby video store and started watching movies on the VCR. Maurice or Darren or some other friend would spend the night and we’d be watching a movie in the front room of the rebuilt house. Sometimes, late at night, Dad would come out wearing long johns and a ratty T-shirt. He would do two things: he would tell us to turn down the volume and then he’d say, “This isn’t one of those rated-R movies, is it?”
Pam
By the time I was eighteen, I had my first real girlfriend. One who would kiss me in front of people and tell me about her periods. It took two months for Pam and me to have sex. She wasn’t a virgin like me. (Okay, I wasn’t technically a virgin either, but did my first time really count? Emotionally I still felt like a big virgin.) She lost her cherry, she told me, when she was fifteen, to a nineteen-year-old who used to babysit her. I didn’t know what a “cherry” was exactly, but her announcement gave me a stomachache. One of the dirty magazines I sought out heavily at that time was called Cheri. It was sleazier than most of the others. In one pictorial, a group of women took turns on a giant chocolate dildo to see who was the blow job queen.
Some of the other magazines I grew bored of. I had heard cautionary tales about porn being like a drug. That I would start to need harder, stronger, more dangerous forms of pornography. A few years later, Ted Bundy mentioned having this problem. Many people thought he was trying to blame pornography for his sick crimes, and I constantly wondered if something was wrong with me as well.
The day after I lost my virginity with Pam, I thought I could get rid of the suitcase. I thought I would want the real thing from there on out. Not only could I have sex with Pam but I could play my Commodores albums for her and she would write me love notes with big bubble letters and heart-shaped happy faces with wide-open hug arms and Flintstone feet. I thought I’d be happy.
We met each other at the Vocational Center where I was taking the Radio/TV class. She was taking some kind of retail class where the students ran a small deli-style store for all the students in the building. I’d go in there and buy Skittles and we’d pass notes to each other. If I didn’t go to the store during each break she would think I was mad at her and she would write a note and have someone give it to me. She was both insecure and bossy. She went to Kamiakin, which was the rival high school in Kennewick.
For most of that senior year, I left the suitcase to fester in the closet. It just sat there, barricaded by the shirts and Miami Vice–style jackets my mom