THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF MY PARENTS' POLAROIDS

I can't believe I'm writing this. When I was a teenager, I found my parents' hidden stash of porn. Actually, it happened very easily. One day, I was home alone for a few hours after school, and I was bored and snooping around the house. You see, both my parent's worked, and I took the bus home, let myself in. I'd get the mail. Once a month was a magazine in a black plastic cover. Being a teenager, I knew two things: first, that it was "adult" related and not to be looked at by me; and secondly, that I couldn't risk letting them know that I knew. Stealing it would raise suspicion, as would a torn package. Kids are smart that way. It was clear that as long as my dad thought his delivery was safely anonymous in the stack of mail, he'd continue his subscription. And long as he did that, it gave me ample time to find the next logical thing: his hiding spot.

Under beds has got to be in the top three most common (and most obvious) hiding places. Under their bed, I found a stack of Penthouse and a tube of KY jelly. I noted if the magazines were facing cover up or down, and which order, allowing me to look at them one by one, and return exactly as I'd found them. It seemed to work, because after school, I always found them in their spot. Page after page, the world opened up to me. Beautiful Penthouse models, and rediculous, but arousing stories from "readers."

I also realized that the issues under the bed were always the last three or four months. That meant one of two things: either he threw away the magazines after he was done with them, or he had an even more secret stash of back issues. Of course, I hoped that he threw them away. That might seem counter-intuitive, but you see, if he thought he was ditching them for good, he'd never look for them again. All I'd have to do was fish them out of the trash (and taking out the trash was already one of my chores). I knew, however, that his Scottish temperament wouldn't allow him to discard anything of any real or imagined value. He was far too much of a miser to part with older magazines. So that left the only conclusion possible: another hiding place.

Now as a kid, I'd read my share of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe (and watching Scooby Doo); I was fully prepared to start looking behind picture frames from hidden safes, looking for hollowed books on dusty shelves, or pushing in parts of the woodwork to reveal secret passageways.

Sadly, all I had to do was turn to the second most obvious hiding place in a house: the bedroom closet. It took me absolutely no time at all to discover that behind the neatly folded sweaters was at least three of four years of Penthouse magazines. This was as thrilling to a teenage boy as King Tut's tomb was to Howard Carter in 1922. It posed a unique danger, though, the complexity of maintaining the piles exactly as they were, and the sweaters, folded, returned as they were.

After school, I'd go straight to the closet, gently pull out the sweater stack, note exactly how they looked. Then reach back and carefully with draw a stack of magazines. After I'd read through the first stack, I'd have to move more and more to get to the older ones. It was like digging deeper into a mine, following the vein. The deeper you get, the risker it gets.

But that's when I discovered the book. It had a red cover and-to my surprise and delight--the title read: "The Curse of the Caine Under Captian Queeg. I cannot tell you how my heart was racing. Having grown up on tales of pirates and buried treasure, this was surely a find. I knew the name Queeg--the captain of the Caine, who's crew mutinied becuase he could not give the decisive order in the face of a hurricane. All of my nerves were on alert for any sound in the driveway. When you're looking at something you know you shouldn't be looking at, it feels like someone is watching you. Carefully, I inspected the book. And literally (I'm not making this up) I checked to see if the cover had been rigged with a strand of hair to indicate a breech.

The inside cover was creme with a sea chart of islands, but I only noticed that afterwards. At the instant I opened the book, dozens of polaroid pictures spilled out. I panicked, because it'd never be able to put them back in the exact order they'd been stored.

I finally began to breathe again. Of course, taken by my parents, they were of my parents. Part of me felt the natural and universal revulsion of being confronted with one's parents' sexuality. And then part of me was a teenager, full of curiosity. Curiosity, when one is a teen, always wins over revulsion.

In the images, I saw graphic details of sex completely unlike the pretty, soft-focus Penthouse centerfolds. These were in sharp detail, with absolutely no layer of art or modesty. There was my dad's cock, long from fucking. My mom cupping her big boobs. My dad's cock penetrating her. Her on her back on the bed, spreading for the camera. Her on her knees, her butt in the air. I soon saw what the KY was used for. I had not only seen my first visual of intercourse, I saw my first images of anal sex. I was shocked, and disgusted, and yet could not stop looking. They were so bold, so real.

You have to try and imagine the world before the internet. Before even DVDs and cable TV. In those days, Porn came to the average American home in one of to forms: Playboy or Penthouse. My friends and I had stolen copies and seen what those glossy pages had to offer. Some of my friends claimed they'd spied on their sisters changing or maybe on a neighbor girl--but you could never fully believe them. But here, in my hands, was the most hard-core porn possible.

I'm sure any Freudian would have his theories about the psychological damage it caused me. But in some ways, it was the best sex ed my parents could have given me. After seeing the images, I had few questions left. It wasn't two actors performing the cliches of porn, but an actual, middle age, middle class, married couple doing what they do in the bedroom.

Naturally, I put the images back exactly as they'd been, replaced the magazines, and gently pushed the sweaters back in place.