never tell them what you’re actually wearing
T
here are three experiences I had in junior high that wildly influenced my nascent sexuality, and all can be traced back to Melissa Ackerman.
Melissa Ackerman was the alpha girl of a mini-clique with liberal enough standards to admit me into its ranks at age twelve. I was elated to be in the social servitude of such a horrible person.
Melissa was a mini-sociopath, according to my mom, who was getting her PhD in psychology at the time and practiced her diagnostic skills on my new friends. And indeed there was something Dexter
-
esque about Melissa, that jerk. She’d constantly pull Queen Bee shit on me to mess with my status. One day she’d be my best friend, the next week she’d glare at me in the cafeteria, whispering nasty things about my parakeet to her posse.
But for one glorious stretch of time, I was one of Melissa’s Yes Girls, and one Saturday night, she invited me to sleep over at her house, which would turn out to be the site of Nascent Sexual Awakening Experience Number One. Also in attendance was Melissa’s BFF, Hannah Ginsberg, a girl with a gummy smile and shaggy layer cut with a constantly yarmulkewearing, bearded father; Deborah Kaiser, the basset-hound facsimile attracted to topsiders, Sally Jessy Raphael glasses frames, and probably, one day, other women; and finally, sweet relief incarnate, Ronit Yellen, the new girl from Israel by way of Massachusetts, whom I’d circled and poached, hawklike, upon catching the scent of “New person who hasn’t known me since kindergarten when I was assigned my rank on the day-school pecking order and so might one day think I was awesome.” We all got together at Melissa’s house to watch
Dream a Little Dream
, a teen comedy intended to whimsically dampen the Hanes Her Ways of girls in our preteen demographic, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman. We were to have a girltastic time.
Melissa was spoiled by her parents, a mouthy Egyptian mom and a dad who was never around. Her bedroom was bedecked with all the trappings of a tween dream: she had a princess phone, a tiny pink TV/VCR combo, boys on the walls ripped from the pages of
Tiger Beat
, and a daybed with a trundle underneath it for Hannah, her Number Two. After Kosher pizza, Melissa led us through what she decided was sleepover-y fun. We played M.A.S.H. and found out whether we’d live in Mansions, Apartments, Shacks, or Houses when we got older. We made those origami fortune-teller things you put on your fingers so we could find out whether our husbands would be Eytan, Josh, Ben, or Yehuda after jotting down the Hebraic names of our comelier male classmates on the insides of the paper folds. We made a big deal about taking our new bras off in time for bed. And all the while, a syndicated episode of
Night Court
was on in the background that would burn an indelible impression onto my budding sexuality.
It was the episode in which John Larroquette’s smarmy lawyer character, Dan Fielding, saves the life of Markie Post’s goody-two-shoes character, Christine Sullivan, by using the Heimlich maneuver on her when she chokes. Because Dan saved Christine’s life, the premise went, she was obligated to sleep with him. Maybe sort of fucked-up for
Night Court
, but don’t forget how many prostitutes and hobos were woven into the story line of what was otherwise a pretty genial prime-time sitcom starring a magician.
It’s difficult to overemphasize how erotically compelling this episode of
Night Court
was to me. I thrilled at the notion of a silver-haired, libidinous character actor old enough to be somebody’s
old
dad, coercing his co-star into taking a load of cum down the same throat he’d dislodged food from earlier in the episode! I imagined Markie Post wriggling beneath John Larroquette on the floor of the hotel room he’d secured for the occasion, sick with the cheap champagne he made her drink, prostrate with extreme weakness, forced to let him enter her and pound until he finished. At the end of the episode, when Larroquette had a change of heart about their “sex-for-choking-avoidance arrangement” and his stupid conscience kicked in, I had a case of twelve-year-old blue clit that an army of Coreys couldn’t slake. I drifted off in the middle of
Dream a Little Dream
, quelled by visions of Dan Fielding grunting over my arched back, holding his calloused hands over my mouth as I whimpered “no.”
I spent the better part of that year in Melissa’s clique, with the sporadic banishments that come along with being friends with someone wont to hate you randomly at a moment’s notice. Like a lot of junior-high girls drunk on their own company, we were very excited about our little group. We came up with a code for our teachers’ names we’d use in notes we’d pass among one another. We ate lunch together every day and listened to Melissa’s decrees about whether or not it was cool to like Arsenio Hall or Sinead O’Connor that week. And we were religious about alternating houses for our weekly sleepover parties.
ONE TIME,
at my house, for the occasion of Nascent Sexual Awakening Experience Number Two, Hannah Ginsberg brought over a piece of contraband she’d confided to us about earlier. She’d found a copy of
Penthouse
magazine in the mail, addressed to her father—the one who looked like a rabbi—and didn’t know what to make of the offending material. She described its contents on the phone incredulously, reporting, “Apparently men like to watch women pretend to have sex with one another,” and that there were “are a ton of vaginas in this magazine. And they’re all shaved!” From her tone, it was like Hannah had found supplies for a pipe bomb in the mail, or a catalog addressed to her dad that contained pictures of huge baby clothes for full-grown men who can only get erections wearing diapers. She was horrified.
“I just can’t imagine that my
dad
would want to look at this stuff! Maybe it was a mistake that he got it?”
Yes, Hannah. It was probably a mistake.
“Then how did they know his name and address? Do you think it was a sample free copy?”
Of course, Hannah. It was probably a free promotional issue of
Penthouse
they sent out to everyone who donated money to B’nai B’rith International that year.
I was insistent that Hannah bring over the evidence. How were we supposed to believe her without proof? All these bald pussies and fake lesbians could have been figments of her shaggy, gummy imagination. She obediently swiped the issue and brought it to our sleepover, which must have
delighted
her father.
We pored over every page, even the ads, as kids have always done when they first find porn. Melissa led the chorus of “ewwwww’” as we confirmed Hannah’s dutiful reportage. There were the bald pudendae, some with cute, trimmed stripes of pubeness on their tops, like sexy Hitler mustaches, and some with the full Paul Shaffer treatment. We beheld the Sapphic ringers, an army of them, decked out in Jane Fonda leotards over neon bike shorts, scowling their glossy, red Warrant
“
Cherry Pie” lips in proximity to one another’s glistening genitalia. There wasn’t a lot of licking, spreading, or touching going on. The photos just documented instance after instance of gesturing with long manicured fingernails towards points of interest on the other model. Nipples, vulva, tongue, buttocks. Those ladies hand-modeled each other’s junk the way spokesmodels show off dinette sets. I was utterly compelled by the spectacle of it. The only other pornography I’d seen before
Penthouse
was boob-oriented—my brother’s issues of
Playboy
featured nature’s blondest coeds heaving their racks in between ads for luxury automobiles and interviews with Griffin Dunne. But
Penthouse
was all pussy: page after page of Virginias, shot like food photography. Labia were lit and airbrushed for maximum appetizing affect, like strawberries or ham.
I woke up early the next morning and quietly fished the magazine out of Hannah’s backpack to review the spreads I’d already memorized. I read all the stories in the
Forum
and learned five new words for “vagina,” including “twat,” which sounded like a sound effect from the 60s
Batman
TV show. I pored over those lesbian photos like I was trying to memorize vocab for a test. I didn’t want to dive in to any of those modest muffs; I was just turned on to be closer to the mind of a straight guy with a hard-on.
Hannah took away the magazine once everybody else woke up and rolled up sleeping bags, but like any first-wave pornographic material that captures your imagination while it’s still forming,
Penthouse
’s content was erotically indelible. I see bike shorts sometimes and I get excited, which is weird, because they’re
bike shorts.
But the most influential section of Hannah’s father’s filthy pussy- magazine was the
Penthouse Forum
.
It’s a cliché that girls like erotica and guys like porn, because women are more verbal and men are more visual, but the truth is that the more you leave to a woman’s imagination, the less you have to bet on the likelihood that she might not like the actor who plays the mechanic in whatever’s the featured clip on RedTube. Today, erotica bores me. Most of it seems to be comprised of one-adjective sentences that alternate between synonyms for genitalia. Heaving. Hungry. Moist. Rod. Slit. Glistening. Taut. Mighty. Shaft. There’s Beat poetry that’s more linear. But at the time, I read all that stuff. I ate it up. I loved those stories. All those “I never thought it could happen to me” chestnuts; the stewardesses, the friends’ wives, the cheerleaders, the hokey endings from “then we fucked all night” to “afterward, I never saw her again.” And little by little, I padded out my dirty thesaurus, which is not just an
awesome
name for a jam band, but would also prove to be a valuable resource during our next fateful sleepover at Johanna Loeb’s house, the site of Nascent Sexual Awakening Experience Number Three.
JOHANNA WAS
a newcomer to our clique; she was tiny—like four foot nine—and freckled, with long nails and dark, straight hair down to her elbows. She lived in Riverdale, and one night, all five of us went out to the Hard Rock Café in Manhattan for her birthday dinner before coming back to her parents’ apartment for her slumber party.
Here is an example of why you should never underestimate a preteen’s hunger for pornography. In the hundred or so feet between the entrance of the Hard Rock and the car door of Mr. Loeb’s White Acura, Ronit and I managed to buy ourselves, from the newsstand on the corner, a magazine by the name of
Stallions
. The transaction itself couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds. We were like porn-starved ninjas, or kids at Fat Camp who manage to get Mallomars on their day pass to the orthodontist. And our six dollars did not just earn us the right to gape at photos of the rock-hard erections of at least ten free-weight and hair-gel aficionados. With
Stallions
, Ronit and I were able to provide the recreational agenda for the remainder of the evening.
Melissa shepherded us into Johanna’s kitchen as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Loeb went to bed, so we could pore over our newly procured booty. Unfortunately,
Stallions
was not as fertile in the gross-out department for everyone, being as we’d cut our dentata on the vaginas of yore. There were boners, sure, but no dirty stories or staged interactions. There was only beefcake, which was not as exciting as Carvel ice-cream cake—the kind with the chocolate on the bottom, vanilla on top, and crunchies in the center—which beckoned, at least to Johanna, who seemed freaked out by her new friends’ porncapades. She wanted to celebrate her birthday with a screening of
Can’t Buy Me Love
; she didn’t expect the horn-dog travails of the new group of gal pals she’d accidentally latched herself on to. Just before we resigned ourselves to the conclusion that
Stallions
was a bust, we found the phone sex ads in the back of the magazine
.
FREE FOR WOMEN! the ads shrieked in white Arial all-caps bold on a black background. SINGLES TALK LIVE! Melissa, ever-alpha, gave the go-ahead for us to call in from Johanna’s landline—the blue touchtone princess mounted to the wall above the Loebs’ kitchen counter—and Ronit went first. We huddled around her and listened in, trying hard not to break up in snorts.
“Hello! And welcome to Loveline,” said a recording of a voiceover actress pretending to be a slut. “You’re about to be connected to one of New York’s hottest singles. Just stay on the line!” The archaic technology prompted Ronit to record an introduction, and she lowered her voice an octave to that “sexy” range that, when you hear it from your friends, makes you want to barf up your Hard Rock curly fries.
“Hello, my name is Danielle,” Ronit said, using the name of an unpopular girl from our grade so as to better play to her audience.
“I’m a brunette, twenty-six years old, tan skin, long legs, and huge boobs. Great skin. Not fat.”
Ronit’s description of “herself” sounded like a letter to Santa, asking for what she wanted more than anything. The system thanked her for recording her greeting and assured us there would be horny singles on the line momentarily, if only we’d stand by.
We stood by. Everybody was flipping out, even Johanna, who’d resignedly brought out the Carvel cake for consumption on the sidelines of what was now the main event. I was mixing the vanilla ice cream into the chocolate crunchies for Carvel soup, my favorite food, when Ronit put the decidedly nonerotic hold music on speaker, per Melissa’s orders. Soon, the music stopped, and there was a canned “chime” sound.
“Great news!” intoned the slutbot. “Somebody liked your profile and wants to talk to you, live!”
There was a click. And then, there was a pause that seemed to last forever. What followed was the distinctively sheepish voice of a man who’d called a “party line” in the express hope of receiving cut-rate phone sex from a nonprofessional.
“Hello?” said the sad man.