In Which I Find A Porno

In Friday's guest post by the wonderful Aunt Becky, I promised to share the story of my first experience with porn. I honestly don't know how I haven't written about this yet, but sometimes you just don't remember something until you are reminded of it. 

While taking a walk with my younger sister one late fall afternoon about seven years ago, I noticed something that looked like a videotape off into the woods a little bit. This struck me as odd, as the road we were walking on was a heavily traveled street in an affluent neighborhood and everything was always fastidiously clean. Leaving my sister waiting impatiently on the side of the road, I trekked into the woods to investigate.

"What is it?" she called after I picked it up.

"I don't know yet," I replied, but that was a lie. 

It was a videotape, but the case was missing. The label had been marred by the recent rain, but I could still make out the title. Clusterfuck: Bondage, it read, accompanied by some verbiage stating that all performers in the video were at least 18 years of age at the time of filming. Of course I knew what it was... It was a porno!

At first I didn't know what to do. I had been trying to get my hands on a skin flick for a while, but when you are 16 years old and you live at home with your conservative Christian parents, there is not a task much more difficult than that. Forget the magazines I had hidden at home... I was holding the veritable Mona Lisa of spanking material, and I couldn't take it home with me! My sister was with me and she would be curious as to what it was. I worried that it might get ruined if it stayed out there much longer, or that someone else might find it, but I realized I had to take my chances and try to come back for it later.

"C'mon, Mike, what is it?" my sister yelled from the road.

"Just some broken videotape," I said. I tossed it onto the ground and kicked some leaves over it. I rejoined my sister and we continued our walk. She babbled on about something and I ignored her completely, silently developing a plan for how I could return to retrieve the tape. 

I wouldn't get a chance to pickup the tape for a couple of weeks. It had snowed by then, but I refused to give up hope. I put on a bulky jacket and walked towards the stretch of woods where it lay, praying that the leaves I had scattered over it had protected it somehow. 

I kicked back the snow and leaves, and there it was. It didn't seem to be in any worse shape than when I had first seen it, despite being a little wet. I tucked it inside my jacket and walked home, trying to act as normal and nonchalant as possible while teenage adrenaline surged through me. I have the house to myself for another hour, I thought. Plenty of time to see what is on the tape. My imagination ran wild.

I dried the tape as best I could before putting it into the VCR in the basement. The reels were played out to somewhere in the middle, but I didn't bother rewinding it first. I made sure the TV was on mute, and hit Play. 

Now, considering the name of the movie (Clusterfuck: Bondage), I suppose I should have been prepared for what I was about to see. With that said, I was shocked. I couldn't tell where one body began and the next one ended. There were leather straps and buckles and whips and latex and chains and spikes and ball gags EVERYWHERE. In the background were strobe lights and lasers flashing to the beat of the music, which I assumed to be some form of techno. I fell back into the couch, almost in horror. It took me a good thirty seconds before I realized that there were two guys on this one girl, and a third doing something with her mouth. There were other groups of people on various platforms in the room, all angrily pounding away. 

Simply put, it was not what I had thought it would be. 

I think I had imagined something like the sex scenes I had seen in movies, just with less clothes and more boobs. This was nothing like that. To be honest, I was scared. It did not look enjoyable at all. In fact it looked extremely painful. I had never seen so many nipple clamps in my life, before or since.

I didn't get much further than that before the VCR started making a loud clicking noise. Worried that the tape would get jammed (thus requiring an extremely difficult explanation to my parents), I stopped the tape and hit Eject. The tape spit out in a cloud of steam. It hadn't dried enough to be played, and the heat generated by the VCR had evaporated some of the moisture trapped inside. That didn't matter to me, though. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to watch any more of the tape ever again. I ran upstairs to my bedroom and hid the tape in the back of my closet. 

I never forgot it was there, and although I got it out a few times with intent to watch more of it, I never did. Clusterfuck: Bondage would remain in the back of my closet until I moved out a year later. I came across it when I was cleaning out my room, and quickly wrapped it in a brown paper bag and buried it in the trash at the curb for pickup. I obviously wasn't going to leave it in my room unattended, and I was not going to get caught with that in my dorm room as a freshman in college. One can only imagine the rumors. 

Truth be told, I was a little disappointed. I plotted and schemed for weeks to get that tape, and it turned out to be a nightmare. The little bit I did see of it taught me one important thing, though. When I introduced myself to Internet porn at college, I knew what genre to steer clear of. Bondage? Not for me.

To each his own, I guess. Or, to each three or four at once.