Greg Palumbo and me, we were always looking for dirty pictures. Walking down Westlake Drive – that was the main drag in the little town outside of New York where I grew up – we’d scour the bushes and every so often – just often enough to keep us at it – we’d find a wet, swollen copy of Top Hat or Stag that had been out in the brush for a few days, ditched by some high school guy. We’d save everyone and pack them up in that bicycle saddlebag that I had gotten for Christmas and told my father I lost, and we’d bury them down by the reservoir where only Greg and me knew.

One time we slipped into the basement of the church where they kept the paper drive collection. Down there in the basement of the Holy Spirit we sorted through stacks of newspapers and magazines in the hope of something and, sure enough, twined in a pile in the corner Greg found about thirty copies of a little known magazine named Velour, sort of like a Reader’s Digest, but a Reader’s Digest with true dirt inside. We were so excited at our find that we couldn’t ride our bikes home; we had to stop on the way and drag the pulp into the woods and absorb enough smut to last us the rest of the way. It took us weeks to read the stuff, locked in Greg’s converted room in the attic, locked in a closet in Greg’s room for extra protection from his powerful mother and threatening sister, reading stories like “Beach Party Girl: The Whole Story” and “From Prom Queen to Hooker on Summer Vacation.” There were pictures too, enough to get our interest wet, but nothing explicit—you had to read the stories for that.

Velour was a true “dirty magazine” – every tale was one of degradation. Babysitters with peach cheeks were always letting their friend Eddie “do it” to them on the couch and someone would always walk in on it and that was all it took. Next thing those peach cheeks were gone and Bets or Sally was pulling trains on Saturday night with her clamdiggers round her ankles and no class ring round her neck, or worse, Dirty Eddie didn’t have no rubber and did it anyway and then joined the Army or wrecked his car and boffed Betsy was big as a house and really, seriously, absolutely, no kidding, in trouble.

In my mind, Eddie looked like Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver and I couldn’t figure out how he was always getting to do it. But I accepted it.  I could believe it about Eddie because he was a high school guy.  There was something about high school guys. They were more than just older, it was as if they were a different species altogether than me. They had those stubbly mustaches and wiry bodies and that smell when they sweated. I was willing to accept that they could get Debbie and Betty to pull out their knockers – that’s what Greg and I called them – from their shirts just to show them off.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believed Velour without question, for there were stories that you couldn’t help but doubt. Greg and I would argue over them for hours like metaphysicians in the stale and windowless closet in his converted attic. Was it possible that girls liked it? We knew of course that they moaned like bitches in heat when they were “getting it good,” but we never were exactly sure why they agreed to it in the first place. Greg thought it was because it was intimate, but that seemed such an elusive explanation.  What did it mean that it was intimate? For example, we had heard from Jimmy Bardwell who lived down the street that Don Pratt – a high school guy who lived next to Jimmy – had fucked his girlfriend 16 times without a rubber. Greg couldn’t stand that one. Over and over he’d say it to himself, “Pratt fucked her 16 times without a rubber,” shaking his head in wonderment at the very thought.

 

There was a lot that I didn’t understand. Greg was two years older than me and he had an older sister that had tits so he understood everything, at least that was the air he liked to project, but I found his explanations mysterious. I wanted to understand, but try as I might there were these terrible confusions and no amount of asking Greg Palumbo could quite set them straight in my mind. What exactly was a Kotex and how did it differ from a diaphragm? I mean I knew there was a difference but I couldn’t tell you what it was. Sometimes when we’d be telling dirty jokes – I particularly was a fiend for dirty jokes – and I’d get to the punch line and not remember whether it was a diaphragm or a Kotex that got confused with a jelly doughnut and so I’d mumble out the line and Greg would whoop and holler and smack me on the shoulders for being an idiot.

Dirty jokes. There must have been a thousand of them. “A guy goes into the doctor and says…” A lot of them began that way. In fact we used that line so much that we’d slur it all together into one long rumbling freight train of a word “guygoesinthedocansez” that could be used to begin a conversation anywhere in the boy world we inhabited.

Guy goes into the doctor’s and says, “Doc, Doc, you gotta help me, there’s a ring around my dick.”

“What?”

“A ring, Doc, a big red ring. You gotta help me.”

“Oh well, let’s see,” the Doctor says, as his patient takes down his trousers. Sure enough, there is a big red ring around his dick.

“Doc, Doc, help. It’s killing me. You gotta do something.”

The Doctor turns to his medicine chest and applies various ointments and lotions to the patient’s tool.

“Doc, its killing me, help, help!”

The Doctor continues his work.

“Hey, Doc, it’s feeling better. Yeah. It’s feeling a lot better. Hey Doc, it’s feeling fine. Oh Jeez, that’s great, how did you do it Doc? What did you use?”

“Lipstick remover.”

*                                  *                                  *

Honey DeVincenzo lived down the street from us and had a boyfriend, believe it or not, named Tex. She had black bouffant hair and was in the high school VoTec program. She did it. Everyone knew. Greg and me used to sneak around in her backyard on the nights that she was babysitting, hoping that Tex would come by in his jacked-up Chevy Nova with the dice hanging from the mirror. He had black hair pumped up in the front and cut in a ducktail behind. He carried a brush in the back pocket of his skintight sharkskin pants so that the handle stuck six inches out of his pocket. Honey’s little brother was a chipmunk-faced kid with a stutter named Jack and whenever Tex saw him he’d shout “Hey Jack, you late?” and laugh hard in his oily way.

Greg and me we never really saw Tex and Honey do it, although we sometimes could see shapes moving through the curtains on the porch and in our hot imagination something dirty was going on, something squalid, but we never knew for sure.

*                                  *                                  *

Greg and me were always trying to get a Playboy. That’s where the real dirt was, the true dirt. Pictures like you couldn’t believe of tits and knockers just right out there on the page—in color. Slotnick’s was the drugstore in our town and it had a whole rack of magazines. And up on the top section, there was always the latest edition of Playboy. We obviously called the store Snotlicks and we were always drifting in for a cherry coke and the chance to see a Playboy when the Snotlicker, as we called him, wasn’t looking.

Greg was very hot for us to buy one, but he wouldn’t do it.

“Come on,” he’d say, Just do it. Pick one up and pay the man for it. That’s all. What’s the big deal?”

“You do it.”

“Nah. I found the Velours. It’s your turn. Besides, I’ll pay. You’ve just got to buy it.”

One day I did. Greg waited on the sidewalk crunching a snow cone and peering in through the window to see if I was going to chicken out.

I walked up to the magazine rack and picked up a copy of Playboy (I could just barely reach it on the top shelf) and then I went over to the register with the blood pounding in my ears. The Snotlicker was standing in his white apron and big black glasses reading the funnies in the Daily News.

“Hello, whatcha got there?”

I handed him a grimy five-dollar bill Greg had got for cutting his lawn. He always got five bucks and his Dad had a self-propelled mower. I only got two for pushing around our dog.

My heart was bonging like a bongo drum.

“What’s this?” the Snotlicker wanted to know. “A Playboy? This is not for boys.”

“Nah,” I said “it’s for my Dad. He was going to come down this afternoon but he’s sick and he said I should pick it up”

“Is that right?” The Snotlicker looked at me intently. He said, “I can’t sell these magazines to boys, they’re for adults. Your dad ought to know that.”

By now I was feeling reckless. “Call him,” I said, totally losing my mind. “He’s just sitting around home.”

I could see Snotlicker’s uncertainty. I pressed on. “He’s really feeling lousy; he’s got a virus. He could be taking a nap, but he said you should call him if there was any problem. The number is RO1-6490.” And then my face went white; I had given him my real phone number. I was an idiot. I was a doofus. I was dead.

Snotlicker shook his head. “Oh well, if he’s sick I don’t want to bother him. You give him my best will you.” He rang up the sale.

I trembled all the way to the street. Greg was 100 yards away, half hiding behind a post box. When he saw that I had got the Playboy he was ecstatic. I was in agony. What was going to happen when my father next walked into Snotlicks for a pack of Camels? Why had I done it? Idiot. Doofus.

*                                  *                                  *

There was a girl in my class who was spectacular. Her name was Nancy. She was unlike the pin-up girls in Playboy; her chest was as flat as mine but she had a coy smile and a look that would startle me with its generous intensity when it flashed in my direction. Boys my age didn’t like girls, but I had many thoughts about Nancy. My most regular fantasy involved me heroically saving her from one terror or another, generally terrors unlikely in the small suburban town where we lived. But the terror was just filler, the key moment was the moment after my heroism when it was just me and grateful Nancy. I would imagine her grateful appreciation of me, her grateful gratitude, her kisses in close and intimate distance. In this, my fantasies were more influenced by the movies of the day than by the tales that came from Velour.

I never connected the sweet romance that I had with the Nancy of my mind with the sweaty ecstasies that I knew Honey DeVincenzo and Tex pursued. I think it was because, in those days of nascent sexuality, there was no connection between the intimacy of love and the supposed dirt of sex. For there could be no doubt in those days that sex was dirty. Velour was a dirty magazine. We knew that if you said cock or fuck or pussy you were talking dirty. We knew, more or less, about the so-called dirty deed. We loved the idea: Smut. Trash. Dirt.

*                                  *                                  *

My two great interests in that period were smut and baseball, which held their own peculiar fascination. It was inevitable that the two converged.  For a boy who couldn’t get enough baseball during the daylight hours, the only way to get my fill was through books.

I read my way through all the Chip Hilton books and the Bronc Burnet books and then the brilliant John R. Tunis books – Highpockets, The Kid from Tompkinsville. From there I went on to the true stories; the stories of Yogi Berra and Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio. And by the time I was midway into Little League I had read all the sports books on the shelves at the school library and was having a hard time finding new sportsbooks in the real library across the street from Snotlick’s Pharmacy. I searched for promising titles wherever I was and it is no surprise that my search included the bookshelves in my father’s study.

There were always a lot of books in my father’s study. They were principally engineering books and those books were filled with mathematical symbols and completely uninteresting to a boy with baseball on his mind. Not much better were the collection of mysteries by George Simenon; not only were these books about detectives instead of linebackers but they were written in French and could not be deciphered.

There was a grab bag of other books. Penguin Classics, dry, dusty, impossibly boring: losers like Faulkner and Wharton and Dos Passos. A few cookbooks. A few brittle paperbacks with cartoons by Thurber or Charles Adams, and way up at the top, lying sideways under a stack of pocket mysteries, was a gem of a book called A Devil in the Flesh by an author whose name is beyond recall but if I said he was Pierre LaCroix it would give the right idea.

I came across the Devil one day and would have ignored it except for the arresting drawing on the cover; there was a woman and a soldier and somehow the woman’s dress had been pulled down off her shoulder so that there was a lot of bare skin showing and – get this – if you looked carefully there was a hint of a breast, in fact, it was more than a hint; it was a breast. You could not see the nipple – that would have been beyond the pale – but there was most decidedly a breast peeking out of the pulled-down dress. And so I climbed down from the bookshelves with the Devil in my hand. I headed for my room where I locked the door and began to read the story.

I was an accomplished reader. I was a leader on the reading chart at school and had once read 100 books over the summer. But I was not prepared for the complexities of prose and vocabulary into which I stumbled. I tried to read the story in a chronological way but I found that approach incredibly frustrating and difficult. I couldn’t keep the characters straight and there was this fellow Raymond who was very difficult to understand in anything he did and so I flipped from here to there in the search for the good parts. Which there were. There definitely were good parts. The nuance may escape me after these many years, but there was a bed in some type of a Paris rooftop garage – this was how I understood the idea of a garret – and the sheets on that bed were soiled and sweaty from the couplings that took place there. First, there was Raymond and a Frenchwoman named Paulette and then there was Raymond and the lady who leased the garage and then there was Raymond and a college art student who fell under his spell while posing for a painting – I forgot to say that Raymond was a painter – and his student was a particularly sweaty romp for Raymond, though one doubts he knew hat he was getting into with the screams and the tortured anguish that resulted from the couplings that they enjoyed.

The couplings came less frequently as the story turned darker and as the problems with the art student started to overcome her feral attractiveness. But what a book. The prose was brilliant.  Even the torrid pages of Velour had not prepared me for the ferocious intensity of sexual congress as described by a writer of the talent of Pierre LaCroix. In his sure hands, the sexually charged congress of two windswept and animally magnetic artists was stunning. I couldn’t believe my fortune. This book was worth its weight in gold. It was, as Greg Palumbo and I for once agreed true smut.

Greg wanted it, of course. Only in his house, he said, was there a place of certain security where no one could find the book. It was only in the cubbyhole behind the dormer in the paneled attic that his Uncle Benny had built last summer that the book would really be safe. Greg scoffed at the notion hat the book could be secreted at my house and he was certain that we could not wrap the book in plastic and keep it under the deck in the back of the house.

I had gotten a little tired of Greg, however, and I was not willing to let him keep the book. I figured out a foolproof hiding place: I put it back on the top shelf where I had gotten it from in the first place. But Greg was desperate to read it – he liked to read it out loud with commentary – and so he would beg me to smuggle it over to his house whenever I came over to play.

It was around that time that Nancy did something that truly shocked me. This is what happened. We had a show at our school. They had these things with a certain grim frequency and I was fortunate to have come up with a foolproof method of insuring that I didn’t need to have anything to do with them; I joined the marching band. The band was so bad that it had no real official function; every so often we had to practice but I don’t believe we ever had anything more to do than that. In our grade school, we didn’t have any teams to parade for; that would come only the following year when we moved into junior high. And so this year was kind of a practice year for the real responsibilities we would have next year. It was just about perfect, particularly if your instrument was cymbals and woodblocks like mine.

Any way I was safely out of range of the class show.  Nancy was the lead singer in the show. The show was at the end of one school day when we all went into the auditorium for first a lecture by our idiotic principal (the principal is your pal, that was the mnemonic device we were taught to use to distinguish principal from principle) and second the show which was in my mind a long stretch of nothing until the time Nancy appeared.

Now to explain what happened I must reveal the basic lack of human goodness that infected my personality in those days -indeed there is surely debate whether I have made any progress in the time since – but I have to tell the story truly.

Nancy came out on the stage somewhat tentatively. She was a small girl with curled brown hair. She was not by any means bold. Who could have imagined having the courage she must have had to walk alone out onto the stage in front of young jerks and imbeciles like me. But she did and if it was tentative, there was no doubt that she was out there for a reason. She walked to the front of the stage in the old auditorium and took in her two hands the microphone that was there. She stoically absorbed the screechy vibrato of the feedback that sounded as she picked up the microphone. And then she turned to the audience, filled with losers like me, took a deep breath and then hit a note so brilliantly clear and transportatively powerful that the accompanying gray lady pianist didn’t catch up to her for a full bar. I do not today remember what the song actually was but if you thought of it as the song On My Own from Les Miserables you would have the effect; slow and evocative and stunningly beautiful.  I really could not believe that it was coming forth from someone I knew. Her voice was gorgeous. The song was gorgeous. It may have been the first time in my life when I was struck by the beauty of a moment.

Of course I promptly fucked it up. For reasons that shame me to this day nearly 40 years later, when Nancy finished, I groaned. And not only me, a bunch of the cretins in my class. This was how we reacted to beauty. We were so embarrassed and half-cocked that we groaned. We groaned audibly. And so Nancy, who should have been cheered by everyone in attendance, got a series of boorish groans along with the chorus of approval of the greater part of the audience. It was criminal. But that was not the end of my fucking up. It was what happened the next day.

We were back in school in music class. The music teacher had been the producer of the show and she was not happy with the way Nancy had been treated. And she made all of us boorish boys write an apology to Nancy. I don’t know what the other boys wrote to Nancy, but I remember every word of my pitiful script. I wrote, “Dear Nancy, I am sorry I groaned at the show but I really thought you sang like a frog.” And I signed my name and gave it to my teacher. A stupid, stupid, boy.

The surprise was about a week later when my Dad took me into Thornwood for my monthly brush cut. I was next store from the barber in the deli where Joe, the guy who worked the register, always gave me a slice of bologna if I came in and said I was getting a haircut. And so I was standing in the deli with a pink oval of bologna flopped over my hand, when miracle of miracles, Nancy came right in the door to the delicatessen. She came right up to me and looked me in the eye and said, “I do not sing like a frog. I do not.” And then she turned and started out as quickly and directly as she had come in.

I had the presence to say to her what every boy shamed in love and envy and embarrassment and wrong thinking would say in such a situation. I blurted out, “do you want a slice of bologna?” And I thrust forward towards her the floppy circle of meat that Joe had given me a minute before and from which I had already taken a little round bite. I was surprised by myself; surprised that I thought this was the way to redeem myself. But my surprise paled before the astonishment I felt a moment later when Nancy, the perfect girl of my dreams, turned towards me, and with no fanfare whatsoever, accepted the already bitten slice of bologna and had a swift small bite herself.  Then she handed me back the twice-bitten slice and, with a “thanks, see you in school” was gone.

I stood there, bewildered. Stupefied. I looked down at the pink oval of meat and saw that the two circles bitten in the slice intersected at their edges. Two small joined circles. It seemed to me at that moment that it was the most intimate gesture that had ever occurred in the history of the world.

Smut was originally published under the pen name Jay Xuret in the anthology Book Lovers Stories