1982 (37 page)

It wasn’t entirely bad. The truth is, seeing Wendy with another guy was strangely liberating. It sanctioned a whole new world of carnal possibilities for me. It allowed me to follow my libido with no reservations. You see, as you know by now, Wendy had been a tremendous romantic aspiration for me. She had been the role model for what I wanted as a partner. She was someone I saw myself buying hair gel with and blasting the Cure in shared headphones with. But Wendy had never really been a sexual fantasy. Not once. I really didn’t want to have sex with Wendy. I wanted to
be
with Wendy. And in my early teens, those were two very different desires.

Sometimes you could have a dream girl and not want to have sex with her. I don’t mean you’d necessarily refuse to have sex if the opportunity arose. It’s not that you’d hate the idea of having sex with her. It’s not like your dream girl was lying on a bed and saying, “Let’s have sex now, please. I’m ready. Take me now, take all of me …” and you recoiled and ran away. It’s more that you’d just never really considered sex with your dream girl. The stakes were too high. It was even more understandable if you’d never had sex, like, with anyone. And especially if you’d never had sex and were a bit unsure about the whole process.

I’d never fantasized about full-on physical intimacy with Wendy. That idea was much too intimidating. She was cool and smart and classy. Prurient intentions would have soiled the dream. Not that dreams didn’t occur. Just with other protagonists. If there was one thing I was definitely interested in by the time I hit Grade 9, it was sex. And girls. Any girls. And now my heart had some sort of free pass.

I didn’t actually know a lot about sex in 1982. I was fourteen when the year began and I hadn’t had sexual intercourse and I was a bit unclear on all the mechanics. I had kissed a number of girls since Dana Verner in Grade 5, and I had gotten to third base with Kim Inglewood by Grade 8, but it was all very clumsy. Kim Inglewood and I had stripped naked at her house, and I had pursued a forensic fascination with her chest. I stared at her breasts with a mixture of excitement and curiosity and then tried to caress them in a seductive way that would turn her on. I had no idea what I was doing. I remember looking up to see a befuddled expression on Kim Inglewood’s face as she stared at me staring at her naked breasts. I had done my best with my caresses. I’m not sure she really enjoyed it. Kim Inglewood and I never really said that much to each other. But I liked her. Or at least, I liked her breasts. And we were both trying to stumble our way into intimacy. I later told Pete Hickey and Toke about getting naked with Kim Inglewood, and Toke said, “Whoa!” and Pete Hickey added, “You’re the master!” I had felt secure in my fledgling manhood for a brief moment during that conversation. But I was no master. I was thirteen then, and I had no idea what I was doing. Part of the problem was that I didn’t have the benefit of pornography. That might have helped.

We didn’t have porn in the 1980s. I mean, we had pornography, it existed, but it was virtually inaccessible to kids. This was a real liability. Without porn, how were we supposed to learn how sex was done? Of course, pornography was often sexist, exploitative, patriarchal, and full of the wrong messages about human relationships and intimacy. But even so, it could have served as a handy tool for seeing how this foreplay and intercourse thing happened.

In the early ’80s, porn was still mostly to be found in those seedy old theatres where lonely middle-aged men in trench coats would go and do horrible things. That was what we were told. These men did horrible things with trench coats on. I don’t really know if all of these men wore trench coats. But that was the word on the street—by which I mean, the word from our parents. The dangerous porn men wore trench coats. Maybe wearing a trench coat sent a signal to others that you were interested in watching pornography. Then you could identify your fellow porn-lovers. Of course, wearing a trench coat may also have meant that it was a rainy day. And certainly, no credible spy would operate without a trench coat. Wearing a trench coat meant all three of these things in the ’80s.

Trench coats had become cool in some circles by the time I hit Grade 9. Simon Le Bon, the lead singer of Duran Duran, wore a trench coat when they opened for Blondie in Toronto in the summer of 1982. I saw Duran Duran with Murray at the CNE Grandstand just a few days after the Police Picnic. We had actually gone to see Blondie, but this new band called Duran Duran was there in support, and they had synths with arpeggiators and lots of hairspray. Duran Duran played the song “Night Boat” near the beginning of their set, and Simon
Le Bon stalked around the stage looking mysterious in a trench coat. Simon Le Bon pulled up the collar at one point to cover his face to his eyes. He looked like a secret agent. That is, a secret agent with very masterfully applied frosted tips in his hair. I decided that wearing a trench coat must also be New Wave. That meant trench coats were cool.

I have made a short list of the kinds of people who might wear a trench coat in the early 1980s:

spy

person in rain

seedy adult-film attendee

Simon Le Bon

subway flasher

As you can see from this list, if a New Wave spy wanted to watch porn on an overcast day in 1982, we know what his outfit would be. But the point is, I didn’t have a trench coat. And I wasn’t an adult. And experiencing pornography took effort. It was frustratingly challenging to see anything pornographic if you were under eighteen. And even if you were of age, you really had to out yourself if you wanted to watch it or buy a dirty magazine at a corner store. It was all near impossible for a suburban Iranian-Canadian kid in Thornhill.

Of course, things are very different today. Today, everyone can watch porn on personal computers. You know it. Now you can watch extreme hardcore porn even when you don’t mean to. Now you might type “light bulb” or “squirrels” or “nice pond” into your computer and you will be transferred to a hardcore adult site. You don’t even have to search for
“porn” or “sex” to find porn and sex, even though that might be easiest. Now everyone has seen everything. There is porn that includes ankles or headbands or triple penetration or aliens or bearded men. And you can be a teenager and watch all of this and be exposed to all different kinds of sex. But we didn’t have that in the 1980s.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all fourteen-year-olds should be watching all cyber-porn. Hardly. There is material that really should be seen by adults only. But the option exists now, and it’s easily accessible. And if you watch it, you may learn some tricks about how people have sex. Possibly. I can tell you, I didn’t know much about this stuff when I was a teen. My sexual skills were embarrassingly novice. And outside of some well-meaning but ineffective sex ed. classes, I had little help in understanding the mechanics of it all. I remember wondering how I was supposed to contort my body in order to get my penis inside another person. It was all very confusing. In the absence of more graphic sex ed., at least some pornography could have helped me with some visuals to consider.

Having said all this about porn, some manner of dirty images did exist back in the day. We may not have had helpful hardcore materials on video and online, but we did have
Playboy
and
Penthouse
and
Hustler
magazines. Or at least, Benny Travers did. And he would share some of the best of it.

Benny Travers was a freckle-faced redhead who lived on our street in Thornhill and was one of the more prominent kids in our scene. He was in Scouts and had gotten lots of badges, because his father and brother and other brother had also been in Scouts. He had acquired a bunch of old
Hustler
magazines from a retired neighbour who had been selling them on his
driveway as part of a garage sale. Word had spread about the old neighbour who was liquidating his stock of adult magazines, and we all took turns visiting the garage sale and getting a glimpse of the dirty materials lying plainly on a table next to some used cups. Only Benny had the courage to ask the guy if he could buy the porno magazines, and for this Benny was our hero. He told us the retired garage-sale man had chuckled and given him all the dirty magazines for a couple of dollars. That was a good deal, even in the late ’70s. Benny was two years older than me and already the leader of the kids on the street. But now he had elevated his status. Benny also claimed two Penthouse books when he made his garage-sale acquisition. Benny became a high roller with important commodities the rest of us wanted. And thus began an odd ritual amongst the boys in our area in the summer of 1978.

A couple of times a week, a number of us would gather at Benny Travers’s house to sit for readings from one of his Penthouse books. It was called
Sex Takes a Holiday
. Toke, Davey Franklin, Pete Hickey, and me—and sometimes more guys from the area—would form an audience while Benny sat on the stairs above us in his parents’ home and read the Penthouse stories out loud.

You probably think this sounds ridiculous. And I am aware that this must sound comical to any kid now. It must seem like some ancient, sad, horny/awkward ritual from another time. And it was. And it’s entirely true. We would gather, and Benny would read these stories to us with thespian-like verve: “Ohhh … harder … do it to me hard … unnnn … I’m coming …”