Number Two (2 page)

I
started masturbating at the age of eight.
Eight!
I didn't really know what I was doing, but every single night, purely on instinct, I would yank down the bottoms of my pajamas, and using the index finger and thumb of
both hands
, I'd
yank my tiny pecker up and down until I felt the sensation of a tiny orgasm. No fluid would be secreted, of course, but it became my nightly routine. I started so young I can only assume I was masturbating to album covers from my mother's record collection or perhaps the curvy and muscular green specimen that was She-Hulk
.

My father owned a drugstore in town, and until he sold it, the concept of paying for comics and magazines was completely foreign to me. I remember the first time I went to get a magazine after he had sold the store. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents for
Sports Illustrated
? Are they
nuts
? It also took some time to adjust
to reading magazines with covers on them. Every week in the store we would take all the unsold magazines, rip off the covers, and send the covers back to the distributor for credit. The cover-torn magazines were now free for all the employees to take for themselves. This included the two adult magazines my father allowed to be sold in the store:
Playboy
and
Penthouse
.

Playboy
was always pretty tame. Even now I like to read it on planes. I get a kick out of it. I try to be a bit covert and keep the cover hidden from view, but inevitably as I'm flipping pages, reading the surprisingly great articles and interviews, I'll come across a photo spread involving two naked co-eds in football gear and I will look across the aisle to see a sixty-two-year-old woman looking at me like, “Does this look like your private den of sin? Shame on you!”

Penthouse
was a different story. It had actual photo spreads of men and women engaged in sexual acts—
with
penetration. Not to mention the infamous
Penthouse
“Letters”
that filled the first few pages of the magazine. “Actual letters from actual readers,” which was complete bullshit, but a real erotic read for a twelve-year-old kid just discovering sexuality. From time to time, I managed to sneak a few
Penthouse
magazines away from my dad's store to the privacy of my bedroom, where I would become engrossed in tale after tale of housewives whose husbands had allowed them to be defrocked by their next door neighbour. Erotic literature of its day, I suppose.

Through these experiences, I became enamoured with pornography, but unlike today when a kid can just learn their parents' password for the “bad” websites and cable channels, there was really no way for me to watch pornographic films. That is, unless I got the assistance of good friends with satellite dishes.

Here's how it worked: I would bring in a blank VHS tape to
school and ask one of my friends to take it home and set his VCR to record at night while his parents were asleep. In the morning he would pop the tape out of the machine, put it in his backpack, and bring it to me at school. Using a clever system of deception that will now be copied by porno-pirates across the globe, I would carefully collect the extra VHS tape labels and keep them in my bedroom. Then, upon receiving the sweet treasure that was a new VHS tape with FP on it (Fresh Porn), I would label the tape with something like “WWF Saturday Night's Main Event,” which was the popular NBC wrestling show of the day that would often replace Saturday Night Live in the late-night lineup when Hulk Hogan et al. were at their peak of popularity. There was simply no chance my parents or sister would pop this tape into the VCR to check out the latest embarrassing loss by wrestler Koko B. Ware, the one who brought a live parrot into the ring. Therefore, I would often leave these tapes stacked up right next to our other VHS tapes underneath the TV, alongside such classic films of the day as
Night Shift
and
Smokey and the Bandit
,
so they were in a convenient spot whenever I found myself alone in the house. It may seem like a lot of effort now, but it never really felt like work—it felt like a necessary part of life.

The funny thing is it took me a long time to find true joy out of masturbation. I realize that's a pretty good “pull quote” for this book—no pun intended—but I'm serious. The whole premise of the Catholic doctrine is that you are a horrible, miserable sinner who is unworthy of God's love, and each and every week God decides to forgive you for your horrible, miserable sins and allow you to enter his “house” and worship him. Catholic guilt has been examined and dissected by therapists for years, but it basically boils down to this: Catholics feel guilty about enjoying
anything
because every
Sunday they are told that they are sinning too much and unworthy of their creator's love.

Now, let's back up, as I discover the harmless and medically healthy practice of masturbation in my preteen years. I was so riddled with Catholic guilt and, worse, genuinely convinced that God was watching me, like
really
watching me, that I couldn't even really enjoy myself like a normal teenager. When I was actually wanking off, that was about as great as life got at the time. But when I was finished, the guilt was so overwhelming I'd almost be in tears. I would look up, to heaven presumably, and beg the Lord's forgiveness for what I had just done. Not only that, but I would talk to him as if I were a crack addict who had hit the pipe one last time and was about to go cold turkey. “Lord, I am so sorry, and if you forgive me this
one last time
, I promise,
promise
, that I will never ever masturbate again.” The next day I'd say the exact same thing, probably in the exact same spot—the guest bathroom, which was far enough away from the rest of the house that I could be assured the most privacy. It was a small powder room, appropriately not much bigger than a confessional booth. One evening, my father burst in and there I was, pants down around my ankles, face red as an apple, yanking away like I was trying to start a tiny lawnmower between my legs. He took one look at me, turned around, and walked out.

Back in the '80s, almost every hotel room in North America was equipped with a Spectravision cable box on top of the set that allowed guests to watch pay-per-view movies—which included
adult
movies. Schoolyard legend of the day had it that you wouldn't get charged for any movies as long as you watched less than five minutes and then quickly changed the channel. So one family vacation I decided to test the theory.

One summer when I was about thirteen, my parents, sister, and I piled into the Chevy Suburban and headed out toward Penticton in the interior of British Columbia. We made it all the way to Banff on our first day and decided to stay the night at a nice hotel in town. After dinner, my parents and sister went to bed and I was allowed to stay up to watch TV. We weren't in a suite or anything. We were all in the same room, one double bed and two singles in less than 300 square feet. And one television.

I sat at the edge of my bed, with my entire family dozing off behind me. Satisfied that everyone else was locked in a deep sleep, I began to test the theory that had been presented to me. I flipped back and forth to an adult film starring Tom Byron, Joey Silvera, and an actress named Raven, about a rock star and his manager and the girl who got between them—literally. I would watch for less than five minutes, always keeping one eye on the clock, then turn back to TSN or MuchMusic. I continued to look back at my family who, had they opened their eyes at any point, would have been staring
directly at the television
.

At some point I crashed, probably after masturbating in the bathroom, and slumbered with a smile, confidently knowing I had successfully defeated the system and watched a lot of great adult entertainment—for free! Life was good. That is, until the next morning when we got ready for the second day of driving to the Okanagan. We packed everything into the Suburban and Dad returned to the front desk to check out. After five minutes we started to wonder where he was. After ten minutes my mom was starting to get concerned. After fifteen minutes I was shitting my pants. I knew exactly what was holding him up.

Twenty minutes later, Dad wandered back out to the Suburban with a scowl on his face. He got in the car and let out a long sigh.

“What happened? What took you so long?” asked my mom.

Dad turned around to face me.

“Did you order up a movie or two last night after we all went to bed, Jay?” He had that familiar, frightening tone of a man who was doing everything he could to keep from exploding with rage.

“Nope, I didn't order anything,” I lied.

“The lady at the front desk said our room ordered three adult movies last night. You have no idea about that, huh?”

I looked around the car. My mom had a look of profound disappointment. My father had a look of barely suppressed anger. My sister had a look that said: You ordered porn in our room while we were all sleeping?
What the fuck is wrong with you?

I had to fess up. “Yeah, it was me.”

Then I completely spilled the beans. I explained that someone in my class had told me I could watch these movies for free if I only watched for five minutes, but obviously I had watched for longer than five minutes at least three times and, wow, was I ever sorry. I would rather have been knee deep in a field full of cow shit than in that car at that moment. I was paralyzed with embarrassment.

“Next time,” said Dad, “just tell us if you want to watch something.”

Oh,
sure
. I can just imagine how that conversation would have gone:

“Hey, Dad, I've turned into an obsessively horny thirteen-year-old with no ability to control my sexual urges. I may also already be addicted to pornography. You wouldn't mind springing for a couple adult films at the hotel that I will watch on the edge of the bed while you all slumber close by, would you? Great!”

At the time I went to university, the Internet was still not widely available. So, having long before accepted that I was a sinner and
a masturbation addict, I was excited to discover I could walk into the Rogers Video on 82nd Avenue in Edmonton and rent adult films to enjoy in the comfort of my own home. This was a wonderful time for the adult film industry as Jenna Jameson was about to explode onto the scene—again, no pun intended. There was a wealth of great material to choose from, produced by classic studios like Vivid and Wicked. The only problem was that I felt even more ashamed renting the videos than I ever did when actually masturbating. That's because the setup at Rogers Video was designed to make you feel the maximum amount of embarrassment possible.

The Rogers on 82nd Avenue was a massive video store, very standard at the time, still renting VHS tapes in 1992. After I made it past all the copies of
The Goonies
and
Dances with Wolves
,
I would walk all the way to the back of the store where there was a
tiny
room with a curtain. I would part the curtain and there, arranged on shelves like little filthy treasures, were the adult films. There would always be one or two other guys in the room already examining the available titles, and they would briefly look up to acknowledge me and then turn their eyes back to the tapes as if to say, “You're no better than me. We're all in this shame spiral together.”

After I selected my tape, or more likely
tapes
, I would make sure to circle back through the main area of the store and pick up one or two “regular” movies to supplement my filth. I would take care to use those normal movies to sandwich the adult movies so the clerk might not be totally frightened when I put them down on the counter.

Then I would take my place in what always seemed to be a long lineup and survey the other patrons around me. I was always hoping, praying, that the lady right behind me had some sort of hearing disorder. This was because it seemed to be Rogers Video
employee policy to say the name of every single movie that passed through their hands as loudly as possible. This would result in a profoundly embarrassing moment when I went to pay that sounded a little something like this:

CLERK:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
! What a classic! You've seen it, right?

JAY: Oh, yeah. Love it.

CLERK: Just amazing. So violent. What else do we have here?
Robocop
. Awesome!

JAY: So underrated.

CLERK: Totally. What else?
The Scarlett Mistress
? Okay . . .

JAY: I'm in a bit of a rush . . .

CLERK: One more.
Busty Backdoor Nurses
? Uh, will that be all?

JAY (ashamed): Yes.

CLERK: Oh, I missed one.
Big Cheek Freaks
. Wow.

JAY: Can we hurry this up?

CLERK: So we have
Temple of Doom
,
Robocop
,
Scarlett Mistress
,
Busty Backdoor Nurses
, and
Big Cheek Freaks
. . .

JAY: Like I said, I'm in a bit of a rush.

By that point, everyone in line was giving me the same look—a look that said, “So, you're not really going to be watching
Robocop
or
Indiana Jones
are you? You horrible pervert. You filth-ridden spank jockey. Take your disgusting tapes and get out of this store.”

Then I would pack up the tapes and keep my head down as I scurried off to my car, feeling a combination of debilitating shame and joyous elation—and mostly just thankful there weren't any children in the lineup.

B
efore I moved to Athabasca at the age of ten I had never been in a fight in my life. In my first year in that town, I was in at least four. It probably didn't help that I wasn't exactly trying to be inconspicuous.

The previous summer my next door neighbour Daryl told me his cousin Colin thought we should both be wearing skinny leather ties. Colin was considered very cool because he was in high school. “Colin told me pink is the cool colour now,” said Daryl. Colin had just returned from Edmonton—“the City”—where he had been buying back-to-school clothes, and basically anything he said to us about how to dress was gospel. “Pink leather ties, that's what everyone is wearing.”

So as the new school year approached, my parents took me to West Edmonton Mall for my own back-to-school shopping and I insisted on going to Zazoo, a store that would become well known two or three years later as a go-to spot for the latest Zubaz sweat
pants. At Zazoo I stocked up on ties. Not just in pink but also in black, blue, and red—all skinny, all leather. It might sound very hipster now, but it was a little weird for a ten-year-old. I think the popularity of Alex P. Keaton, Michael J. Fox's conservative character on
Family Ties
, led me to believe that wearing ties to school in grade five would be a wise decision. Instead, it put a giant target on my back.

A few weeks into fifth grade, I participated in an ill-advised arm wrestling contest one day after school. My long, lanky arms provided extra leverage, and miraculously I placed second. I was beaming with pride as my new friend Troy Dubie described me as “pretty tough,” especially since Troy was a real cowboy, a future bull rider. It seemed like everything was going my way until one day, when walking to my dad's new drugstore after school, I was suddenly cornered by Rory Langevin, easily the biggest kid in my class. I had heard of him but never met him, and now he was introducing himself to me the only way he knew how.

“Hey, are you Jay?” he asked.

“Y-y-yeah?” I replied, reluctantly.

“Some guys were saying you were tougher than me today, so we're gonna fight after school tomorrow. Right outside the gym. Then we'll see who's tougher.”

“What?” I literally almost shit my pants right then and there. A wave of panic swept through my body and my stomach tightened. Why had I entered the world's stupidest fifth-grade arm wrestling contest?

“Do you want to go bike riding sometime?” asked Rory, a quick changer of subjects.

“Uh, no. I have to get back,” I replied absent-mindedly. Get back to where? I had no idea. I had to get away from this monolith that had me pinned against the wall by the post office.

“Okay. Remember tomorrow.
Boom
!” And with that, he walked away.

Good God. I had unwillingly been placed in a main event title fight with a
major
weight class discrepancy. Every other fight I'd been in had been against someone fairly close to my body size, but now I was about to take on the Goliath of the Northern Prairies, and the whole school was going to see me get destroyed. Tears began to stream down my cheeks as I stumbled—
stumbled—
down the remaining stretch of alley toward the back of my dad's store. As I waited for him to finish work so I could get a ride home, I wandered around the store in a daze, flipping through comics, every inch of my body filled with unbridled terror.

I was practically inconsolable on the drive home as I explained the situation to my dad. Once we were in the house, my parents tried to calm me down.

“Why would someone say that to you? What did you do to him? Just come straight home from school.”
Moms
! If only life were as easy for their children as they wanted it to be in their heads. After she walked away to finish making dinner, my dad quietly offered me words of advice for dealing with a playground combat situation.

“Remember: Quick jabs to the face.” Got it.
Quick jabs to the face.
I would be sure to remember that as Rory took one big swing at my chest and sent me flying back ten feet as my fellow fifth-grade students laughed uproariously.

I didn't sleep much that night. The next day, I awoke with a feeling of dread the likes of which I had never experienced before.
Dead man walking
. My father dropped me off at school and wished me luck, probably wondering what my face would look like at the end of the day. I went through the motions in my morning class like a young zombie who had just been bitten and was getting used to a catatonic state. Gym class was right before noon, and Rory was
going to be out there playing dodgeball either alongside or against me. Maybe I could fake a dodgeball injury and he would see it and spare me a beating.

I wandered into the tiny gym and went to sit on the stage while the rest of my fellow students gathered. None of us were changing into gym clothes yet. We were too young for that. We were too young to really sweat anyway. We'd just run around like idiots and then return to class in the same clothes. That was the routine. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I saw Rory, a hulking presence in hand-me-down jeans, running shoes, and an oversized T-shirt. He was headed right for me. My eyes bugged out in terror as he sat down beside me on the stage. He couldn't have had a more pleasant disposition.
What the fuck is wrong with this asshole?
I thought. Why was he so calm and measured about ruining my day and my reputation and my face in this new town and this new school where I was doing so well? He opened his mouth and spoke slowly:

“Hey, I heard we're going to be on the same hockey team,” he stated proudly, like he was actually happy about this.

“Uh, we are?” I wasn't really capable of forming coherent sentences with this bully sitting beside me, talking to me like I was his friend when just hours later he was going to use his big bear paws to dent my delicate face.

“Yeah, my mom said you're on my team.”

His
mom
?
How did
that
subject come up? Did Rory get home after interrogating me in the alley by the post office and tell his parents about the skinny new kid in town he was going to massacre the next day? Only to have his mom inform him that the skinny new kid was going to be playing defence on the second power play? This whole conversation was highly bizarre. Then Rory turned his head to one side, tilted it even, like he was actually thinking, as if there were actually thoughts going on in his oversized noggin.

“Hey, do you really want to have that fight after school?” he asked.

“N-no,” I mumbled. I was a broken young fella, so happy and relieved, but too rattled to enjoy being let off the hook.

“Me neither, see you at hockey!” And with that he leapt off the stage and into the fray of dodgeballs and squeaking sneakers.

Of all the times I had been rocked by violent diarrhea while away from the cozy confines of my toilet—and by now you have probably guessed that situation occurs frequently—nothing compared to the relief I felt that day when Rory called off the fight that afternoon. I no longer had to worry about Rory, other than the fact that he couldn't skate and was a real detriment to the success of our hockey team.