Queen

When I was in sixth grade, right before the one-two punch of puberty and junior high, I knew virtually nothing about popular music. I didn’t listen to the radio, I didn’t read magazines, the only music I did hear was whatever was playing on classical WIAA or, occasionally, something my mom would put on to do housework to (her favorite, to give you an idea of where I was coming from, was Andre Kostelanetz playing instrumental arrangements of Chicago songs (that’s the group Chicago, not the city or the musical)).

One day, my sixth grade teacher told a story about how you shouldn’t hire somebody by the hour, because he had once hired somebody to rake his lawn for $5 an hour and came back a few hours later to discover that the kid had done nothing but drink soda and push a couple of leaves around. Since then, Mr. B said, he only hires people by the job and not by the hour.

At recess, I asked him what he paid to get his lawn raked and when he told me he paid $20 for the job, I nearly fell over. Twenty dollars! That was an inconceivable amount of money, as I was currently on my 35 cents a week allowance (and of that, I could spend the quarter any way I wanted, but I had to save the dime for college). I told my friend and classmate Mel about it, and we agreed to split the job and the money. We approached Mr. B about it and he hired us to come out that weekend.

Now, it’s not that Mr. B had a particularly big yard, but there were an unimaginable number of leaves on it. Certainly more than a million. Probably more than a googol. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that they totaled a milli-millilion (that’s 10 to the power of 3,000,003). Okay, that many leaves would crush the planet to dust, but it did seem like an inordinately large number of leaves for one yard, and, after raking for a couple of hours, I was beginning to feel that we were the suckers for taking the job for only $20, when that morning I figured we were taking Mr. B. to the cleaners.

Mel and I had figured that one Saturday afternoon would be enough, but it soon became clear that we’d have to come back. Many times. And each time we came back, it seemed like Mr. B had trucked in another couple of tons of leaves. And, it should be pointed out, we were raking his yard in the spring, which meant the leaves had already been lying on the ground, getting sodden under the snow, for six months.

I lied earlier. It is true that I hadn’t yet experienced the ego jolt of junior high, but the sweaty fingers of puberty were already closing around me. I had suddenly, inexplicably started noticing the girls in our class in a different way. My thoughts had started straying into some vast, unknown areas, and the peach fuzz on my cheek was just starting to shadow. I was months away from my first, surprising, paradigm-shifting orgasm (oh, I get it!), but the sap was starting to flow.

Mr. B was, hands down, the hippest of our provincial school’s eight teachers. He had a moustache, drove a Camero, and coached the basketball and football teams. Although the ideas of teachers having sex was entirely uncontemplatable (I had just recently learned that they had lives outside the classroom), Mr. B nevertheless seemed quite the swinger. Or, at least, the one who most wanted to swing, which, in a small town like the one I grew up in, probably meant he was the most frustrated teacher in our school. It also meant he had the largest porn collection imaginable. These days, you could discretely house hundreds of magazines worth of prurient pulchritude on your hard drive (or so I’ve heard), but back in those dark analogue days, if you wanted several hundred skin magazines around the house, you had to have several hundred skin magazines around the house.

Every surface of Mr. B’s house dripped with Playboys and Penthouses as well as legions of lesser mags – your Hustlers, your Knaves, your Adams and what have you. I discovered his vast collection by merely coming in the house to use the bathroom. He made no attempt to hide it, not that he could have, with the sheer number of them. Current issues of everything imaginable lay around the tables and counters of the house, and the archives were kept in giant stacks in the unattached garage, as I discovered when I went looking for a shovel. Well, over the next couple of weekends, I found plenty of occasions to come into his house to use the bathroom. Although I was, as stated, still months from that portentous physical turning point, the pumps were primed and ready, and the casual interest in naked women that I had harbored since childhood was quickly turning into an obsession, invading my thoughts night and day. I couldn’t wait until that mythical far off day when beautiful women consented to let me see them naked (I still can’t wait for that day), and I savored any chance I got to study their exotic forms. I must say, much of the allure of magazines such as these is not so much that the women are naked (well…), but that, in most of the photos, these beautiful naked women boldly and calmly meet your gaze. They know you can see all of them, and they don’t care, so intimate is your relationship with them.

Living with my mom, I didn’t have much of a chance to explore my interests, although I did find a Penthouse buried in a stack of Dance Magazines where, I’m certain, my mom thought it was safe from my prying eyes. I preserved the illusion by carefully putting it back in place after finishing looking at it, but I did practically memorize that entire issue. But still, I wanted more. I needed to study the different aspects of different bodies. To see the variations of areola, to measure curves and mass, to asses different asses to see what I liked. I needed more research material. A lot more.