Queen

One dark morning later that summer, I slid out of bed, dressed carefully, put on an empty backpack, slipped a flashlight into my pocket, and quietly got on my bike. I rode out to Mr. B’s (several miles away) in the perfect silence and uninterrupted darkness of a rural night – it was around three in the morning and there was no indication that anybody else was even alive at that hour. I parked my bike in the woods and walked the last mile to his house, heart drumming in my head, footsteps pounding on my ears, sweaty hands nervously fingering the dark flashlight. When I got to his garage, I stood perfectly still in the shadows for ten minutes, making sure nobody was around. Then I very carefully crept in through the door, lit the flashlight into my palm, and seeped a little of the light onto the far wall. There they were, stacks of magazines, hundreds – if not thousands – of bodies to be studied and appreciated. I shakily turned the flashlight off and set it on a shelf by the door. Silently, I stepped around the silver Camero and slipped the backpack off. With sweaty, trembling fingers, I quickly loaded my backpack with all it could hold – probably 30 to 40 different magazines, chosen semi-randomly (I focused on the Playboys and Penthouses, but some darker need caused me to grab a couple of Hustlers too). I carefully put the backpack back on and skulked back to the door. A quick, panicked search in the dark on the shelf failed to turn up the flashlight. Too scared to turn the garage light on, I fumbled for it for a few seconds and, unable to find it, cut my losses and slipped out the door and back into the woods to my bike. I rode the few miles home undetected by anybody, hid the magazines in the basement, and went back to bed.

For weeks I worried about that flashlight. It had my fingerprints all over it, and Mr. B. would surely discover it when he noticed that some of his magazines were gone. The fact that my fingerprints weren’t on file anywhere didn’t comfort me; in my guilty conscience, I might as well have had my name and phone number etched into the case. Fortunately, that particular crime went unsolved and now that the statute of limitations has expired three times over, I feel safe in acknowledging my first foray across the legal tracks to the dark side of town.

Those magazines sustained me (and worried my mom) for years afterwards, until she “donated” them to the man who would eventually become my step-father. He kept them in his pre-divorce apartment, in the back room where I slept when my mom was busy being the other woman, so I would have something distracting to do while they didn’t want to be disturbed. It was through studying the instructive text and the helpful visual aids in these magazines that I was able to finally achieve my first orgasm, in the upstairs bathroom, one week after my 13th birthday. I didn’t even really know what I was doing, but as soon as I had done it, I knew. I understood the world in an entirely new way, and I’ve never been the same since.