By Jimmy

I was chubby when I was 10 years old. I styled a unique, some would say cultivated, "right-off-the-boat" helmet-head afro that would put Marge Simpson to shame. I was the 5th-grade lunchtime fishstick champion (40 in one sitting), made that funny friction sound with my way-too-tight Lee corduroy jeans, inadvertently farted in front of my entire classroom during a physical examination, and had the biggest crush in the world on the track-star-to-be Patty Trejo (who was visiting the school nurse when the farting incident occurred, thank goodness). The very last thing on my mind at that awkward and carefree time was sex, even in the readily available form of pornography.

Life had other plans for me. Growing up in downtown L.A., I was witness to stabbings, shootings, beatings, theft of every imaginable kind, racism, classism, domestic disputes, riot gear cops venting on drunken neighbors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what sticks out in remembering all the nastiness of that place wasn't so much the brawls, the aggressive deaths, or the pungency of a life at the bottom of the barrel. What sticks out most, for whatever reason, is how I developed my own personalized aversion to pornography.

Again another day had passed in the scorching summer of 1985 in the middle of downtown L.A. I came home, had a tall glass of sweeter-than-pure-sugar Kool-aid. Wired, I was more than ready to play tag or anything to abuse the energy which the glucose gods had granted me. No one was around though, and I just kinda lingered there, shaking in my tweaked-out state. Then from around the corner came Jamal, face glowing, eyes bloodshot, catching his dry breath en route to fetch me.

The little homeboy was gone -- either way out or way in, both seemingly far away from home. He teetered a little and eventually slurred out a, "You gotta check this out." I followed, fully engulfed in trying to figure out what the hell had Jamal so jazzed.

Drifting behind him, I had this overwhelming feeling that he was gonna show something really intense, like a cat with its brains spilled out, maybe found drugs, a peephole to the building hood-rat's bedroom, or even some of the porn mags all the boys bragged about having access to.

We turned a couple of corners, and the day started to blend into night. Up above, the clouds swished in cayenne swirls of dusk as beads of sweat dribbled from my chubby 'fro. Nearing the abandoned van at the back of the building, I already knew that whatever awaited past its doors was something I could not ever tell my mom about. That's usually a bad sign. But I followed, not from peer pressure, but from whatever killed the cat with the spilled brains I never got see.

First, the van's rear right door cranked open, snapping at the joints like chicken bones cracking. A wild plumage of dense smoke spilled out, obscuring the interior. Time subsiding, a couple of tiny, manicured, white feet pierced the cloud, followed by pair of long skinny legs and pink panties as the only barrier between an adolescent boy's dream come to life and her only salvation. But apparently she had already lost that.

She was maybe 16, 19 at the most, and was a white girl; and there just aren't many of those in a Latino 'hood unless they've got two strollers with three wailing children, a straight-up "tied down" cholo for a husband, and a Ronald McDonald makeover. She didn't have any of that, and she did not belong there. Although lifeless, her big blue eyes shone brightly beneath her strawberry blonde hair.

With her breasts exposed to the warm summer night and her mind warbling away in a freaktown stupor, her soul must have been long gone. Still bearing the distinct swollen sores of heroin and the glamorous nudity of a heroine, which she became for the boys in her selfless carnal yield. I vicariously felt her nowhereness. But I hope that she was never there there, because it looked more painful than anything I have ever experienced.

Jamal gleamed at me in acute anticipation, wanting me to go next in their Hustler role-playing. "Check this one out; look at her hairy pussy!" blurted out a little voice from inside the van, pointing at a beaver shot in the mag. "Do 'er like that -- no, no, no ? like this?," another joined in. Mostly they were too afraid to touch but seemed eager to experiment, as it were.

For me, it was a condensed moment wrapped nicely in unforgettable duality. I, like them, had a place for wild sexual fantasies, had grown up around the same nympho 'hood rats, the same phallocentric pleasureville of a thug's life, and I suppose they expected me to react accordingly. But as I stepped back for leverage - the beautiful young supine woman ready for dissection, the burning at my nose from the smoke of the reefer, the red sky, the dilapidated van, the crumbling building, the stink of the whole atmosphere -- it just came across like a bad X-rated after-school special.

I took off -- away, not home, not to some other friend's house to play Sega, not even to see if Patty Trejo might be hanging outside her balcony. I went back to the school yard to play tetherball, by myself, in the night, without any tripped-out white girl, smoked-out little misfits, porn, erection -- without any goddamned duality.

A year later I learned of the girl's destiny. She was uncovered, decomposed at the bottom of a dry pool that had been reclaimed as a garbage dump, located in what would have been the building's cooperative social space, had the junkies not converted it into an open lavatory. The reek of human feces layered in and about the pool concealed the stench of the rotting corpse beneath the heap of rubbish.

If I hadn't developed an aversion to porn in association with my previous experience, then the synapse snapped a little delayed. Remembering the precarious and compromising postures that the women and men took in the Hustler and thinking of the necrotic flesh of the beautiful white girl and the uncontrollable hard-on and Patty Trejo and 40 fishsticks, it was just overload. How did those Leggos snap together? I just did not know, and I still don't know.

I don't have a problem with naked people. I don't even have a problem with naked people having a go at it. It's the in-between-the-lines stuff that gets to me. The idealism that abounds in fascist preconditions of beauty and reality -- themselves malleable concepts made rigid by who? Not by the dead girl. Not by me at 10 years of age. Not by a reefer. Not even so much by the porn mag.

That metaphysical rigidity is the ideal itself. Uncensored and unchecked those very ideals draw one to the edge of identity, wagering it for that beautiful, that perfect, that definitive piece of sure bliss that lies just ahead in the next experiential acquisition. Pornography, I believe, can lure someone -- like drugs, like culture, like art -- dangerously close to that edge. I believe myself fortunate, for I was unwilling to wager what little identity I possessed for the ideology that my prepubescent comrades were embarking upon.

More often than not, it seems that relinquishing a flourishing and dynamic identity in exchange for a romantic and fixed ideal appears remarkably promising. But is it really? I would like the opportunity to ask that of the dead white girl in the van, but I guess that's idealistic all of itself. I have a feeling though, that she would like to have her identity back.

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