Politics and Porn

If you ever saw one of my elementary or middle school pictures you might wonder, “Oh dear lord, what the hell happened here?”
Pornography, politics and one terribly ungifted barber inadvertently uniting the two.

My parents didn’t really seem to pay a great deal of attention to my overall appearance after I turned 5; a total reversal from the time prior. Up until that age, any photograph you saw of me might have you thinking you’d stumbled upon “Kids Vogue” or some such magazine that doesn’t actually exist. There I was in my little red short suit. There’s little Joe playing on the beach in a sharp yellow swim trunks with matching flip flops and sandpail. See me strolling down Commercial Street in Provincetown, 1973, decked out in a kick-ass Osh Kosh B’gosh overall/sweater combo. I was stylish, ridiculously cute and outrageously, inescapably lame. As if some instinctual awareness of my developing loserdom had been awakened in me, I began to combat my parents’ fashion efforts with careful, socially toxic rebellions. Sometime in October of my sixth year, I thought it might be a curious little experiment to not change my t-shirt until Christmas, a boycott that sort of automatically excluded bathing. I’d do things like wear two different shoes and then lose them both before the end of the day, and just to make it interesting, each hours apart. I relished “Dental Days” at school, wherein us students would chew mysterious, certainly toxic pills that would turn the teeth of those beset with plaque red. I would make sure I had the reddest teeth and that they stayed that way for the whole day.
My parents surrendered quickly to such attacks, preferring to save the discipline for more important things like room cleanliness and counterproductive rules regarding eating.
However, one ritual that remained consistent for my elementary and middle school career, was that of the day-before-school-photo-day haircut. My parents reasoned that a good one or two months worth of filth could be neatly disguised by a good, clean cut, a little toothpaste and a shirt bearing an embroidered likeness of a man and a horse participating in what is such a grossly snobbish sport it makes sailing look like NASCAR.

My dad was an old school “man.” He wasn’t exactly cut from the same cloth as the local hunter/fisherman types, he was more European Aristocrat, but he had that oddly universal, bordering on homo-erotic need for serious American male fraternity. So, when it came time for the haircut, while I could have gotten a fine ‘do from the woman who cut my mom’s hair, or even a decent style from just your regular old family neighborhood barber, my dad instead took me to Jolly Roger.
Roger was, to put it mildly, a weird dude. His barber shop looked like a tiny moosehunting lodge, paneled in dark wood with hand carved signs nailed to the outside and 20 years worth of NRA stickers on the windows that blocked most of the light from getting in. He always wore plaid flannel shirts and black suspenders and he had sharp, close-cropped sideburns propping up a short, oily pompadour that smelled like cigars and Aqua Velva. The thing I remember most about him though, was this super-totally-ultra creepy grin he’d sneak out all too often and it for some reason made me think I was glad I wasn’t his dog.
Roger’s barber shop was always busy, with 4 or 5 guys waiting to get in his chair and get the most god-awful haircut known to man. It may seem strange that there would be such demand for low-rate chop jobs like the one’s Roger dished out with complete consistency, but more than anything, most of these guys were either killing time between the breakfast table and the Elks Club, or just waiting to die.

If you were from, say, Colorado or maybe Vermont and you now lived by the sea or on the flat plains of the midwest, if you saw my school pictures you would instantly get homesick and cry. My bangs were like a goddammed mountain range, and a freshly formed one at that. No sloping beauty of Mount Fuji here. No, Roger, each time mind you, managed to carve from my precious locks stunning renditions of the Rockies, of the Sierras, of Everest. Looking at the cragged line of my brow, I find it amazing I still have two intact nostrils.
Yet, still, there was a reason I didn’t protest too much the trips to Roger, and it wasn’t just the ever-present threat of an angry Spaniard. It was porn, and lots of it.
Roger, as one might expect, had a vast array of “educational” magazines strewn about the shop. The selection and range was as broad as it was confusing. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Swank, Juggs, Better Homes and Gardens, Newsweek, Time, Hustler, Field and Stream, and Highlights for Kids. Oddly, there were no sports magazines. I think Roger and his buddies thought that pictures of guys sweating without hunting or being at war was way too close to gay.
I wasn’t advanced at much, still not, but I had a strangely early tendency to be girl-crazy.
I asked a girl out in the 1st grade, gave her a box of chocolates and everything. This was, not surprisingly, my first experience with rejection.
But now here I was at 10 years old and due to a plethora of yet more experiences with rejection, I was getting a pretty good idea that it might be a very, very long time (with my luck and social skills, likely longer than just about anyone my age) before I saw a girl naked. Because of this, Roger’s library became sort of a Holy Grail. I wasn’t so hyperbolic as to believe that within these magazines lay the very keys to human sexuality, but I at least held a hope that they’d give me some kind of general look at what I was missing, albeit in retrospect, minus the airbrushing.
Over the course of a year, my dad would take me to Roger’s maybe 5 times. Over 4 years or so, that was 20 trips. Somewhere around #12, I really began to case the joint. I picked up on when the attention wasn’t on me, when the pauses in conversation would and would not make for a good time for my plan to unfold.
My plan - and it’s simplicity was as brilliant as it was unintended - was to grab a copy of Newsweek and hold it up as if I were reading it. Then, when the timing was right, to quickly snatch, say, a Playboy and open it up inside the Newsweek. I, of course, hadn’t taken into account the fact that I would now appear to be reading a very thick copy of Time (though I reasoned that if pressed, I could just say it was the Fall Fashion Issue with a 62 page spread of Menachem Begin in Christian Dior “and look, there’s Leonid Brezhnev looking just smashing in a Gucci wrap!”) but that was a minor concern at best.
Roger and my dad were exchanging mono-syllabic jokes about brown trout and my dad must have come up with a real zinger, because Roger was suddenly doubled over with laughter (taking Fred-in-the-chair’s top of Mt. Washington and part of an eyebrow with him) and my dad was also in teary-eyed hysterics. I seized the moment, seized the Playboy and seized sociopolitical infamy.
Part of my plan was to ask Roger if I could take the copy of Newsweek with me to use for an extra credit report for school. I was sure he’d say yes, as I knew the value he placed on such a magazine was nothing compared to his truly treasured ones.
When it was my turn to get in the chair, I placed the magazine(s) under a copy of Better Homes and Gardens (I still don’t know what the hell that was doing there) and hoped for the best.
After my bangs had been transformed into the silhouette of a shattered radial saw blade, I climbed down from the chair and picked up the Newsweek. “Roger, would it be OK for me to borrow this? I have to do a report on a politician for school and I thought this guy would be good,” I said, referring to the old man with the receding chin, thin gray hair and glasses on the cover of the magazine. “Sure,” said Roger, adding with more than a tinge of hope, “You like Jesse Helms?” I stood there, unsure but sure I should just agree and be done with it. “Oh yeah,” I said “he’s the best.”
There is definitely some karmic lesson here regarding the objectification of women and how it may or may not relate to backwards-thinking politics, but to this day I prefer to be ignorant of it for fear that I may just suddenly become a horribly guilt-ridden monk.
Now, I was committed to writing a report on this Helms guy, a man I knew nothing about, nor did I really wish to, but I couldn’t get out of it because my dad had seen this whole little transaction occur and while he probably was at least partially on to me, he also would let it slide if I actually followed through. My pops was big on education, having been an immigrant who paid his own way through Brown and anything I did to lay to rest the still nagging fear that I might be mildly retarded was A-OK with him.

I have to say that for a 10 year old, I was a political monster, though only in a completely self-serving, narrow way, like a little, budding neo-con. I did things like refusing to order off children’s menus at restaurants because I found the suggestion belittling and discriminatory. I wrote angry letters (I’m not even making this up) to the Lego corporation, demanding that they make a Lego space set, which they in fact had, and I simply hadn’t been able to find it. I was a concerned citizen, man, but I didn’t know a damned thing about national politics (though later that year I would feel this strange, unfamiliar disgusted sensation when I learned both my parents had voted for Reagan.)
Copying the story from Newsweek verbatim would have been better journalism than what actually transpired. Instead, I took what to this day I’m still not sure but can only imagine was a not exactly glowing piece on the outwardly racist, purely evil Senator from North Carolina, and turned into, well, a glowing piece about the outwardly racist, purely evil etc. etc. I actually even titled it “Jesse Helms: an American Hero.” No shit. David MF Duke might have dialed that one down a bit.
The real beauty of it? The man who was my sixth grade English teacher who would be the recipient of said report and would undoubtedly give me an “A” for such advanced, impassioned journalism, was none other than Mr. Dennis Pearl.
Dennis Pearl was as close to a true left of center, progressive, intelligent and driven teacher as you could get. The fact that he was teaching the sixth grade is a testament to his sense of dedication to his calling. While most teachers at that level were there because they either couldn’t get anything better or 6th grade was as far as they could go and still be guaranteed intellectual superiority, Mr. Pearl was there because he viewed this age as a crucial turning point. And now here I was, standing in front of this hopelessly idealistic man, handing him a green folder with the letters spelling out “Jesse Helms” in red, white and blue stars and stripes.
“Wow, Jesse Helms,” he said, laughing easily, fairly sure this wasn’t a joke, but still pretty goddammed funny nonetheless. “’An American Hero’, you really like this guy, huh?” he asked. “Uh sure, yeah, he’s great,” I responded, trying to sound confident in whatever it was I’d written. “What do you like most about him?” Mr. Pearl asked, genuinely curious. I was struggling. I couldn’t remember much of anything from the article, as I kept taking breaks from reading to look at the Playboy I’d stolen. Suddenly numbers came to me “I guess it’s that he’s been a Senator for 10 years, I mean that’s like a lifetime,” which to me, it rather exactly was. Mr. Pearl laughed easily again at this. He had one of those laughs that only good teachers have. He would never mock you, even when that was essentially what he was doing in finding some weird 10 year old idea you’d proposed hysterical.
“Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll read this, and give you credit for it. But, I’d like you to go to the library and look up a little more info on Senator Helms,” he continued. “I’m not trying to tell you to think one way or another, but you might want to take a look at how he feels about things like black people, free speech and some other issues.” I began to get a very sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach. The report was still within my reach and I wanted to take it back. I somehow knew that I’d done something so bizarrely and perfectly wrong that I needed to rectify it, or at least never let it see the light of day. “Well, maybe I should take another stab at this before...” I said, reaching in vain for the folder that now laughed out loud at me in the colors of the flag. “No, I’ll hold on to this. You’ve taken the time to write it and the least I can do is read it.” I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

I didn’t bother going to the library, as if something in me knew that all I needed to know about the good Senator from the Tar Heel state would be revealed to me soon enough. Instead, I went home after school and once again looked at the Playboy and had a sort of a 10 year old’s version of an epiphany. I realized that if I’d paid even one tenth the attention to the Newsweek article that I’d given to this other magazine, I might have had a better idea of just who this Helms character really was. Yes, this was probably true, at least on paper. However, still not necessarily. As with as much time I’d devoted to studying every inch of this precious volume subtitled “Entertainment for Men,” I still hadn’t learned much of anything about women.