Tommy had a more mature attitude than the rest of us did, and tended to hold back a bit, staying on the fringe of our mania like any sound leader. Yet we knew he easily could have found a girl to “do it” with had he wanted to. He was so good-looking it was unfair, yet he seemed to never use it to his advantage, as if somehow he were unaware of it. Donald was still at a point where he pretended (largely for the benefit of the rest of us) that girls were of sexual interest to him, and Bernard and I pulled up the proverbial rear, spending most waking hours thinking about girls but rarely getting anywhere near them.
The following September we’d enter high school, and within months I’d have my leather-jacket-wearing rebel routine down and my first real girlfriend. But that summer I was still a gangly and awkward kid with a twenty-four-hour erection—a hard-on with feet—my older brother Kenny had labeled me. He was five years older than I was, which had made him old enough to understand what had happened to our father, to miss him, and it devastated him. By the time I entered high school he had already graduated and enlisted in the Navy. He’d always seemed wholly uncomfortable in the role of big brother, much less surrogate father figure, so he kept his distance, and although it never seemed malicious or deliberate, I saw him just often enough to miss him, and frequently felt like an only child. He left home and joined the Navy at the end of that summer of 1975 and never looked back. From that point forward my memories of my brother consisted mostly of postcards he’d send from points all over the globe, and the one or two times a year I’d actually see him, when he’d blow into town for a day or two then head right back out on a ship to some distant locale.
A lot happened that summer—a lot changed, and memories were abundant—but on this night, sitting amidst the pale glow of security nightlights in that drab used car dealership, sipping beer and thinking back, I focused on one particular afternoon.
We moved through the forest purposefully, striding quickly along the path until we reached an incline and finally a large clearing more than fifty yards in. Perhaps fifteen feet high and set on a circular cement platform stood an old stone fireplace. In years past, when this particular stretch of state forest had been a popular camping area, the fireplace had been a necessary intrusion to the natural setting that kept fires set by the hordes of campers who descended on the area each summer safely contained. But due to the continued growth of residential lots being sold and built upon, along with the emergence a few years prior of a more modern campground on the other side of town, this patch of woods had been all but forgotten. Here, the forest had been thinned out considerably, and the new house lots were slowly closing in, but the appeal for us was that you could still reach this relatively private area quickly, in less than five minutes in fact, from the center of town.
Once we’d reached the fireplace I stopped, surveyed the surrounding area for witnesses then gave Bernard the go-ahead nod.
He crouched down in front of the fireplace, removed several round stones blocking the front then reached his hand inside up to the elbow. It returned holding a magazine concealed in clear plastic. My heart skipped a beat—it was true. Bernard hadn’t been making it up.
“Holy shit,” I mumbled, “is that it?”
Bernard scrambled away from the fireplace and plunked down onto a bed of pine needles, eyes blinking rapidly behind thick lenses of glass. “Check it out.”
I sat next to him. The sides of the plastic bag were blurred from condensation and dirt. “How long has it been in there?”
“Couple days.” Bernard laid the bag across his lap and set to opening it as if handling fine china. “I didn’t want to risk leaving it at home. If my mother finds this she’ll freak out.”
Bernard had claimed he’d come into possession of a certain magazine, one that supposedly made Playboy look like a comic book in comparison. He had not mentioned this magazine to anyone but me, or so he claimed, but you could never be totally sure with Bernard. His lies were never malicious, but they were often plentiful, and it left even close friends like me off guard at times as to when he was or wasn’t telling the absolute truth. I’d been very leery when he’d first mentioned it that morning—a magazine so intense he couldn’t keep it at home, couldn’t tell anyone but his closest friends about because it was so bad—the whole thing reeked of a Bernard story. But, here we were.
I looked around, abruptly aware of how quiet the forest was but for the occasional cackle of a bird or the windy echo of a car speeding past on the nearby highway.
“OK, we gotta go easy with it because it’s not in the greatest shape.” Bernard carefully removed what appeared to be a very old magazine from the plastic sleeve. On the cover was a black and white photograph of a blonde woman tied to a wooden chair. She wore a bra, panties, garter belt, stockings and high heels, and some sort of leather harness similar to a horse’s bit had been attached to her mouth. At first glance she looked like a typical model on one of the “true crime” or “detective” magazines we’d managed to get a hold of in the past, magazines featuring scantily clad women and headlines like Knife-Wielding Sex Fiend Tortures Bubbly Blondes! (Or some equally lurid blurb), and yet, even initially it seemed different somehow. The look in this woman’s eyes didn’t look posed or phony like the models I’d seen before. She looked genuinely terrified. My eyes shifted quickly to the words in bold red letters above her picture: BITCHES IN HEAT. The cover was cracked in several places, faded with age and dog-eared, and I couldn’t find a price listed anywhere. It had something of an amateur look to it, not a nice slick and glossy cover, like most magazines I’d seen in stores or on the newsstands.
“You’re not gonna fucking believe this.” Bernard laughed, sounding more guttural than gleeful. “It’s from the ’60s, I guess, and it’s illegal.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Chuckie DiNunzio.”
“Figures.”
“I was gonna buy another Penthouse or something, but I asked if he had any other stuff, you know, better stuff where the girls were doing shit instead of just laying there. Porno.”
“Yeah, dip-shit, I know what it’s called.”
Bernard gave a wide grin. “Anyway, Chuckie said he had some underground stuff that used to belong to his old man. He said there was a big stack of them buried under a bunch of crap down in his basement, so he took me down there and let me go through them. Man, I was freaking out, thinking Chuckie’s old man might show up, but Chuckie said the magazines had been down there so long his old man probably didn’t even remember they were there. Anyway, I went through them real quick and picked one out. I didn’t even know what was in it until I got a chance to sit down by myself and check it out, and then—ohhh, baby!”
I elbowed him lightly and laughed. “You’re such a fucking goof, Bernard, I swear to God.”
He laughed too, but quickly grew serious. “Hey, Chuckie says if they catch you with stuff this bad you’re screwed royal.”
I shrugged. “Chuckie DiNunzio’s a moron.”
“It was more expensive than the other ones, too,” Bernard said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Twenty bucks.”
“Twenty bucks? Where the hell you get that much cash?”