It's only skin.

Last night as I rode down a street near my mother's that I'd driven hundreds of times a funny image came to my mind's eye: myself, age eleven, and my best friend at the time gathering water-damaged sheets of paper in the grass next to the shoulder. Our bikes had been tossed aside without hesitation, once-prized possessions now reduced to second-rate scraps of metal and rubber. "This one's in good shape!" Brian called to me, stuffing the crumpled magazine into his coat. "Her head's missing on the page I found, but that doesn't matter," I may have replied. Cars were passing by us on that busy route, possibly our mothers, so we had to act fast to round up our quarry. "Come on, let's get out of her, Bri," a characteristically nervous pre-pubescent version of myself pleaded once the risk outweighed the reward. We rode our bikes back to whichever fort we currently had in the woods behind our development to examine our new-found booty.

Pornographic magazines were sinful treasures to be cherished growing up in the pre-internet explosion of the mid-90s. They held some answer to a question we weren't quite sure how to ask yet. Sure, we'd seen the naked female form before, but never like this. A full-frontal shot in a late-night movie on a pay channel sent us into a confused state of quasi-innocent bliss. A little bush was all it took. What lied underneath that puff of slightly darker hair, however, was still a mystery; sometimes one that I wish I'd never solved. This is where the likes of Hustler, Esquire and numerous periodicals with grotesquely explicit names came into play. Just what was going on behind closed doors that grown-ups seemed so ashamed of, exactly?

Our mothers may have still bought our clothing, but that made us no saints. We wanted to know what all the fuss was about and would go to extraordinary means to accomplish this goal. Sometimes that meant raiding the secret stash of an older brother that could have single-handedly thrashed both of us at the same time without breaking a sweat. "Sean's not home. I know where he keeps them," Brian would say. Then, depending on Sean's latest hiding spot, we'd raid a sock drawer, lift a mattress, or overturn some large flat rock in the woods down by the railroad tracks. "Here, check this one out," my partner in crime would say, handing me a folded nudie mag that he'd just peeled from a shopping bag used to keep out whatever moisture the rock failed to protect it from. "The blonde on page 42 looks like that student teacher in Mrs. Pringle's class." At that point page 42 couldn't come fast enough as my thumbs flipped frantically to unstick the soggy pages. There she was, in all her glory. No longer would we need to resort to undressing her with our eyes. We knew what Mrs. Pringle's hot little helper looked like in the buff, and that she had some other male fans interested in sharpening their pencils as well. Did people ever do that to our moms? They must've, at some point, otherwise we wouldn't be here. At times the revelation was a bit too much to handle. Even now at age twenty-five it's rather unsettling.

Once we were done perusing the stash we'd return the magazines to their temporary resting places as if they'd never been touched. Kids are just as sneaky as adults, they often leave things a certain way to know if they've been handled by someone else. It wouldn't be a crime brought to the attention of Brian's mother for obvious reasons. Sean would seek his own justice in the form of our pummeling; well, Brian's, but Brian would be sure to include me in the sentence with a simple "It was his idea!" since pain, like misery, loves company. In retrospect, it may have been a terrible idea touching those soiled pages at all, regardless of the danger. Sean was a few years older than us and may have discovered the true purpose of pornography. Just what exactly was he doing with the door locked all the time? I'll leave it at that for the sake of this one's light-hearted nature. Perhaps I've already said too much.

Just as wars are fought over and debts are paid with money, the sacred porno books were used as a form of crude currency. If a friend made you mad to the point of irreconcilability there was one place you could hit him where it'd truly hurt. Stealing, exposing, or (gasp) defiling ones collection was a blow dealt only to those with whom there was absolutely no chance of any future peaceful relations. Likewise, a truce could often come about through the gracious presentation of a valued piece. Then, of course, there was the amiable trade brought on by sheer boredom with ones own array of two-dimensional naked women. Think of it as a less traditional wampum, minus the ceremonial smoking of the peace pipe. Brian found the latter later on in life. I too found one, though in an unexpected place that led to further questions, spurred another mystery, fueled another fire; but we'll leave that alone for a later date.

And Brian, if you're out there, I'm sure you've learned the same thing about the three-dimensional variety: most of them are better as someone else's problem.