My First Porno

I didn’t know Mark was bringing a porno videocassette to the hotel room. I really didn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered though, if I did, because I still would have rented the room with him, Lynn, and Jason. I had a crush on Mark and was excited he’d be there. Lynn and Jason knew I liked him, too. Even Mark knew. I’m not sure whether this became more or less apparent as the night went on, when the four of us teenagers hung out in the very average Holiday Inn hotel room with two double beds just west of I-94 on Touhy Avenue in Skokie, Illinois. Mark said his mother was out for the evening, that she wouldn’t notice he had taken the porno from her stash. Jason brought an extra VCR from his mom’s house in a brown shopping bag. While the two of them hooked it up to the TV, Lynn and I walked down the gray and maroon hall to the vending machine and bought a bag of peanut M&Ms in anticipation of something we didn’t quite know.

It was 1987, and we were 11th graders attending different high schools along Chicago’s North Shore, and though we consequently didn’t see each other every day at the same school, we were strongly connected by the overnight summer camp we all went to—a Jewish, socialist camp in Three Rivers, Michigan, now called Camp Tavor but back then called Habonim, which means “the builders” in Hebrew. The camp models itself on an Israeli kibbutz. We lived in tents that we, American mostly upper-middle-class suburban Jews, assembled ourselves. We slept in narrow, less than single-sized bunk beds, each with various grades of mosquito netting our parents bought for us before camp started and which we tied to the corners of the beds delicately like we would fasten bows on dresses.

Away from home all summer, we worked in the morning, lived in nature, and developed a sense of who we were and who we wanted to be—living out a particular kind of egalitarian idealism in a simulated kibbutz on 68 acres nestled between Chicago and Detroit. We fashioned a mode of liberation available to us only in the eight-week summer session of camp. During the academic year, we trudged through our school days as budding suburban capitalists with mild depression, Jews in a cold secular, Christian world, longing for the selves we were growing into and nurturing at camp. During the camp summer sessions, we were socialists, fulfilling the camp’s mission to “empower the youth to dream of and build a more just and peaceful world,” though I’m not sure we did make the world a better place.

In the evenings, after Israeli folk dancing outside on the basketball court, we fooled around in our tents, naively exploring our sexuality in a space seemingly filled with freedom and openness. A friend fooled around with another camper behind a shed near the woods. “He lit candles,” she whispered to me the next morning. “It was very romantic, but such a fire hazard,” she joked. We possessed an air of detachment that revealed our insulation in our upper-middle-class world. We were incapable, I thought back then, of worrying that anything too bad would actually happen to any of us; though, of course, this wasn’t true. We were simply sheathed in the bubble of camp that also extended beyond its physical edges. When we went into town, for example—a rare endeavor that occurred maybe once a summer—we made fun of the “townies,” the Christian locals who had heard, we were sure, of the crazy Jews who stayed at their commune each summer. One Sunday morning we went to Denny’s for an all-you-can-eat buffet, lying about our ages to the manager so we could get the kid price. While Lynn and I slouched our shoulders and curved our backs trying to make ourselves shorter, another camper played footsie with me under the booth while we ate scrambled eggs and pancakes drizzled with too much maple syrup. But despite all the sexual exploits that occurred at camp, I remained fairly innocent. A guy kicked me out of his bed one night when I wouldn’t do anything more than kiss him awkwardly under the thin veil of mosquito netting.

It was fall when the four of us rented the hotel room. Jason picked up Lynn and me in his sister’s understated white Toyota Corolla. Mark drove alone in his mom’s black Camaro, a sporty two-door with a gold eagle on the hood. Arriving in cars that didn’t belong to us, though suited us nonetheless, might have reminded one of the opening and closing scenes of The Breakfast Club, the 1985 John Hughes movie, filmed in two different high schools in Chicago’s north suburbs—a fact we took enormous pride in, given we were 10th graders when the film came out. We had watched it together dozens of times, memorizing lines as banter when we teased each other. Four of the teenagers’ stereotyped personalities match the cars their parents drive. Claire, the spoiled rich girl, is in a BMW; Andrew, the athlete, in a pickup truck with the license plate OHIOST, as if he were already headed to Ohio State on a sports scholarship; Brian, the nerd, in a nondescript sedan with his Einstein-homage license plate EMC 2; and Allison, the basket case, in an old Cadillac. Only John, the burnout, walks across the school field alone, lacking the family structure the others have, and that we had, too—parents who will drive them to and from their Saturday detention at school in their cars. We were unaware of the contradiction we projected onto the world—at once aspiring to a socialist-based collective yet also admiring the teens in the film who lived a life of privilege, products of their families’ capitalist backgrounds.

With the videocassette porno in his JanSport backpack next to him on the passenger seat of his mother’s car, Mark turned into the parking lot of the hotel that night from Touhy Avenue with a confidence as though the car were his own, bought and paid for with his own hard-earned money, blasting The Clash, the tires screeching beneath him as he pulled into a spot.

VCRs were still new then, and porn was widely available for the first time for watching at home. In our case, the convenience of porn videocassettes and VCRs on which to view them, allowed the four of us teens to see it together at the hotel. I’m unable to recall, however, why we didn’t simply watch it at one of our homes, for it seemed we were always hanging out together when our parents were gone for the evening, playing house using the glasses, plates, and cutlery our parents bought, jumping on furniture they had picked out, rough-housing on their rugs, drinking their alcohol. We emulated their lifestyles while claiming to rebel against how they lived, too, waiting for our own turn at adulthood. We lacked any real sense of the disappointments that would accompany us once we did inhabit the adult world.

Like the grownups in the comic strip Peanuts who are intentionally left out of the children’s world, our parents seemed in the background of our lives, too. With our parents out, we acted as though our homes were our own, which, of course, they were, because we belonged to our parents, but we moved in our bodies and around our houses without an awareness, I think now, of how hard our parents were working behind the scenes of our youth to pay for their homes. Perhaps the decision to rent the hotel room that night to watch the porno was a way to begin to individuate from our families during the school year, as we did for eight weeks each year at summer camp (though our parents paid for our camp tuition while we pretended to be socialists), hoping to experience something new about ourselves outside the home.

The energy in the hotel room that evening before we watched the porno was exciting, perhaps a bit titillating, if we could have even named it that—an awkward mode of platonic foreplay, anticipating the pornography we were going to collectively view in the neutral hotel space a few miles from our homes. But we were also innocent and young, shy yet curious. That we even called it “porno” and not “porn” was perhaps a way to make the adventure more playful, as though adding the “o” to “porn” somehow made the difference between real perverts and us (though the term “porno” does refer exclusively to video, whereas “porn” often is used for all pornographic content). I don’t think any of us had had sex yet. And so I believe we were also scared. Once Mark and Jason successfully hooked up the VCR to the hotel TV, they suggested we get stoned. They had brought weed, likely also stolen from their parents. After smoking, we quickly got the munchies. Our hunger took precedence over the impending sexual awakening, and we soon left the hotel to go to Jack’s, a 24-hour greasy diner just across the street. I don’t remember what Jason and Mark ordered, but Lynn got a tuna melt on rye, and I had grilled cheese with cheddar and Swiss and a chocolate shake, the kind where they give you the extra in a metal cup.

This was decades before the days of the internet, Pornhub, and “porn literacy,” as it’s now called—the effort to educate teens about porn in safe and trusting places so they don’t have unrealistic expectations about relationships and sex. Most teens today look to porn for their sexual education. Porn literacy wasn’t needed for teens like us in the 1980s. We simply didn’t have the immediate access to it young people have today. Video pornography was almost beyond our reach, forbidden, something teens strategized to steal from their parents who watched it, which was why it was such a big deal that the four of us were going to watch it together at the hotel.

The porno Mark brought had just come out in 1987 and was called Little Shop of Whores, a pun off the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors. I remember how much I loved the wordplay when I saw the title on the videocassette. The nerdy attraction I had developed for witty double-entendres expanded to include more titles of pornos I found amusing (but had not watched): You’ve Got Male, Urban Cowgirls, Ocean’s 11 Inches, ET: The Extra Testicle, Night of the Giving Head, The Sperminator, Edward Penishands, Good Will Humping, A Few Hard Men, Village of the Rammed, Breast Side Story, A Clockwork Orgy, Any Officer and a Genitalman, Gulp Fiction, Beverly Hills, 9021-ho!, The Bare Bitch Project, My Bare Lady, Buffy the Vampire Layer, Pulp Friction, Gangbangs of New York, School of Cock, Throbin Hood, Sisterhood of the Traveling Sluts, Romancing the Bone, Brassiere to Eternity.

Of course, a clever title was never a sure indication that a good film was to follow. In the hotel room, I lay next to Lynn in anticipation on one of the two double beds. Jason and Mark sat on either side of us cross-legged and eager, closer to the TV. Like kids about to watch a G-rated movie with their family, Lynn and I were each on our stomachs, heads propped up by hands cupping our chins, swinging our knees and feet as we ate the peanut M&Ms, ready for the show.

It wasn’t the first time the four of us hung out in a bed together. Months before, we were at Lynn’s house in Evanston one Saturday night when her parents were seeing a show at a theater in downtown Chicago. My dad dropped me off at Lynn’s and Mark and Jason came later. We were in the guest room on the dormered third floor. The house was huge, modern, beautiful, and a block from Lake Michigan. In the living room was a life-size horse made of stone. The kitchen had just been updated with tiles Lynn’s mother brought back from a trip to Israel. The back of the house, a two-story family room, was all glass. The sheets, pillows, and comforter in Lynn’s guest bed were fluffy and light. You felt like you were inside of a cloud or a buttery biscuit in that bed, nothing like the sheets and blankets in my house. Buried under the covers with our clothes on, we four pretended to watch TV as we tickled each other. Soon, we removed our socks.

My crush on Mark had been growing, so my efforts to be near him were more pronounced than for Lynn and Jason. Apparently, at one point during our evening playing in the guest bed, Jason thought he was holding Lynn’s hand, and Mark thought he was holding mine. I happened to lift my head and looked at their arms, and I saw that in fact Jason and Mark were not holding either of our hands but each other’s, their fingers intertwined like lovers. I felt a bit encouraged by the thought that Mark had seemingly been reaching for my hand, a brief yet bold move, given our naivete about sex. “Jason and Mark are holding hands!” I blurted out awkwardly, laughing and pulling back the thick comforter. They seemed surprised, for clearly they had not realized they were touching each other. They quickly let go with a self-conscious laugh, embarrassed, for their pursuit of us had fallen flat. With nervous laughter, we decided to go downstairs to order a pizza, our bare feet slapping the polished oak wood floors on each step like children running on cement at a local pool in the summer.

Another time, we hung out at Mark’s mom’s house in Wilmette when his mom was gone for the evening. We were jumping up and down on her bed, fully clothed. At one point Mark asked me to have armpit sex—revealing a bit of chivalry, asking for consent for armpit sex!—with him. I nodded, a young girl eager to do anything for her crush, and he soon rammed his armpit into mine as we jumped higher on the bed. I quickly caught on and pushed back. It was hard to feel much of anything, though, our armpits pushing against each other through our thick winter sweaters. His mother had a copy of the 1972 book The Joy of Sex on her nightstand that shook up and down as we jumped on the bed. We had looked at it together earlier that evening, in distanced awe of the pictures and positions that seemed so far away from us, as though an invisible line of our youth kept us from going further that night. Unbeknownst to us, I realize now, we were naively awaiting the adulthood that we thought would go hand in hand with adult sex in big adult king-size beds, in big houses in the suburbs that adults buy with the adult jobs we’d each have someday.

The Joy of Sex wasn’t the only book we marveled at together. At camp, we read and discussed the groundbreaking 1971 book Our Bodies, Ourselves like it was scripture. The book revealed things to us that we had wondered about privately but had never talked about with others. I had been very shy at home, and learning about the body in a kibbutz-style collective felt different and open. We were young, attractive teenagers who were given permission to experiment and talk about our bodies, and we retained an authority over how far we would or would not go, growing in ways we didn’t yet understand. We skinny-dipped at night like little kids who were expanding into adult bodies yet weren’t aware, dipping in and out of spaces that were at once erotic and youthful. One night at camp, we sat around a bonfire singing David Bowie’s 1971 song, “Changes”—these lines are also the epigraph in the opening moments of The Breakfast Club (after a few seconds on the screen the words crack to the sound of smashing glass)—confident in Bowie’s assertion that we retained agency over who we were in the adult world:

... And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through …

In between singing, we were quiet, listening to the crickets around us, mesmerized by the crackling of the campfire, the popping and crackling of red and orange underneath the burning twigs and branches. It smelled like sandalwood. We wanted the night to last forever though none of us said so, for we were youthfully unaware that such moments like this would become the past. Several of us at camp fantasized about moving to Israel once we graduated from high school to volunteer on a kibbutz, working in the fields picking tomatoes and tilling the land, making our simulated kibbutz camp in Michigan into a longer, extended socialist reality in the Middle East. Lynn’s parents and mine balked and told us no when we asked them if we could defer university for a year. Nowadays, many who can afford it take a gap year in between high school and college, working and volunteering and interning, but it wasn’t a branded popular thing that people did when we were younger. We were going to college, our parents insisted, which we both did. We scoffed at them, but ultimately, we did what they said, feigning our supposed independence with bravado.

Despite most of my memories of hanging out at each other’s homes when our parents weren’t there, I still felt I knew Lynn’s, Jason’s, and Mark’s parents much better than any of the parents of friends I’d meet later. Lynn’s father read The New York Times every morning at breakfast before he went to work, leaving sections of the paper strewn all over the table. Most evenings he brought a fresh baguette home for dinner. Her mom always had fancy sweets in cardboard boxes tied with string from bakeries in downtown Chicago I’d never heard of. Jason’s parents got high. One time when Jason and I were smoking a joint in his kitchen, his mother came home and I ran out the back door, scared. “It’s fine,” he said, coming after me. “She wants some, too.” Mark’s mother was completing her Ph.D. and working full time after her divorce. Once we went to college and met new friends, we’d talk about our parents as though they were these odd roommates we were forced to live with when we were younger, a period of our life we had outgrown. Looking back now, it’s clear that even though we spent so much time at each other’s houses with our parents in the background, we were also growing, unknown to ourselves, in ways that would ultimately emulate them—their personalities, mannerisms, belief systems, and modes of being seeping daily deep into our unconscious minds.

I remained connected to Lynn’s, Jason’s, and Mark’s families. Once I graduated from college and was looking for work, Mark’s mom hired me to proofread her dissertation. In the 1990s, when I was living in Jerusalem as a graduate student, she brought Mark’s sister for a visit. I introduced them to a tour guide I knew to show them around the city, and hung out with them in and out of their hotel room in between their tours. Lynn’s father was the first of our parents to pass away. At the funeral in 2012, Mark showed up and sat next to me, though I hadn’t seen him in at least a decade. We were 42 years old, married, no longer in touch. The seats at the synagogue were narrow; we sat close. It was awkward and distant, yet also oddly comforting to sit with someone who knew me when I was young. These days, I have fewer people in my life who are witnesses to my youth like these friends were. Jason was the first of us to get married, and the first to get divorced, too. When his older brother died tragically in an accident in 2016 at age 51, I spent time with Jason at his mom’s house in Lincolnwood, and got high with them like we used to once in a while. In her grief, stoned, his mother methodically reached for one Reese’s peanut butter cup after another from a bag in her freezer.

I know such moments in our lives don’t last forever, but it’s also astonishing, I think sometimes, how we’ve drifted apart. The last time I saw Mark was at Jason’s brother’s funeral. We hugged and said hello, shared in the shock that Jason’s brother had died so young. We haven’t spoken since.

Little Shop of Whores was unimpressive. I don’t remember much except for the opening scene. The camera focuses on a woman’s face while she paints her nails, chews and snaps her gum loudly, and talks on the phone, seemingly bored. It occurred to me later that she was in a similar position as I was on the bed, laying on her stomach, her hand cupping her chin. When the camera zoomed out, though, we could see that a man was having sex with her from behind while she showed her detached annoyance. After so much buildup, I was let down by watching someone so uninterested in sex engaging in it on the screen in front of us. It wasn’t erotic. It wasn’t romantic. It was boring. I gave Lynn a look that said, “That’s it?” with no words to describe the anticlimactic nature that night became. Despite all the anticipation and buildup and imagining we had put into what that night could be like—even though we really had no idea what it might have been when the night began—we were disappointed.

I wonder now if, back then, I had a feeling that our evening together would be meaningful for me as I got older—if I would look back on that night with nostalgia, for nothing like it would happen again. And though I was unable to express the disappointment, I knew I felt a sadness, perhaps, a hint of what was to come later when I actually did become an adult, and had other experiences over the decades with other people in other beds, some who would care for me deeply and some who would not at all, and I wonder if these moments that make up a life mean more or less to me as they tuck themselves into the folds of the back of my brain and become memory as I age. I remember a discussion in English class about the end of Romeo and Juliet when I was a freshman in high school, two years before Lynn, Jason, Mark and I would watch the porno. Our teacher asked us if we believed love could last forever, and most of the class said no, based on the tragic death of the two young lovers. “Is love any less meaningful,” she pushed, sitting on top of a desk at the front of the classroom, “if it doesn’t last forever?” I remember feeling my heart racing. I wanted an answer. I’ve never forgotten that discussion, not only because I was a teenager who would soon begin to experience losses in love, but because I would return to that question myself many times as an adult. But I’ve still come up short trying to figure it out. I simply don’t know.

We didn’t finish watching the porno in the hotel room. Outside, beyond the thick gray vinyl curtains insulating us from the outside world that we had pulled across the window for privacy, it was cold and windy, the days becoming shorter. Soon, it would be winter, and we’d be counting the months until we went back to our cocooned Jewish, socialist camp, the place where we slept inside see-through mosquito netting and would never need thick curtains to protect us.

Later, once we had stopped watching, Mark took a video camera out of his backpack. We didn’t know he had brought one. Now that we had watched a porno, he told us, we were going to make our own. He moved around the room, pretending to film us, telling us to move our legs this way, raise our arms that way, though we had been fully clothed all evening. We laughed at him, then, and he laughed too, and then we decided we should go down the hall to swim in the hotel pool. Lynn and I changed into our bathing suits in the bathroom. After playing in the water, splashing and shoving each other, doing somersaults and handstands with our heads near the bottom of the pool so straight our feet stuck out perfectly like upside-down ducks cooling off their bodies in a pond, we came back to the hotel room and collapsed, too young to begin thinking yet about all of the things that wouldn’t last forever. Despite our best intentions to force it, the adult world had not quite yet descended on us. We slept like babies, the four of us in the same bed, for the rest of the night.