Pornography, Childhood and the Great War

 

Navarone Playset

When I was a young boy in the 1970’s, my dominion was the carpet.  Between its 70’s shag fibers thousands of battles took place as my soldiers spread out in endless formations.  Bit by bit my mother’s Kirby vacuum would suck up small pieces of them.  Guns, knives, hats and scarves.  All would disappear in due course.  I treasured my toy soldiers.  From America I had knights, cowboys, Indians and Civil War soldiers.  Green army men who would occasionally do battle against the prized Nazi’s a young friend of mine had.  His name was Shane, and he had the best toy sets usually obtained at Christmas.  My favorite was a small mountain fortress with cannons sticking out posing as the fortress in the film "The Gun’s of Navarone."  He also had an Alamo play set filled with Mexicans and Texans.  

Hamley's Regent Streat, London

One Christmas morning in Alaska I awoke to find a giant playset my father had created for me.  Ever the architect he had constructed it out of fiber board cut into elevations forming mountains and roads.  On a hill was a cowboy fort constructed out of dowels carved with pointed tips.  Burrowed into the side of the hill was a gold mine its tracks extending outward.  On the opposite side of a small ridge was an Indian village with tepees covered in translucent hide with flickering bulbs inside.  

My half-finished basement empire

I had a record player and a collection of LPs.  One specifically recently came to mind.  It was a soundtrack from a WW2 propaganda show made by the US Navy called Victory at Sea.  The soundtrack was composed by an American composer named Robert Russell Bennet and incorporated battle sounds juxtaposed around classical stanza.  I loved playing that album while I fought battles across my room.  It was my private soundtrack along with the soundtrack album to John Waynes’ "Alamo." I can still recite the monologues Wayne spoke on the album in my mind.  “Republic, I like the sound of the word.  Means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober however they chose.”  Wayne was a giant to me at a young age, far before I learned of some of the racist statements he once made.  Despite this I believe in ethical leniency.  It must be said, he was a man of his time.  I don’t believe we should condemn those of his generation too harshly as the nation in its entirety lived with a different mind.  Despite his politics and occasional obtuse thoughts, Marion Robert Morrison will always be an icon to me.  

My friends would visit me, and I am sure they envied me as I envied Shane and his play sets.  Mike and Robert were much different situations.  Mike, a couple years older than me had two brothers and toys were apportioned accordingly.  Robert on the other hand came from a family that barely knew he existed.  On Christmas morning when we all compared our hauls, I must have looked absolutely magical or possibly obscene, when they came to find my cowboy town or pachinko machine complete with lights and a ringing doorbell when the jackpot was hit.  

In my early childhood home, there was a half-finished basement complete with 70’s wood paneling.  My parents made it my bedroom and at one end put a captain's bed and a desk.  The room spanned the width of the house and had a window at either end.  On one side was the driveway and on the other, the window looked out toward Mike’s house next door.  I seemed to live half my life on restriction for violating one thing or another.  These days I can’t even remember what I did but it probably involved receiving some disciplinary note from my school known as a “Pink Slip” or not finishing some tasks at home that I had been assigned.  Restriction meant confinement to home with limited access to TVs, toys etc.  Basically, parental prison.  On the weekend my parents would leave to run errands and I would sneak friends into my room.  They came through the front door and at the sight of a car pulling into our driveway, would leave through the window.  There were so many occasions when Robert, Mike, Shane or Ron Clark would be launched through the window with me throwing their shoes after them.  

The one time I can remember a reason for punishment happened in the pre-pubescent years.  Somewhere around the 5th grade I came into possession of a pornographic film.  This was the days prior to video tapes and the film was in the 8mm format.  It had previously been owned by a classmate named Gary who had swiped it from his father’s collection.   Gary was a hapless child who had no reason to be educated.  In the fourth grade our teacher Mrs. Woods decided that she would make a stab at modern educational philosophy combined with reverse psychology and created the "I don’t want to work chair."  It was a chair in one corner of the classroom where a student that was not participating could be sent with the hope that their exile would encourage them to reconsider their attitude.  Gary became a frequent occupant, and it was not long before Gary, who was likely smarter than everyone, decided he had lucked into a legal loophole.  While in the chair he had a carte blanch to not do anything!  It was brilliant.  Eventually Mrs. Woods relented and the “I don’t want to work chair” became a failed educational experiment.  

Anyway, I digress.  So as a young child with a pornographic film I had a problem, how to see it.  Viewing the film required a projector and my father had one.  One day with my parents away myself and a group of neighborhood kids seized my father’s projector and went about trying to view the film.  We couldn’t figure out the projector so Ronald, an older brother of Mike was invited to come in and help us.  With his assistance we were up and running and a number of young minds were permanently tarnished with moving sexual images.

Days later for whatever reason my father took out his projector and there, caught in a spindle was a small piece of film.  Ever the investigative man he held it up to the light, likely squinted with one eye open and discovered the image of a naked woman.  My father had a different philosophy of upbringing then I have maintained and initiated a search of my room where he discovered my bag filled with pornographic magazines in the vacant space below my captains' bed.  All were seized and I was summarily punished.

For my part I raised my child in a decidedly different environment and attitude.  At a likely equivalent age, I allowed him to watch Pulp Fiction with me.  My logic was either I would create a screwed-up monster or an incredibly well-adjusted child, it could go either way.  Fortunes be told I ended up with the later, not the former, for this I am grateful. 

In retrospect those days were so much simpler.  For us pornography meant shoplifting a pornographic magazine from Quick Mart and Fred Meyers or stealing the example picture out of the top of Playboy puzzles.  It involved a stash somewhere.  For some like me it was at home.  For others like Mike and his brothers it was in the Burlington Woods.  The Burlington Woods was a small, wooded area behind my subdivision that long ago surrendered to a housing development.  Whenever it was bulldozed, I wonder if anyone ever discovered boxes hidden like buried treasures filled with childhood fantasies.  Moving pornographic images were almost unobtainable.  The only ones that had access to those were parents with Multi-Vision subscriptions on microwave dishes. It was a time before video tapes and the most anyone could usually hope for was the well-worn pages of a magazine.

For the rest of us a copy of Oui, Hustler or Penthouse was about the best you could get.  At 10 years of age, it was a gateway to an adult world.  For my part the seizure of my film brought about the end of a dream for a money-making enterprise.  My plan was to charge the neighborhood kids for viewing and with parental seizure, that ambition came to a disastrous end.

Today sexuality is everywhere, and pornography is a keystroke away.  There is nothing hidden, nothing unobtainable.  There is no perversion that can’t be satisfied.  The tiny clip of a dirty film is now a line in a browsers’ search history that is nearly beyond my comprehension to discover.  

From laying on the floor having wars with toy soldiers to hiding your dirty magazines from your parents these are the moments that color the life of a young boy, at least during my childhood.  I am not sure if it has been the same for every generation through history, but somehow personal reflections seem to make one’s own “time” seem simple in comparison.  Today fears of drugs, violence and guns seem to tarnish what once seemed so innocent as we went about discovering life and who we were.

When I look at the childhood of my own son it seemed so complicated. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when he moved through it.  As I see young people around me have children, I can’t help but be afraid in my heart as I wish them well and sincerely hope that one day, their children will look back and think of their childhoods as simple and innocent in a never-ending reflection passing from one life to the next.  At the same time, it is difficult to conceive how this could in any way be possible.  While this sentiment is an ever-present reality it still seems to be a universal truth that we all look back at what once was the innocence of our own youth.