A Common Pornography: A Memoir

by Kevin Sampsell

  I looked around for my car and then realized I had left it at Big Momma’s. I had to walk about twenty blocks to my high school. My hangover made me not care so much about being late for the rehearsal. Maurice was probably the only one who would notice I wasn’t there anyway. The heat was getting to me and I did that thing with my T-shirt where you pull the front up over your head but keep the sleeves around your arms. Suddenly I felt the sickness come up and I heaved the sour throw-up next to a tree in someone’s front yard. I wiped my mouth with a leaf and kept walking in the direction of my school. I started to feel self-conscious, speed walking with my shirt up like that, my face melting like a sick drunk’s. People were driving by me on Garfield Avenue, probably wondering why I wasn’t at school. A couple of blocks later, my legs buckled. I rested on one knee and quickly vomited between a STOP sign and a storm drain. Before I reached the school, there was one more retching moment between cars in a church parking lot.

  Maurice looked at me harshly when I finally got there toward the end of rehearsal. He could somehow tell that I’d been drinking, but instead of lecturing me he said that he too was going out to get drunk that night. I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of reverse psychology on his part. Maybe he was jealous because I didn’t get drunk with him. Nonetheless, it made our graduation night stressful. Maurice was probably my only true friend in my class and now there was tension.

  On graduation night, there was a big Las Vegas–themed party in the high school gym for us, the triumphant Class of 1985. Maurice told me later that it was really fun and it lasted until three in the morning. I went home immediately after throwing my graduation cap into the air. I locked myself in my bedroom and listened to music on my headphones, wondering what to do next. My mind was blank.

  Homemade Clothes

  One day I wore an especially effeminate shirt that Mom had made for me. Dad saw it and freaked out. It didn’t help that I had recently pierced both my ears (by myself, using the potato method[1]) and constantly ratted my bangs too. “Why don’t you just go ahead and turn him into a girl?” Dad said. Some of my guy friends I hung out with were worse. A couple of them actually did wear skirts.

  At the time, I was really into paisley. Mom made me dress jackets that looked like they came from Prince’s wardrobe if he were on the show Miami Vice. Some of my friends even asked me if she could make jackets for them. It was like I had my own personal designer. (Red Carpet Reporter: Who are you wearing? Me: This is from the Mom collection.) I loved Mom for that.

  One time my friend John, who was fairly normal looking compared to the rest of our friends, was over at our house. When he left, Dad shook his head sadly and said something about John wearing mascara. But John didn’t wear mascara. He just had pretty eyes.

  The Palace

  That summer, after graduation, I started to hang out at this place called the Bingo Palace. A couple of my friends actually worked there, calling out numbers and letters to the weeknight gatherings of oldsters. I thought it was a cool job and I was a little jealous. But the coolest thing about the Palace was the Friday night all-ages dances. After the brutal breakup with Pam, I decided that I had had enough self-pity and disgust. I was finally feeling confident about who I was, and besides that, it was a good place to show off my fashion sense.

  About a hundred or more pimply minors would go there every week, and it wasn’t just Kennewick kids. You’d see the Richland punkers and preppies and the Pasco jocks and break-dancers hanging out too. The dance floor used to be a skating rink, so it was pretty big. Around the perimeter of that was a carpeted area with four big mushroom-shaped seats where each clique claimed their space. The far back corner was where all the New Wave kids hung out, stuffing their trench coats under the mushroom and filling the air with clove smoke. Since the different cliques of people didn’t mingle, there were never any fights. But many of the jocks and a lot of the Wavers were weekly regulars and they would sometimes exchange dirty looks or sarcastic comments. The DJ would have to play a wide mix of music to please everyone there. Whenever songs by Love and Rockets or ABC came on, the floor would belong to the Wavers. Then Def Leppard would signal the return of the jocks and everyone else. Sometimes the DJ would slip in Anita Baker or that love song from Footloose and the floor would fill with anxious and nervous slow dancers.

  The Friday night dances became the highlight of my week. I met many of my longtime friends at the Palace that year and I discovered a love for dancing. I even thought to myself: Dancing is my life! I live to dance! Maybe dressing up and dancing to my favorite songs was as close as I would come to being a pop star, so I went for it, and I felt euphoric afterward. I was starting to really feel myself physically in the world, self-conscious in a good way. Living in the moments of music. I remember being at the Palace and thinking about how sad it would have been to be somewhere else. All those people at home. All the people at work. Anyone, anywhere else but here—I felt sorry for them.

  Water Softeners

  I didn’t have a job for a couple of months and I was starting to run out of money. I had a pretty large collection of records (in milk crates) and cassettes (in fruit boxes) and I felt a voracious need to buy music. A friend gave me a tip on a job where all you had to do was call people on the phone. I didn’t realize at the time how painfully monotonous it was going to be.

  I was cold-calling people from a photocopied list, trying to sell them some kind of water softener system. I wasn’t even sure what it did but I was assured that it made taking a shower feel like wet heaven.

  A couple of weeks into the job, I called in to take a night off. Instead of just faking a sickness, I told them that my dad had a stroke. They called my house the next day and found out it wasn’t true.

  Neon Vomit

  My new friend Terry and I were goofing around one day and I showed him some poetry that I’d been writing. But I never called it poetry back then. They were simply called “pieces.” I had seen Henry Rollins do some of his spoken word on a TV show called IRS Records’ The Cutting Edge. He read “Family Man” and I thought it was the most hilariously uncomfortable thing ever. That was the sort of prototype I was working with. Terry liked these pieces of mine and so we decided we would turn them into songs and record them.

  Our first “album” of punk rock songs was recorded on a cassette player in his bedroom and bathroom. Just Terry and me. We decided to call ourselves Neon Vomit. He was good at creating some heavy riffs based on my smallest suggestions (usually just me saying, Can you do something like this—and then imitating a guitar part with my clenched mouth), and then I would yell the lyrics in my best Rollins imitation. There were no drums, but sometimes we would bang on the toilet seat for percussion. Among the first songs we recorded was a sarcastic putdown of Doug, one of the more snooty guys in our little circle of community college New Wavers. It was called “Gee, Doug, You’re So Funny” (chorus: “Gee, Doug, you’re so funny / You make me want to vomit!”). Terry and I made a few tapes and passed them around the campus of Columbia Basin College and it was soon the center of a rivalry as heated as West Coast versus East Coast hip-hop.

  In a classic double-cross moment, Doug somehow talked Terry into playing guitar for him on a song that he wrote called “Kevin, You’re Such a Fag.” I admit that it was a pretty catchy song, especially with the cool drum machine they must have borrowed from someone.

  Even though it was fun to record the Neon Vomit songs, I still wanted to sing (not just yell) in a band that would actually play shows. My friend Len played keyboards and wanted to form a more traditional New Wave band—with expensive haircuts, high-fashion clothes, poetic lyrics, and a sexy name.

  I was writing more and more songs as Len tried to find a guitarist and a drummer. My lyrics started to sound a little less like Henry Rollins and more like a Prince protégé. It was an embarrassing mix of those two influences, with some Cure and Scritti Politti blended in. A classic case of some journals I should have burned a long time ago. Thankfully, nothing
ever came of it.

  Daphne

  I met Daphne at the Palace. She lived in Hermiston, so instead of driving back that night, she and a friend stayed at a cheap roadside motel. I went to the hotel too, and Daphne and I had sex on the floor while her friend slept in the bed. I liked her immediately because she also liked Prince and she was easy, like me. Easy and eager.

  We saw each other off and on for a few months, whenever she came to town for the weekend dances or to shop at the mall. An alternating gaggle of other kids from Hermiston also would come up with her. They always stood out a little because their sense of style was actually more small-town than the Tri-Cities. They tried a little harder to seem different. But under their Goth makeup and torn punk jackets, they were hicks like us.

  Daphne and I would have sex anywhere, anytime. She wanted to do it in a cemetery once, so we drove to one and did it in the back of her station wagon.

  She had a problem with acne, as did I, and sometimes when we made out, our mouths would inadvertently slurp up all the Neutrogena acne wash and cover-up cream. I thought that her skin problems were probably due to stress. I’m sure it was a burden to always be so horny and to have a dad who was a minister.

  One of the last times we had sex was in the middle of my high school football field. We brought a sleeping bag out to the fifty-yard line and squeezed inside. We called it the Human Burrito.

  Making the Band

  David was one of the other Hermiston kids. He was a stocky grocery store worker, always trying to talk me into starting a New Wave band with him.

  Almost every weekend, David and Daphne and whoever else was around would sleep on Marco Torrez’s floor. Marco was this guy all my other friends made fun of. He was a tall, black-clad Mexican who wore lipstick and women’s hats.

  One night, David and Daphne met me at Shari’s, one of those twenty-four-hour restaurants that we often found ourselves in since we were too young to go to bars. David kept going on about how he was learning guitar and buying a drum machine. “We could be like the Jesus and Mary Chain,” he said. “There’re only two guys in that band.” David seemed to think I was going to be the singer in his band. “We have to think of a good name and we have to take press photos,” he said as he sipped from the oversize milkshake in front of him. I looked at Daphne to try and gauge her position on the matter.

  “You should take naked photos,” she said. “That would get some attention and create controversy. I could use my uncle’s camera. He lives up here.”

  “That’s awesome,” said David.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of posing nude for photos but I liked taking my clothes off in front of Daphne.

  The following Friday, we met at Marco’s before the dance. I’d been to his place only once before. It was a small one-bedroom apartment with big posters of the Cure and Bauhaus looming over the front room. There were black curtains and black candles and a black fake leather couch. David sat in a director’s chair, writing band name ideas in a notebook. He told me Daphne was on her way and that her uncle was coming over to help her set up the camera. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Her uncle is cool. I met him once. I think he used to be a model.”

  There was a little kitchen in the apartment and I went in there to say hi to Marco. I was hoping nobody else would be there to watch this. Marco was wearing a satin bathrobe and I asked him if he was going out later. He shrugged and took a pizza out of the oven. “I guess we’ll see what everyone feels like doing,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “We’re all going to do it,” he said. “It’s going to be cool.”

  One of Marco’s Goth friends came out of the bathroom, a girl named Alexis. I didn’t know her very well. She was sort of new in town and over twenty-one. She bought all the alcohol. She was tall and skinny and wore clothes that barely stayed on. She made up her face to look like a china doll. In fact, her whole body looked like it was powdered white. She could glow in the dark. She was probably the first person I knew who wore such sexy clothes. Garter belts. Lace. She probably had to go to Seattle to buy such things. I said hi to her and wondered if she was going to get naked.

  Daphne came in with her uncle then, carrying a tripod and an awkward camera. Her uncle was a chubby forty-year-old with a fringed jacket and feathered hair. “Hi everyone,” he said, a little too jovially. “This is going to be fun.” He helped Daphne set up the tripod in front of the couch. “So, should we do the band photos first or just start with everyone?” asked the uncle. No one said anything.

  Daphne turned and snapped a photo of my blank expression. “We have lots of film,” she said. “Let’s just do some candid shots first. See what develops. Get it? See what develops?” She turned and took a photo of her uncle.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t let your dad see me in these photos. He’d damn me to hell—again!” Everyone laughed a little about that. We all started drinking then. I put more vodka in my Big Gulp cup, mixing it with the last of my Coke. I liked the burn in my throat. The sensation of almost throwing up with each swallow. Five or six swallows later, I was over that hump. I became loose and daring.

  “Shirts off,” yelled Marco. He had Depeche Mode on and I was watching Alexis dancing out of the corner of my eye. Five shirts were thrown into the corner.

  We looked at the uncle with his striped polo shirt still on. “I’m only here to document,” he said. Then he asked Daphne if there was supposed to be someone else there. “I thought you knew an Asian boy,” he said. He seemed a little disappointed when Daphne told him that her Asian friend wasn’t coming.

  Alexis grabbed my arm and led me to the couch. She had on a black see-through bra and I saw her small nipples sticking out a little. “Let’s see how tough you are,” she said. She had me lie down with my shoulders on the armrest of the couch. She grabbed a burning candle and dripped wax on my chest. It stung just lightly before drying in clumps. I peeled the pieces off my smooth chest and looked at them closely. She tried to make designs on me. A question mark. The anarchy A. There wasn’t quite enough wax melted to do them in one try. She straddled me and leaned over with the candle. One of her bra straps was down and I was hoping that she’d move close enough for me to brush my mouth against her breasts but the candle went out and she leaned back, laughing. I remember some things vividly: her bra slipping down a little more as she laughed, the quiver of her body, the anxious erection in my pants.

  Daphne lit some more candles and was starting to take photos. She wore a white bra and her breasts looked heavy in it. I noticed a few acne scars on her back. I wanted to look at them closely but I didn’t want everyone else to think I was weird. Marco sat by me on the couch and Alexis grabbed another candle and moved over to him. “Let’s see if you can take the pain,” she said to him. Marco was more lighthearted about the whole thing. He laughed and squirmed and pretended like it was really hurting. I felt sort of foolish and I got up to grab my drink.

  David was standing behind Daphne as she paced around and aimed the camera in odd angles toward the couch. He seemed a little stoned or nervous. I got the feeling that he wanted to see Alexis naked too. He fingered the belt loops on his pants and breathed awkwardly as he drank three cans of beer in quick succession. Daphne’s uncle eventually tried to sneak out of the apartment, growing disinterested. “Where you going?” Daphne called out. He said he’d see her in the morning, and left without saying good-bye to anyone else. “Oh well,” said Daphne. She set the camera down and unsnapped her bra. Alexis and Marco hooted their approval and she kept going. Her socks and pants were tossed sloppily in the corner. David nudged me and we followed her lead.

  “Check this out,” Marco shouted over the music. He stood up, dropped his pants, and had his penis sticking out the fly of his boxers. The girls laughed. The mood seemed so much lighter after Daphne’s uncle left; it almost floated. I saw Marco’s penis and it was the first time I had seen someone else’s penis. It look
ed big around the head but the rest of it seemed splotchy and discolored. Daphne took some photos and Marco covered his face, suddenly shy. “I should get it hard first,” he said. Then he paused. “Right? We don’t want our dicks to look small.”

  “Nothing looks worse than a dead dick,” David said. All of us burst out laughing.

  “I’m not helping out in that department,” said Alexis. My anticipation was killed a little when she said that.

  Daphne’s camera turned our way. “Okay, future rock stars,” she said. She stood on a chair and took shots of us from above. I put my arm around David and he felt tense. He pushed me away a little and said he had to go to the bathroom to check himself out in the mirror. “We’ll use only the best ones!” Daphne shouted after him. She gave me the camera and told me to take over. I wanted to snap a photo of her but she dashed away, following David into the bathroom, saying something about how she didn’t like pictures. I thought I heard David getting sick in the toilet.

  On the couch, Alexis laughed as she tried to put her bra on Marco. But it wouldn’t fit and ended up looking like a weird sling or bandage. I took photos of that, trying to keep Marco’s penis out of the frame. Then I took some really close snapshots of Alexis’s lips, legs, and breasts. She was drinking a lot and posing with a bottle of cheap vodka that was almost empty. I started to wonder if she might throw up, but she reached behind the couch and grabbed a blanket. I put the camera down and joined them on the couch. I squeezed in between them and Alexis slowly closed her eyes as she turned her back to me. I tried to kiss her shoulders but she shrugged me off. I was starting to feel a little dizzy as well. I felt Marco pressing against my backside. I figured if I was going to make a move on Alexis, I wouldn’t be able to get rid of him, so I tried to block him from my mind. I felt his hands on my hips, slowly moving to my penis. All three of us were under the blanket. I wondered what was happening with David and Daphne. I heard the shower in the bathroom.