Confessions Of A Porn Shoplifter
By Jimmy Chen
Circa 1990, when we were both freshmen in high school, my best friend Ian was my accomplice, or “wing man,” in a handful of highly successful convenience store shoplifting schemes, most often the Shop-n-Go on Clayton Road, in Clayton California, a mid-to-upper class suburb in the Bay Area. We may have walked out of there, cumulatively over the year, with upwards to around $80 dollars in merchandise. We had money from our parents, that was not the problem. We needed porn. We had irrational erections which needed to be drained daily, sometimes twice, with the help of visual stimuli. Our brains were braised in splooge in the slow-cooker of our heads. This was before the internet, kids, when kids back then went to great and precarious lengths to acquire pornographic material. What follows is an illustrated account of a typical venture.
The cashier (A) listlessly gazes out into his domain, only half-focused, perhaps coming down from a high dose of marijuana or a recent break-up. His periphery is represented by the two dashed lines stemming from his fat stupid head. Ian (B) stands between me (C) and the cashier (A), thus blocking the latter’s view (as represented by the multi-tone lines). This was not the most sophisticated technique, and part of me — in nostalgic hindsight at possible “bro code” — wonders if the cashier, likely a porn advocate himself, saw us and simply let it happen. Ian stands in the cashier’s direction, feigning interest in Slim Jims on the counter, signalling to me the split second windows of averted eyes during which I am to stuff as many pornographic magazines down my pants as possible (usually 4-5). This was planned a day earlier, and I wore XL-sized pants with super elasticy waistband for greatest yield (note this had nothing to do with the “baggy pants” hip-hop/ghetto look, for which I lacked swag or comparable gait). I came close to injuring my penis a few times, mashing it with the relatively rigid magazines through my emphatic stuffing and forceful movements.
The porn stuffing was so rapid and adrenaline fueled that I had little time to be selective. Sometimes we ended up with inferior publications like Juggs, as opposed to the cherished Barely Legal, Swank, and Hustler. It’s hard to explain, but it felt like an “out of body experience,” a hyper-cognizance which seemed almost enlightened. My deft hands moved quicker than I could perceive them, as if I were simply following some ancient ordained fate that all boys bust their nut tonight. We always went straight to Ian’s home, which was closer to Shop-n-Go than mine. Also, his parents were nicer, and there was always food around, and they had a pool. Juggs‘ editorial conceit was simple: enormous breasts — which is great, but lacked the complexity of the other mentioned magazines, whose anatomical explicitness was coupled with, perhaps even assuaged by, an interest in the narrative build-up to coitus (i.e. idle virgin at home with melting popsicle; solemn college professor and slutty T.A./grad student; nurse coaxing patient out of a coma, etc).
Ian and I sat cross-legged, in boy lotus as unlikely yogis, on his bedroom floor going over the loot with rapt attention, only occasionally breaking the pristine silence with “holy cow,” or “whoa,” while pointing at the gravity-laden subject(s) of our commentary. A 14-year-old boy has no business with DD-cup breasts. It’d be anthropologically impossible — were it not for porn — that I’d be gazing so close into the dark glistening caverns of such cleavage. We divided the loot 50/50 among us, even though I took the bigger risk and had more to lose were we to ever get caught, not to mention the horror of embarrassment at what we were shoplifting. I guess this was my gift to Ian. In a perfect world my copy of Juggs would have been something else, the bad photography and skank models replaced with angelic nubiles in soft-focus awaiting me in their girlish rooms, supine and agape, guarded by sentient teddy bears who didn’t judge. I miss the rush of the risk. I miss the blindness of wanting something so bad. Man, I miss those juggs.