by Idara Solomon

My introduction to his work occurred one Saturday afternoon in Great Neck, Long Island, where I grew up. The phone rang and it was my best friend, making an urgent plea for me to rush right over before her parents, who were out playing golf or tennis, came home. Since she lived only a half mile away, I hopped on my Schwinn, pedaling furiously to the family’s single-family ranch where she was waiting outside, impatiently tapping her foot on the pebble driveway. Hustling me in, she led the way to her parents’ bedroom. The closer we came, the harder my heart thumped, as we were about to violate their no-entry rule. What reason could there be for such brazen disobedience? What else but the scorcher of a book?!

Snatching it from the night table, we sat cross-legged on the white shag carpeting, pointing and giggling at what were to our wide-eyes X-rated illustrations of a pair of aging stoners sharing a deep affection for each other’s droopy reproductive parts, slackening skin, body odors and hirsuteness.

The man had stringy hair, an unkempt beard and coarse features, making him appear to be in an arrested state of evolution, a vestige belying Cro-Magnon extinction. His hooded penis – a freakish-looking member bearing no likeness to the circumcised organs belonging to those that my friend and I spied when our brothers were naked – made us two girls roll over, grunting and gagging in theatrics of disgust. As for the man’s female companion, her shaggy mane seemed in desperate need of a good cut and blowout from our local hair salon, Peter’s Place, and her dense tufts of armpit hair were in dire straits, silently screaming for a liberal slathering of Nair.

The couple’s facial expressions betrayed shameless states of ecstasy as their bodies interlocked in endlessly changing, contorted and animalistic positions. The depictions of them doing it from behind made the act appear particularly uncouth, as lacking in finesse as dogs humping. And the book made special note of postures with strange, foreign names, from "croupade" to "cuissade" to "flanquette," each promising female pleasure since they simultaneously allowed for clitoral and vaginal stimulation.

Admittedly, neither my friend nor I knew what the hell all that meant, though the broader, underlying message that a lack of inhibition was essential to satisfying sex, and that lovemaking was also supposed to feel just as good for females as it did for males, along with the titillating potential of light bondage, discipline, mirrors, stockings, vibrators, bisexuality and innovative ways of having fun with food, would have a latent impression on me. It would sustain any number of postadolescent, masturbatory fantasies, as well as an openness to erotic experimentation and expectation of gratification once I came of age to partake in pleasures of the flesh à deux.

Although I failed to actually read most of the book, only skimming the naughtier passages, the graphic illustrations hypnotized me. They were the source of a lot of dirty stuff that made me popular with boys – bad boys, naturally, the rest being scared off. Of course, my erotic precocity alarmed my parents who made the progressive-minded decision to not deadbolt the door to my bedroom from the outside in order to keep me in lockdown but, instead, to send me directly to a shrink’s couch in the hopes that I could be talked back into a state of grace