Old enough to have stolen a porn magazine from a Times Square sex shop because there was no internet.
My teenaged shoplifting phase was centered on violating the porn rack at the Waldenbooks in the mall.
I ripped off so many copies of Penthouse that I must have materially contributed to the collapse of Bob Guccione’s empire.
I remember Waldenbooks well. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time there lingering over Milo Minara graphic novels and issues of Heavy Metal and hiding my ridiculous teenage erections.
We only had one bookstore that carried Heavy Metal, and they went out of business before I was old enough to appreciate it. I remember surreptitously looking at it in the store when I was ten or eleven, and thinking, “If I’m ever caught reading this, my ass is grass.” In reality, I’m not sure anyone would have noticed —my parents weren’t that inquisitive— but my imagination conjured all sorts of dark consequences.
So my illustrated sexual excitement was far more mundane. Y’know what stupid-ass thing had me fascinated? Mastermind fucking with Jean Grey’s mind in the Claremont/Byrne X-Men from ‘78 to ‘80. My pre-pubescent brain didn’t fully get what was going on, but I knew I loved the idea of this creepy mutant fucker psychically gaslighting her into oblivion in order to make her his obedient little love slave/attack dog.
I learned early to enjoy watching the goodest of the good girls go bad.
