I remember when I was a kid, my parents used to watch the Dick Clark Rockin New Year's Eve from Times Square, and we'd watch the ball drop live on TV.
It always looked like something amazing to us, there in small-town Southern America.
I lived in New York in 1997 and had the opportunity to go watch the ball drop. How could I pass that up?
The first thing I was amazed by was how many cops there were, and how efficiently they were herding people around up there. Certain streets were one-way to control the flow of crowds. And there were security checkpoints set up all over the place; not everybody got searched or frisked, but eveybody got eyeballed at the very least, and there were drug dogs out, too.
Of courses, anybody visible drinking alcohol was quickly seized by the cops, and if they weren't hauled away by the humorless 90s cops of Rudy Guilliani, at the very least their alcohol was confiscated.
It was really cold, below freezing, and I went around 10 or so and stood in the crowd for a while. I had a pint of vodka in my pocket. I can't remember if I didn't have a girlfriend at that time or if she just couldn't go out with me that night for some reason.
And I stood there for a while longer.
Among the tens of thousands of other folks. Mainly seemed to be meatheads from New Jersey.
Mostly just standing there.
Finally, bored and cold, I gave up and went back downtown by 11:00pm, and managed to get into a bar I went to often at that time on Ludlow Street, and saw in the New Year there amongst the 90s hipster doofuses. I made out with a chubby girl, and was then amazed to find she had started work at the same language school I worked at a few weeks later.
Small world, eh?
I saw in the year 2000 on Koh Phangan in Thailand -- read about that in TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY -- and while it was a fine way to celebrate, those big parties always tend to be a bit anti-climactic, really. I mean most people are dancing and drinking, but a considerable number of people at really big parties are people who don't often go to big parties, and they tend to be irritated or bored.
Wasn't it Hunter S. Thompson who said he never went out on New Year's Eve, because he considered it amateur night?
It's small parties where you have the serious fun. I went to a few of those in Russia, of courses. Where you get the whole group making out, rolling naked in the snow, shooting fireworks out of their pants, etc.
(But we had plenty of better parties NOT on major holidays, for the same reasons mentioned above -- there are always people at a New Year's Eve party who don't go out often and don't want to do anything stupid.)
I look back at my teen and college years and I'm kind of drawing a big blank. I do remember one when I was about 19 where I had to take a girl to the hospital because she took a bunch of acid and flipped out, and I was in the hospital parking lot at midnight. (Fortunately I was with one of those small town slut types, and we were fuck buddies before that term existed.)
But I for some reason remember my adolescent years, 13 or 14 or 15. They used to have these all-night comedy marathons on HBO, featuring George Carlin and Richard Pryor's famous specials and filmed concerts.
I remember watching those and being totally engrossed, even though I probably didn't fully understand at least half of the things they were talking about at that time.
But undoubtedly, my fondess for obscene language developed there.
So if you don't have any parties full of bored and irritated people to go to, check out those specials. And a Happy Fucking New Year to all of you!
Unsurprisingly busy with family on the holiday, I nonetheless offer you a Chistmas prezzie:
I almost forgot that I had made this (because it doesn't sell), but there is a collected edition of all the books I've written about English teaching, and you'll be able to get it from December 26 - December 30 free on Amazon, and free all the time on Kindle Unlimited.
So! How's everybody's TEFLpocolypse going as 2015 draws to a close?
Back in April and May when I failed to get a job in the Emirates,I put in several applications for jobs in the Kingdom -- including my first one, the one I liked (and probably shouldn't have left.)
I heard a blank terrifying nothing from ALL of them.
But then in September and October, after I took this job in America, they started getting back to me.
My first employers said they would be glad to have me back.
Three months later, I have still not received an official job offer, nor a contract.
Likewise, another big college in the Kingdom. They said they would move forward with the application, but warned that it was taking up to 18 MONTHS to get all the papers in order these days.
(With my first two jobs in the Kingdom, it took about 6 or 7 months between interview and arrival.)
But hey, I have a job already, right? I'm even making an annual salary greater than my age. Can't complain too much.
The way I heard about this American job was from a guy who I worked with at my first Kingdom college job.
Let me tell you HIS TEFLpocolypse story.
In 2013, when Big Oil Company was hiring a lot of English teachers, he took a week off to fly to America for an interview with Big Kingdom Oil Company. (That's typical corporate logic, right?)
They offered him a position -- an official, signed offer -- so he left his job at the college, and went back to America to wait.
And he waited. Three months passed.
He got the contract, and signed it and sent it back. (That's about normal, so far.)
He got his papers together and sent them in to apply for the visa.
He was told there were some issues, and they couldn't get the visa yet.
(What exactly these issues were, they didn't say.)
He waited. And he waited.
Six more months passed.
Finally he was told, well, too much time has passed, and now Big Oil Company doesn't need any people.
What exactly is the protocol and etiquette for educating one's 75-year-old father about which porn streaming sites are safe, and which things one should click and not click?
I moved back to America partly to help my father, who has Parkinson's and was losing the ability to walk, as he moved into an assisted living place.
He likes it quite a bit there, and his condion has improved. It's more like a hotel for old people than a hospital -- he has a studio with a view of the woods behind the place, with a disability-minded shower and cable, and of course, internet.
I go to visit him every long weekend I have -- that's been about once a month since I came here in August. His computer, an ancient desktop, is always gunked up with viruses and malware when I get there, mainly of the porn variety. His browser is regularly full of links to the most heinous kinds of porn, often transvestite and she-male themed.
I suppose it's possible that's just a coincidence. He mentioned that he was trying to look up information about a transsexual shoe model who worked for the shoe company he worked for in Brazil years ago, and ended up with all this crap on the computer.
Perhaps that's true.
Perhaps.
PORN ON MY MIND
I've been thinking about porn a lot lately.
As we all know, I began making extra money writing indie porn in 2012, and this intensified this year when I couldn't get a TEFL job.
Perhaps fortunately, Amazon changed its payment policies, making short porn less profitable, Fortunate, because writing porn daily for a couple of months had reduced my brain to a puddle of goo.
I realized I had a problem with it when I went to Mallorca with the Girlfriend in June. We had sex maybe a half-dozen times over the eight or nine days, but then the day she left, I jacked off to porn three times.
In a row.
90 DAYS
So I went three months without watching porn. Or writing any.
(I still jacked off, I should say.)
And much like when I stopped drinking, my main thought was: WOW! What a TREMENDOUS amout of time and energy I was putting into that activity.
Three months I lasted. And then I slipped.
One of my short porn novels ended up back on the best-seller lists, and in my research for the sequel, I looked something up and I was back to porn.
It's not as frequent as before, but it's a weekly thing now. (And I'm back to making more than a thousand bucks a month from the books, which currently is going towards paying for my father's assisted living place.)
People joke: how could porn be addictive?
And I'm like, how could it NOT be?
BACK IN THE DAY
I was born around 1970. While porn has in various forms been around since the dawn of human activity -- witness the temples at Khajuraho -- the modern form of porn has pretty much grown up with me, arguably beginning with the 1972 release of DEEP THROAT.
The attempt to include a narrative and characters (and stupid jokes) into porn didn't really last, and we've now gone back to the sex-act-only short films which in the 50s and 60s were called "loops", but DEEP THROAT really began the "mainstreaming" of porn.
(I can't recommend the Rialto Report website and podcast enough, for a look at a history of the industry and a look at the psychopathology of people who have way more sex than they really should.)
* * *
My personal first exposure to porn was probably typical of guys my age: PLAYBOY magazine.
There was a copy of the issue that included an interview with Jimmy Carter hidden on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet in our house. I don't remember how I found out about it; but finally, one day when I was left alone there -- 70s kids were often left alone in the house -- I climbed up and got it out and looked at it. I guess I was about 11 or 12.
I don't think it showed pubic hair, even. (Girls' pussies were covered by an additional layer of intrigue in those days, in the form of pubic hair.) Just some relatively tasteful 70s topless shots.
But I was like, wow.
I didn't jack off to it, because I didn't do that yet. That is something I specificialy remember; some of my friends were avid masturbators in 8th grade, and always telling me how awesome it was, and I remember them actually mocking me because I hadn't tried it yet.
How many kids get made fun of for not masturbating? Is it a lot? I'm guessing not many.
* * *
From there, I remember going to a lake house holiday with one of the guys who made fun of me for not masturbating -- if you read my last memoir, it would be the guy who I referred to "the former class president" -- and he had a PENTHOUSE magazine hidden away up there. He'd found it at a construction site nearby, he said. (You could do that, in those days.)
So that was the first poontang I ever saw. Hairy split wet beavers.
As it probably was with most guys, I was equally horrified and fascinated.
* * *
The late 70s and early 80s was a time of exploitation in general, as free love got monetized, and there were plenty of horror movies and cop movies that were loaded with nudity, rape, kidnapping, and bondage. I watched these in edited form on regular TV, and then by the time I was 13 or 14, on cable TV.
In retrospect, I was twisted by these, I think.
Particularly the horror movies, many of which were actually directed by the same people who directed the porn films. I made unhealthy associations between sex and being stabbed to death from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th movies.
While it doesn't have any actual nudity, or not much, this film, VICE SQUAD, was a big one in terms of warping my sexual preferences towards bondage. I remember watching this literally on the edge of my seat when I first got a TV and cable in my room at age 13:
A damn good thriller, really, but ... well, recommended for mature audiences.
And the comedies, too. ANIMAL HOUSE and REVENGE OF THE NERDS and RISKY BUSINESS of course had plenty of nudity and sex, and what we would consider now to be a tremendously cavalier and non-PC attitude towards statutory rape, illegal voyeurism and peeping, and teenage prostitution.
Tell me that doesn't give you a boner. If it doesn't your medulla oblongata is fucked up.
The first actual hardcore porn I ever saw? I was 15.
The movie?
TABOO 2.
(This is just the credit sequence.)
(Researching it, I was even more delighted to find that it was the first porn that Adam Carolla ever saw also, and he has spoken at length about it on his podcast.)
TABOO 2 is pretty sleazy even by the standards of the time, about a family of sexed-up fuck-ups who do a lot of inappropriate and generally illegal fucking with each other. All filmed in glorious 35 mm.
Where did I see it?
At a party.
There was a guy at my high school, a rich kid, who was often left unattended while his parents traveled. He was a couple years older than me, and my friends were already 16, and we went over there and drank whatever sweet-ass alcohol cocktails we liked as teenagers, rum and cokes most likely. There were always a lot of girls at these shindigs.
So at one of these parties, somebody put on the video cassette of TABOO 2.
We watched it as a group. Can you even imagine watching porn in a group, these days? With girls?
But in those days, that was your only choice. Before cassettes, you had to actually go to a theater to see them.
Just ... amazing, right? Equally horrifying and fascinating.
My big take-away at the time was: that guy's cock is huge. I can't compete with that thing.
But of course I learned a few other tricks.
* * *
So that was the first porn I ever saw.
It would not be the last.
NEXT: THE ACCIDENTAL PORNOGRAPHER, PART 6 in which I will discuss the Silver Age of late 80s porn, the last days of 42nd street porn in NY, and then, of course, porn in Russia in the early 00s.
