As a boy, I lived, for all practical purposes, on the edge of the earth. Looking north from my back yard a couple of miles, you could actually see the sign that said “Here there be monsters”, right there to the left of that last wheat field, just a touch past the ramshackle, suspect building with the flickering neon sign out front proclaiming “The Doll Ho se”. My street was the last in my neighborhood that had any occupants, the next street back had two model homes, and after a few more streets with nothing at all built on them, suburbia abruptly gave way to miles of fallow farm fields and undeveloped land. I could walk out the back of my house with a Daisy 880 pellet rifle and a box of pellets and spend twelve hours a day shooting trash birds like sparrows and starlings and never see another living soul. The first summer was a nirvana of exploration and dead birds.

The next summer, when they started to build houses on the streets behind me, I began to hunt something else among the sand piles, slabs and lumber. Porn. Sweet, sweet porn. If you are in construction, how else are you going to while away the hours pretending to frame a house? I quickly discovered that construction sites were a treasure trove of discarded magazines. My first find was a Playboy discovered in the bare dirt front yard of a house whose slab had just been poured. It was lying there on the cracked black earth, pristine and shiny, beckoning like a double-breasted boy beacon. I pounced on it, cackling wildly at my great good fortune. The magazine went between my mattress and box spring, because surely my mother, who changed my sheets with OCD frequency, would never think to look there.

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