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.

For the next few weeks, I occupied the outward leg of my hunting journeys with obsessively searching for porn. I was like the porn Coast Guard, flying search and rescue missions for printed pussy. Realizing that two sets of eyes were better than one, I employed the resources of my hunting partner, The Mexican. The Mexican and I searched daily with hormonal fervor until one day, peeking from the edge of a sandpile, were a few pages of literary masterwork. I think the magazine was titled Trashy Cum-Guzzling Anal Whores VII. The images, weathered by the Texas summer sun, were as faded as the dignity of that woman with the fist in her ass on page 34. When the question of ownership arose, we did the only thing we could think of; we immediately shot it out with pellet rifles. I won, and Anal Whores went beneath the mattress with Playboy. My collection was growing. I envisioned myself amassing the Library of Congress of construction site porn.

The Mexican and I honed our porn-finding skills to a point where we could spot a quarter-inch nipple poking out of a sandpile from more than 500 yards. We would sprint, shoving and tripping one another, to see who could get there first. The firefight would start, pellets whizzing and zinging. Sometimes I would win. Sometimes I would lose. Either way, I always managed to hide the pellet wounds from my mother. One time, The Mexican laid claim to a particularly choice piece and backed up his ownership with a thrown chunk of concrete to the head. Laughing through the blood, I told him to just take the goddamned thing. It only took a few stitches to close the wound.

Fast forward 20 years. I discovered that my mother, while changing the sheets on my bed one day, discovered my stash. The following telephone conversation took place:

MOM: I just found magazines under Supremo’s mattress. What should I do with them?

DAD: You put them right the hell back where you found them.

Thanks, Dad. I owe you.

Written by El Supremo