Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography - A Memoir

The family namewas originally spelled Samsel. Some time in the 1930s, when my dad was a kid, his mother changed it slightly, adding the P and extra L . Apparently, someone named Samsel had committed some terrible crime that summer and she didn’t want her kids going to school with that name.

Two of theneighborhood kids, Willie and Todd, joined my brother Matt and me in a game we had invented. We’d make a quick buzzing sound and become a “spirit,” which was like a superhero. There were good guy spirits and bad guy spirits, and each one had a special power.

Matt’s main spirit, The Claw, had a dangerous weapon called the Brain Hold. There was no defense against this hold but Matt was fair by not doing it all the time. He’d often yell, “Brain Hold!” whenever he was going to do it. I had one spirit that was so fast he could run around the house several times and not look like he was moving at all. I had to tell my friends when he was done running. I imagined that this spirit might have a female sidekick, but there were no girls who would play with us. Todd’s sister was about our age, but we all teased her because she wasn’t pretty and her name was Sissy.

At night, in our bedroom, Matt and I would talk about what our spirits were going to do next, and discuss maybe killing off some of our old spirits for new ones. It was highly dramatized and loosely scripted, like the professional wrestling we watched on Saturdays. The show, Big Time Wrestling, was a weekly ritual for us. This was before wrestling became glitzy and hugely marketed. Some of the popular Northwest wrestlers like “Playboy” Buddy Rose, Jimmy Snuka, Jesse Ventura, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper even came to Kennewick and wrestled at the high school sometimes.

I was going to make up a spirit with a super brain to combat The Claw and his famous hold, but Willie and Todd moved away and we stopped playing.

That’s when Matt and I began reading books about Bigfoot.

Two plastic recordplayers and a nice stack of Top 40 45s were all I needed to start my own radio station. My plan was to do a pirate radio show that would broadcast to my neighborhood. Instead I just pointed my speakers out the upstairs window and hoped the sound reached the corner.

In fifth grade I started writing really bad pop song lyrics. When I wrote something I thought to be particularly hit-worthy, I’d cut out a piece of paper in the shape of a 45, and then, after coloring in the black wax area, I’d put the name of my song on the “label.” Some of these hits were “Sound of Thunder,” “Rich Dude,” and “Diamond Girl.” The name I gave myself was Billy Rivers, because I thought it sounded cool.

After cutting out the center hole, I’d string the smash hit to a hook on my ceiling. I imagined I was a megastar. Sometimes I’d even put them on one of the turntables and watch them spin. Forty-five revolutions per minute. Once I put a needle on one as it spun and ruined the needle. I had to go to the record store, where they sold little smoking pipes and stoner posters, spending my entire five-dollar allowance on a new snap-on needle.

The popular radiostation was OK 95. They hosted a discount at the River-Vue Drive-In movie once and I went with a bunch of friends and one of their parents. We loaded up a station wagon full of people and got in for ninety-five cents. Some people from the radio station were giving out records as we drove in. My friends and I stuck our heads out the windows to see what they had. There were a couple of boxes full of albums, but it was all stuff we had never heard of. They were probably rejects, bands from small labels that sent their records to the station in hopes of getting their big break. A dozen cars behind us started to get impatient, revving their engines and honking their horns, but we didn’t know what to take. Finally, the radio station people gave each of us a random record. They all looked suspiciously like hard rock, which OK 95 wasn’t playing at the time. I ended up with a record by Krokus. It was called Hardware . When I listened to it later, I was repulsed by the music—a tasteless sort of stoner metal. There was one song in particular called “Smelly Nelly” that talked about a girl’s crotch. It has the worst lyrics ever (“Her skin is dry and spotty but her ass is just the best”). I’m sure OK 95 was glad to be rid of all those records.

At halftime ofthe high school football game, Dad and I walked down the bleachers and waited for our turn in the bathroom. There was a long urinal where about six people could go at once. Dad and I went side by side and he seemed to be watching me as I pulled my pants down to my knees and went.

When we were back outside, standing in line to get hot dogs, he explained to me that I didn’t have to pull my pants down to pee. He pointed to our zippers, showing me how they were made to open up so just our peters came out. I felt embarrassed, not realizing that people were probably staring at me in there, wondering why I had to pull my pants all the way down. I believe I was eleven at this time. I wore tight white briefs and probably didn’t change them enough. Soon after this talk, I also stopped wetting my bed at night.

In 1979, twoyears after I became a big football fan, J. V. Cain, the starting tight end of my favorite team, the Cardinals, died suddenly in training camp. It was the first time I felt shocked by a death. He died on his twenty-sixth birthday. I rode my bike to the drug store every day that week to read the national newspapers to see if they figured out what the cause was.

There was one particular J. V. Cain touchdown that I’ll never forget. It was against the Browns in a close game. He ran a simple ten-yard hook pattern to the goal line and turned to catch. The ball was overthrown but J. V. reached up with a larger-than-life right hand and pulled it down like he was tearing a bird out of the sky. It seemed unbelievable.

The drug store kept their newspapers by the magazine rack, away from the busy cash register area, so it was easy for me to tear through the sports section every day without the clerk shooing me away. I read multiple papers, speculated with friends, and even asked the family doctor about what would cause such a bewildering death. Eventually it was announced as a heart attack. The team retired Cain’s jersey number 88 and wore black armbands that season, which turned out to be another terrible one.

Matt and Isaw a spaceship skipping through the sky. We reacted at the same time, surprised we both saw it. We stayed up late that night, sleeping outside on our side porch in our sleeping bags. We talked about UFOs and Bigfoot. We planned a Bigfoot hunt near Walla Walla when we got older.

After falling asleep, exhausted from speculation, I awoke sometime in the middle of the night. Unsure why I was dream-interrupted, I lifted my head to look around. Roughly twenty yards away, near the alley and beside the garbage cans, stood a large figure with its legs slightly spread and its arms at its sides. It was a silhouette similar to that on a men’s room door. We had a dog at the time, a shaggy black mutt named Pebbles who was about the size of a breadbox. He was looking at the figure too, but he didn’t make a sound. I froze and kept my eyes on the figure. It seemed to be watching Matt and me sleep.

The next morning we called the radio station to see if there were other sightings of a strange light in the sky. There were. We talked about it all morning until Dad got agitated and told us to zip our mouths. I’m pretty sure that Dad believed in UFOs too, so I was surprised he got angry. It was probably against the Bible for Catholics to openly believe in UFOs or something. I never got around to mentioning the shadowy figure by the garbage cans. I thought maybe I was dreaming.