Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography - A Memoir

My dad had a quick temper and things escalated without warning. There were fists thrown, choke holds, objects broken. I would go to my room and jump into bed, crying and pressing my head into the pillows to mute the noise, though I still felt it pounding like an earthquake through the walls. Sometimes Matt would do the same thing.

Eventually, when we were older and bigger, there was a time when Matt got fed up with the fights and decided to do something. He stepped between them and pressed Dad against the wall, his strong arm under Dad’s chin, and told him, “You’re not going to talk to Mom like that. You’re not going to hit her again.” Dad’s body was tensed and surprised at Matt’s strength. He started to panic and asked Matt to let him go. After that, he never got mad when Matt was around. He became more passive. He looked at Matt sometimes with eyes that shyly asked, Are we okay? Is everything cool between us?

Todd’s family livedright across the alley behind us. His dad was always working on his race car in their garage, and it was the loudest thing in the neighborhood. He raced it at the local speedway and in other cities too. Sometimes I’d go in there and ask if Todd was around and his dad would let me cut through their backyard to get to the front of their house. The reason I liked going into the garage most, though, was because Todd’s dad had a bunch of Playboy centerfolds up on the walls. I remember seeing Playboy centerfolds in other people’s garages too. But there were pictures from other magazines as well. Women wearing bikinis or torn shirts and leaning on motorcycles or across the hood of a hot rod. Maybe having all those naked women around helped Todd’s dad feel better about all the time he worked on his car.

One time when I was over at Todd’s, I had to use the bathroom and walked in while his mom was in the shower. I stopped for a second and started to back out. But then I realized that she didn’t know I was in there. She was on the other side of these thick and blurry shower doors. I saw her warped image as she rubbed the water and shampoo into her hair, the shape of her body out of focus. It felt like my bladder was about to burst, but I stared for a long time while holding it in.

The toughest kidat our school was named Chongo, and he was a short but muscular Mexican who always seemed to be suspended or doing Saturday school. He lived in the pit of this valley that ran alongside a long irrigation pipe. The pipe was connected to the ditches surrounding our neighborhood and it had a flat surface on top lined with flimsy two-by-fours. For some reason, we always called this pipe “the floons.” My friends and I would often have races on the floons. There was an element of danger whenever we did because there were big gaps where you could fall through and go into the dirty water. And if we went too far down the floons we’d be dangerously close to what we called “Chongo Country.” Other kids had told us that if you got a good look into Chongo Country, you’d see all sorts of stolen bikes and bike parts in his weed-filled yard. When Chongo had his shirt off, they said, you could see a tattoo of Pontius Pilate across his chest. We never dared to look.

Mom served upa hundred hot dogs and then helped someone bandage his hand after he hurt it with a firecracker. She often volunteered to help with my fifth grade outings.

Summer vacation was just an hour away.

All the kids got back on the bus to head back to school. We had spent the day at Sacajawea Park. Mom was missing. I asked my teacher and she said she didn’t know where she was.

Driving up Washington Street on the bus, I noticed smoke billowing up somewhere in my neighborhood. Seconds later I was yelling at the bus driver to stop. I saw the firefighters spraying at the flames that came out of my bedroom window. The driver said he wasn’t allowed to let me out. When we got back to school, a friend’s mother drove me to my house, which was badly burned on the top and on the sides by our upstairs bedrooms. Mom had left the field trip early and was home already, watching the tall flames from a neighbor’s driveway. The cause was unknown but I heard someone imply that my older brother Mark was home from school, smoking pot (I’d seen him and his friends smoke pot once and thought it looked cool—there was this twisted glass thing they used).

We stood outside watching. Nobody was hurt. My dad was in the alley screaming, “Fuck the world!”

It seemed like a lot of people were watching the house become wrecked with fire and water, and when they grew bored of it, they went back home.

On our firstnight after the fire, we stayed with a family from our church. They were trying to conserve water and I remember taking a bath with one of their boys before bed. The next couple of days we stayed at a motel in Pasco while the insurance matters were figured out. We spent part of those days going through our stuff at the house, figuring out what was too trashed (burned or water damaged) to keep. We stored all the salvageable things in our garage, which was just a cluttered mess of a structure made out of concrete, tin, and mismatched wood.

A few days later, we found a basement apartment to live in and we started moving our stuff over. It was only a block away, which was convenient, but besides that, it was way too small and depressing. The main problem was that it didn’t have windows. Living there made me feel like I was in solitary confinement. Or “family confinement.” A friend asked me if we lived in a bomb shelter.

The June sun was unbearably hot and everyone was sweaty as we carried boxes of stuff down the alley to our temporary home. Toward the end of the day, Matt and I tried to help Dad move the refrigerator down the concrete steps to the apartment. Halfway down, Dad’s fingers got slippery and he smashed them on the guardrail. “Fuckshitgodfuckcockbitchfuck!” he yelled.

It was the most inspired stream of bad language Matt or I had ever heard and we would repeat it often for the next few years. We had that George Carlin record where he said the “seven words you can’t say on television,” but that routine paled in comparison to this.

Darren Green wasone of my best friends. His grandparents lived next to us, so I saw him only every few weeks when he visited them. But we became best friends and always talked about what it would be like when we got older and moved into a loft apartment together. One of our favorite things to do was go to Dairy Queen and get sundaes in those plastic football helmets. We did that for a few football seasons, trying to collect the helmets of all the teams.

Another thing we did was look at dirty magazines. We discovered that the guys’ employee bathroom at the Mayfair Market was a good place to look. Even though we lived right across the street, we would sometimes use the bathroom there, and we’d usually find a Playboy or Penthouse poorly hidden behind the garbage can.

We were just becoming familiar with naked women since the Dinken brothers had shown us some of the hardcore magazines their dad kept behind the seat of his old pickup. I’d steal candy bars for those Dinken kids, and, in exchange, they’d tear out pages from the magazines for me. The pictures were often of couples, and those confused me more than anything. Just naked women standing by themselves were all Darren and I needed.

Once, at the Mayfair, I talked Darren into stealing one of the magazines by stuffing it down his pants. On his way out of the store it slid out of his left pant leg, and he was taken to the manager’s office. I ran across the street and watched the store to see if he’d get away. Minutes later, police arrived. Then his parents. I was scared they were talking about me.