(if you missed Part 1, you’re gonna be confused)

The conditions of my suspension were that I would be held accountable for all missed schoolwork, which I was to turn in upon my return to school. To facilitate this, my mom would swing by the school every few days and pick up assignments from my teachers. Because my mom was busy running classes of her own, there was no one at home to “keep an eye on me”. She decided to drop me off at my Grandfather’s place which was only a few miles away, right across the street from the PV Mall. My Grandpa — we called him “Da” — had, at the time, started making bird houses with little wooden dowels. Not little houses, mind you, these were like bird mansions. I don’t know where he got the idea to do it, or how he knew every step along the way, but I never saw him consult so much as a manual and, yet, they turned out gorgeous and detailed every time.

In addition to making the bird houses, he liked restoring guns. He had a little workbench setup in his bedroom closet, where he’d drill and saw and sand and polish all kinds of little gun parts. The smell of gun metal is still a nostalgic, pleasant one for me. I learned a lot about guns at the time, most of which I’ve since forgotten. He even taught me how to remove the slug and stuff wet napkins in its stead and how the power of just the hammer hitting the primer was enough to send the paper wad about 20 feet. It probably sounds insane that my Grandfather handed his 11-year-old grandson a gun and had him shoot at targets around the inside of a suburban apartment, but it was perfectly safe and we had a good time.

Since he was an old man, he took a lot of naps. That left me a great deal of free time to just fuck off and hang at the (empty on weekday afternoons) PV Mall, watch some TV, or *sigh* do homework. I hated the homework. It seemed like the teachers just made up assignments, lest they seem like I was getting off easy or that, maybe, they weren’t doing their jobs. I had more homework in those 11 days than I’d ever had before or since in the same period of time. I also had to bring my books with me, and then back home, everyday.

One day, I’m out walking around the complex and I walk past a dumpster with a curious group of paper bags sitting just outside the dumpster. I looked inside and they were filled with porn. Raunchy, raunchy porn. Not Playboy. Very few Penthouse. We’re talking Swank, Hustler, Screw, Juggs,  and a host of other names I don’t recall. Within these pages, I saw my first blowjobs, pussy-licking, anal sex, the exact details of vaginal sex in so many damn positions. It was enticing, but also kinda gross. I figured adults didn’t really do most of these things, and this was just for shock, or because these magazine people were paid to do freaky shit like that. Years later, Pam told me that her boyfriend would “eat her out” (and it was explained to me what that meant) and my mind flashed back to these magazines where men were licking women in the pee-hole. I said “ohh gross!” to Pam, and she said “one day, you’ll change your mind on that”. I said “not a chance”. I’ve done a complete 180 on that one, and practically fucking live for it now.

I ran back to Da’s place, grabbed my backpack, emptied it out on the couch, ran back to those paper bags and filled my backpack. When I got to his place, I stuffed them under the couch. Not the couch cushions. I mean I lifted the couch and put them under there. After a few trips to the bags, I had about 100 magazines under there. I knew I needed to get them home, but I’d have to do it in shifts. Every day, I’d stuff as many as I could in my backpack along with a few books, and I’d carry the remaining books. My mom said “wow.. lots of homework, huh?”. With that “clever” trick, I was able to get all the magazines home bit-by-bit before the end of my suspension and no one was the wiser.

Prior to this, I’d had quite a few Playboy and a few Penthouse magazines that I’d found in my dad’s bedside cabinet. My mom asked if I “wanted any of Dad’s old golf magazines” and I thought “well, I should take a look” and under the first 5-6 golf magazines were all these Playboy mags. I thought I was clever by putting them under my filing cabinet. But, one day, my mom had to lift the cabinet to clean my carpets and… out came the porn mags. This time around, with these filthier magazines, I just put them in the cabinet and locked it. My mom never suspected a thing (I had a tendency to lock everything anyway), and Phase II of my devious plan came together.

The plan was simple :

1. Mention to a few students that I found some porn mags
2. Bring them a “sample”
3. Sell them some magazines
4. Once they were all unloaded, tip off a teacher or two
5. Watch as they were exposed as perverts, and maybe also suspended

This had to work, right?

For the first month or two, my plan worked flawlessly. The bullies backed off, cause I was providing the porn. I made some new friends — two guys named Brad and John — and we not only swapped porn, but we hung out on the weekends and went fishing and rode bikes, and we trick-or-treated together (as “Ninja Assassins”) that year. By Christmas time, my stock was still going strong — since there was so much trading going on as well — and I still had about 60 magazines. I put together little Christmas special bundles for $10, and whittled the stock on hand down to about 40 by the new year.

My plan was working so well, in fact, that I kinda forgot why I was doing it in the first place. I was being left alone, and semi-accepted. I had friends. I could ride my bike around the neighborhood and not get fucked with. I even had all kinds of inside dirt on who was into what. That’s a thing about dudes around porn, even to this day. Show some porno to a guy and he’ll almost immediately open up in glorious detail about what he likes or doesn’t like about what you showed him, and tell you a few other things he really likes. Only recently have women opened up to me about the porn they like, and I’m always happy to lend a non-judgmental ear to those discussions.

I actually thought maybe I didn’t need the plan after all. Everyone was happy, and the porn flowed like wine. Until people got careless. Around mid-late February, I saw a kid sitting in the “quad” area to the side of the lunch room, just … reading Swank. Like it was a book. He didn’t even have it covered up. I grabbed it from him and said “dude! teachers are gonna see!”. He told me “ohh they don’t care”, but I warned him that little mistakes like that would send this whole operation crashing down. He laughed, put it in his backpack, and walked away.

In the last week of February, my dad invited me and my sister out to New Orleans for our first (and still only) Mardi Gras. It was an awesome time, being in a small historic New Orleans neighborhood, eating crawfish out of a keg, hanging with relatives I’d never met (and, because we’re Italian, probably weren’t actually relatives), and watching the madness of parades and the occasional way-too-drunk older woman flash her massive mammaries for some plastic beads.

One night, about 2 days before I was supposed to come home, my father sat me down and said “now, tell me about these magazines you have”. I was in shock. I needed a lie, and quick. While I stammered, my dad continued “some boys at your school were found with backpacks filled with dirty magazines, and they all — one by one — told the principal that you sold them the magazines”. I wanted to explain my plan, but realized it would sound insane and wouldn’t help matters. I just said “yeah… I found those magazines and some kids wanted to buy them”. I didn’t need to explain myself to my dad since he was in no position to ground or punish me.

When I got home, my mom sat me down and explained that there are some things for adults, and some things for children, and that she would be confiscating the remainder of my stash and taking it to the city dump — “so you don’t try and retrieve them from our trash can” (which is what I’d do, of course). She said I had to report to the principal first-thing Monday morning, cause he wanted to have a talk with me.

I’ll never forget sitting there across from this short, balding man, as he flipped through porn mags and said “some of this stuff is just disgusting!“, and berating me for corrupting the students. As if it was all sunshine and roses before Porn King Mitcz came in and threw gynecological-level spread pussy shots at every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I couldn’t tell him about the bullies, of course, cause he’d “have a talk with them” and I think we all know that just leads to more beatings. God forbid he and the other staff, I don’t know, paid fucking attention to what was going on in the school.

He told me I needed to shape up, and I said “I’m trying”. He came up with this stupid analogy where he said “look, this is me trying to pick up this hat” — and of course, he didn’t pick up the hat — “…and this is me actually picking up the hat”. I’ve always wished I’d have said “well, how about you try to do something genuinely difficult and we can talk about the meaning of the word ‘try’?”. But, I wasn’t nearly that clever then, so I just stayed quiet.

In the end, I was suspended for 5 more days. Back to Da’s place. When I returned, there were rumors that I was cutting holes in the magazines and fucking them, or that I’d forced them on people, or that I showed photos to girls in class and made “how about you and me do this?” kinda jokes. All of which was just so insane I can’t even figure out why they made all that up. I kept a few friends through it all, and the bullies only beat me mercilessly a few times after that.

The irony in all of this is that for the past 15 years, I’ve been making porn websites for a living. It’s like I planted a seed when I was 11 that would follow me into an Executive Pervert all these years later.