released it. When I’d finished what I was doing I’d tie a bow with the pink ribbons, listen to be sure the coast was clear, make a dash across the landing from the lavatory to my bedroom, and stuff the box in a suitcase under my bed.
Now for the contents. I have said that these were familyphotographs. Naturally I mean that they were photographs of my mother’s side of the family — photographs of my mother herself, my grandmother, and the Shrinking Violets; some of them studio studies, but, in the main, snaps I had taken with my little box camera during one of our peregrinations around Sowalki, or on a blushing trip to Lewis’s at the top of Market Street. Photographs that had men in them were of course no use to me. Nor were group photographs of any sort. One woman at a time was how I liked it. And not necessarily alive. I had a good one of my grandmother’s mother Cheena, for example, looking pensive in a feathered hat. And another of my great-great-aunt Sophia, come to Bialystok in her rustling finery to pose against a painted forest and gain immortality in the putrefying imagination of a twelve-year-old boy still half a century away from being born.
Is it such a sin, jacking off, as the Church of England boys put it, over loved ones? In its own clumsy way, doesn’t beating one’s meat over the female branches of the family tree show a certain groping genealogical respect? If you’re gonna spill, spill over your own.
That would have been my defence, had the marzipan box gone on containing only what I have so far described. But I have, and had, no defence. No defence, no excuse, no rationale, no sanity.
Soon, satiated with the aplasticity of the photographs themselves, I added to my scented coffret of concupiscence the following: a magnifying glass, a pair of kitchen scissors, a tube of glue, and pages of particular appeal torn from
Span,
a pin-up magazine I had fallen into the habit of buying, the minute I was able to lose the hand of a Violet, from a soft-porno shop on Deansgate, immediately opposite Manchester Cathedral. All porno was soft then. Girls hitching up their skirts, showing a suspender, looking down at their own disarrangement in astonishment, unable to account for how a breast with an unaroused nipple, or a star where the nipple should have been, had slippedits moorings. No split beavers in those days. No beaver of any sort unless you went for
Health and Efficiency
and then you had to put up with the volleyball and the rest of the family. Otherwise not a hint of a hair, let alone a labium. That was what the magnifying glass was for. To see if I could detect where a hair had once been. And the scissors … and the glue … ?
Ah, the scissors and the glue …
On its own,
Span
was nothing, a half-hearted iniquity no matter how filthy the ever-irked, all-judging proprietor of the soft-porno shop tried to make me feel, refusing me a brown paper bag, daring me to check my change, not taking his eyes off me as I stuffed the magazine into my shirt. What were they to me, these hard-faced yekeltehs with dead eyes and thin lips who resembled no one so much as the mothers of the prefab boys who threw stones at me when I left the house? What they did with their bodies on the other hand, their lewd gestures, the shamelessness with which they bent over or found pretexts for letting you see up their skirts or down their blouses … that was something else. Be strictly logical about it and you’d have to say that their bodily contortions perfectly matched their facial expressions; that only women who looked as though they lived in prefabs and brought their kids up to throw stones could have cared so little for the aesthetics of the human form. But since when did lewdness ever have anything to do with a perfect match? Disparity — that, surely, is where lewdness has always found its home. An elegant woman in an inelegant pose, a demure face on an obscenely splayed body. Where’s the shock of seeing reserve
Now for the contents. I have said that these were familyphotographs. Naturally I mean that they were photographs of my mother’s side of the family — photographs of my mother herself, my grandmother, and the Shrinking Violets; some of them studio studies, but, in the main, snaps I had taken with my little box camera during one of our peregrinations around Sowalki, or on a blushing trip to Lewis’s at the top of Market Street. Photographs that had men in them were of course no use to me. Nor were group photographs of any sort. One woman at a time was how I liked it. And not necessarily alive. I had a good one of my grandmother’s mother Cheena, for example, looking pensive in a feathered hat. And another of my great-great-aunt Sophia, come to Bialystok in her rustling finery to pose against a painted forest and gain immortality in the putrefying imagination of a twelve-year-old boy still half a century away from being born.
Is it such a sin, jacking off, as the Church of England boys put it, over loved ones? In its own clumsy way, doesn’t beating one’s meat over the female branches of the family tree show a certain groping genealogical respect? If you’re gonna spill, spill over your own.
That would have been my defence, had the marzipan box gone on containing only what I have so far described. But I have, and had, no defence. No defence, no excuse, no rationale, no sanity.
Soon, satiated with the aplasticity of the photographs themselves, I added to my scented coffret of concupiscence the following: a magnifying glass, a pair of kitchen scissors, a tube of glue, and pages of particular appeal torn from
Span,
a pin-up magazine I had fallen into the habit of buying, the minute I was able to lose the hand of a Violet, from a soft-porno shop on Deansgate, immediately opposite Manchester Cathedral. All porno was soft then. Girls hitching up their skirts, showing a suspender, looking down at their own disarrangement in astonishment, unable to account for how a breast with an unaroused nipple, or a star where the nipple should have been, had slippedits moorings. No split beavers in those days. No beaver of any sort unless you went for
Health and Efficiency
and then you had to put up with the volleyball and the rest of the family. Otherwise not a hint of a hair, let alone a labium. That was what the magnifying glass was for. To see if I could detect where a hair had once been. And the scissors … and the glue … ?
Ah, the scissors and the glue …
On its own,
Span
was nothing, a half-hearted iniquity no matter how filthy the ever-irked, all-judging proprietor of the soft-porno shop tried to make me feel, refusing me a brown paper bag, daring me to check my change, not taking his eyes off me as I stuffed the magazine into my shirt. What were they to me, these hard-faced yekeltehs with dead eyes and thin lips who resembled no one so much as the mothers of the prefab boys who threw stones at me when I left the house? What they did with their bodies on the other hand, their lewd gestures, the shamelessness with which they bent over or found pretexts for letting you see up their skirts or down their blouses … that was something else. Be strictly logical about it and you’d have to say that their bodily contortions perfectly matched their facial expressions; that only women who looked as though they lived in prefabs and brought their kids up to throw stones could have cared so little for the aesthetics of the human form. But since when did lewdness ever have anything to do with a perfect match? Disparity — that, surely, is where lewdness has always found its home. An elegant woman in an inelegant pose, a demure face on an obscenely splayed body. Where’s the shock of seeing reserve
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