Dirt Along the Roadside

I am a dirty old man. I love my strip clubs and my porno mags.

I am a man, and so I walk between desire and depravity, keeping to a crooked path—it’s true—but taking care to ignore those siren signs promising purity up on an angel’s wings.

I am proud of the human stink of me. I do not wish to leave this meat behind, to become one of those unchanging, unliving whisps of exhaust and steam that dreams of little more than trailing God’s big, beautiful ride through the sky.

For too long I kept that dirty old man locked away inside of me, off the street and out of the public eye. For too long I respected their sensibilities, their sense of decency, their delineations of perversity.

No more.

Society must see this dirty old man no longer as furtive blur darting between darkened rooms but instead as a sweating, stinking, lusty ape with porno mag in hand plucking out the eyes of those who ride in shiny metal boxes, spinning those eyes around so they are forced to look inside their vain sarcophagi.

Either perversity has become pedestrian or it’s the pedestrian that’s become perverse: either way, the sickness is virulent, and people need to be warned. So I whipped the old man out after walking through my parents’ town of Bumfuck, Idaho, U.S.A. back in the summer of 2006. Four days in that deadening town drained me of all lucidity, leaving me an unrepentant woody seeking release. I needed a skin mag. The closest strip club was eighty miles away but I had no car, my parents had no Internet and no cable TV, and, quite simply, the bars are not for me: I watch the rows of men and women hunched over their drinks, picking over their memories, over the steps that had led them to these dank, stagnating rooms, and my insides squirm with the fear that I, too, will fall onto a seat, grow roots and never, ever, leave. But there was only one store that sold porno mags, and that was a truck stop out at the north end of town. That meant a thirty-minute walk through the August heat. I slipped on a long-sleeved shirt and stuffed a plastic shopping bag into my pocket. Once outside, my body went on autopilot while my brain scanned itself for entertainment.

What happened to all the stores in this town that used to sell porn? I remembered how many of these downtown stores used to carry Playboy or Penthouse. Perhaps the neutron bomb of Christian morality had nuked the mags but left the stores still standing. Maybe it was just that the Internet’s user-generated 2.0 pornocopia had done in yet another form of print media. After all, that’s where I did all my browsing, clicking away hours at a time scanning JPG’s, MPEG’s and AVI’s.

Many stretches of the road had no sidewalks, or the sidewalks had sections broken or buried in dirt and weeds. Small towns have less money than cities for building and maintaining sidewalks, sure, but there’s more to it than that. By keeping the size and number of sidewalks to a minimum, they enforce that unspoken American creed that everyone should buckle down, grow up, and buy a car in a public display of maturity and financial responsibility (one being so often mistook for the other). The condition of the car is irrelevant compared to the contractual obligation inherent in its ownership: “I, the undersigned owner of and slave to this dirty, leaking, smoking heap, do hereby swear to lock myself into a lifestyle requiring the regular purchase of gasoline, oil, and air fresheners at ever-increasing prices; to become sedentary; to devote endless hours and vast acreage of mental landscape worrying over maintenance; and to shell out for insurance that only plays into the mass illusion of safety surrounding these massive hunks of hurtling metal. And if you don’t sign on the dotted line, well…small town people may smile friendly, but behind their eyes they’re saying, “Get a car, you bum.”

Bits of brightly dyed plastic wrappers littered the unpaved shoulders. Shards of glass, half-hidden beneath the leaves, warned barred soles had best beware.

Through all these thoughts and the regular tick-tock of my legs the sound of passing cars and the hiss of their tires licking the pavement reminded me of the nether regions of the radio dial: glimmers of music and words, strong signals blaring and then gone, weak signals whispering and then gone—all of them heard in a blur, replaced by the next, lost in the noise.

I’d look up only at intersections. Then I’d wish I hadn’t: stopped at a “DON’T WALK” I’d see the waiting drivers looking at me. They weren’t starring outright, of course. They’d looked away just a moment before I looked at them. And that made me paranoid that somehow they could see I was on my way to purchase pornography.

To counteract my paranoia I tried on a bit of bravado. Once inside the cool, air-conditioned truck stop, I didn’t fuck around pretending to have interest in the other products: I walked straight the porno rack, plucked a likely candidate from the rows of sensual, smiling faces, carried it to the counter and, with disarming confidence, laid it face-up on the counter in front of the young woman standing there. She rang it up and told me the price. I paid her.

Only when I waved off the black shopping bag did she seem surprised. Pulling my own out from my pocket, I, the horny bastion of environmental sensitivity, chirped, “Reuse, recycle.”

“Have a nice day,” she muttered. An obligatory smile scuttled across her face. She’d slipped a semantic prophylactic between her and me, smoothing the Braille bumps on the penis of personality, rendering communication meaningless. Her eyes were locked on me and not, I realized, on the magazine still lying on the counter, its cover showing a young woman kneeling naked before a headless man, she reaching up for what we knew was there hidden behind a black rectangle, the contrast of seen and unseen providing just enough titillation-cum-frustration to hook the likes of dirty little ‘ol me into carrying it home and tearing it free of the plastic shrink-wrap so I could pour over the contents like a soothsayer pouring over avian entrails: remembering the past to image promises of the future. There will be nothing new gracing its pages. The simulacrum of skin on skin teases memories forth, but confuses, so that a set of pre-determined options is mistaken for hope.

“Have a nice day,” she said one more time, urging me on my way. Fuck, I had to get out of there. I shoved the magazine in my shopping bag and hurried for the door.

Outside, I checked that the shopping bag was opaque enough to keep the magazine cover from view. Just to be safe, I flipped the bag so the cover faced my thigh.

There was only one sidewalk in this part of town and that forced me to walk towards oncoming traffic.

Every time I looked up, though, I met the eyes of those inside. There were all looking at me—even the drivers going the other way. What the fuck? There was no way any of them could’ve seen the magazine’s cover, and in my shirt and jeans I couldn’t have seemed much different than any one of them.

How wrong I was.

I walked with my eyes down.

Back at the house, I wrenched open the screen door and plunged inside, relieved to be out of the public’s eye. Setting the shopping bag on the kitchen table, I drank a couple glasses of tap water while I cooled down and got my breath back. I looked at the shopping bag, wondering again if they had somehow seen inside. It remained as opaque as ever.

And that’s when realization struck.

No one had guessed what was in the bag—they probably hadn’t even cared. Nonetheless, I’d been pegged a pervert.

Someone who takes a socially-sanctioned goal (ejaculation, for instance) and changes the method by which the goal is achieved until that method falls outside the herd’s conception of “normalcy,” taken so often as being the definition of “decency,” is a pervert. I, by being a pedestrian in an age where everyone is expected to drive, had become a pervert; furthermore, my old perversion (that of buying porno mags) had become pedestrian. This was a sickness I could no longer ignore.

That is why I’ve put the dirty old man on display, and invite others to do the same: to walk the streets and invite the scorn, pity, judgment of those who desire nothing more than clean, hermetically sealed transport through this inconvenient and dirty little world. My shoes are an angel’s wings on monkey’s feet. Mercury, not Apollo, is my name.