Porn in the Bathroom

The first and only time I have ever eaten squirrel was at Billie Jo’s house. She is my dad’s first cousin so my first cousin once-removed, and she used to baby sit us quite a bit. There is no mistaking squirrel for chicken–the fried carcasses looked comically just like headless, tailless, hairless rats as they drained over paper towels prior to us eating them. I used to spend loads of time in Billie Jo’s bathroom–not because she fed us weird things like squirrel but because there was a stacked ton of Playboy magazines in there that I used to pour over around the age of 11. I can still remember finding them as I picked up an aged issue of Southern Living featuring a strawberry dessert for toilet reading and spied Pamela Anderson’s breasts about to fall out of a school girl uniform on the cover of the magazine just underneath the Southern Living. The old lady magazine hit the ground, and I reached up to make sure the door was locked to the bathroom. Had I known who Keith Richards was, I may have read the interview in that October 1989 issue, but as it was, I was content to soak up every single fold and crease of skin within the other pages. I held the magazine so close to my face that if someone had seen me, they may have thought I needed the pages to breathe. I can’t recall how long I spent in Billie Jo’s bathroom that first day, but subsequently, I found myself needing to go to the relieve myself much more frequently at her house than anyone else’s.

Tacked to the wall above the substantial stack of porn was a poem about Jesus. That poem’s strategic position and subject matter exacerbated my guilt so I took it upon myself to commit it to memory so that my time spent staring at explicit pictures was countered with a dose of religion. Once upon exiting her bathroom after a particularly long visit, Billie Jo said to me, “uh, huh, JessiCat’s been looking at the dirty magazines,” which mortified me and caused me to turn beet-red from ends of my hair to the ends of my toenails. “Nuh-UH! I’ve been in there memorizing your Jesus poem! I will recite it for you.” I rattled off the first verse, but my countenance exuded guilt that just like a squirrel carcass–could not be disguised with any amount of batter, breading, or deep-frying. As much as I liked looking at naked girls when I was young, it took me a few more years to admit to myself that there was more to it than just liking to look at them. And it took me a few more years after that to understand that Jesus didn’t care either way about my sexuality and that a poem about Him is just as natural hanging in a church as it is to hang beside a stack of porn in a bathroom.