Found Porn

Day 48

I heard rustling in the stall next to me. I wondered if he was masturbating. On my way out, as I was washing my hands, I saw the Playboy on the floor. There was no one else in the restroom.

When I was a kid I found a Penthouse magazine on the street. Doesn’t every growing boy find discarded porn at some point? I don’t remember how old I was, or where I was, and I don’t remember if I took it home. I just remember the images. Some corny layout about ninjas. There was an “ancient sacred triangle” with two girls and a guy. It included all three forms of oral sex that heterosexual men are interested in. That first Penthouse experience was sort of like killing an ant with a grenade launcher, or cutting a toothpick with a chainsaw. I mean, at that point I was still aroused by Reader’s Digest. Really, I remember sneaking issues of Reader's Digest into the bathroom with me to look at…what? It must have been the ads.

Later, when I met Linsey, I fell in love with her Elle magazines. I couldn’t get enough of those high-gloss fashion layouts with models in gauzy pastels that showed everything but bush. Nipples were fair game, but it wasn’t “porn.” And it was such a delicious notch up from my grandma’s Sears catalogs. Eventually, it was the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue, and then in college I bought a few Playboy pictorials.

And then came the internet. I followed a similar path, from softcore to hardcore, but it was much shorter. By the time I acknowledged that I was a sex addict, I was in an endless cycle of downloading images, erasing them all in a moment of strength, then later restoring them with file-recovery software. My sponsor called it “dumpster-diving”, a reference to the same pattern in an offline world. How many thousands of images have I looked at? How many are still in my head?

Tonight I was wearing a long untucked shirt, which covered my jeans pockets. I knew that the magazine had already made it past the theft-prevention devices on the way into the restroom, so I could get it out of the store without any problem. All the excuses were there: I've felt shitty for the past few days and Linsey and I have been fighting about sex.

I dried my hands. I walked out and left it on the floor. For me, that’s a big deal.