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Summer, 1989. V. and I are hanging out in his room, trying to get past some level of Zelda, when we decide to pause the game and run around the corner for a cigarette. V.'s mom is home, so we take up our usual "hide cigarette smoking from parents" position behind a large wooden fence on the other side of the block. Here we are, well hidden, yapping away, smoking our smokes, and generally passing another care-free teenage day, when who comes trotting out of his house, videotape and remnants of McDonald's meal in hand, than Gino the Douchebag from across the street. Oh, Gino the Douchebag. Early-thirties, hairstyle balding con mullet, aspiring to Queens guido status, but too unattractive to even pull that off, thick herringbone chains - purchased from some discount Indian jeweler in Main Street, Flushing – all adanglin', white sneakers all aglistenin', wife-beater tank-top and Sergio Tecchini's all tight in the wrong places, his thin little mustache recalling maybe the era of fascism. Gino's been a douchebag for a long time. When we were younger, and played baseball on that corner, Gino would gun his sad little Camaro at us, and always seemed quite serious about it. Once, when Brian G. hit a ball into his yard and jumped the fence to retrieve it, Gino - a grown man, mind you - grabbed little Brian by his red Irish hair and pulled him out of the yard, then kept our ball. Like I said, douchebag.
Perhaps it was fate. V. and I halt our conversation and watch from our hidden vantage Gino's progress to the curb, where his now even sadder Ford Probe sits next to his garbage pails. Strutting and preening, he tosses his McDonald's bag into the trash, then circles round the Probe to the driver's side. Pay attention now. He's about to make a decision that will change three lives forever. Gino opens the door, hesitates, places the videotape on the car roof, reaches into the car and grabs the McDonald's soda which he'd left in the console, brings it to the trash, dumps it in, circles back, gets in his vehicle, revs it up, and drives off. Did you see what we saw, careful reader? Did you notice Gino's slip up? Because yes, indeed, the douchebag had forgotten his video perched so delicately on the Probe's roof, and there it is now, sliding off the back of the car to the cracked street below. Transfixed, we knew we'd seen the same thing. No communication to that effect was necessary. V. and I turn to each other and say, in unison, what we're all now thinking: "That's gotta be porn."
We wait for Gino to drive out of sight, then run over to where the videotape lay in the street. It's in one of those video rental boxes - no cover art, plain black, with a sticky label on the spine. V. picks it up and - O Fortune has smiled on us this day! - the spine reads simply: P*SSY DREAMS. We open it up, and there is a videotape, obviously porn, plain black with a cheap label: P*SSY DREAMS. We exclaim at once, "P*ssy Dreams!" and run back to our smoking spot. No doubt Gino was on his way to return it to the video store on Union street, whose porn library - a forbidden fortress for us - was legendary. I've often thought since about when he realized that he'd slipped up, what fury must have coursed through him as he tried to make sense of the sudden disappearance of his rented video, so recently firmly in hand, and whether he ever figured out the mystery of its abrupt absence. But it was gone now: gone for Gino forever, and soon to be forever with us.
Tucking the videotape between skin and waist band, V. re-enters his house, with me fast on his heels. But this windfall must be shared, surely? Are we so selfish as to deny others this boon? And besides, maybe two teenage guys watching porn together is a bit - ahem - you know? These considerations are made, and we decide that both the interests of selflessness and heterosexual orthodoxy require a third, and that damn quick, so we call Patty, the toughest kid on the block, with the following message, telegraphic in urgency: "Dude, Gino the Douchebag just dropped porn V.'s mom leaving for work 20 minutes come over immediately pick up snacks dude we are not fucking around with you yes porn yes Gino yes The Douchebag yes porn porn porn." Pat asks, weirdly: "What's the title?" "P*ssy Dreams," V. laughs into the phone. It's decided that Pat will get dressed, drop his sister off at his grandmother’s house, run up to the bodega on 149th Street, pick up some snacks, and come over. It’s on.
Six minutes later, in comes Pat, greeting V.'s mother with a smile, and carrying three quarter drinks and the biggest box of Mike 'n Ikes I've ever seen. "We've got food here," V.'s mother says as she departs for work, "You didn't have to --." Pat's charming now: "Oh thanks, Mrs. L. I was in the mood for some Mike 'n Ikes." As soon as she's gone, he demands to see the tape, which we immediately produce, laughing and tingling with anticipation. Porn in the afternoon for this secret brotherhood. We take our places, arranging ourselves to best conceal any sudden bodily emergences from each other, it being perfectly OK to watch some porn with the fellas, but necessary that one maintain some distance in such situations, yes? And with a flourish, V. slides the tape into the VCR.
The first sign that something has gone terribly wrong is the distinctly Teutonic voice over that greets us through the black screen. "That ain't English," Pat sagely observes. Nein. And it turns out language is the least of our miscalculations. You see, we've assumed the wrong vowel. For P*SSY DREAMS is not so much concerned with the female genitalia and nocturnal symbolic imaginings thereof, but rather with a particular liquid that from time to time is released therefrom, and the various ways of placing said liquid on, in, around, or about other individuals. In addition to this somewhat yellowy focus, P*SSY DREAMS also seems to devote a major segment to the practice of inserting the balled human hand into various orifices, with or without accompanying micturation, and with the further suggestion that those on screen engaging in this practice – while all seemingly of legal age to consent – are nevertheless all members of a social unit known to our sociologists as nuclear, thereby rendering the content of this particular segment of P*SSY DREAMS rather Oedipal, and its title, as it were, positively alliterative. Gino, my friends, is much more freaky than we originally imagined. Needless to say, most people would turn off the revolting mess that was P*SSY DREAMS almost immediately, and we surely would have too, but what else were we to do on this summer afternoon. Point being: we watched the entire hour and fifteen minute video in all its disgusting splashiness, we never looked at Gino the same way again, and I can assure you that none of us has since eaten even one Mike 'n Ike, nor can see them being eaten without falling into full-out gags. But we learned an important lesson that day, to wit: never mistake an "I" for a "U" - a common lesson for humanity.
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