Andy told us he’d found it in his father’s underwear drawer. We were all so intrigued, sitting there around the cafeteria table during 8th period lunch like we did every day, that we didn’t even think to give him a hard time about what he was doing going through his father’s underwear drawer. “How do you know it’s porn?” Olson asked.
“It was in his underwear drawer,” Andy answered. “It’s called ‘Butcher Boy.’ What else do you think it could be?”
“Is there a picture on the box?” I asked hopefully.
“No. No picture.”
“We have to watch it,” Jack proclaimed. “We need to watch it.”
“I have a projector,” I said. “It’s 8 millimeter, right?”
“I have no fucking idea how many fucking millimeters it is,” Andy answered.
“My parents are going to be away for the weekend in two weeks,” Jack said. “We’ll do it then. You can all
come over.”
“I can’t drive at night yet,” Tierney said.
“Then we’ll do it in the afternoon,” Jack answered.
“Do you think you could sneak it out, Andy ?” I asked.
“I think so. I doubt he watches it, like, every night. But who knows, maybe he’s more a perv than I give him credit for.”
***
It was something of a big deal, planning to get together outside of school. We’d never done that before. We were new to being a group. We’d known each other on and off since elementary school, but we’d only ended up spending time together because we were hangers-on to the jocks, who let us sit with them at their lunch table. We all played sports but weren’t among the first-rank starters. At the lunch table, we listened as the jocks talked about the weekend parties they went to and the girls they were going to ask out. We were never invited to these parties. It was sort of boring, and eventually we started talking to each other, which was much more fun.
The Saturday afternoon designated for the showing, my father noticed me taking the movie projector out the door. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “What do you need that thing for?” he asked.
“Uh, Jack has some old movies he wants to watch. Sports movie. Ali and Foreman in Africa.”
My father smiled. He didn’t know what I was doing, but it was clear he didn’t believe me for a minute.
“Okay. Just be careful with it.”
***
I was the last to arrive. They were all down in the basement of Jack’s house: Andy, Tierney, Olson, Jack, and some guy named John Dickson who wasn’t really a part of our group but was totally obsessed with Jack, idolized him, and who Jack tolerated because he liked being idolized. None of the rest of us thought too much of John Dickson.
“All right, all right, all right,” Jack said. “Here he is. Here’s the man. Here’s the man with the plan.”
It was like he couldn’t stop himself. We normally would have made fun of him for this nervousness, but I think we were all feeling a similar way.
I threaded up the movie and someone turned out the lights. Jack didn’t have a screen, but he’d taped a light-blue sheet between the door and the wall. He’d also put black paper over the basement windows so we’d have maximum darkness.
There were no opening titles. It started right in with a young boy—he looked a little older than us, eighteen or so—showing up at the front door of a suburban home with a bag of groceries. A woman answered the door. She was wearing a negligee. He offered the bag. She shrugged, and there was a dialogue title, like in an old silent movie—“But I have no money.” The butcher boy waited. Another title card: “Come in. Maybe I have something better.” Cut to him sitting on the couch while she was blowing him. He looked happy, but disinterested. I noticed he was still holding the bag he was supposed to deliver in his hands. There was another abrupt cut, and the action shifted to the bedroom.
Jack’s basement, as we watched this, was utterly silent. None of us even seemed to be breathing.
The film ran out while the butcher boy was in mid-doggie-style-stroke. We sat in silence in the dark for a few seconds, as though we expected it to magically continue.
“You want to watch it again?” Jack asked.
This time, we couldn’t shut up. We made fun of the butcher boy’s haircut. We made jokes about his bag of meat. We made disparaging remarks about the appearance of the woman in the negligee and her thick bush of pubic hair. When the dialogue title cards came on, we all screamed the words at the top of our lungs: “BUT I HAVE NO MONEY.”
***
During our fourth viewing, we were at the scene in the bedroom where the butcher boy is holding the woman’s ankles to spread her legs, which was fast-becoming my personal favorite scene, when an amoeba suddenly appeared in the middle of the picture.
“It’s burning,” Andy yelled hysterically. “It’s burning up. Stop it! Stop it!”
I leaped up. But it was too late. The projector had burned the film right through. It flapped around the take-up reel with a sound like a baseball card in a bicycle tire.
“Oh, shit,” Andy said. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit, what’s my father going to say when he sees this? Jesus Christ, he’s going to kill me!”
We were silent again, caught up in Andy's panic. Then Tierney said, “Just put it back where you found it, Tony. He’s not going to say anything. Do you think he wants to think of you thinking of him as someone who owns something like this?”
It made sense. No one was going to get in trouble. But our mood had been punctured: something curdled hung in the air along with the acrid smell of the burning film. I felt embarrassed by how excited the film had made me and embarrassed to have seen how excited it made everyone else. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, I’d been dying to see a real porno movie, but then why the sudden rush of guilt when I’d thought about Andy's father and my parents finding out I’d watched one?
Glancing at the averted eyes around the room I didn’t think I was the only one trying to sort through some complicated reactions.
“You have anything else we can watch, Jack?” John Dickson asked.
“I think I have some old movies of a vacation my parents took to Florida.”
We put those on. It was something to do. We made jokes about the way Jack’s mother looked in a bathing suit, but then Jack threatened to turn the movie off if we didn’t shut up so we shut up. Jack’s mother turned and waved at the camera, as though telling Jack’s father to film something else. She smiled a radiant smile: for the camera? For Jack’s father behind the camera? John Dickson reached a hand up and hand-shadowed squeezing her tit on the screen and Jack made me turn off the projector and threw us all out.
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