Adult Only Narnia
Trigger warning: adult language.
I passed by a mysterious door during a late night walk. I think it was the sign on the front that caught my eye. An eight and a half by eleven sheet of white printer paper taped to an otherwise unmarked entrance. Ladies were free but gentlemen would have to pay twenty-five dollars, unless they came together in which case the price per pair was only seven. What you were paying for was left up to the imagination.
I pondered the blacked out windows and vaguely suggestive posters lining the alcove. Inside there was most certainly something pornographic. The separation between us was physical, a literal threshold, and I thought that was the strangest thing in the whole world. It felt like I was staring at some kind of fucked up door to adult-only Narnia. Should I walk in? No, the time for that was before comparing my situation to a hero’s journey. What if a well-endowed lion asked me to whip out my sword and help him lay the frigid ice queen. I wasn’t prepared to own that kind of story.
Aimless as I was that evening, it seemed like any puff of magic, real or imagined, could blow me off my non-path into the great mysterious unknown. Those days I was smoking all the time, inhaling cold nights and greasy black doors, and exhaling the future. If you’ve ever gotten lost down a rabbit hole of Yelp reviews looking for that perfect option, you’ve seen the future too. It looks like two globs of dimensionless matter locked in a heated argument, waiting on the arbiter glob to show up and sort everything out but its running late or maybe had a family emergency. The indecision eventually swallows everything in the room, which is about the time you should really try to get the fuck out. Any door will do, except of course this one it leads into a god damned porno theater.
Across the street, there was a cafe that served fancy pizzas to an entirely different subset of humanity. I went there sometime later, sat at a sidewalk table, picked fresh arugula off sizzling prosciutto and once again contemplated the door. The circumstances had changed since our last encounter. I had moved to the city recently, just a few blocks away. The fear that I might float off into some seedy underworld of sad public masturbation had been replaced by a feeling of harmless curiosity. I was too grounded here to walk through some door and never walk out, at least not without a heavy gust of bona fide magic. The good stuff, not the fake shit I had been manufacturing out of each breath that made every possible step look like a leap from a ledge. I teetered indecisively up on my precipice for the better part of two years, high on my own supply. But a door is just a door, right? And real magic may be a mystery but curiosity feels like a good hound to follow.
I took in all these thoughts as a sign of my progress as a human being. I was learning how to be present in life and that meant opening up doors without hesitation and taking a look around. I walked across the street through the thick summer air. It was late but still light out and people were everywhere. We were all wrapped in the same blanket of roses, all of us children of the Sun and Earth no matter our sexual predilections.
I stood in the alcove for a bit taking in the latest bits of vague information. My shorts were sticking to my thighs with sweat and I wondered if I was inappropriately dressed. I had fancy pizza written all over me, not just my thigh high Nordstrom shorts but my whole aura. This wasn’t exactly new information but it struck me then as a profound self-discovery.
Waltzing in there like a blatant voyeur was no good. I had wanted to blend in but that was a non-starter. Maybe I could pull off naive intrigue? I read and re-read an event poster with faux concentration while ironing out the details of my cover. Then it occurred to me that I had been staring at this sparse poster for quite a while. I could feel the eyes of other fancy pizza people on me as if I were on a sacred mission. Shit. No hesitation!
Inside there was a highly typical cinema lobby just like the ones from everyone’s childhood. It smelled like popcorn and belonging. Movie posters hung on the walls and lo and behold they were all pornos. I walked up to the cashier and made an attempt at a neutral inquiry. Tell me more about the upcoming event. This gregarious man obliged me with more details than any reasonable human could have possibly expected or desired. It was like he was overcompensating for the vaguery outside but not really because you could see very clearly he was standing in his truth.
If I wanted I could come by tomorrow before it started and then come and go as I pleased. There would be a potluck in the evening with really great food. In fact, some people come just for the food; chili and burgers and big ears of corn. Of course, people also come for The Fucking, which apparently needs no further explanation. I imagined spending a whole summer day in and out of a porno theater. I imagined showing up and sitting on cum stained fabric just to eat someone’s homemade chili because it’s that good.
When I returned to my table, the waiter asked me very sincerely and sweetly if I had enjoyed my ride. Sorry… no… I was just curious. He left me with the bill and a knowing smile. I felt my sweat glands kick it up a notch.
When he returned, he told me there used to be hundreds of them all across the state. He grew up surrounded by doors advertising strangely specific prices and ambiguous services, but then the internet happened. You could end a lot of sentences with those five words. He told me I had wandered into a piece of living history, something from a simpler time.
The nostalgia for this man was real and as we were all wrapped up together in this thick summer heat, smelling of flowers and citrus and God’s green earth, I couldn’t help but reach down into my own deep well of empathy and pull out some tender thoughts for North Watt Ave. This was my close approximation, a stretch of strip clubs and adult video stores and maybe a porno theater on the outskirts of Sacramento that seemed old and decrepit even twenty years ago. It was a strait shot down Watt from my high school and being on the verge of adulthood as I was there was something feverishly exciting about driving past these adult-only establishments. I still come across ads for North Watt strewn across the city and sometimes they leap out and kick me in the face with nostalgia. All bets are off when it comes to free association where even strip clubs can remind us of the sweet innocence of youth.
The fucking. Was it participatory? A live sex show? Maybe just good old fashioned porn up on the screen like background music for a dinner party. I considered the impossible notion of going back the next day to find out, but I was more amused by the ambiguous phrase itself than what lay behind it. The Fucking, as if it were an object, the object, said over and over again like code for something known only to the insiders. I needed to be inside of something but that wasn’t it. Really, just being inside my own skin would do if we could ever stop arguing. If we could just move every fight to arbitration and let the courts decide. After a while of grinding away, you realize that any outcome is better than none at all.
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