Hugh Hefner Versus Heaven

hugh hefner vs. heaven

Like most of my fellow modern men, I spent adolescence learning about sex on the television through disturbing ribbons of green and static. We were like deep space astronomers, forming a visage of breasts by the impressions they left in a nameless void, like we were theorizing new planets from their unseen gravitational tug.

As a young boy, I loved the irony of it: by day, Channel 25 was a Christian-themed local access channel, chock-full of preaching and round-table discussions on the Scripture, ancient nuns’ jowls silently swaying as the Word of God spewed from dry, cracked lips. At 8 p.m., Hugh Hefner’s glossy parade of soft-core porn took over. While these two forces were vying for airtime, they were also fighting their dearest for my pure, pubescent soul.

If you listened through the crackle and fuzz, you could make out the pleasured moans and somewhat sad whimpers of the ladies, the unsettling grunts of male pleasure, the repetitive world-music beats, and the now-clichéd tenor saxophone. The television was usually set to “mute” anyway, and if parents upstairs, downstairs, or in the next room intruded, a quick tap of the “last channel” button on the remote would bring us safely back to MTV- which, in retrospect, was quite similar.

When I had started tuning into to this new scrambled channel, I was still young enough where I definitely wanted to: (a) lick breasts and (b) kiss breasts, though I could understand nothing further. I wanted to simply hold them, rub them, test their durability and send my findings to Consumer Reports. Beyond that, a mystery.

If someone could catalog everyone’s young sexual misconceptions into one hysterical volume, I’m sure that would make for an amazing read, but for now, we only have mine (and yours). My earliest picture of a vagina was not unlike my own penis. I had caught a glimpse of my younger sister in the bath once, and it led me to believe that beyond all women’s labia, deep down, a wee-wee just like mine resided, hiding like a turtle.

When I was gently explained that babies come from the Special Opening On The Mommy, I imagined a birth involving the removal of a large square of stomach, like a slice of Mom’s lasagna. The baby would then be scooped out with relative ease, and the square would fit neatly back into place. The belly button seemed to have something to do with this, perhaps an access plug or a keyhole. This all seemed quite gory. Maybe I wanted nothing to do with this foul act, come to think of it.

One rainy Sunday afternoon when I was twelve, I realized I was trapped in the bathroom with nothing to read. I had left my Mad Magazine on my bed, and with nowhere left to turn, began thumbing through my mother’s copy of Redbook. Oprah Winfrey, as is mandatory, was on the cover. I flipped past all the shoes and new-mother-worry-inducing-bullshit, and got right to “How to Make Your Man…” whatever. The first line I stopped on was:

You won’t believe how pleasurable it is for the man when you take his penis and gently insert it into your vagina yourself.

Eureka!

This opened up a can of worms however. Thousands of questions spooled off of this new discovery, becoming knotted and tangled. I was at a loss. That’s when the holiest of holy days happened, bigger than Yom Kippur and The Feast of the Assumption put together and times’d by two.

That’s when we got free cable. That’s when things started to come into focus.

My dad came home one night with a little wooden and metal box. I remember it odd that it had no packaging or instructions.

“It’s called a ‘hotbox’,” he explained.

Dad had purchased it from his morbidly obese acquaintance, Hank, a man whom always seemed to be involved in slightly dishonest pursuits. For a one-time fee of $200, we had access to 35 channels of pure magic.

With the joy of HBO, however, came the deep paranoia that began to grow and fester inside my father like an ulcer. He always believed that we were just moments away from being caught. At any minute, the cable company and the FBI would break down our door, lead my father and mother away in handcuffs, and send us kids into foster care. The Gary Shandling Show would play on in the family room without an audience. The front door would lightly smack against the porch in the wind, dinner left half-eaten on the table. The corner of Locust Drive would be awash in red and blue lights as Dad and Mom were taken away.

This was the image in his mind.

My sister and I would be watching television while doing homework and my father would come bounding down the stairs, yelling, “That cable truck has passed by our house two times! Two times! They know! They know!” He would reach behind the television, rip our a fistful of wires, and turn the lights off for good measure. We’d sit in the dark for a minute or so and waited for the cable truck to drive away.

“They can scan into the house, they have scanners,” he would say again, intently peering out of the window. In his mind, there was a Bureau of Stolen Television, Mix Tapes, and Dubbed Movies that sent out a team of Special Forces to Long Island every night, just waiting to bring bastard like him to justice. “I think they’re on to us. No more television tonight.”

This happened all the time. For me, if having adult entertainment in the house meant I might not see my father for fifteen-to-twenty, then so be it.

While Dad was hiding from the Ministry of Cable, my mother was going through a bit of a religious revival, something that wasn’t going to coincide well with our new illegal family room or my late-night viewing. Mom was always active in the church and complacent with her beliefs, but sometimes she would get a little hard-core with the stuff. She wasn’t at the jihad or the Look-I’ve-Got-The-Wounds-Of-Christ level, but some of her friends were. I’d come home from school occasionally and she would be holding prayer groups in our home and a bunch of fat, ugly middle-aged women who would insist I spent my Saturdays at confession.

I believe what sparked this particular revival was a little blue book that looked a lot like a mimeographed punk-rock fanzine. It was called The Pieta, referencing the famous Michelangelo work of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Jesus. Within its inky and typo-ridden pages, amidst the bizarre stories and sketches, were supposed secret prayers and meditations that gifted monks had received on the direct line from God. It was more like a video game cheat book than a religious text, it contained the Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-B-A-Select-Start’s of getting up into Heaven where you belong. (I hope you got the Nintendo reference there.)

It also made a good point to let you know what a guilty little shit you were, and how close the great majority of humankind was to spending the afterlife in flaming agony.

One night, my mother wept on the couch for the fate of her soul. She thought she was a sinner. My sister and I sat at the kitchen table, slightly freaked out. It was weird to see our mother cry. It made me angry with God for the first time.

When my father arrived home from work, Mom informed him that dinner was in the oven, the kids have homework to do, and she would be spending the rest of the evening at church. Church at night? On a Thursday? Was she losing her mind?

Dad shook his head and acquiesced, and that’s how things went for a few weeks. For me, this meant I had one less parent to keep tabs on. This also meant a long evening with just a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and the Unholy Channel. Not a bad evening.

One afternoon after school, my mother read me a charming little anecdote from The Pieta that fucked with my young mind quite a bit. It went something like this: during one of the Virgin Mary’s stops on her Third World Tour (it was either somewhere in Yugoslavia or Peru, I can’t remember), she peeled open the Earth for three special children to see what Hell looked like. It was just as we had been taught, supposedly. Tortured souls writhing in agony. The fire. The brimstone. By the way, for a fun exercise, ask any person, religious or otherwise, to describe what the hell brimstone actually is, see if anybody knows. (The answer is sulfur, in case you were wondering. So that means that hell smells like farts.)

So, the story goes on: one of the little boys (whom, I imagine, would be spending most of his adult life in an intense psychotherapy program) pointed down into a deep dark corner of the recesses of hell, where a young and innocent girl lay. Demons were poking her, agony stretched across her face. She was dirty and tattered. Faintly, light jazz could be heard in the background.

“Why, Mother Mary?” the kid asked. “Why is that young girl to suffer in hell?”

“Because,” the Immaculate One replied, “She read a dirty book.”

My mother looked up at me and said, “You see how hard it is to stay good in the eyes of God?”

A dirty book? Television ran at something like sixty-frames-per-second; if judgment was based on exposure, then where did my fate lie? I was currently planning my evening around doing some homework and catching Best of Naughty Amateurs 4. I was also at the point where I actually was following the plot in that weird French erotica series, Emmanuelle. I wasn’t jacking off all over Mom’s sofa, but still, I was certainly damned. For all eternity, nonetheless. I briefly contemplated a life of mass murder. Robbery. Becoming proprietor of a false-idol shop. If I was already in trouble, I might as well go down in flames, so to speak.

Lo, and behold! Salvation also lied within that damned book. There was a “get out of jail free” card in there. If I could recite two Apostles’ Creeds, five Our Fathers, five Hail Mary’s, and two Nicene Creeds every night before bed for two years, I could shave some time off of my sentence. At least get bumped up to purgatory, which is something like where I grew up on Long Island: not really good, not really bad- just there. I could deal with that.

So every night, I pushed the thoughts of tan melon-esque breasts and cleverly manicured pubic hair out of my mind. Instead of focusing on starkly contrasting tan lines, I silently prayed. For nearly two months, every night, I accomplished my goal. I said each prayer slowly and thoughtfully, not that quick, mumbling version that some Catholics have been known to race through after receiving a Draconian penance. I thought of my young soul- had I gone too far? Was I beyond saving? Eternity was- is a really long time. I almost went mad trying to grasp the concept.

For two months, you could say I was a religious boy. I swore off the forbidden channel. I even stopped reading Cujo when I came across a clitoris reference. I didn’t know exactly what a clitoris was, and the jury is still out on the proper pronunciation, but I knew that clits make Jesus cry.

Somewhere during the third month, I was nodding off during my second Nicene Creed, and I fell asleep somewhere while ruminating on Pontius Pilate. I woke up the next morning instantly aware of my lapse in piety. This sucks, I thought, as I brushed my teeth, looking at the face of a sinner in the mirror. Did I just reset the two-year timer on my holy quest, or was it cumulative? Did I have to start from scratch? If that were the case, I’d never be able to make it through the two years without missing a single day.

I sat quietly, pondering my soul in silence over chocolate milk and a corn muffin. I wondered if that little girl in Hell and I could be friends. Perhaps, with me as her partner, she’d be eager to try out whatever it was that she had been reading.

With that, my first “dirty” thought in a couple of months, I suddenly realized something. It was Tuesday. Four Star Erotic Cinema night, double feature. Bare Ambition was on at eight. Asian Invasion was on at ten. If ever there was day to descend to sin, it was today.

Maybe I set myself up for failure. Maybe God did. I was happy enough playing. Super Mario and He-Man a few months ago. I didn’t ask for everything to get complicated. It seemed that the reason I was getting boners all the time was Him.

In the end, after a deep moral debate in my formative twelve-year-old mind, Hugh Hefner beat out The Lord God for my eternal soul. It came down to this: they both hang around in robes; God associates himself with puffy white popes and pious little grannies. Hef chills with Slash, Sammy Davis Jr., and six-foot-two platinum blondes from Norway. Hef, most importantly, also has the distinction of having never made my Mom cry. The decision was easier than you think.

Eventually, the technology changed and our little “hotbox” became useless. Even though my father complained about having to now actually pay per view, he was relieved. The small monthly charge for the premium networks would be worth his freedom and a good night’s sleep.

My mother has become a much more reasonable woman of faith, one whose confessions now include that she wouldn’t mind some time alone with Vin Diesel, or that she would rather have a few glasses of chardonnay than sit in those uncomfortable pews.

As I grew older, I slid down the slippery slope of reading books and enjoying logic. I eventually stopped going to church, which led to agnosticism, and finally settled somewhere between atheist and I-Couldn’t-Care-Less.

That conditioning still lies in some deep dark corridor of my conscience, however; and sometimes, late at night, when I’m sometimes thinking about all these silly things, I secretly hope (pray?) that Hef rebuilds his earthy paradise in the recesses of Hell, and when it’s all said and done, he’ll be there, relaxing in The Grotto and waiting for me, with a dry martini and open arms.