Read Online A Common Pornography: A Memoir by Kevin Sampsell - Free Book Online
Authors: Kevin Sampsell
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Airplane!, and Devo.
I started to hang out less with Darren and Maurice. I hung out at Pat’s house a lot and spent the night there on most weekends. We stayed up late and watched Night Flight, an assortment of music and comedy that took over the USA Network on the weekends.
At school, we would do weird things for the sake of being weird. We’d go sit in a class that wasn’t ours until the teacher would look at us, puzzled, and then ask us to leave. While walking down the hallways, we’d sometimes fall to our hands and knees and spastically crawl several feet before getting back up on our feet, our facial expressions flat and muted, as if nothing goofy was happening at all. We would get in fake fights and then run away from each other, pretending to cry. If someone from Yearbook was taking photos, we’d try to get in the picture and point at something outside of the frame, sometimes with a look of glee, sometimes with an expression of horror.
We were friends for a couple of years, but something odd started to pull us apart. I really wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t sure if I could hang out with Pat Kennelly and be cool. Plus Maurice would make snide remarks about Pat and how much we were hanging out. Not that Maurice was any cooler, but sometimes it’s easy to be swayed by fear, and I was afraid I would lose Maurice as a friend. We’d been friends for a long time and we sometimes talked about living with each other when we got older. I think when you’re a teenager and you start making plans with your friends in regards to living together or going to a college together or hunting for Bigfoot or whatever, you really get excited. Because it’s the future! And it’s without your parents!
I’m sad I wasn’t Pat’s friend for longer. I’ve looked through all my high school yearbooks and I don’t think he even signed any. There is one funny scrawl that takes up a half page in back of my sophomore yearbook. It doesn’t have a name signed to it, but it says in part:
Kevin,
Guilty! Where is the fish? Dance with the flame! The yellow man inside that egg is in love with Big Leggy! Vegetables!
I’m pretty sure that’s from Pat.
Trespass
Once, during a snowy winter break, Maurice and I were jonesing to play basketball, so we walked over to our high school to see if any of the doors were open. Sometimes there were doors left open near the gym because there were teams practicing or a janitor working.
We got there and found the doors unlocked and the gym lights on, but no one else around. No sign of a janitor. We had our boom box with us and plugged it in at courtside. We had some sodas and a bag of chips from the store. It was like we had set up camp for the night.
We shot baskets on the beautiful hardwood floors and listened to Kurtis Blow and the Bar-Kays. About an hour into our private practice, three cops appeared. Two of them were up in the stands, walking around as if we had hidden bombs somewhere, and one of them approached us on the court. “What are you guys doing here?” he asked. Maurice turned the music down and told him we were just shooting baskets and that the doors were open and that we were students of the high school. They took our names and phone numbers and made us walk back home in the snow.
When school started again in January, we were called into the office and told we were to do Saturday school for two weeks because of our “trespassing.” The school narc gave us each a police report and told us to have our parents sign them. Maurice and I went home that day, nervous that they had called our parents. They hadn’t, so we forged the signatures on the reports and served our two weeks of Saturday school without our parents knowing.
Big Gulp
For most of my junior year of high school, I developed a strange dietary ritual. Before school, I would start my day with a package of Hostess Donettes (usually the waxy chocolate-covered ones) and a
I started to hang out less with Darren and Maurice. I hung out at Pat’s house a lot and spent the night there on most weekends. We stayed up late and watched Night Flight, an assortment of music and comedy that took over the USA Network on the weekends.
At school, we would do weird things for the sake of being weird. We’d go sit in a class that wasn’t ours until the teacher would look at us, puzzled, and then ask us to leave. While walking down the hallways, we’d sometimes fall to our hands and knees and spastically crawl several feet before getting back up on our feet, our facial expressions flat and muted, as if nothing goofy was happening at all. We would get in fake fights and then run away from each other, pretending to cry. If someone from Yearbook was taking photos, we’d try to get in the picture and point at something outside of the frame, sometimes with a look of glee, sometimes with an expression of horror.
We were friends for a couple of years, but something odd started to pull us apart. I really wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t sure if I could hang out with Pat Kennelly and be cool. Plus Maurice would make snide remarks about Pat and how much we were hanging out. Not that Maurice was any cooler, but sometimes it’s easy to be swayed by fear, and I was afraid I would lose Maurice as a friend. We’d been friends for a long time and we sometimes talked about living with each other when we got older. I think when you’re a teenager and you start making plans with your friends in regards to living together or going to a college together or hunting for Bigfoot or whatever, you really get excited. Because it’s the future! And it’s without your parents!
I’m sad I wasn’t Pat’s friend for longer. I’ve looked through all my high school yearbooks and I don’t think he even signed any. There is one funny scrawl that takes up a half page in back of my sophomore yearbook. It doesn’t have a name signed to it, but it says in part:
Kevin,
Guilty! Where is the fish? Dance with the flame! The yellow man inside that egg is in love with Big Leggy! Vegetables!
I’m pretty sure that’s from Pat.
Trespass
Once, during a snowy winter break, Maurice and I were jonesing to play basketball, so we walked over to our high school to see if any of the doors were open. Sometimes there were doors left open near the gym because there were teams practicing or a janitor working.
We got there and found the doors unlocked and the gym lights on, but no one else around. No sign of a janitor. We had our boom box with us and plugged it in at courtside. We had some sodas and a bag of chips from the store. It was like we had set up camp for the night.
We shot baskets on the beautiful hardwood floors and listened to Kurtis Blow and the Bar-Kays. About an hour into our private practice, three cops appeared. Two of them were up in the stands, walking around as if we had hidden bombs somewhere, and one of them approached us on the court. “What are you guys doing here?” he asked. Maurice turned the music down and told him we were just shooting baskets and that the doors were open and that we were students of the high school. They took our names and phone numbers and made us walk back home in the snow.
When school started again in January, we were called into the office and told we were to do Saturday school for two weeks because of our “trespassing.” The school narc gave us each a police report and told us to have our parents sign them. Maurice and I went home that day, nervous that they had called our parents. They hadn’t, so we forged the signatures on the reports and served our two weeks of Saturday school without our parents knowing.
Big Gulp
For most of my junior year of high school, I developed a strange dietary ritual. Before school, I would start my day with a package of Hostess Donettes (usually the waxy chocolate-covered ones) and a
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