Several years ago I went home for Thanksgiving dinner only to resign myself—after having argued with my grandmother about my boyfriend, the MTA employee/spoken word poet—to spending the night in my bedroom. Seeing as how my father had converted it into a study, however, there wasn’t much there in the way of entertainment save for a do-it-yourself guide to Rug Weaving and a biography on Howard Taft, so I opted instead to dig through a box in the back of my closet. On its side my dad had written, “Old Sara Bits,” and on the top I found a tattered spiral notebook. Slathered as it was in those puffy, googly-eyed unicorn stickers, I recognized it as a diary I’d kept some 15 years prior. I opened to a random page and read: “Then I take his pienus and rub my face in it.”
This surprised me. While I’d correctly identified it as a diary, I’d anticipated some thing more PG. Something more like, “Today I went ice skating.”
“Then I take his pienus and rub my face in it,” had thrown me off guard. It’s when I realized: this was The Porn.
The Porn is a screenplay I wrote when I was 11 years old, horribly unnerved by the new and unexpected urge to thrust my crotch toward raging faucets. It’s riddled with eight pornographic sex scenes imagined from the perspective of an inexperienced, sexually frustrated tween. I start with, “Hey! Wanna French?” but advance quickly to “He humped me wildly with his wiener!’ I swear I thought I’d burned it, but apparently my father chose instead to find it, save it, grace it with the oddly grotesque title “Old Sara Bits.”
My chosen title, conversely, was Rosewood Beach. Rosewood Beach is a local beach in my hometown where, at age 10, a man in a trench coat and fedora flashed me. So for years, I thought: Rosewood Beach = Penis. Like peanut butter, jelly. Rosewood Beach, penis. The protagonist was a young woman I named Jenny Wilkinson, and her love interests were named Mark Brolin, Jim Henley and Brian. Brian had no last name. The only follow-up detail I give is that he’d only have sex if Michael Bolton’s ‘91 smash album, Time,Love and Tenderness was playing.
“Take off that real sexy leather skirt,” he says in Scene 5, “We can get in my convertible. I got this Michael Bolton tape.”
“OK,” answers Jenny. “I feel like some real wild humping anyway.”
The first page of The Porn includes a cast list. I cast Christie Brinkley in the role of Jenny Wilkinson and Tom Cruise in the role of Mark Brolin. Christie Brinkley? Fine. But the Tom Cruise thing is upsetting seeing as how all that enters my head when I think of him these days is Scientology and a wide variety of things relating to the anus. My character descriptions explain that Jenny is the most popular girl in high school and Mark, the captain of the football team. Obviously, this means they ought to have a lot of intercourse. And they do. Here is Jenny’s description of their first night together:
“I switched myself around so my head was right on his pienus and I made my legs go into a squatting position and made so he exactly saw up my viginia. So I am lying on top of him and he is humping me so hard I’m nearly flying off him.Then I take his pienus and rub my face in it.Then I grab it in my two hands and rub it all over my body.”
I believe I may have meant penis and vagina in lieu of the more exotically spelled pienus and viginia. But who knows? Spelling aside, The Porn has other errors. Re-reading it as an adult I realized that I was confused about the following:
1. I was convinced that all couples enjoy a post-coital champagne toast. As far as I was concerned, where there’s sex, there should be bubbly.“That was very nice,” Jenny tells Mark in Scene 8, “Now I’m going to go get the champagne.” It’s not the mix of sex and alcohol that I find odd, it’s the champagne-specific focus. Several awkward stints as bridesmaid notwithstanding, champagne has been notably absent from my amour making, personally.
2. I was convinced an erection means you can’t have sex. “JIM’S ERECTION IS OUT OF CONTROL!” declares the narrator in Scene 13. “Jenny tries to use her hand to calm it down before the problem gets any worse!” The last time I checked, erections weren’t a problem. I mean, if spotted in public or on a relative it’s a less than ideal situation to be sure. But in the privacy of a bedroom, I, for one, encourage them.
3. I was confused by orgasms. Conceptually speaking, they’re awfully strange before you have them, and despite intuiting the need for a release following the feelings of arousal, I couldn’t hammer out exactly what said release should be. So in my porn, the characters pee. Everywhere. “I was at my peak of heat,” Jenny tells her friend Carrie (the actress for the part included in the cast list? Paula Abdul), “and so I peed on him. Everywhere.”
“And then?” Carrie prods.
“Well, then I cleaned it up with the help of my boobs. And then I went and got us some champagne.”
When the ladies excuse themselves from this particular conversation, it’s so Carrie can go have sex with her boyfriend Zach and Jenny heads to the local concert arena to have sex with a rock star named Don Henley. Don’s passing through Jenny’s hometown for a one-night only appearance, and in The Porn’s final scene he tells his butler Hank, “Get me that sexy girl.Ya know, that one in the biker shorts and lacy bra.” He means Jenny of course, and she obliges.The two then spend an hour “humping wildly on a steaming bearskin rug,” and in the end, Jim pees.
Jenny, however, does not. This makes her angry.
“Well now I gotta go,” she fumes.
“That’s too bad,” says Don, “since, ya know, it’s been so satisfying.”
“Maybe for you,” says Jenny, “but not for me. Bye bye.”
Those are the two final lines of The Porn, and I find them shockingly realistic, especially since the rest of The Porn flies directly in the face of sexual realism. I mean, who pees in lieu of an orgasm? Nobody. Unless, of course, a gal’s had too much beer to drink. Beer I said. But not champagne.
Adapted from People Are Unappealing: Even Me © 2009 by Sara Barron.Published by Three Rivers Press,an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
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