The Polaroids in the Patent Leather Purse
On innocence and evidence
CARTOONIST ROBERT CRUMB told me that the first dirty picture he ever saw was a ten-second glimpse of something his older brother Charles was circulating on the playground. Big brother was subsequently caught pink-handed and suspended.
“It was a naked lady,” Robert recalled, “with great big tits.”
Female masturbation guru Betty Dodson, who was older than Robert but of the same generation, told me she drew her own first dirty picture. Furthermore, she got away with it. Betty remembers that her girlfriends dared her. They said she didn’t know how a man and woman did it.
She said, “Do so!” and dashed off a man with an enormous dick, entering a woman with an equally huge vagina. She surprised herself.
While pre-WWII babies Crumb and Dodson found their taboo in penciled illustration, my generation's encounters with the forbidden came in the age of instant photography.
I grew up in the sixties, and my first dirty picture wasn’t a drawing. I discovered it when I was in fifth grade, playing around after school off Baldwin Avenue, a suburban main drag in the San Gabriel Valley, right near the recent fires.
I was scoping out one of several undeveloped lots on Baldwin. People dumped stuff there; I found all kinds of garbage treasures they’d discarded, and I also used it as a site to hide my favorite clothes that my mother wouldn’t allow in my closet.
I left early for St. Rita’s parochial school every morning to make a quick change on the road after my mom had approved my school attire. This was 1968, and I had two secret mini-skirts that my mother had thrown away but I had rescued because they were finally short enough.
Mom wanted my skirts down to my knees. She wanted me to wear 1950s saddle shoes, too. Was she trying to get me killed?
I had a pair of Adidas stashed in one particular tree. I was always on the lookout for new places to hide future stashes.
My thrift store Adidas were the symbol of my wishful thinking: not only did I have secret clothes, I also had secret friends, girls who would no more want to be seen with me, an unpopular brain, a “Girl Scout,” than I would want to be seen in Oxfords.
Kim Elder was a friend like that. She was cool; she had long blond ironed hair and paisley-print mini-dresses. Her parents were hippies who put marijuana in their spaghetti sauce, and she really liked to hang out with me—AFTER school hours, when no one else was looking.