Chapter 3
So Much Easier

The screen flickers. Always flickering. It’s the first thing I see; sometimes, it feels like the only thing I see. Not real things, not the peeling paint on the ceiling, not the dust motes dancing in the weak sunlight that dares to peek through the grimy blinds. No, just the screen. The offering. The endless, grotesque offering.
It started… I don’t even remember when it truly started. There was always that undercurrent, wasn’t there? A hum in the air, a phantom itch beneath the skin. Dad’s rage… the way he looked at me sometimes, like I was the reason for everything wrong in his miserable life. Mom, always fading, always shrinking, a ghost in her own house… I just wanted to disappear. Escape.
And then I found it, with my dad, ironically. ‘Hardcore’, 1979, where a man almost ends up busting his balls to his own daughter, Kristen Van Dorn, at a bondage dungeon. ‘Taxi Driver’, 1976, by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader, who directed ‘Hardcore’ two years later, where a young Jodie Foster plays an underage prostitute and a friend to an ex-marine and Vietnam Veteran. I digress.
So, yeah, after consuming the fleeting on-screen intransigent (and the limitless possibilities), I encountered adult pictures unexpectedly, fortuitously, rather lamentably. The dark corners, the hidden alleys, the insatiable hunger. It was… relief. At first. A valve, a pressure release. A way to feel something other than the hollowness that echoed in my chest. Click. Scroll. Click. The images flashed, promises whispered – acceptance, control, power… lies, all lies.
But the lies were so damn convincing.

“Silver stream silvery scream ah, impossible concentration” – Jim Morrison (The Lords and the New Creatures, 1970) – Curses and Invocations
The first time, guilt gnawed at me. A dull ache in my gut. Shame burned hot on my face. I swore I’d never do it again.
I lasted three days.
Three days of sweating, of twitching, of a mounting anxiety that felt like spiders crawling under my skin. Three days until the screen beckoned again, a siren song that drowned out reason, morality, everything.
It was a monster, even then, a small, insidious thing that burrowed into my brain, laying eggs of obsession. Every click – as the tape loaded (the clicking of the cassette latch) – the alluring whirring or humming noise from the motor that promised the moiré fringes after which the ‘action’ began – and the static or hissing sound while the tape is playing. The latter was a feeding, each grimy image of penetration, the moans, the cumshot, large buxom obese queen. Garden hogs and cunt veterans. ‘Silver the extremely shameful display of flesh, the mortification of bodily fluids, a strengthening of its hold. It grew with every secret glance, every hushed session, every lie I told myself.
‘It’s just a release.
‘Everyone does it.’
‘It’s not hurting anyone.’
Lies.
Years bled together. College, a blur of missed classes and panicked late-night study sessions fueled by caffeine and self-loathing. Relationships? I tried. God, I tried. But how can you connect with someone when you’re already connected to it? When every waking thought is tinged with the phantom sensation of a VHS latch-click, the electric jolt of a new image?
Sarah… her eyes, the way she laughed… I remember, vaguely, wanting to be present with her. But the monster was always there, whispering in my ear, showing me visions of perfection, of unattainable ideals. She left. Of course, she left.
Work… another casualty. I lost count of the days I called in sick, writhing in the throes of withdrawal, the monster screeching in my head, demanding its fix. My apartment became a tomb, a darkened sanctuary where the only light came from the lambent screen. Food became secondary, hygiene a distant memory. The monster didn’t care about my health, my well-being. It only cared about the next hit or the rapturous disgorgement.
The physical… God, the physical. The headaches that throbbed behind my eyes, the constant fatigue that clung to me like a shroud, the tremors in my hands that made even simple tasks an uphill battle. Erectile dysfunction… the ultimate humiliation. The carnal beast was devouring me from the inside out, gorging on my flesh, pigging out the viscera, poisoning my blood.
And the mental… The anxiety that clawed at my throat, the depression that weighed me down like lead, the paranoia that whispered that everyone knew my secret, that they could see the sweaty, acidic squalor clinging to my soul. I was fracturing. Splintering. Becoming less human with every passing day.
I tried to stop. I really, truly tried. Cold turkey. Support groups. Therapists who looked at me with pity and confusion. Nothing worked. The lecherous, libidinous monstrosity was too strong. It had burrowed too deep. It was me.
One night, I stumbled across something… something different. Something darker. More twisted. Something that even the monster seemed hesitant about. But the curiosity, the morbid fascination, I couldn’t resist.
That was the night the monster truly took control.
I don’t remember much after that. Just fragments. Flashes of images that burned themselves into my retina sounds that echoed in my skull. The screen, always the screen, a malevolent eye staring back at me, reflecting the emptiness within. This wasn’t ‘regular’ porn I was used to. No, it wasn’t; this was ‘Guinea Pig, the Flower of Flesh and Blood.’ A film that made the FBI uncomfortable in the 1980s. Their investigation was based on the various calls received after snuff film allegations made by the callers, whose curiosity had not taken time to suck all sensuous longing out of them, replacing it with pristine odium for the craving, but not me.
I remember thinking: ‘Now, now I’m just a shell, a husk. The ungodly creature wears my skin, speaks with my voice. It goes through the motions of life – orders takeout, pays bills, pretends to be human. But there’s nothing left inside. Just the gnawing hunger, the insatiable need for more.’
And immediately after the introspective brooding, another VHS was hissing in the VCR.
The doctor’s words echo in my head, a dull, muffled drone. “Brain atrophy, hormonal imbalances, severe depression, possible neurological damage!”
He had looked at me with a mixture of pity and disgust. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand. I didn’t want him to understand, for understanding would mean tolerance, and if we accept everything, well, just look around you or me.
The monster laughed sinister, menacing roars now, a low, guttural chuckle that reverberated in my bones. It knew it had won. It had consumed me completely.
And the screen flickers. Always flickering. Waiting for the next victim.
Be careful. It’s out there. Waiting for you, too. It starts small, a little flicker in the darkness. But it grows. It festers. It consumes.
Don’t let it in. For God’s sake, don’t let it in.
Because once it takes hold, there’s no escape.

Barnstable. Salt air, the screech of gulls, and the ghosts. Always the ghosts. They cling to the weathered shingles of the houses, seep from the clam flats, and whisper in the rustling beach grass. Even now, decades later, I can taste the tang of it, the heavy, suffocating feeling of being… watched.
Eleven. That’s when it started, really started, though the seeds were planted long before. My father, a man of appetites, a man who chased shadows and never quite caught them. Movies. He loved movies. Not Disney, not family fare. No, he wanted the edgy stuff, the stuff that made you squirm. Hardcore, 1979. I, a kid, barely holding onto the last threads of innocence and Hardcore, a neon sign pointing to a hidden world. Taxi Driver, 1976, too. The desperation, the grime, the simmering rage… he wanted me to see it, to understand.
What did he want me to understand?
Pornography. That word, a dirty secret, whispered in the shadows. Before the internet, before it was everywhere, it was hidden, forbidden. It was a glimpse behind a curtain, a promise of something… else. The Miller vs. California thing, yeah, I remember that vaguely. The legal battles, the shifting sands of what was acceptable, what was obscene. It was all swirling around, a miasma of confusion and growing awareness.
Junior high. Or maybe it was still elementary school. The timeline gets blurry, the edges frayed. No internet, no endless scroll of images. Just paperbacks. Sleazy detective novels, lurid covers promising sin and danger. Sometimes, there were illustrations, crude and suggestive, just enough to set the imagination racing. That’s where it started, the furtive glances, the stolen moments of exploration.
Then, the magazines. Playboy, Penthouse. But even before those, there was something else, something earlier, something buried deep in the recesses of my memory, back when I was in the single digits of life. Single digits. That’s how young I was. Receipts. I have receipts. Addresses scribbled on scraps of paper, faded ink connecting me to a past I’m not sure I want to revisit. It helps bring back memories.
Harriet. Harriet McCurdy Cameron Hall Jacobucci. That name, variegated, psychedelic identities. Harriet Cameron, back then. Two sons, hippie types. Steve and Stan. Stan. Six or seven years old, and Stan took a liking to me. “Come up to my bedroom.” He had said. I remember it like it was the day before.
A proper hippie room, he called it. Incense, posters, the scent of something earthy and forbidden. And the magazines. Stacked in the closet, just behind the door. Playboy. I knew what was in there.
“You can look at those if you want.”
“I’m not looking at those. I know what’s in there.” Black dinguses drilling off shore, deep, dark recesses of shit. Boring fun. The hairy 70s.
But I did look. On subsequent visits, I did. The glossy pages, the airbrushed bodies, the vacant stares. It stirred something in me, a feeling I didn’t understand, a feeling I didn’t like. Shame. Guilt. Curiosity. It all mixed into a toxic cocktail of uncouthness. Pornography. It was there, even then, lurking in the shadows, waiting to be discovered.
The small house. Three males, hormones raging like a toro bravo. My father, restless, searching. My brother, lost in his own world. And me, caught in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. My father’s paperback on the nightstand. My brother’s hidden stash. Secrets. Everyone had secrets. Snooping. We all snuck. A desperate attempt to understand, to find some kind of… answer.
The Fourth of July. My father’s birthday. The Lannings. Friends of my father’s friend, Harriet Cameron Hall’s family. The campfire, the smell of smoke and beer, the sound of laughter. My brother wasn’t there, too popular, always out doing something. Just me, my mother, my father, and the Lannings. The gift. A wrapped copy of Penthouse. A birthday present. A joke.
Appalled. That’s the only word for it. I knew what it was. I wanted nothing to do with it. They knew. The Lannings knew. They knew my mother wasn’t giving him sex. It was a gag gift, a cruel reminder of his unhappiness. My mother and I left. Walked down to the fireworks area. The explosions, the bright flashes of color, couldn’t drown out the feeling of disgust and repulsion.
Shaking. I was shaking.
Trying to make a joke, “Gee, Mom. I don’t, um, I never looked at porn. I know I never use pornography. I don’t even have a phonograph.” A stupid joke, a desperate attempt to lighten the mood.
She played along: “Oh yeah? To you, that’s old hat.” That was it. The extent of the exchange.
The idea of it. It intrigued me. As I got older, it captivated me more and more. I thought about it a lot. Puberty. The changes in my body, the confusing urges, the overwhelming need. D.Wires news service. Hares and Hyenas Books. A proper magazine retailer. Not a country store, not a local market. A bookstore. Paperback books. Magazines. I stole them. Prodigiously.
That’s where it began, I think. 1971. Eleven years old. The red-light districts. I knew what was going on. As soon as I was old enough to get on the bus, I went. Between fourteen and eighteen years. What was I thinking? I don’t know. Curiosity? Desperation? A need to understand? A need to escape?
Barnstable. The salt air, the screech of gulls, the ghosts. They’re still here. They’re always here. They cling to me, whisper in my ear, remind me of what I was, what I did, what I saw. The darkness. It’s always there, just below the surface. Waiting.

Ludovico Technique – Controlled Tears Headgear Contraption
Yarmouth. Drive-in. No. Not there. The smell. The sticky floor. Was it sticky? Or just felt sticky? Memory is, it is a film reel curling, jumping, frames missing, others stretched, distorted. Yarmouth Drive-in. Father. Big car. Dark. Too dark. Movies. He took me to the movies. That’s what fathers do, right? Movies. But even then, even as a little kid, the screen was secondary. Flickering lights, giants on screen, monsters maybe, spaceships, cowboys, whatever. Didn’t matter. Felt the car move. His hand. On the seat? Close. Too close. Don’t remember exactly. Just wrong. Something wrong in the dark of that car at the Yarmouth Drive-in. Didn’t want to go. Later. Teenage years. Hated it. “Family time,” he’d say. Family time. Trapped in the metal box, the car, the dark pressing in, the giant screen a distraction, a lie. Lie of normalcy. It wasn’t normal. Never normal.
Movies though. Movies talked. Whispered secrets. Dirty secrets. Like Clockwork Orange. Violence. Weirdness. Father liked that. Taxi Driver. New York grit. Seedy. He liked seedy. Then Hardcore. That one. That one burrowed in. Peep shows. Adult arcades. Underground. A hidden world. Behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, but not magic, not wonder. Something… else. Something rotten. But fascinating. Compelling. Like a car crash, you can’t look away. Movies showed it. Movies hinted. My father… he was a hint, too. A dark hint.
Boston. Emerson. Escape. Thought it was escape. From Yarmouth, from the cape, from him. Boston felt different. City. Noise. People rushing, not like the slow drag of Cape Cod life. Emerson campus, right downtown. They said “urban campus experience.” Urban. Combat Zone was urban, too, and opportune. Just a walk.
Walking distance, they said for Emerson. Convenient. Convenient for everything. For classes, for coffee… for the Zone. Didn’t know it was called Combat Zone then. Just heard whispers. “Red light district.”
“Bad area.”
Bad. But… interesting bad. The kind of bad that pulls you in.
It was my first time walking there, heart pounding. Like a trespasser entering forbidden territory. Neon signs buzzing, glittering (volatile) like dying insects. Peep shows, adult bookstores, theaters with names you couldn’t quite read, letters missing, bulbs burnt out. Smelled like stale beer and… something else. Something sour. Something human but wrong.
Arcade. Adult video arcade. That’s what they called it. Arcade. Like a game. But not games. Boo