Travis Bickle: Part 1
For as long as I can remember, I never got girls. They were something you stared at, but not something you talked to or interacted with. It might tie into […]
When last we left off, our plucky protagonist had just been scarred for life by a parent-teacher conference that featured him confessing to his teacher his non-stop pornographic fantasies in which she held a starring role. It was my mom’s idea. And this was my first grade teacher. I was six years old.
The conference did nothing to quell my appetites. Day after day, I spent my every after-school moment hounding out my dad’s porn like some depraved caricature of Yogi Bear questing for picnic baskets. Dad would routinely move the stash about the garage to prevent discovery, but, like some bloodhound that had a nose for full penetration and Adam & Eve catalogs, I always got my man. To this day I’m convinced that if they’d let me loose in Afghanistan, I’d have marched out with Bin Laden’s head in under 72 hours thanks to the skills I developed in those pornographic Easter egg hunts.
Given my age and the fact that I hadn’t seen any pornographic footage (just photos) the experience only went as far as me staring at pictures for hours on end, deep in thought and grinning like a jackass. The fact that staring at porn was merely the alpha and not the omega of the act was completely lost upon me. And so it went, day after day, year after year. Until one fateful day when I met a lad by the name of Jimmy Thomas and my life was changed forever (cue dramatic music and award points for trying to give that line as homoerotic an overtone as possible).
Believe it or not, there was a time when my life had potential. Standardized testing had concluded that I was, in fact, a genius (I suppose it does takes a lot of brainpower to figure out how to make only thirteen dollars an hour when you’re 28, a college grad and have an IQ of 151), and, from third grade onward, I had been shoehorned into the Gifted and Talented program. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Gifted and Talented (GT) took the best and brightest out of the “regular” classrooms and put them into a class that consisted solely of their fellow wunderkinds. This translated to me being surrounded by the children of frustrated intellectuals who sucked at life and figured they could right their own sinking ship by drilling junior on the multiplication tables from 18 months onward. Oh, and a mere four girls in my entire class. Ugly girls. Really ugly girls. A pedophile’s version of last call, three o’clock slop. My life’s sausagefest fate was sealed.
I will get into how GT probably fucked me for life in another article: the pertinent facts for the moment are: 1. Jimmy Thomas was put into GT with me in the fifth grade. 2. Jimmy Thomas was familiar with a fantastic invention called the “internet.” 3. Jimmy knew how to get digital pornography off of this so-called “internet.” 4. Not only did Jimmy know how to get porn, but he claimed that there was more you could do with it than just stare (blasphemy)! I felt like Paul first hearing the words of Christ: my ears had been opened by the Truth.
I don’t recall how Jimmy and I met, but it didn’t take long for us to form a small cadre of classmates that were also aware of women in spite of the Gorgons that were our classmates. We swapped whatever material we could get our hands on: Hustlers stolen from frustrated fathers, Victoria’s Secret catalogues taken from frumpy mothers. Hell, even a good Macy’s lingerie ad could get the job done in those days. We were the mini-MacGyvers of smut, and, though we had little, we made do. And then, on a day that started out like any other, Jimmy pulled us aside and produced a floppy disc he had stolen from his dad. He revealed that it contained porn. Not just pictures, but actual, moving footage. And he was going to make copies and bring one in for each and every one of us the next day. The hell with Jesus feeding 5,000 with five loaves and two fish: this was a miracle. True to his word, Jimmy came the next day and passed out a copy per man with a single word scrawled upon it: GRASPRT.
Have you ever seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory? Do you remember the scene where Charlie plucks the golden ticket from a candy bar and races home, happy to share his good fortunes with his family? Well, play that in super fast forward and replace Aryan poster boy Charlie Bucket with a chubby, lustful yours truly and you have a pretty good idea of the scene when the school bell rang. Had you put me against Carl Lewis that day, the poor bastard wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Seated at the family computer, I slid in the disc. My instructions were simple: at the DOS prompt (I’m telling you, this was at the infancy of computer porn…it was two steps above jacking off to cave paintings) type in “GRASPRT” and the disc would do the rest. I typed in the magic word and, goddamn if the disc didn’t begin to whir and do its thing. The house lights dimmed. The opening strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” filled the air. And, on the screen, I was greeted by the words “Jade Wong stars in ‘East Sucks West.’” For six seconds, I was treated to the grainiest footage you’ve ever seen of an Asian broad going down on a white guy with a hog for the ages. It was over before it even started. But my life had forever changed. My computer could bring me nudity. Nudity that moved.
The next installment will touch on the great responsibility that came with this new, great power. Oh, and I start whacking it.
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