by Diane Kepler

My relationship with naughty books isn't a casual one. It's intimate and long-standing.

Curiosity started it -- that and frustration. As a kid, you see, I was vastly curious about the magical province of "ess-eee-ecks". All of my friends were too; however, we were all in the dark as to how it was done. Kids at school would speculate endlessly during recess, but if I asked them a pointed question, it turned out that they were just as ignorant as I was.

Books seemed like the obvious solution. After all, if I could find books that told me how far away stars were, or what dinosaurs ate for breakfast, surely I could dig up some info on what men and women did in bed at night. But despite a thorough search, the library at my elementary school revealed nothing. Even the dictionary seemed to be missing a few words.

This made no sense at all. Why couldn't I read about what everybody talked about? Surely there must be books about such a fascinating subject, I reasoned. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

It was at a sleepover that I was first rewarded. Sleepovers were closely connected with all things sexual, not only because (as I grasped much later) one set of parents had the luxury of complete privacy. It was also because of the darkness. Those silent hours, when the rest of the town slept, were oddly liberating -- letting us exchange wishes and share our more closely guarded secrets. All sorts of mischief were possible on that fold-out couch in the den or spare mattress and sleeping bags in the basement.

Nowadays, I realize that had the grownups known about our nighttime antics, they would surely have banned sleepovers forever. But they never suspected. Indeed, why should they have? We were only kids, after all.

Little did they know.

"Do you want to see something gross?" whispered Kelly one night.

At my assent, we snuck across the hall to her parents' bedroom. She got down on the shag rug and groped around in the pitch darkness under the bed.

"Darn, they must have moved them," she muttered, when a thorough search revealed nothing.

"Let's go," I urged, certain only of the fact that this was a Naughty Thing and if caught, we'd receive a scolding at the very least.

Undaunted, or at least certain that her folks wouldn't tear themselves away from the TV this early in the evening, she went around to the other side of the bed and soon came up with the object of her search. I didn't get a good look at what she was carrying until we were back in her room, under the covers with the flashlight on.

Recognition brought a flash of illicit pleasure. It was one of those magazines that they kept on the top rack at the corner store! Right there in front of me was a picture of a naked woman! She smiled at us invitingly, offering her boobs in her hands, as if they were made of candy.

I drew a juvenile breath and squeezed my thighs ecstatically together. Boobs were so neat! The whole prospect of growing up and becoming curvy was our most intoxicating fantasy. We'd been inspired by Barbie, of course. Even though she had no nipples, Barbie was undeniably sexy. Sometimes when I was alone, I'd put tennis balls up under my T-shirt and admire my make-believe boobs in the mirror. But it was never without a sense of disappointment because they always seemed to look like tennis balls and not like the boobs of real women I'd see on the street. Not even like Barbie's unrealistic projections.

One glossy girl in particular held my attention. Aside from black, ankle-length boots she was entirely naked. Ropes secured her crossed wrists and spread ankles to a horizontal bar overhead. The glistening redness of her secret place was both alluring and frightening.

Unschooled, curious, I didn't wonder if the model enjoyed that position. I didn't reflect on whether she'd been exploited, or if looking might predispose me to fantasies of power and surrender, none of which I could help thinking if I saw that picture today. Back then, I was simply fascinated by all the hair. Nobody had ever told me that women had hair down there.

"That's where you poo and that's where you pee," said Kelly, the budding (and, I later understood, erroneous) anatomist.

"That's boring," whispered Kelly. "Here." She took the magazine away from me and opened it to a few pages of comics. I wanted to read the words, but my friend, who'd seen it all many times before, turned the pages far too quickly. From what I could make out, it was about a haunted mansion where a lascivious ghost ravished some not entirely unwilling guests.

We spent quite a while under the covers, letting in cool air when the flashlight and our combined breathing made the atmosphere too stifling. At the sound of a parental footstep in the hall we flicked off the light and flattened ourselves against the mattress, hearts pounding in fear. But the moment it was quiet again, we returned to that mysterious comic with its wide-eyed girls who seemed completely immune to the effects of gravity.

To be honest, we relished those colourful panels. How could we not? With naked cartoon boobs, and naughty sound effects (Slurp! Eeeee!) displayed in in the Pow! Biff! style we knew from Batman, it was better than any comic book we could buy.

So we knelt in the torrid atmosphere under the blankets, I with a heel unconsciously pressed into my secret place and rocking, rocking. We stayed that way until Kelly announced it was time to replace our pilfered treasure. What was more, she insisted that I accomplish the mission, even though her parents had already gone to bed.

"I can't do it!" I breathed, very much the B-movie heroine, "they're in there."

"You've got to," she hissed. "What if they wake up and find it's missing?"

"We can do it in the morning," I argued. "They won't look."

"They might."

Swayed by this faultless logic, I retraced our path, wiggling on my belly like a commando as I pushed the pernicious glossy ahead of me. Suddenly, a grunt-and-snort from the mountain of blankets caused me to freeze in place. What next? I waited with rigid muscles, realizing at last that this was what authors meant when they wrote about somebody having their heart in their throat. In the end, I cracked under the strain. I flung the magazine under the bed (wrong side, but I didn't care) and hightailed it back to Kelly's room.

I had to wait a few years until my next encounter with a naughty book. The opportunity was provided by my best friend Nicole, who had one of Judy Blume's steamy creations stashed in her desk drawer at home.

Blume had a certain cachet, for she was sanctioned, even though she wrote about things which you sort of kind of weren't supposed to talk about. However, our school was progressive enough that teachers would read passages of her books aloud at storytime. We would sit on the nappy rug like twenty-six small Indians, by turns dead silent or giggling furiously. In this way, our teacher dispensed priceless information about getting your period ("Eww, gross," shouted the boys) or having a wet dream ("Eww, gross," shrieked the girls).

I already owned all of Blume's works, except one. For some mysterious reason, my mother would never buy it for me. "I think you're a little young for this," she'd say, and put the coveted tome back on the shelf at W.H. Smith's.

But here was the chance to read it! And helpful Nicole had even paperclipped the good parts for me. I sat near her open desk drawer, ready to stash the offending matter if her mom (who had a disturbing habit of bursting in unannounced) was heard outside. Because of the impending danger, I skimmed where I wanted to linger. My legs were crossed throughout, muscles doing what I hadn't yet learned to do with my hands.

Still, the book wasn't completely satisfying. By then I knew that sex was about kissing and moaning and putting naughty things in naughtier places, but that was about it. I longed for books that contained hard data on anatomy and technique.

Romance novels, judging from their lurid covers, promised to be helpful in this regard, but it wasn't until a few years later that I got my hands on one. It was my friend Heather, who generously lent them to me so that I could read them at home on my own lily-white bed. There I could pore over the risqu� passages for as long as I liked.

There was stress involved here too, but I had a system. When my mom came in to kiss me goodnight, I'd drop the book into the tented area between my raised knees and catch up a healthy work of science fiction, always kept at the ready.

However, the books turned out to be enigmatic, if not downright disappointing. The authors would elaborately describe their sloe-eyed, creamy-thighed heroines so that no detail of their appearance or costume was left to the imagination. But at crucial points, they became maddeningly vague. What was this strange business about exploding suns and pounding surf? Sure, I understood the idea of metaphor, but couldn't anyone ever describe the sexy parts in plain English?

Apparently not, or so I thought for a number of years.

Yet in the end, enlightenment did come to me. It came at a most unexpected shrine: that of the neighbourhood garage sale.

My mother and I liked to visit these places, she for the various knicknacks and I for the ubiquitous cardboard box with its retinue of Harlequin romances, Westerns, and formula mysteries. I distinctly remember crouching over such a box one balmy morning. My hand encountered a 60's pulp paperback with a garishly painted cover and the title Hot Cocktails. As it wasn't my beloved science fiction, I discarded the volume and continued rummaging.

But wait -- was there a double meaning here? To check, I glanced at the first page. This flash of curiosity revealed a phrase ("She unzipped his fly and took his semi-erect cock into her mouth.") that instantly etched itself into the deepest folds of my memory.

I dropped the book as if scalded and hung on to the cardboard box to avoid falling over. The back of my neck felt tingly and the juncture of my legs, hot. Had anyone caught me? Had anyone seen me read the word "cock" in helvetica medium on that sunny Saturday morning? I looked around. Apparently, no one had.

Thus, I snuck another look. Again, nobody noticed. A third look turned into serious reading and soon I was bobbing on an ocean of delight, my brain buzzing and my youthful loins fairly aglow with the forbiddenness of it all.

When my mother called to check on my whereabouts, the shock just about killed me.

"What were you doing, Sweetie?"

"Oh, uh . . . just looking," I mumbled, my breathing rapid and shallow.

She smiled a fond smile. "You and your books."

After that, I kept my eyes open, but it took a few years before I got lucky again. This time it was a book-sized magazine with nude photos and letters submitted by readers. The number of people milling about in my neighbour's driveway made me drop it before I could get a good look. A copy of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying held my attention briefly, but did not evoke nearly the same reaction as that highly unauthorized magazine. I considered stealing it, but a combination of apprehension and youthful morality prevented me.

How, then, could I obtain it? That fusion of nude photos and sex described in explicit and uncompromising terms made the magazine precious beyond all measure. What about leaving a quarter in the box as payment? No, my mom would catch me for sure and then I'd be in for it!

A month, later I was asked to babysit at that house.

The thought of getting a second look at that magazine strobed through my mind in ever-quickening pulses until the appointed day. The hour between my arrival and the kids' bedtime was maddening -- the intervening minutes between bedtime and true sleep, sheer torture. Then the uncertainty -- would the box still be in that forsaken corner of the garage? Would the magazine still be inside?

Miraculously, it was! With utmost reverence, I bore it upstairs and arranged myself at the kitchen table, where I proceeded to read it cover to cover. What a wonderful collection of prurient letters! What astoundingly educational images!

Yet despite all the questions the little magazine answered, it raised even more. For instance, why did this man think female amputees were sexy? Or why did this woman like to pretend she was a nurse who gave her naughty little husband soapy enemas for being bad? My confusion deepened as the mysteries stacked up. Still, I took it all in, rejecting nothing.

Nowadays, although there are still mysteries to be solved, obtaining smut to read is far easier. The library offers a vast array of cunningly disguised cliterature. What's more, I can easily fabricate excuses for having it around. For example:

1- "Well, I thought I'd better get around to reading Lady Chatterley's Lover some day. It is a classic, after all."

2 -"Oh, this Complete Works of de Sade? It's for philosophy class."

And if I'm in the mood for something less literary, most bookstores now offer prurient writing in a special adult section. The clerks have been carefully trained not to drop their eyes and blush, no matter what I plunk down on the counter. Convenience store owners will even chat with me as they ring up this month's glossy indulgence.

Such liberation. No longer do I have to resort to sneaking around when I want to read something libidinous. And even though it can't replace real live sex, erotic writing, whether literary or lowbrow, still excites me, transports me, and keeps me in a daze at work.

Yet these days, I can never exactly recreate what I felt during those early, forbidden glimpses. The difference can't be totally ascribed to an adult viewpoint or a sophistication of tastes. It's difficult to explain . . . almost as if the fear of being caught was an important part of it all.

Hm. Maybe tomorrow, I'll take a book to work. Let's see how good I am at hiding what I read.