David from the United States
My mom was a single parent who worked a lot, so I grew up with a lot of freedom and a lot of time to myself. As long as I didn’t get in trouble, kill myself, or get taken to prison, my mom didn’t ask questions. I have to give her credit for how much leeway she gave me as a kid.
My mom had a safe and normally I wouldn’t have cared about it but at some point, I noticed that every once and a while, it would be slightly ajar, or closed but not locked. One of the days it was slightly cracked, I looked to see what was in there and I saw some VHS tapes. I was curious, so I decided throw one in the VCR. You can only imagine my surprise.
There were all of the classics: Ron Jeremy, Traci Lords, all of those classic 80’s porn stars. They were all blank VHS tapes so it has to be stuff she recorded during the brief time we had cable. It wasn’t anything particularly fancy, just regular old sex with lots of hair.There might have been one or two lesbian scenes out of the whole four or five hours worth of porn.
Once I knew what was on the videos, I started to care a whole lot about being able to access them. I never knew when the safe would be left open and I didn’t want to have to depend on those rare times my mom would leave it unlocked. My mom also had a gun in there but the gun was of no interest to me. If it were just the gun, I would never have cared about the safe. Between gun and porn, definitely have to go with the porn.
It’s interesting because I knew that porn was sex but I didn’t really think of it as such. I wasn’t even masturbating yet. It was almost like a circus attraction, something that I watched to kill the time and to illicit this feeling I couldn’t identify.
I started paying extra close attention to the safe, when it would be locked, when it would be unlocked and any sort of patterns I could identify. First I noticed that when the safe was open, it would be on 81. I knew that if it was on 81 when it was open, then that had to be the last number.
I use to watch all of these old black and white spy shows like the 6 Million Dollar Man and the old Sean Connery, James Bond stuff so I knew safes were one number to the right, one to the left and one back to the right.
I have always been the kind of person to notice details. The big explosions and all that stuff didn’t really interest me, I cared about the details. If the writer took the time to add these bits, I thought they must be important.
I started looking for other numbers that I would see more than once, maybe she started to open it but the phone rang or something. Then it was just a process of elimination until I found the other number. I saw everything in code. Everything was a pattern to me. All in all, it probably only took me a summer to figure it out.
Once I figured out how to open the safe, I memorized the position of everything in there. This tape was about 45 degrees that way, that tape was sort of turned just a little, with four or five envelops on top. I made sure to put everything back perfectly.
Even at five or six years old I was a detail guy. I had it all figured out. I would go home and watch the tapes for however long I wanted to and then put them back in the exact order. Fortunately my mom had a fancy VCR that showed the exact time of how far through the tape was so I could put it back to the millisecond. It was like the whole thing was set up just for me.
I watched those videos until I was eighteen and went off to collage. It was always these three videos, she never got any new porn. It’s incredible now that I think about it as an adult with the internet. How many times can you watch the same old porn? She had just those three movies for all of those years.
Maybe that’s all she needed.
The safe thing was really one of the highlights of my childhood. I didn’t have the social skills a lot of other kids had but in terms of pure determination, I could not be fucked with.
