Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Jockeys

My father is an old man who seems to exist solely on a diet of refined sugar and protein. It’s difficult to keep an eye on his diet from so far away, but it seems to me that whenever I visit home, he’s got a refrigerator stocked full of big haunches of roasted meats he’s purchased at the local supermarket, from which he slices little pieces until over the course of way too long he finally consumes the whole thing.

I’ll pull open the door and there’ll be a huge old ham, a roast turkey roughly the size of the one that Mr. Scrooge fed to the Cratchits, and a hulking lump of beef, sawed away on one side. Then there’ll be the sugars. Twinkies. Ho-Hos. Little Debbies of every flavor. Archway cookies—the soft kind. Tubes of Pillsbury dough that can be sliced and baked at a moment’s notice. His entire home office is a candy store, basically. Half of the shelves are devoted to actually books, while the rest exist to hold the bags of candies that he munches on at whim. To be fair, the man is in great health for his age, and is much thinner than I. My teeth, on the other hand, are in better shape.

It was a few years back, when I was visiting my dad in Virginia and had a Tootsie Roll jones that I knew could be fixed with a quick scan of his office bookshelves, that I discovered his stash of porn. Most people to whom I tell this story recoil at this point. They simply can’t imagine confronting evidence of their parents’ sex life, whether it’s porn or condoms or a vibrator spied while snooping in a cupboard. I really don’t care, though. In fact, I thought to myself as I leafed through the material to see what he had, my reaction was more along the lines of wanting to high-five him and crow, Good on you, you seventy-something-year-old dawg! The only thing that could’ve made me happier for him was if I’d found some actual signs of involvement with someone other than Miss Rosie Palms, if you know what I mean. And I’m pretty sure you do.

Apparently my dad is now into women with enormous jugs. At least, that’s what I’m guessing from the abundance of magazines and calendars featuring porn babes with mammaries that weren’t merely ample, but that were so oversized that it made my back hurt just to look at them. I confess to a little surprise, since my mother’s figure was lithe and boyish—in other words, she was a beautiful Audrey Hepburn look-alike in her youth, but fairly flat-chested.

What surprised me most, though, was that my dad actually had porn. Hidden away, no less, though not very well. Because when I was growing up, that simply wasn’t the case. Oh, I would’ve known if he had. When I visited the houses of friends, starting in about fourth grade or so, I was a master of sniffing out their dads’ porn; I didn’t even need a dowsing rod. We’d wait until the coast was clear, and then I’d lead my innocent friend into his dad’s bedroom and produce magazines from under his bed, or at the back of his closet, in a small box tucked behind the shoes. Or maybe I’d lift up the mattress and pull out a handful of dirty photographs, carefully hidden away.

The magazines were usually nothing racier than a Hustler or a Penthouse, though in a couple of instances we discovered some harder-core materials and even once a photo magazine with a definite bisexual angle, which had to be an eye-opener for my friend. The two of us would look over his parent’s porn for a little bit, wide-eyed and silent, barely making any more movement than the rapid darting of our eyes and the occasional flick of a tongue over our lips. Then we’d stuff the magazines back into their hiding places and not speak of them until we looked for them again the next time. My friends were usually too timid to hunt for the stuff themselves. I offered myself up in the role of scapegoat, though I knew I was more of an instigator, a catalyst, whose role was to put the sexually-charged sessions into motion.

Some things never change, right?

My father, though, didn’t buy dirty magazines. My parents were open about sex, had a lot of it together, and found no need to hide it from me when I was growing up. They had sex manuals in abundance, but I didn’t have to hunt to find them. They started handing them over to me to read at the age of nine or ten or so, and would check in periodically to see if I had any questions. In that brief window of time in which art films and pornography mingled, they’d take a night out and head down to the little foreign film theater to see I Am Curious (Yellow) or Deep Throat. My parents did own two copies of Playboy, but they weren’t squirreled away in a secret hiding place. They were in the stack of magazines beneath the coffee table, mixed in with Time and Smithsonian and Southern Living. I’d been invited to look at them when they’d been added to the pile.

It was shit like this that made my parents seem like total hippies, to all my friends.

I knew the contents of those magazines intimately—both were from 1976. One featured the somewhat infamous interview with David Bowie in which he discussed his bisexuality. The other was the even more infamous issue with an interview with President Jimmy Carter, in which he confessed that he had lusted in his heart more than once.

I knew those magazines from cover to cover, at one point. One of the issues had a feature on sex in the movies, so I got to become familiar with a photo of Kris Kristofferson’s tiny nipples, and to become very acquainted with a glimpse of a tiny sliver of black dick in a shot from the film Mandingo. I read through all the crude cartoons, trying to decode from the slang what they might mean in the adult world of sex. I read through all the letters and articles, sucking them dry of any titillating sexual content they might have offered. About the only thing I didn’t become overly aroused by were the photos of the naked women, oddly enough. I didn’t begin to explore that side of my sexuality until my later teens.

But what I fixated upon most, in one of those two issues—I think it was the Jimmy Carter one—was a two-page spread from Jockey advertising its wide variety of underwear choices. The advertisement was simplicity itself. All it did was feature a grid of photographs of professional athletes modeling Jockey shorts. Some wore T-shirts or tank tops as well; others were shirtless. Try as I might, I cannot find the two-page ad anywhere on the net, though I have found a one-page version from the same campaign.



I cannot exaggerate how many times I masturbated over this Jockey shorts ad. It was the closest thing I had to gay porn for many, many years. I was sexually active by the time I first saw it, but the actual sex I was getting never stopped me from whacking off to it in the mornings before I left for school. Several times a week I’d wake up at six, shower and dress, grab something for breakfast and do the homework I’d neglected the night before over the cereal bowl. Then I’d have fifteen blissful minutes behind the coffee table, on the floor, with the magazine propped open to my two favorite pages. My little pants would have been unzipped and my shorts tugged down and around my nuts, my hand furiously working over my dick, while I gazed at those men in their Jockeys.

I loved their chests—muscular and bare, or covered with cotton that let tufts of hair peek out at the scooped neck. I loved their strong, thick legs, their nineteen-seventies ‘staches, the roundness of their shoulders and biceps. But most of all, I liked looking at the mounds inside those Jockeys and wondering that they’d be like, inside me. Soon enough I’d squirt, wipe it off, and run off to the bus still bearing that chlorine-like scent of my semen back then.

Fred Dryer looks pretty damned good, in the ad I found. But today I look at the ad and mostly cringe a little at the loud prints, the garish colors, the netted tank top, and especially the circus tent boxers poor Brad Park is forced to sport.

At the time, though, those men were pure masculinity to me. And I still grow nostalgic at the thought.

23 comments:

  1. My parents - good Mormons that they were - didn't have a hidden porn stash. But they did however, own a Hitachi Magic Wand, which I used to great effect, and then carefully replaced, in the hidden nook under their waterbed (it was the 70s, after all).
    I finally went down to Good Vibrations a few years back, and bought myself one. I love that thing!
    As far as undies go, dad wore the "magic Mormon underwear." But riffling through his bureau, I came upon (pun intended) a pair of ancient, white, XL, cotton boxers that were the softest thing I'd ever felt against my skinny, young flesh. Those, I never returned.

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  2. BTW, my name's Drew. Bubbinga is a pet name given to me by a sweet guy I dated many years ago :)

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  3. I too discovered my widowed father's porn stash—also consisting predominantly of gargantuan jugs not found in nature. My reaction, too, was a grin and an "Attaboy!" for my septuagenarian dad.

    It was several years later that I found the stack of Polaroids in his sock drawer; they were not photos of Miss Rosie Palms. It's an eerier feeling than you might imagine—not as much "good on you" as you're thinking now. Not at first anyway. The questions (unaskable and unanwered) were not so much of curiosity (Who? When? How?) but of concern (Was she a professional? Did she take advantage of him? Was she good to him? Good for him?) and entirely protective. It's jarring to see hidden-away images of a naked woman cavorting in your father's home. But you shake it off. And in the end, you hope he enjoyed it, you hope it gave him pleasure—and then you grin and think "You old dog!"

    (And yes—I hope to be just like him one day. Like father, like son...)

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  4. My father had huge amounts of porn. But we were a special case, I suppose. lol

    Those Jockey ads, though, had such a massive impact (on boys, men and all of society) when they appeared. The cultural impact sometimes can't be explained to kids today. I mean, today we're accustomed to David Beckham, et al in their wildly bulging uw ads. But it was uber hot to see not only men in truly BULGING ads but SPORTSMEN, at that.

    The impact of combining such public ad displays and men's bulge and muscled physiques AND sports star macho was enough to make head reel - and nutsacs squirt.

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  5. Jockey still makes great ads. Of course, they have great packages to advertise. Never found my dad's porn, but he did make a lot of solo trips to San Franciso==humm.

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  6. Drew,

    I wish I had a pet name. Lucky man.

    Golly, a Magic Wand AND a waterbed? Are you sure there weren't key parties when you were asleep?

    Do you still have the underwear? I find that story both tender and erotic.

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  7. Throb,

    So did the photos make her look like a professional? I'd probably have those knee-jerk protective reactions, too—though it's perfectly obvious that by now, my father can make his own sexual choices.

    You have to wonder what my son might think, upon stumbling upon my blog after my death.

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  8. Mr. GHJ,

    I'm SO relieved you remember these Jockey ads, because I was going a little crazy trying to find even the most rudimentary records of them on the web, last night. I'm not really surprised you recall them. We often seem to have had similar youths.

    I was surprised at how difficult it was to find this particular ad because the other images I found myself using as masturbatory fodder over and over again—that is, illustrations from some homoerotic Cannon towel ads of the 1940s, which I discovered when I was 9 or 10 and was fascinated by a stack of old Life magazines my dad had kept from his youth—are easy to find on the net. Darned web.

    It would be interesting to see how far back sexualized images of sports personalities go in underwear ads. I wouldn't be surprised if these Jockey ads were the start of it.

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  9. Anonymous,

    Maybe he just liked the sourdough?

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  10. The entry was GREAT...wonderful youth memories...HOWEVER...I'm pleased to see this phraes:

    "had a Tootsie Roll jones"

    I remember this phrase and used it and people looked at me as if I had lost my mind...THANK GOD at least ONE other person understands what 'Jonesing' means!!!

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  11. Hi Rob
    I felt like I was reading my autobiography in your post. Short of finding my Dad's current stash. My parents too were quite liberal and started enlightening us on sexuality at a young age. I found my dad's penthouse stash and thought I was in heaven. I keenly remember the Jockey ads as well as Sear's Catalogue underwear ads. Television at the time only ever showed men and boys in boxers and it was the first ad that I saw briefs. I had a major crush on Jim Palmer for awhile. It was the the Mandigo shot that fueled my desires to other races. I grew up in a very white town, no other races to know on a personal level.
    Right down to the jonesing, I was reverted back 30 years to early sexual awakenings.
    thanks for the trip.

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  12. Yeah, something about them did—either the age difference or the kind of bustier-and-garters get-up on the way to full nudity. And the in-your-face poses. I don't know. I tried not to read too much into 'em. Didn't seem fair to him.

    He was very popular with "the widow women" though—and we joked about that for several years. A social 60- and then 70-something gentleman is quite in demand. And he was a good catch.

    So who knows...

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  13. Throb,

    A good catch? Like father, like son, indeed.

    And I don't know about the age difference thing. You and I both know I've had a few decades between me and some of the ones who keep coming back for more.

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  14. ItzAll,

    I'm hep to all the slang the whippersnappers use these days!

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  15. Vancouver Steve,

    I always liked Penthouse better because the forum section was more sexually provocative than anything else in the magazine, and in all of Playboy. Plus a lot of the letters had bisexual experiences in them, which was good for my imagination.

    I remember some Sears underwear ads that featured intergenerational shots of guys sitting around in their tightie whities. Those were good fodder, too.

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  16. My parents had to keep moving my Dad's porn stash which did include some bisexual magazines.

    When I first found them, the mags were in the top drawer of their dresser, and I would take them out, lay whatever I was looking at on their bed, and then slight my dick in between the two mattresses they slept on and fuck the hell out of that bed til I came.

    But my Dad also had this gold g-string that I'd put on and wear. I loved seeing my erection stretch it out.

    And then one time I found the motherload: a polaroid of my Dad's dick about halfway swallowed by (I assume) my Mom's vagina. I shot so much teenage semen with that one. I wish I had absconded with that one before the mags were finally banished to my Dad's office.

    I did get away with his Club magazine though which had more men in it than women.

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  17. Being raised in a born again christian household - at least for most 'formative' part of my formative years - porn wasn't really around. However, the joy of sex, and more joy of sex, they were things that I ran to every time the family went out and I was lucky enough to spend the night at home. Alone. :)

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  18. John Davidson, the cute blond singer and later host of Hollywood Squares, was an underwear model for the Sears catalog early in his career. There was one famous shot of him in briefs which was not airbrushed properly and it showed his bulge. I creamed over that image several times!

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  19. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. This version of the ad you posted is the exact one that I jerked off to in the late 70s. I found it in an old copy of Field and Stream and hid it under my bed for more than a few years. I also saved clippings of men's underwear ads from department store fliers, but not from Sears. I always thought the Sears models the least sexy: always wearing T-shirts damn it!

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  20. Writer,

    Your dad had MUCH better porn than mine. Wow.

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  21. Rahinpa,

    John Davidson had some impervious hair, didn't he? I remember him as a perennial guest on Tattletales.

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  22. Anonymous,

    The Sears models were a little too white-bread wholesome for me. At least the sports stars looked as if they had random sex with groupies.

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  23. I, also, remember when that Jockey ad came out (no pun intended!). I was in high school and, Oh, man! Hot men!
    But, I also remember years before that, an 'incident' with the Sears catalog: one of the men in boxers could be seen just dangling out of the leg of his shorts! The cross-the-street neighbors (they had 4 girls, 1 boy - the babe) were all agog about it. I managed to catch that too!

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