almost okay

Dear Lyzako,

I spent a pleasant hour or so on Friday afternoon rummaging through the stacks at All Star Books over on Van Dyke just north of Eight Mile. You know the place. It was sunny and warm outside and a portion of the natural light filtered in through the filth-encrusted windows of the single-story block building, made it past the piles of books, records, magazines, toys and paper ephemera that lined every wall and topped the glass counter behind which the bearded, disheveled proprietor sat. A smidgen of sunlight even made it back to the 'Adults Only' corner where I was casually perusing the stock.

Every square inch of floor space in each of the two tiny rooms is put to full use, leaving barely enough exposed linoleum to pick one's way between the shelves displaying new stuff and the tables loaded with cardboard boxes of old men's magazines, topped here and there with precariously placed piles of comics. Racy paperbacks, pornographic DVDs and coverless video tapes are jammed on shelves around the room, and the occasional milk crate filled with records sits on the floor, an interesting obstacle that begs to be inspected after stumbling over it, the hard brown plastic of the crate being just sharp enough to dig a divot of skin from an unsuspecting naked shin. Narrow, off-level shelves mounted haphazardly on most of the walls are filled to the point of spilling with vintage radios and old toys, and what little square footage of wall space left is covered with curling posters and old comic book ads.

Flipping through the magazines created an invisible cloud of dust which instantly filled my sinuses and produced the urge to sneeze. I fought it back, though, and continued to search for buried treasure. Each magazine was carefully wrapped in a thin, clear plastic bag more akin to cheap gallon-sized food storage bags than those normally made for the task of preserving paper collectibles. It made viewing anything other than the cover impossible, as the bags were tightly folded on both left side and top to conform to the size of each magazine, then secured with long strips of transparent tape on the back. A white sticker on the front of each bag bore the asking price scrawled in ball point.

There were lots of Playboys, past and present... Penthouse, Cheri, Oui, Hustler, High Society... you name it, the All Star guys had it, including a nice selection of specialty mags featuring panties, feet and bondage, even a few older men's mags from the '50's and '60's, like Sir and Gent. The Playboys were generally kept together with little regard as to the year of publication. All the other stuff was tossed into boxes without any kind of organization. I was looking to fill out my collection of Players magazines from the '70's and was hoping to pick up a dupe of the Pam Grier issue for a fair price, but I had to wade through all the Leg Shows and the Hustlers to find pockets of the magazines I was interested in.

My hard work eventually paid off, though, and I picked up several key issues, including two from 1977. One had a story by Iceberg Slim and an interview with Betty Carter, and the other featured on its cover a doctored photograph of a beautiful dark-skinned woman sporting a large Afro and wearing a harem outfit while holding a silver platter on which sat dangling grapes, apples and the frowning severed head of Richard Nixon. I also picked up a couple of clean copies from 1982, one listing 'America's 10 Sexiest Black Women'. Pam was a top four vote-getter of course, and so was the cover model, Azizi Johari, a Playboy centerfold in 1975 and sometimes actress who appeared in the Cassavetes flick 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie'. The second one from that year featured an interview with Gil Scott-Heron and a behind the scenes look at Eddie Murphy during the filming of '48 Hours'. One of the nude models in the latter one also had an incredibly hairy bush, which she displayed from every angle while wearing a red and white checkered garter belt, white fishnet stockings and ruby red pumps.

The last one I picked up was from 1988, and had a nearly life-size head shot of one of my favorite porn stars (and Lansing native) Angel Kelly on the cover, her generous lips painted crimson and softly parted as she looked me right in the eye, as though she was just about to whisper: “Kiss me, Marty. Kiss me hard, then fuck me like an animal.” The tasteful pictorial of Angel inside featured a mix of soft-light boudoir photographs of her in black lingerie and diamonds, along with a few outdoor shots in which she's standing against a graffiti-marked cement wall under the high California sun wearing nothing but sunglasses and a skin-tight, fluorescent yellow mini-dress, the fabric riding high enough to reveal her luscious ass cheeks. Mmmm...all that Angel...plus a profile article on Prince's one-time squeeze and now born-again Christian, Vanity. For three bucks? How could I go wrong?

In addition to the the five Players magazines, I also picked up a Players Girls Pictorial from 1997. In case you didn't know, the brilliant folks at Players began putting out the Pictorial editions so that we could just look at the girls without having to read all those wordy interviews and articles. This issue had a bathing-suited Charmaine Sinclair (a former porn star and model once rumored to have been romantically linked to Robert De Niro) on the cover and a great photo spread of her inside as she lounged nearly naked on a white sandy beach, brazenly parting her legs for the camera. There was also a large bonus poster of Charmaine and her perfect breasts folded and stapled in the center, completely intact and in mint condition.

Two more acquisitions rounded out my purchase: the very first issue of Black Lust magazine, vintage 1989, and the Holiday 2000 issue of Cheri that featured Tera Patrick on the cover, proclaiming her 'READER'S CHOICE: TART OF THE YEAR' and crowning her 'QUEEN OF ALL COCKS'. The former is a hardcore magazine, the contents of which is comprised mostly of stills from X-rated black and interracial videos. On the cover is my all-time favorite porn queen, Nina DePonca (misleadingly called Raven according to the cover blurb) and an inset of Angel Kelly getting laid vertically while straddling a standing black man in front of a baby grand piano. She's wearing a white bow in her hair, frilly white ankle socks, baby blue pumps and nothing else but perspiration. Inside the magazine I found a lesbian photo shoot with Angel and a pretty blond, one of Nina posing in all sorts of compromising positions with a bearded, monster-dicked black man (King Dong according to the captions), and page after page of video stills showing people of all colors doing all sorts of things to each other, singly, in pairs and in groups.

The Cheri issue had a fine layout of the exotic Ms. Patrick posing naked in a garden (spread eagle and sprayed with water of course), a photo article on the Miss Nude Canada 2000 Pageant, several pages of amateur shots submitted by readers showing off their hot, naked girlfriends, some extremely hardcore photo shoots that included the obligatory 'nut on the grille', a handful of downright grisly bondage pics, and a page or two of the funniest fake letters to the editor I'd ever read. The letters included some of the most creatively comedic euphemisms for sexual behavior I'd heard to date. To whit: “Her spasming bung hole is clamping and unclamping my wood...”; “Drilling my spasming prick deep inside her shrinking cooze, I fired off a volley of jizz bombs...”; “I took up her invitation to plunge into the pinkness of her pie”; and finally, my personal favorite: “...“I'm curious as to what it would feel like to have his hang-down up my shit winker”.

Bear in mind that while at the store the exact contents of individual magazines were practically unknown to me, all but one of them (the Players Pictorial with Charmaine) bound tightly in their plastic bags. I figured I'd made good choices, though, loosely tallied the total in my head and passed them over the stack of junk on the counter to the proprietor, the top of his head the only visible evidence that somebody was even back there. He took his time coming up with his own total.

“Twenty-nine,” he wheezed as he pulled a flat brown paper bag off a stack from somewhere behind the mess on the counter. He held up the one with Nixon on the cover. “This is a good one. You don't see much Nixon stuff anymore. I got a Nixon thing over in the window.” He pointed over his shoulder and I squinted to see what he was talking about, searched for the image of Nixon amongst the clutter of toys, models, books, posters...junk.

“Oh, yeah,” I said after finally spying the plastic head to which he referred, the distinctive caricatured ski nose of good old 'Tricky Dick'. I handed him a twenty and a ten and he handed me back a one. Once I was outside in the sunshine I noticed that my fingertips were grimy and brown from the search and I made a mental note that after I got to Happy Hour I'd have to hit the head and wash up before I started drinking. I didn't want to take the chance of accidentally ingesting any of the dirt that came out of that place. My luck they'll be out of hand towels, I thought.

As I drove west on Eight Mile the sneezes started. Not one sneeze. Not even two. No, I sneezed like I was trying to break the world record for consecutive ones, lost sight of the road each time as I clutched the wheel and my eyes twisted closed. I reached for some tissues, but could find none. The sneezes just kept coming, though, so I wiped my snot chute with the back of my hand, pinched my shit winker tight to avoid soiling myself and wiped the slime across the inside of my pants leg, just a few inches to the right of my hang-down.

I figured nobody would notice.

Regards,
Marty Sherman