  It happened when I was eight years old. I was hanging out with my friends, minding my own business, when God dropped a stack of Playboys from the sky. Or at least that is what I thought at the time. I grew up on a dead end street in North Canton, Ohio. On the other side of that dead end was a twenty foot drop off, some railroad tracks, and a small stream. We loved to hang out at "the tracks" because all of our parents forbid us from going there, thinking we'd end up dead and flattened like strategically placed pennies.
The truth was that trains hardly ever used those tracks. They were largely unkept, cluttered with weeds and bits of garbage that had made their way over the guard rail at the end of the street above. We'd lie to our parents, saying we were all going to each others houses, and venture down to the end of the street, climb over the rail, traverse our way down through the wild trees and overgrown grass and weeds, then end up on a small patch of dirt that ran along the tracks. Most days, we'd just hunt for bugs, beat the dirt (or each other) with sticks, or dare each other to go wading into the nasty, smelly, vein of mud that was trying to pass itself off as a stream. Every once in a while our fun was interrupted with noise from the street above. Any time a car came all the way to the end of the road, we were convinced it was the police, there to cart us off to jail for hanging out by the tracks (which we were convinced had to be illegal).
When we'd hear a car or adult approaching, we'd slam our bodies against the incline (hoping that someone casually looking over the edge wouldn't notice us) and stay quiet and still. So, what does all this have to do with little Eric's introduction to pornography? One afternoon about five of us, ages six to nine, were hanging out doing...well, probably doing nothing. We heard a car driving up fast. "Cops! " someone yelled.
We all dashed out of view as quickly as possible. The car screeched to a halt so close to the edge that it sent loose dirt and gravel raining down on our heads. We heard a man and woman screaming at each other in what sounded like Greek. Then we heard a man's voice coming close to the guard rail. "Here," he yelled in English. "Are you happy now?
" Boom. A large package landed in front of us and exploded. It was a paper grocery bag full of magazines and photos. We heard the man, still screaming at the woman in Greek, get back in his car and speed away. We stayed frozen, not quite sure what to make of what just happened. After a minute or so, we ventured forth to examine the bounty from above that had just landed two feet in front of us.
It was full of Playboys, Penthouses, and glossy photos of naked women. When you are a young boy, nudie magazines are the ultimate currency, like beaver pelts to a frontiersman. If you fished your old man's copy of Playboy out of the garbage, you could use if as exchange for gum, comic books, toys, or almost anything. It bought favors or could be used as hush money. It didn't matter how ratty, worn, mutilated, or illegible--for whatever you wanted, a girlie mag was solid gold. And fate/God/an angry Greek man had just provided us with the little boy equivalent of Fort Knox.
We immediately knew that if hanging out at the tracks would put us in prison, being in possession of such illicit loot would surely get us the chair--so we went about gathering the photos and magazines, then scouted out a place to hide them. After several discarded attempts, we finally settled on putting the magazine in a freshly dug hole, covering it with dirt, then rocks, then tree branches, and then more rocks. Each morning we'd met down at the tracks, post lookouts, then unearth our buried treasure, silently passing them around for about a half hour before reburying them until the next day. Your perspective towards porn is quite different before you hit puberty then after. Before, pictures of naked women are the forbidden fruit--totally off limits. There was a great deal of interest in seeing them, but once you'd done so, that was kind of it.
To an eight-year-old, once you've seen one boob, you've seen them all. So over time, we'd only unbury them every couple days, then once a week. Following a particularly rainy stretch of days, we didn't even bother. We were convinced they had melted or something. Towards the end of the summer, I was playing alone down at the tracks and thought about digging up the pictures and magazine. I went to the spot--and they were gone.
Someone either had discovered them, stolen them, or perhaps the cops finally showed up and took them in as evidence. The only thing left was the hole. I immediately suspected one of my friends had gotten them--but no one ever confessed nor did any of them show up again. The strangest thing is that I can still, to this day, can meticulously describe the women I looked at, the cartoons I viewed, and the stories I read (it took me years to figure out what a "cooter" was). 
