It’s 1991, I’m 9 years old, and my dad has just sprung for cable TV in the family room. Until this point, the dopamine receptors in my boy brain have already been raised on an endless stream of broadcast TV. But when I see the massive wood-paneled control box, so full of buttons and dials that makes it seem like the choices are mathematically endless, my dopamine levels explode like World Series fireworks. I learn to pilot the remote like an X-wing fighter. I’m flying from Clarissa Explains It All to Pinky and the Brain, with commercial break asides to Charles in Charge reruns, all without breaking a sweat.
But there’s one thing I can’t do.
Channel 36.
DON’T EVER GO TO CHANNEL 36.
My parents make me promise to not press the button for this channel. Or else I’ll lose all TV privileges. This threat, and my crippling TV addiction that couldn’t bare the thought of losing TV, is honestly enough to keep me from ever pressing the verboten button. Besides, the TV in the family room is pretty much always in earshot of one of my parents, and so there’s really just no way I could watch the channel even if I wanted to, without them knowing.
But, at a certain point, strange things start happening in my house. In the early mornings, I increasingly find my dad sleeping on the couch, surrounded by what seems like an inordinate amount of used tissues. Whenever my parents have friends over for dinner, somewhere toward the end of the night, my dad will say to all the other men, “I have to show you something on my new cable box!” And then they mysteriously disappear behind the otherwise always open door to the family room. All the women and kids are left at the dinner table, the moms making odd, exasperated faces.
I know something is different, but for the life of me I don’t know what it was.
And then one night, my parents have their friends over and their dinner conversation starts to get too boring for me to be around, so I wander off to play by myself. In my weird-little-kid world, I have all sorts of tiny hiding spots that I squeeze myself into so people can’t see me and I can be alone. One of them is a small clearing at the middle of a bush. Another is on the bottom shelf of our towel closet. And my favorite is underneath the end table next to the couch in our family room.
So on this particular night I’m hanging out under the table in the Blanket Corner (creatively named by me since it's where we store our throw blankets, and also it's in a corner), when suddenly my dad leads all the adult men into the room. Me being little, underneath a mostly obstructed table and pretty much covered in blankets, I go unnoticed. I’m about to say something so they know I’m there, when suddenly my dad flips on the TV and, OH MY GOD, HE’S GOING TO CHANNEL 36!!! THE NEVER CHANNEL!
All the men sit on the edge of the couch, eyes wide and smirking, and I turn to the TV to see what this grand mystery is all about. At first, I’m really confused because it’s just some women on an aerobics exercise show. What’s wrong with this? Olivia Newton-John does this and she’s fun for the whole family. But then the show goes in a different direction. … The ladies take their tops off. And then their bottoms. Through it all, they literally never stop doing aerobics.
I’ve never before seen living, breathing naked ladies. I don’t fully get how it all works, but it’s mesmerizing nonetheless. Boobs and butts and pubes and the general movement of them all in rhythm to weighted lunges. I now know that Channel 36 isn’t a bad place. It’s the Valhalla Channel.
Over the next couple years, I become obsessed with finding a way to see Channel 36 again. But with family members at all points hovering around the TV room, this becomes like a complicated heist job for me. And then, I discover a crack in the system: The TV in my bedroom, a TV without cable, for some reason broadcasts (without sound or color) a highly scrambled image of Channel 36 – directly into my room! So I begin staying up until all hours of the night, poring over these unbelievably fuzzy images, trying to discern useful details. Was that a nipple?! Or just a hand? Was that a lady on top of a man?! Or was it a refrigerator?
After months of studying the gyrating squiggles, the moment arrives! It’s 2 a.m. and I make out what is almost certainly a naked lady! “Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! There’s gold in dem dere hills!” I hoot like an old-timey porn prospector. I grab the first VHS tape I can find (a Dorf on Golf comedy video I’d begged my parents to buy less than six months earlier) and tiptoe-sprint to the family room. I fire up the TV and navigate my way to Channel 36 and press record on the VCR. But by the time I’ve gotten it all in place, there's maybe 10 seconds left of the sex scene. All that’s left to see is the actress finishing up her writhing in post-coital bliss and the inexplicable breeze on the canopied four-post bed beginning to subside.
Undeterred, I repeat this pattern for another year. But every time, the process takes too long and I’m left recording just the last 10 seconds of the sexy scene. Eventually, I compile a full 9 minutes of the final 10 seconds of sex scenes; the weirdest mixtape that’s ever existed. It’s strange and unsatisfying and gross, but I cherish it. Whenever I’m done with it, I always delicately place it in a golden box (for the Super Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, which serves as both subterfuge should anyone come across it and honorarium for the VHS’s special place in my heart).
Eventually, however, as with all things in childhood, this particular fasciation subsides and I move on to totally new ways to experiment with my sexuality. My family gets a computer with dial-up AOL, and I become obsessed with slowly loading images of Cindy Margolis and chatrooms where I pretend to be a college kid named Dee who goes to the University of North Carolina so I can have typed sex convos with 19-year-old college girls (who were almost certainly 45-year-old men pretending to be 19-year-old college girls). At some point, I just lose track of the tape. It ceases to be an object in my consciousness. If this were some perverted version of Toy Story, this would be the point where all hope would be lost for the plucky little masturbation totems.
And then, all of a sudden, I’m in my goddamn thirties. I’m an adult. I’m married. I’ve had sex. On multiple occasions, thank you very much. Life is just sorta life, with all its complications and confusions. And I’m visiting my parents' house. I’m poking around the closet of my old childhood bedroom looking for some old picture album when I see a glint of something in the recessed darkness. I lug out decades' worth of piled-up junk to get to this hidden gold. And there it is – my Link to the Past!
All I want to do is watch this insane little smut collage a much younger, sillier version of myself created. To relive who I was back then and to feel those feelings. The mystery, the wonder, the adventure, the erections. But wouldn’t you goddamn know it … my parents threw out all the VHS players! (Who needs them anymore?)
I tell this stupid story to my writing partner, Doug Mand, and it gets us thinking about how many things there are like this tape. Little bits of nostalgia that defined us, that gave shape to our life and experiences. But that, well, are gone now. And your only choice is to move on to the next thing. Or become the guy angrily haggling for a working VHS player at his local pawn shop.
We took this emotion and started constructing a movie around it that would eventually become my film Most Likely To Murder. Go watch it! An old filthy VHS tape is part of the movie too, but I promise it's only, like, six percent of it.
