‘The Boffer’

I was sixteen years old when I saw my first real porn movie.

Video Difference was on Quinpool Road in 1987. For a while it was in trouble when Blockbuster opened up half a block west. Blockbuster died, and Video Difference came away bloody but unbeaten. It’s still there today, even though in Vancouver all the good video stores are disappearing.

Video Difference had several floors of VHS selections. When Jumbo Video opened up across the street with themed rooms (horror, porn) and lower prices, we wondered if Video Difference was going to up its game. My stand-bye store just expanded its selection (it had a good foreign section) and added a floor. It kept its porn on the top row on the upper floor and that’s what we were interested in.

The porn in those days was an odd lot: newer stuff cheaply shot on video, or older stuff shot on film, which wasn’t necessarily better (film porn can be horribly grainy and twenty years behind the year in which it was shot). A lot of Midnight Blue stuff (which was soft-core) with people like John Holmes and Seka, a lot of rather quaint European stuff, and some of the video movies, which had more explicit covers and glossier skin.

One Friday night, my friends and I had to see a damn porn tape. So we hung around the upper floor, pretending to look at the Comedy and Horror. But what we were really looking for were single men who were getting porn tapes. For some reason, it had to be me who did the talking. I’d actually kissed a girl, and that somehow made me more eligible to approach strange men and ask them to rent us porn for underage teenage boys.

I finally found someone, and I can still remember him: mid-thirties, stocky, glasses, brown leather jacket, with longish ginger hair and a moustache. I walked up to him, a porn tape in my hand.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Er… could you rent this movie for us?” I held out the tape for him.

If he’d said no, I would have given up there and then. It’s one thing to hang around in the dark outside a liquor store asking people to but your booze; another thing entirely to haunt the video store looking for strange men to illegally rent you porn. And my friends and I were planning on watching it together – there would be no wanking involved! It wouldn’t have been worth it to keep at it for all that long.

“Uh…uh… okay,” he said.

I asked him to meet us outside. He did, and handed us, three unknown teenage boys, a porn tape rented in his account. We could have kept that thing and he would have been liable for the cost. Even though the bro-code didn’t exist at the time, I had no intention of leaving this fine moustachioed fellow porn-consumer in the lurch. I brought it back the next day as a gentleman should.

The movie was called B.Y.O.B., which is short for Bring Your Own Body. The plot escapes me – in fact, I think it just boning in different combinations. Here is the cover:

As porn flicks go, it was pretty inoffensive. They just did it, there was a cumshot, and then onto the next scene, until the credits scrolled by with those rather comically earnest ’80’s porn names: Blake Palmer, Gail Force, Kristara Barrington, Sasha Gabour. The only part I really remembered was a three-way with two men and one woman – one man, while taking his female partner from behind while lying on his side, paused to pragmatically adjust the pillow under his head. Then he starts giving it to her like he’s a jackhammer. For some reason I remembered that: Ok, let me get comfortable – (grunt!) – and then I’m taking you to the moon, baby! One of my friends called him “The Boffer” and we joked about him for years.

Later on, all porn videos were either put in a separate room or the basement of video stores, and taken off the top shelves where impressionable young people could see them. But the covers! Those cheapo eighties VHS porn covers! We may laugh at them, but the DVD porn that followed had covers that were vile, and put together like collages made by mental patients. Back then, I think video companies actually tried to look… somewhat classy. They failed miserable, but looking back, I appreciated the effort.

On some of the covers I saw several times a week, but never in motion, was this woman: Ebony Ayes. She has since disappeared and no one seems to know where she’s gone, or if she’s even alive. But she haunted my dreams:

Among the eighties porn, there was older stuff as well. I later heard saw that John Holmes movie, and it had no actual sex in it. Can you believe that? Everyone just wriggled around and grabbed each other, moaned, and thrust their hips back and forth. It was very disappointing. But the other movie, A Taste of Money? That was pretty good – sort of a cautionary tale about stardom.

Eventually the whole game changed: it’s now 2012 and 10 year-olds can get porn with a few clicks. All free, somehow, even though people make it and make money in some way that isn’t clear to me. But… that’s how it was back in the day. It was an embarrassing and weird process, and God help you if anyone caught you coming out of one of those rooms, or reaching up to the top row and bringing down one of those VHS boxes.