C.K. Hartuni

The Secret Stash

On our recent family jaunt to Palm Springs, we wandered into a vintage shop, mostly for the vinyl, my teen daughter’s latest obsession. The staleness of the air struck me hard, as if we had walked into your grandmother’s closet or an estate sale inside a random dead person’s house. The next thing that stuck out was the vintage porn, set forward and displayed proudly with no protective barriers for 21 and over to cross. And as my 14- and 16-year-olds walked nonchalantly past the display, I found myself looking back with a longing gaze. I so wanted to pick up a copy and thumb through it, but I didn’t, mostly because I was with my family. It is 2022, I’m half a century old, and I still care what the world, my world, thinks of me. Instead, I walked right by them and headed to the concert t-shirts in the back of the shop and began to browse.

Even today in 2022, pictures of naked bodies and our participation in viewing them has consequences. Those vintage copies of Playboy reminded me of the time I ransacked my parents’ house when I was left home alone for the first time.

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I was alone in our modest two-bedroom house for the first time. My mom had finally let me stay home by myself while she ran errands, because she thought I was old enough. I was eleven and her only child. My first instinct was to comb through our tiny 1,000 square foot house, inspecting the drawers full of stuff in our built-in cabinets in the corridor and my parents’ bedroom, the stacks of books and magazines on the shelves of my dad’s makeshift office in the corner of our dining room. I wasn’t entirely sure why this excited me so much nor did I know what I was searching for. Perhaps it was the innocence of firsts, the simplicity of childhood freedom, roaming about without someone watching over me or maybe it was the sheer pleasure of snooping and the possibility of uncovering secrets about my parents.

These jaunts were the first breaths of independence I took away from my mother. And they were never long enough. There was so much to explore in that tiny house. You see, my parents had stuff - lots and lots of stuff. They went through four major moves across three countries and still managed to bring all their stuff and accumulate more. There was a small horse statue from my dad’s childhood home in Iran that dates all the way back to the 1930s. And then there were the random issues of National Geographic magazines stacked on the living room coffee table and in numerous empty boxes that inevitably landed in the garage, in case they would be needed some day. It would be so easy to stow some treasure or slip a forbidden truth in between the junk.

My first stop that day was in our bathroom. I pulled out my dad’s personal drawer and saw his trusty electric shaver, which he used every morning for a smooth shave. Then there was his black plastic comb, which he used to groom himself, and of course, the magic marker he used to touch up his grays which would tide him over until the next time my mom dyed his hair. Yes, my dad had taken to having my mom dye his hair (and eyebrows) and did so until the end of his life. But what really caught my eye that day were the boxes that were shoved all the way in the back. There was a long, white box with a tube of cream inside and the words “long-lasting” and “pleasure” printed on the outside and an open box of condoms. An “ick” crept up my belly to my throat. I remember the horror I felt when I saw these items. Instinctively, I threw the items in the drawer and slammed it. This was my moment as their child realizing that my parents have a sex life, an unspoken secret that they share. Something I’m not privy to. The feeling swept over my body like invisible ants crawling on my skin. Going through my mother’s dresser drawer on a different day confirmed this fact when I found a pair of sheer high-waisted panties circa 1960. This pair was very different from the cotton briefs I was used to seeing in the laundry basket.

As an adult thinking back to that time, I think that it is truly miraculous that my parents had sex. I mean they had to have done it at least once to have had me. But the idea that they would have sex for pleasure was unfathomable. You see, I was a horrible sleeper and so was my mom. When I was a baby, I wouldn’t sleep by myself so rather than co-sleep with both parents or sleep train me, my mom decided to haul a mattress to my room and sleep on the floor next to my crib. This was her solution for both of us to get some rest. She tried once, maybe twice to let me sleep on my own, but it never worked out. My anxieties always won the battle, and my mom became my roommate. My uncle, a psychiatrist, warned my parents that they were too overprotective of me and that this codependence had to stop.

But it didn’t. Instead, my mom continued to sleep in my room until I was a preteen. If it wasn’t for the freak accident that landed her in the hospital for a week, who knows how much longer it would have continued? During that miraculous week, my life changed. We both grew a little, and I finally learned to sleep through the night, by myself. I was twelve years old.

In time, I have been a mom to two twelve-year-olds and been blessed with a healthy husband. I can’t imagine the burden our co-sleeping put on my dad and their marriage. A therapist once advised me that my mom’s co-sleeping might have been deliberate to avoid sex with my dad. Another wave of “ick” swept over me at that revelation.

On subsequent adventures throughout the house, I found epic issues of Playboy and Penthouse magazines buried underneath stacks of PC magazines. They certainly weren’t displayed proudly like the ones in the vintage shop of Palm Springs in 2022. The Penthouse magazine featured Vanessa Williams who had just given up her crown as Miss America. Someone had leaked nude photos of her with another woman, and this was way too much for 1984 to handle. Clearly, 1984 was not ready for a Black Miss America. By this time, I was thirteen and had never seen anything like this before. The images of the naked bodies made my heart beat fast and my legs tingly.

My dad also had a stash of nude photos of women in my parents’ closet. He had a suitcase full of them neatly cut out and saved from magazines. I was shocked at the sheer number of them. Their hairstyles and makeup informed me that these photographs were taken in the 1950s and 60s. My parents were married in 1961. Why did he keep these pictures over so many years across so many moves? I was fascinated by the degree of variation in their colors. Fifty plus shades of beige. Some with contrasting hues for their nipples, some with nipples that blended into flesh.  But most of all, I was surprised by how different their bodies were in shape and size. Their fleshy arms, generous thighs and soft bellies. Their bodies were definitely not skinny and far from fit by today’s standards. The weight of their breasts, some perky and strong enough to stand up on their own, others hanging heavier and waiting to be harnessed. There was a clear commonality. They were all natural, untouched by the hands of cosmetic surgeons, unchiseled and pure. Pictures of real women in their purest form.

I never confronted my mom or dad about the pornography that I had found. But I got the distinct feeling that my mom knew about it. At the time, I was infuriated. How could she just let it go? Wasn’t it the equivalent of infidelity? Didn’t the beratement of women bother her?

When I was fourteen, my parents started having loud, painful arguments. I strained to hear, through my closed bedroom door, to make sense of the yelling. Like a jigsaw puzzle the missing pieces came together. My dad wanted to try for a boy and my mom wanted no part of it. She was done. She must have been going through perimenopause. And this was my dad’s final plea before it was too late. In the mid-eighties, forty-six was already too late. My mom could no longer use my sleep issues as an excuse and so the arguments ensued until it was a moot point. That chapter closed on our lives. I would be an only child.

After I had children, I asked my mom bluntly why she didn’t want to have two and she confided that she did want two, but that there was no one to help her. She didn’t really explain it, but I filled in the gaps. Her family lived on the other side of the world in another hemisphere and my dad wouldn’t have stayed up nights to help out.

In the weeks after my dad’s passing, my mom’s cousin, a good friend of my dad, came up to visit my mom and pick up a DVD that my dad had burned for him.

“What is this?” I asked my mom. I picked up a disc with three X’s inscribed on it with a black Sharpie. I wanted so badly to just toss it.

“Oh it’s something your dad made for Dave.”

From the label, it was obvious my dad had burned a compilation of porn videos for his buddy.

“Mom, just throw it away. Why did you call Dave and tell him to come pick it up?”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Yes. It’s okay. Let him come pick it up. Your dad wanted him to have it.”

She snatched the DVD from my hand and put it on top of the TV in the living room safe from grasp. My suspicions were confirmed, she did know about the porn all these years. Maybe she was grateful for it? And at that moment, I couldn't help but wonder if she popped it into the DVD player and watched it before David picked it up. I would have.

C. K. Hartuni is practically a native to Southern California. She immigrated to Los Angeles with her family at age 5 from Iran. She has been writing short stories since age 7. In March 2020 when the pandemic shut everything down, she began a daily practice of morning writing with a group of fellow writers. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays about growing up as an immigrant in America. She is also working on her debut novel about a woman struggling with depression in the 1950s.