Stolen Porn

Traveling to San Diego I was given a copy of Penthouse magazine (YESSSS! Porn!) by my traveling companion. I was really excited about it because, besides its obvious awesomeness in being packed full of airbrushed photos of naked women, it had guidelines on how to apply to model for Penthouse (which I totally want to do, anyone got any ins? I'll love you forever!).

I read it on the late night flight and stuffed it on top of my cary-on under the seat in front of me when I was done. It slipped a little forward to the point where it must have been pressing on the achilles tendons of the woman in front of me. I couldn't reach it to pull it back. I could only see the back of her head, covered in long brown hair cut in the kind of no nonsense hockey pageboy you only see on guys in 80s movies and uptight women who have ceased caring what they look like. She was sleeping, so I didn't want to wake her to say, "Excuse me, could you pass me my smutty magazine?" I decided to wait until the end of the flight.

I got up to go to the restroom and returned to my seat. My magazine was gone. It must have fallen totally out of my space and been sucked into her footwell. We all know I'm not a shy person, but I knew that I could be reduced to mortification if the woman were to turn around at the end of the flight, -expecting me to be someone that I imagined a woman with that haircut would picture a reader of Penthouse to be- sneering while holding the magazine out to me. Upon seeing me, her face contorting from disgust to shock. "I believe this is... yours?" She'd say.

I would want to reply with a flip, "Hey thanks! Of course it's mine. Porn is cool! Get with the times lady!" (with requisite toss of the head and gum snap) but I would probably blush crimson and take the magazine while muttering, "thanks"

Clearly, the only way to cope with certain mortification was the way I always do and cut it off at the pass. As soon as she woke up and began to gather her belongings I would lean forward between the seats and -discretely, so as not to embarrass HER (yeah, right)- I would murmur, "Excuse me ma'am. I seem to have dropped my Penthouse. Could you hand it back to me?"

She would blush, her eyes would widen and her gaze would fall, but I would be the one setting the tone for this conversational exchange so she would comply. Though the would probably gossip to her friends about it later she would demurely reach to her footwell and hand me the offending magazine.

That then, was the way to handle this....unless, as her squat stature, man's button down shirt and ugly haircut suggested, she was a narrow minded, anti-porn, "feminist" dyke. In that case, any conversational exchange we might have was destined to turn into nasty looks, snide remarks and anger.

As the plane landed I pondered this while complaining bitterly to my traveling companion over the lost magazine. I turned my attention to packing up my things while my Schrodinger's anti porn feminist woke. I saw the back of my target's head move as she packed her things. Surely she must have discovered the magazine by now. She made no indication that she had. Most excellent news for me!

The plane parked at the gate and I still hadn't summoned the courage to ask for my magazine. The person in front of me stood up, and cast a furtive gaze at me. My "anti porn feminist" was a man! The woman I had worried so much over was a very small, quiet, bookish-looking man who now had the ass end of a Penthouse magazine stuffed inconspicuously in the outside pocket of his satchel.

I frowned, focusing my eyes on the shiny pages beckoning from his caryon. Surely that was my magazine. I looked at him. Though he was facing me, he refused to meet my eyes. My frown deepened until I'm sure it was a dead ringer for a child's petulant stare. He met my eyes briefly, his eyes moistening and color rising over his ears. This man had stolen my magazine! The magazine that I wanted enough to embarrass myself in front of a random stranger for, the magazine whose existence had forced me to spend the last 20 minutes obsessing over ways to ask for it! He was going to quietly walk away with my present because I couldn't think of a way to ask this poor, sad, meek man to return my porn to me when he so obviously wanted to keep it for himself.

I spent the next few hours feeling both magnanimous for "donating" my magazine to a man who was much too shy to purchase one for himself and feeling angry for being so easily swayed by a silent plea from a weak man with puppy dog eyes. My weakness was bought by a man who was no weaker than myself. Perhaps our weakness were one and the same.