Chapter 31 – The Internet is for Porn
On the morning of my first full day in the city formerly known as Rangoon which had formerly served as the capital of the country formerly known as Burma, I’d awoken with the intention of replying to a handful of emails that I’d been ignoring over the past several weeks during the drunken Southeast Asian bender I’d been on. To my chagrin, the internet at the hotel I’d been staying had been nonfunctional. Nevertheless determined to confirm with my mom that I was still alive and to forward some naked pictures sent to me by a Thai waitress to several of my friends, I went out looking for an internet café. Because at-home connection to the World Wide Web didn’t yet seem to be the norm in Myanmar, internet cafes had been quite popular around those parts and it didn’t take me too long to find one.
After I’d been settled at a computer in a place that had about thirty of ‘em – outdated models, almost all of which had been occupied by teenage boys and young men – I wrote out an email to mommy dearest, sealed it with a kiss and sent it back home to the states. Before doing what else I’d set out to do however, I was quite apprehensive about opening messages containing nude photos in a public place in what is reputed as a rather conservative nation.
Back in the good old US of A when I’m washing windows at peoples’ houses with my father – this is my occupation – we have to go in every room of the house that has a window, bedrooms included. When I’m in the bedroom of a teenage boy scrubbing bird shit off sets of triple-track storm windows and I see a computer in there that’s connected to the internet, I automatically assume that it’s used by that kid for little other than obtaining whacking material – it’s his “beat station,” if you will. And of course, when I see a ruler next to one of these kid’s computers with no pencils or pieces of paper around, I assume he’s using that tool for no other purpose than to measure his you-know-what.
I know this because I was once a teenage boy and that’s the shit that I used to do. I was never lucky enough to have had the internet in my room but I know what I’d have been using it for if I did. And when it comes to the whole ruler thing, I once made the mistake of leaving my dick-measuring device on the top tank of the toilet after having jacked off to one of my dad’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues before taking a shower. It was a white six-inch ruler with little burnt orange drawings of animals on it that I’d gotten out of a Highlights magazine when I was a kid. Naturally, my mom found it almost immediately after as she went to brush her teeth before bed. Since she knew damn well I wasn’t doin’ any geometry homework in the bathroom, she came in my room, tossed it on the floor and said something along the lines of, “Here, you forgot your boner-measuring tool on the toilet,” and walked right back out before I could even come up with a lie or an excuse to spare myself the embarrassment.
So, if I learned anything from my experience as a teenage boy, it’s that rulers are for ranking stiffies and the internet’s for porn. Because of this knowledge, I shouldn’t have been so surprised in Myanmar when covertly looking to my left and my right to see if I could quickly and sneakily open an email conversation with a few nude photos in it to send ‘em along to my friends and seeing that the fifteen-year-old boys on each side of me – aside from the headphones they’d been wearing – had not even attempted to be the least bit discreet while watching hardcore Indian porno. In fact, when looking around the room, almost seventy-five percent of the people in there had been tuned in to porn. I shrugged, opened my email, passed the photos on to my friends, left the smut dungeon and went on with my day.