We could live at the beach forever. My wife Joan and I had told one another that for years, every time we made our annual trek to Nags Head, North Carolina with our boys. In the end after each week long vacation, we always came back to reality and knew we had to return home to work and family.
This year as we had for the last several, Joan and I shared our vacation with our best friends, Katie and Mike. This was the first year without any of the kids though. Here it was Wednesday evening, mid-week in our vacation. Wednesday evenings had become the traditional night for the wives to do a bit of shopping. It was a ladies-only night. Mike and I usually stayed at the beach house and watched a ball game and drank a couple of beers. As luck would have it this Wednesday night the cable was out from a storm earlier in the day.
Talking about two very frustrated middle-aged men!
We sat on the deck instead and drank our beer. I was bored near to death, not that Mike and I can't hold a good conversation but Wednesday night was supposed to be a guy's night with beer and ball. As I drained my first bottle of beer I remembered something.
"Hey, you know I saw some DVDs in the cabinet when we got here. Maybe there's something in there worthwhile for guy's night."
Mike gulped the last of his first beer and sat it rather sharply down on the deck table. "Maybe there's a good thriller or better a good spy flick, you know with a hot babe or two to watch."
"I'll go check." I said and stood with my empty bottle.
"Here," he grabbed my bottle, "I'll go get us a couple more of these and meet you in the living room."
So I went in one set of sliding doors and Mike went in the other.
At the television cabinet I shuffled through the couple dozens plastic DVD cases. The first few were all chick flick-romance-types. Not really guy and beer drinking kind of movies. Then I found an old one of the British Secret Agent's best. As I was about to shove all the others back one non-commercial labeled case fell to the floor. I picked it up and opened the case. All that was written on the gold disc in black marker was 'Special Features'.
"Huh." I uttered to myself. "What's this?"
All too curious I slipped the disc into the player and after a bit of jumbled images came up and the background music began a rather heavy beat. Before I knew it, what I thought was colorful art slowly became images of people, very naked people.
This was porn!
In seconds overlaid in front of the naked bodies was a title, "Girls Suck!" And seconds later examples of what was to come showed just that, girls sucking men.
I hit pause button real quick. At first I was a little embarrassed and quickly looked back to see if Mike had caught me watching. He was still clanging around in the kitchen.
'Okay now what?' I asked myself.
Do we go with the secret agent flick or do I offer my best friend the opportunity to watch some porn. I smiled and realized what could be more of a guy's night watching a skin flick. I just wasn't sure either of us would be comfortable watching porn together. Not that either of us hadn't done it on our own before. We had even admitted to one another a few years ago to surfing for the stuff on-line. But to think about sitting in the same room together and watch it, I wasn't sure.
So there I stood, spy flick in my left hand and paused porn flick on the television. I looked from one to the other and back again.
"Hey Jim!" Mike yelled from the kitchen.
The suddenness caught me off guard and I flipped the DVD case in the air. It fell to the edge of the cabinet, popped open and the disc rolled out behind me on the floor.
"Uh, Yeah?" I answered and stepped back to get the disc.
"How about some cheese and crackers with our beer? I forgot I bought some of the extra sharp cheddar the other day." Mike called out.
"Sure. Sounds good." I yelled back and stumbled, my heel coming right down on the edge of the disc.
'CRACK!'
The sound in my ears was louder than it really was I'm sure, but I knew I had just busted it good.
I bent over to pick it up and saw it was split all the way to the center hole. That disc was no more. Then I chuckled as I realized the choice had just been made for me. Porn it would be.
I put the cracked DVD back in its base and back in the cabinet on the other side of the TV. I would have to remember to hit the local mall and find a replacement before we left for home at the end of the week.
"Here we go," I heard Mike and turned to see him walk in with a couple beers in one hand and a paper plate piled with cheese and crackers in the other. "So did you find something worth watching?"
I realized I was standing between him and the TV so he couldn't see what was on display.
"I think it might be worthwhile."
"So? What did you find?" Mike asked as he came around the couch and sat the plate and beers on the table.
I eased over to block the TV still and just stood there.
Mike stood up his beer in his hand. "Well?"
"You wanna watch some porn?" I asked.
His head snapped up. "You have porn here?"
"Yeah, well, no but someone did. Look what I found." I stepped out of the way and let him see what was on the TV.
"What's that?" The he realized what he was seeing. "What the hell?"