Eleven years ago, when I was a young nineteen-year-old girl, my friend Anna and I found a gloryhole down in her basement. A shockingly surprising oddity, it had been kept secret by her parents, and when we found it neither one of us could believe that they'd have such a thing. I have a vivid memory of Anna's embarrassment when she and I first saw it and realized what it was.
With me being her very best friend, I spent lots of time at her house, a house her parents still live in today. The basement has a nice game room that her father built, with some comfortable chairs, a couch, a pinball machine, a pool table, a huge TV on the wall. There's a fairly sizable bar at one end of the room, with a refrigerator and a sink built right into it, and neon signs are hung all around the room, advertising old-fashioned brands of beer. Anna's father keeps the liquor all locked up in cabinets underneath the bar, but when we were eighteen Anna found the key somehow and had one made to keep for herself.
There's another room right next to the game room, more of a woman's room I guess you'd say, where Anna's mother has a fancy sewing machine and all the stuff for making the jewelry and handbags that she sells, hippie style things with a rock and roll vibe. Back then, there was a couch in that room, the pull-out kind that turns into a bed. I slept on it a few times with Anna, when she and I were younger and did sleep-overs there. Usually it was just us two girls, and before bed we'd watch scary movies on the big TV in the dark game room. Her father would sneak down there once in a while, just to scare us. We always screamed, and laughed hysterically.
There's a bathroom down there, too, out in a hallway that turns and leads to the staircase to the upstairs. The sewing room has a door that's right across from the stairs. It all seemed sort of patched together, like there was one room, and then two, and then the rest, without a plan to make it flow in any kind of normal way. Maybe a lot of 'finished' basements are that way, just sort of thrown together by fathers with hammers.
It was autumn when we found the gloryhole. Anna's parents were out at a party that night—they went to
lots
of parties—so Anna and I smoked a joint in the backyard, then we went down to the basement and started sipping on some coffee brandy, the stuff that tastes like really good cough syrup. You had to be twenty-one years old to go to a real bar, so we loved sitting at her dad's bar, with the beer signs lit up and music playing, sipping on some sort of liquor, pretending we were older. You remember how it was — nineteen feels pretty young when you're stuck in it. Not a little girl anymore, but not yet a fully adult woman.
Standing up from her bar stool that night, Anna lost her balance, laughing because it was the weed and the nice little brandy buzz that did it. Staggering backward in a flailing attempt to stay on her feet, her shoulder hit the wall quite hard and rattled something loose. We thought it was one of the fancy beer signs, and worried that it might fall, but when we looked closer we saw that the bottom of the wall had come loose. The whole room is paneled, and this piece was about two feet wide and went all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Up there, just below the moulding up by the ceiling, it looked different somehow — there's a crack there, a seam, I guess you'd call it, that was different than the rest of the wall. Anna said she'd never noticed it before. Curiosity was always one of Anna's traits when she got high; pretty soon she'd realized that some hidden hooks, up at the top, held this loose piece of paneling, so she lifted it off of them.
I almost burst out laughing. I would have, but it was just too much of a 'What the fuck' moment. Hidden under that removable panel is another, fixed panel, this one slightly thicker, stronger plywood, and on it is a crudely painted naked lady, full sized, looking like she's standing on the floor. It's the back view, but sort of hot looking, with a skinny waist, curvy hips, a nice round ass, and blonde hair just like Anna's mother's. The thing that made us both freak out, though, was the hole in that panel of plywood, right where this lady's ass or pussy is, the edges of the hole sort of smooth and...used looking. Sort of dirty, you know? Not sexy dirty, but...dirty like it's been used.
"What the fuck!" I said.
At first, Anna was too shocked to say anything, but then... "Is that... what I
think
it is?"
"I think...maybe," I said. It was a weird situation. I didn't know what to say. "She looks...kinda like your mom."
Anna nodded. Yes, the height, the hips, the hair. Maybe not the skinny waist, but, that could be the way Anna's mom wanted it to look. She's the crafty one in the family, so I was thinking Anna's mother painted it herself.
Anna tried to put her hand through the hole, but it was solid on the other side. I followed her as she went in search of some answers, neither of us speaking, and we immediately noticed a similar seam up near the ceiling in the sewing room. We took off that panel, and there, just like the game room side, was a crude painting, this one a naked man, with the hole right were his dick would be. And yes, the man looked a lot like Anna's father.
For hours after our discovery, up in Anna's bedroom, we searched and watched gloryhole porn. Anna and I had watched porn together before, just run of the mill normal stuff, nothing too out there. I wouldn't exactly call gloryhole porn 'out there', but it's a distinct avenue that I, and probably she, had never even thought about. So we watched some, and watched some more, all the while thinking about the painted lady and the painted man, down there in the game room wall that we'd quickly closed up.
"So...what are you thinking?" I asked. "Do you think...it's just your mom and dad? Maybe, like, a fantasy of theirs?"
Anna shrugged. "Maybe," she said. Lots of her answers where only one word ever since first seeing the hole. I let her think for a minute, and she said, "These porns are all, like, parties. It's kinda like...gang bang stuff."
I nodded. Anna and I had never talked about kinky sex, but now seemed to be the time to discuss it, at least a little bit. "Gang blowjobs, too," I said, letting the idea of it sink in, then, "You're dad wouldn't cheat on your mom if she wasn't there, I don't think, not with her picture painted on it, so, they must both be in on it, right?"
Anna sat still, her eyes different. "They have parties down here," she said. "They always used to kick me out, remember? I'd come sleep over at your house. And now...I'm trying to think...they always have them, most of them, when I'm not here. They ask me, and then a couple days later Mom'll say, 'Oh, we're having some people over. Good thing you won't be home, we won't have to worry about bugging you with all our classic rock.' She always laughs about it, like we're doing each other a favor," Anna said.
We never did come to a real conclusion about things that night; in the days after, I could tell Anna was still curious. When we weren't working at our crappy jobs we spent almost all our time together, so it didn't surprise me much one night, about two weeks later, when Anna said, "Mom and Dad are having a party. We need to sneak in."
I nodded, knowing just what she meant.
-
We approached her house the back way, in the dark, through the neighbors' yards. Pink Floyd's music was loud enough to be heard, the party raging below ground, down in the basement game room. It was too risky to walk in through the front door, so Anna and I snuck in through the screened porch out back, through a door that she'd left unlocked. We took off our shoes and quietly hurried to her bedroom just down the hall. Being a house with just one floor, the music was thumping right below us. We heard both men's and women's voices. We heard sex, but not like a wild orgy. It was different.
"I think the men are all in the game room," I whispered.
Anna nodded, listening, her eyes intense.
I asked, "Are the women...all in the sewing room?"
"I think so," Anna whispered.
Things in Anna's room started to rattle as a rhythmic thumping thudded below us. "Are they doing it?...Are they fucking through the hole?...Oh my God!"
We listened to all of it, our eyes wide with surprise as the sound of a man moaning and cumming made the hairs on my arms stand up. The woman didn't make a sound, at least not one we could hear.
