A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Taternuts

This is how I learned about cunnilingus from a policeman’s wife and became a legendary fryer at the same time.

First off, I was a graveyard waiter at a place called the Top Hat. It was an all-night diner in Pasco, just down the street from where the prostitutes walked around. They’d sometimes come in with their johns and I had to serve them coffee and pie.

On my way home from work, I stopped at a doughnut shop called Taternuts. The reason being, of course, because it was there. And because it was open, which many places weren’t at five thirty in the morning.

A man wearing an Ocean Pacific shirt and graced with a mustache as thick as Gene Shalit’s was strong-arming a blob of dough on a floured surface near the entrance. I checked out his action over the plastic sneeze guard.

“Whatcha up to?” he asked me. I was wearing a tie and probably looked like I had been out all night drinking.

“Uh, I just got off work. I wait tables. The Top Hat. Graveyard.” I moistly chewed out the words, amid cake doughnut debris. “These cake ones are awesome,” I said.

“They’re called spuddies,” he enlightened me.

“What the—”

“We don’t make doughnuts here. These are made with potato flour mix. The cake ones are spuddies and the raised ones are taternuts.” He folded up the flattened dough three times and then plopped it atop a machine that fed the dough into a cutter-type roller. “This is taternut dough. It has yeast, so it rises in here.” He opened a metal door and showed me some hot racks near his feet. “The spuddie dough doesn’t have yeast, so it stays cake.” He let me think about this. “Want a job?” he asked me.

A few days later, I went from graveyard-shift waiter to early-morning taternut fryer. It was closer to home, there were free taternuts, and the pay was better. The man I worked with was called Big K. He was about thirty and built like a tight end, about six-three, 240 pounds. Big K’s sister was a large woman named Debra and she was real bossy sometimes and real funny at other times. Whenever we got busy, which we did a lot it seemed for just a doughnut—I mean taternut—shop, Debra would say things like: “Shake yourself” and “C’mon Kev, you want me to take over back there? Gotta get crankin’!”

It was easy to get pissed at her but she knew how to make you work harder. She would have made a great basketball coach. Maybe it was the fact that she was getting married to a cop who came in all the time. You know, it’s funny; I never really thought about it until now: a cop marrying a woman who runs a doughnut shop. I mean taternut shop.

Most of the people who came into the taternut shop were people who worked a couple of miles down the road at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Also there were lots of teachers, sundry retired folks, suits, and assorted early risers. It seemed like a requirement to like sports if you were a regular. And if you were a regular that also meant having the same thing every day. If Debra saw you coming from across the parking lot (even at a snail’s pace) she’d shout out, “Sedale, chocolate taternut and a decaf for Joe. Quick.” If a customer came in and his usual diet wasn’t set up at his everyday spot there must’ve been something wrong somewhere. We were a well-oiled machine.

Sports were the reason I became known as Sedale. Big K was a pretty goofy jock kind of guy who was always making funny noises and doing silly pranks. I was mostly into music at the time, but I still had a passing interest in sports clinging to me from my days as a statistics-hoarding football freak in junior high. Big K and I went out after work a few times and played some playground basketball. His stiff but powerful inside play reminded me of Robert “the Chief” Parrish of the Celtics, while my quick, slashing drives and hustle earned me the alias Sedale Threatt, who was a backup point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers.

So we’d be working in the midst of some mad rush and our pace is faster than the taternuts can fry in the fryer and just to keep the mood fun for all, K would shout out my nickname in an exaggerated PA announcer voice: “Sedaaaale Threeeeeeatt!” and then I would go “The Chieeeeeeeef!” All the customers seemed used to these outbursts and even our occasional and random animal noises.

Some customers were also special enough to receive trumpeting treatment. Murphy was one. He was a slouched sixty-two-year-old whom we’d greet by announcing: “It’s the Armeeeeenian!” Other regulars were Ray, Coach, Betsy Baker, Danny Boy, Ozzie, and Miss Missy. Random terms were rotated for folks we weren’t familiar with. Tags like Old Man, Big Dog, Chi Chi, and Buster.

Whenever we had the dough rolling through the cutter, Big K and I had to stand on each side and gather up the uncooked taternut shapes. They’d then go into the warm racks where they would rise, then we’d plop ’em on a wire tray and stick ’em in the fryer, where they cooked in the oil. All the extra dough was rolled into a little football and thrown around the shop when it wasn’t busy. For a little joke, we’d sometimes plant a small piece of dough on the ground where we knew that someone would step on it. Stepping on one of these things felt like you were stepping on a small squishy turd. K and I would casually watch over our time bombs and make ticking sounds. Whenever Debra or whoever would step on it, we’d laugh and congratulate each other on our treacherous achievement.

At some point during this job, which I held for a year and a half, Debra started to ask me about my sex life. This was right before I started to see Daphne, and then Elvia. I was getting around, as they say, and sometimes girls would come see me at work.

Debra wanted to make sure I knew a few important things—tools for life—such as the mysterious and tribal-sounding ritual known as “eating out a pussy.” All the photos of oral sex I’d seen in magazines were of women giving it to men. I had no idea that oral sex was such an equal opportunity activity. The first time a girl asked me to give her oral sex, it was a one-night stand with a sixteen-year-old devil-worshipping runaway. We were making out and I had her shirt off. I began licking her breasts and she asked: “Will you eat me out?” I thought about it for a second, knowing I didn’t even know the first step, and politely answered, “No, thanks.”

My mother and I had too much of an age gap to have sexual talks. I think she knew something was up in regards to my sexual blooming, but she never pried. Mostly she stayed in her sewing room and listened to Nat King Cole as I wrestled with my puberty (and penis) in the next room. I’m sure that some of my family thought I was gay. The Scotch-taped photo of Ralph Macchio on my wall could have been cause for alarm.

Big K was possibly my best bet for sex advice from an older, more experienced person.

“Gotta grow yourself one of these first,” he pontificated, sticking his mustache out as far as the tip of his nose. I decided to cut my losses and not explore his wisdom further.

After work that day, Debra cornered me in the back room. “You want me to just tell you how to do it and save ya some time?”

I tried to think of something funny to say, but settled for: “Sure, if you want to.”

She explained several things: the taste, the labia, the clit, the secret button, the canal. She mapped out certain methods: the vibrator, the fingers, the tongue, lips, teeth, etc. And finally, she soberly gave me a few warnings: yeast infections, periods, pubic hair in the teeth, gagging on excess pubic hair, pubic hair that seems to be either absent or shaved.

I didn’t ask her about how the cop did it to her. Actually, oral sex may have been against state law for all I knew. I made a note to be careful in case it was.

The results were: I loved it!

Even despite close calls with yeasty girls and others who looked like they had Jimmie Walker’s head sticking out of their groin, the giving of oral pleasure was high on my priorities list on every date. It was indeed one of the most valuable things anyone has ever taught me. Thanks, Debra!

Soon after these lessons, I was preparing to quit my job and move to Spokane, where I would go to broadcasting school. It was time to hang up my apron and retire from the taternut biz. My last day of work was a tearjerker. “You were a legend in the fry zone, Sedale,” reflected Big K on my eighteen months of fabulous frying.

I was glazing up a batch and doing my best Dick Vitale, “It’s SHOW TIME, baby!”

Big K splashed water on his face and wiped faux tears from under his eyes. “We’re gonna retire your apron, man. It’ll hang from the rafters.”

I looked at my early-morning work companion with respect.

Murphy rattled through the door. “It’s the Armeeeenian,” I announced.

Murphy stopped for a moment and asked over the sneeze guard, “This is your last day, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, off to the medium city, old man.”

“Well, you make one heck of a taternut, kid,” he said. Then he paused to let me prepare for some wisdom. “Just remember,” he started, “when you get there and get settled, you can’t come home again.”