Everyone Has a Pervert Hidden Inside of Them

All you have to do is find it

Estate sale, Encino, Calif. (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)

Not long ago, I started going to estate sales. Over the course of the pandemic, I got obsessed with Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, perusing the listings to pick up vintage paintings, an old-school bar cart, a hand-carved wooden cat tchotchke, a set of three midcentury modern world globes, a little metal BAR X DUDE RANCH painted with cowboys, horses, and cacti. After awhile of buying some marked up pieces from sellers who’d likely found the wares they sold at estate sales, I decided to check out some estate sales myself. It took me awhile to get around to doing this because the idea of wandering around in a dead person’s house, picking through their things and nosing through their underwear drawers, didn’t sound that appealing. But recently I started looking up estate sale listings online, and I spotted one that I had to go to or I would die of regret. Among the usual stuff—the old typewriter, the nice dresser, the glassware and dishes—there was art, much of it erotic in nature. Drawings of penises. Clay sculptures of male torsos with tiny phalluses. That sort of thing. The place wasn’t far—in North Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley, where I live—so I got in my car and rushed over, worrying, since it was already afternoon, that I was too late. When I got there, I found myself wandering through the small house with other folks looking for treasures. I’d assumed the place had belonged to an older gay man who had spent his final years contentedly rendering artistic homages to the penis, but when I got to the bedroom, I realized the deceased resident had been an older woman. A woman had spent her days painting these penises, sculpting these phalluses, drawing these nudes. In the bathroom, there was, along with the other things, the makeup and the brushes and the jewelry boxes, a hot pink vibrator she’d presumable bought, still in its package. In her art studio in one of the spare bedrooms, I selected one of the large painted woman’s mouth cutouts she’d created. It was $60, but I was able to talk one of the women working the estate down on the price. As I paid the guy in the front yard, he remarked the woman who lived there had been beautiful. “Those were probably her lips,” he noted. Her mouth now sits atop one of my bookshelves at the base of an “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” poster and next to a figurine of William Faulkner that I bought on Etsy. Last weekend, I went to another estate sale. This one was in Encino, which is also in the San Fernando Valley. The guy who lived there, now dead, had been an avid collector of, well, many things. The storage room behind the garage was filled with movie posters, actor’s photos, and Hollywood books. I flipped through an album filled with autographed photographs he’d gotten from sexy stars: Playboy centerfolds, sultry actresses, and porn stars (the photo above features the album and two photos of Jenna Jameson, which were personally autographed by her). There were other things, too, including a vast collection of graphic Hustler Magazine playing cards featuring Hustler models from the Nineties, their mouths open and their legs spread. In any case, it’s strange, what you learn, when you walk into the life of someone who no longer exists. In the end, we may repress our baser impulses on a day-to-day basis, but our animal nature is always there, lurking in the corners, waiting to emerge.

I’m a writer and consultant | Follow Me on Twitter | Follow me on Instagram | Email