El Paso, 1967. I'm almost 14. Ken is in Saigon. I take advantage of cooler weather to explore the dust farm above our two-car garage in suburbia and find a pair of nondescript scrapbooks tucked away among the long-ignored keepsakes of an occasionally turbulent marriage. They've been hauled from one continent to another (Asia, North America & Europe) for more than 20 years.
Black corners glued to spiral-bound, black construction paper hold dozens of small black and white photos in place. My adolescent sweat stains the pages as I peer at them with a flashlight. Pornography fills the first scrapbook. Gaping vaginas, erect penises, and entwined Japanese bodies offer a frighteningly explicit primer in heterosexuality. It does less for me than the sight of a well-built co-worker at Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors removing his shirt to clean the three-gallon ice cream tubs which I take home to decorate with Playboy centerfolds in a feint-and-parry move to conceal urges I still refuse to accept from my parents.
The pornographic scrapbook disappeared when Ken, after surviving the Tet Offensive, returned home. Although he never acknowledged my discovery, I'm pretty sure Mary gave him an ultimatum to toss it. When she steadfastly refused my whining entreaties to purchase an athletic jersey with the number 69 ("It means something dirty," she explained primly) I had confronted her with a full-throated, teenage accusation of hypocrisy.
"Then what about the caricature of Dad hanging in his study?" I shouted. "His prison suit says 69! And what about the dirty pictures in the attic?"
It wasn't until Ken died unexpectedly on Father's Day in 1992, that I wriggled back into the crawl space and rescued the other scrapbook fearing it might not survive my stepmother's purge of all things related to the "first wife," a cleanse that already had been completed elsewhere, turning
9912 Collette into a home I no longer recognized.
In many eyes, the photos in the second scrapbook may be just as unsavory as the porn. I can't be sure, but I'm guessing Ken collected them while working as a criminal investigator for the Army during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. Nearly all the photos are captioned with strips of typewritten paper behind yellowed tape, and multiple shots of automobile crashes with tongue-in-cheek descriptions suggest they were curated by him. After removing the photos from the scrapbook for scanning, I also could see that many had been stamped on the back with the date and the name of the photographer, S. Yamamoto, who remains anonymous to Google but whose chilly eye for composition is unmistakeable in this online resurrection almost 75 years later.
Given the frequent depictions of seized contraband in the photos, it seems reasonable to assume that the contents of the discarded scrapbook may once have been in an unmounted private collection. Although the sexual proclivities of parents usually remain highly veiled to their children, I'm fairly confident Ken wasn't a pornophile. Still, the crawl-space cache of erotica did also yield a silk-bound manual presented to Japanese newlyweds with explicit, hand-drawn depictions of marital sexual relations and a first edition of Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy with photographs by Brassai.
Now that I'm older than Ken was when he destroyed the pornographic scrapbook, I recognize that I inherited his collecting impulse. You can't deny that these photos aren't interesting either as artifacts or a voyeuristic peek at the underbelly of human nature. It's comforting that Ken's captions are race-neutral, although he may be guilty of using "Japs" pejoratively.
Here's the photo that ends the scrapbook. I'll try to channel Ken and call it "the love that dares not speak its name" or at least I never did, not directly to him anyway. So much to unpack: Why isn't it captioned? Why did he include it? Is the guy in the framed photograph one and the same with the subject? Why does it follow another caption-less photo of a dead soldier on his blood-soaked pillow holding a gun?
Narcotics
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| Japanese Army Narcotics (August 1949) |
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| 25 Grams Impounded Heroin (November 1949) |
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| Complete Opium Smoking Paraphenalia (July 1950) |
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| A Good Way To Get Caught (undated) |
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| GI Method of Pilfering Clothes from Warehouse (undated) |
Fires, Crashes & Fatal Accidents
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| Hotel Fire, 3 Officers Dead (undated) |
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| Corpses of Stevedores Caught in Hold of Burning Ship (February 1949) |
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| Train Wreck Caused by Army Truck Falling on Tracks (undated) |
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| End of a Ride with Another Man's Wife, 2 Dead (undated) |
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| Mercury Playing Like A Boat (undated) |
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| Broken Pitman Arm Shaft on Jeep That Almost Caused an Accident (undated) |
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| Death Fall of 30 Feet (undated) |
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| Accidental Death of Japanese Housemaid by Electrocution (undated) |
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| Hit & Run (undated) |
Assault, Homicide & Suicide
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| Weapon (October 1950) |
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| Assault and Battery With Weapon Used (undated) |
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| Corpse, Bullet Exit (undated) |
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| Corpse, Bullet Entrance (undated) |
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| Human Heart Showing Entrance and Exit of 30 Caliber Shell (undated) |
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| Exit of M1 Rifle Bullet (undated) |
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| Murder of a Jap Shopkeeper by GI (undated) |
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| Jap Suicide 2 (undated) |
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| GI Suicide with the Aid of a 12 Gauge Shotgun (undated) |
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| Suicide by Overdose of Sleeping Pills (undated) |
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| Suicide of 2 Prostitutes, Jumped from Moving Truck (undated) |
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| Autopsy Being Performed On Murdered Soldier (undated) |
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| German National Suicide (undated) |
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| Suicide of GI Sentry By Drowning (undated) |
Forensics
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| Dr. Nakagawa, Analyst, 4 Pounds, 24 Grams Heroin (undated) |
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| Deception Reaction on Keeler Polygraph (undated) |
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| Fibers of Cloth That Led to a Conviction (undated) |
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