Inverted Hedgehog

I don’t think my dad was very much into porn. I often doubt his heterosexuality in general, since he never seemed to show any special affection towards anyone. There’s a lot of asexual people in our family, and those who reject this path seem almost like frauds, like they are trying really hard to be a black sheep and fool everyone into thinkin there is a chance that our bloodline will continue.

That makes me the biggest scam in the last 50 years; a hopeful lie.

There were a lot of signs that my father is maybe something else, something lost deep inside a closet that’s chained and dropped into the sea where it’s guarded by the great Cthulhu himself. One might technically uncover it, but not without losing their sanity.

I remember finding a forgotten Playboy in our house more than 25 years ago, covered in dust, it didn’t look read. I’d heard the name before, though I didn’t know what it was or why anyone talked about it. But obviously it was some kind of a sacred thing, something of value, and it was here in my hands.

Browsing through it, I realized why it was so special. It was wild, it was transgressive, it showed me things I never saw before… It had – a gross food article! There were fried grasshoppers, frog legs and, what grossed me out the most, a seahorse soup. Sure, everything else in the magazine was pretty boring, but it had some colorful comics and insects. What else could a boy want?

Decades later I found an equally dusty box filled with old pictures of my dad traveling through Netherlands with his friends. I’ve never seen him that happy so it’s no wonder he kept talking about that trip for the rest of his life. But there was one photo that caught my paranoid eye – him, in the middle, surrounded by two tall, bulky shirtless guys, his hands around their waists, and the biggest smile he could ever possibly produce. I’ve found my cryptid.

I’ve shown that picture to my mom and without pulling punches I said: “Maybe he was gay.”

“That would explain a lot”, she said with a shrug.

I wasn’t brave enough to ask for elaborations. But I never stopped wondering if there was something here, some big secret that would explain his frustrations and cataclysmic insecurity.

Maybe the truth was always there, in my hands. Not the Playboy, but the dust that covered it.

Later I would tell my friends to come over, I have something they need to see. Then we’ll run to a barn in our yard, hidden from the rest of the world, where I’ll be ready to uncover the biggest secret of the universe: the seahorse soup.

Like father, like son.