A Practical Guide to Hiding Your Friend’s Porn Stash

We’ve all had it happen; it could be a surprise visit from the parents, forgetting about those anime tapes your girlfriend isn’t supposed to know you have, or you could be staring down a horrible terminal disease and just don’t have time to clean up evidence of your sex life from whoever is going to be cleaning out your house.  This means you need your friends to do it for you…and sometimes, you have to return the favor.

Step 1: Don’t Panic

Most likely you’re getting this phone call at the worst time conceivable for you to duck out of work, grab pornography, toss it in your car, and escape.  Friends have bad timing, they never ask for favors like this when you have a free weekend and an extra case of lotion.  This is why you shouldn’t have any friends, but unless you’re a World of Warcraft power user or an internet comedy writer, it’s inevitable, you will.

So, make your excuses and step out.  Talk to your friend.  Find out where the porn is, how much there is, what they want you to do with it, how much time you have, and whether or not you can keep the good stuff, which should be a precondition of doing this.  Otherwise, hang up and let some self-sacrificing martyr deal with it.  To quote Kurt Cobain, “if you ever need anything, please don’t hesitate to ask someone else first.”

Step 2: Hit the Liqour Store

It’s likely you’re going to need two things to get through this, boxes and whiskey.  The liquor store will have plenty of both.  Two points: with boxes, the stronger the better, and with whiskey, the cheaper the better.  If it doesn’t set your entire esophagus on fire, you shouldn’t be using it for this.  Also get cheap vodka in case you have to burn things or if coming to terms with the depraved shit your friend is into requires additional inebriation.

Step 3: Break In

If your friend has any foresight, they’ve hidden a key to get into their house that will be easy for you to use and locate the material in question.  If they haven’t, you’re going to have to break a window or pick the lock.  Since presumably you’ve had some of that whiskey already, we’re going to assume you need to break a window.  Pick a good size rock and go around back; “being arrested for trying to steal porn” is hard to explain on a job application.

Step 4: Find the Porn

Again, hopefully your friend offered clear, cogent directions, because otherwise you’re going to have to trash the place.  However, just like any other valuable, there are easy clues to spot to locate the porn stash.  Look for bottles of lotion next to tissues, wadded up socks strewn around chairs, or palm hairs leading in a trail right to the jackpot.  Dump it all in the box and get out of there before the police show up; “being arrested carrying a box of stolen porn” is even harder to explain on a dating website that does background checks, which is why we use OKCupid.  Stupid eHarmony.  Also, just to be safe, take some other shit, you’ve earned it.  Maybe a nice blender or a votive candle holder or all of his electronic gadgets.  This way, if you do get arrested, you’ll look like more of a criminal who likes porn than a pervert who breaks in houses to steal smut.  You can always give the shit back to him, if he notices, that is.

Step 5: Dispose of the Porn per Your Friend’s Request

This could be simple, just dousing a box with flammable liquids in the park and torching it, or complex, requiring sorting algorithms and Texas Instruments scientific calculators to help determine what to keep and what not to keep.  Either way, you’ll need the whiskey for courage, because you’re about to do something deeply private and possibly soul-scarring (burning boxes of porn is always a tragedy). We sort our friend’s porn stashes into three piles:

A) Blackmail material

This could be anything.  Proof that he really is into some freaky fetish, photos of him and his ex-girlfriend, photos of him and farm animals.  Either way, someday, you will need him (or maybe his brother if he’s sick) to move a couch, and he won’t want to do it.  So keep these handy to trade.

B) The Good Stuff

I.e. the stuff this sucker actually paid for that is now yours.

C)The Hilarious Stuff

Unless it’s that terminally ill scenario, you need to be sure that he will never live down begging you to hide his porn from his mom.  If it is the terminally ill scenario, then you’ll need to prove you got it while busting his balls, because that’s what friends do with friends who have cancer.  Either way, there’s bound to be some comedy in there, so find it and exploit it.

What to Do If Caught:

Re-enact the “Big Box of Porn” scene from “the 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Loudly proclaim that you’re stealing back “your” porn.  Make sure there isn’t anything illegal in there, first.

Offer some to the person who’s caught you.

Scream loudly and run away, leading the police on a high-speed chase and being featured in News of the Weird.

Insist that you’re just collecting evidence for Chris Matthews.

Make random pop culture references until the target’s head explodes.