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When I was 19 years old, I’d never seen any porn, but as a hormonal teen-ager with a normal sex drive, it sounded like a wonderful forbidden fruit. So I decided to buy a copy of Playboy to see what I had been missing.

I was nervous about it, but I went into a convenience store on Green Springs Highway in Birmingham and asked for a copy (since it was kept behind the counter). This was the first and only time I’ve ever bought any porn.

At first, I was amazed at what I saw. These were physically perfect women who were clearly ready to have sex with me — or pretty much anyone who would pay them, presumably. But after the initial rush of hormonal excitement died down, I quickly realized that the pictures didn’t arouse me in the same way that my own girlfriend did.

Let’s be honest. The women in the magazine were physically perfect in a way that my girlfriend couldn’t be. (I didn’t understand at the time that not even those women were actually physically perfect.) Physically, everything about them was just right. But I realized that I was far more attracted to my own girlfriend and to other women who I knew — women who couldn’t possibly be that “perfect.”

Why?

It didn’t take me long to learn something that I’ve never forgotten.

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I used to want to be placed onto a pedestal as a hero.

That might not be too surprising. After all, our culture is filled with tales of grandiose heroism that invite people — especially young men — to insert themselves into the stories as the hero. So what’s the big deal that I used to have a burning desire to be a hero?

It’s hard to explain and the full story isn’t pleasant. In fact, there are parts of the story I’m not yet ready to tell publicly. The time will come when I’ll talk about the ways that my life has been affected by the influence of narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. Expect a book when the time is right. Until then, here’s what I’m ready to say.

After I moved recently, I started unpacking boxes and going through papers that hadn’t been touched in decades — some since my teen-age years. The things I found were fascinating and they forced me to see early evidence of emotional problems that I eventually had to deal with in counseling.

One of the most fascinating troves of notes and papers consisted of things I wrote over a three-year period starting when I was 13 years old. They dealt with my first serious crush on a girl.

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This is more of a thought experiment than anything else.

These are the mug shots of a few of the 170 people arrested related to the gang war this past Sunday that left nine people dead in Waco, Texas. How would we be seeing this story differently if this had been the same confrontation between two black gangs in an inner city?

I suspect the reactions would have been different all around. I’d like to consider it briefly.

In the wake of the Baltimore riots — almost exclusively by blacks — I heard condescending things from friends. I’m not talking about nasty Archie Bunker-type racists. I’m talking about middle-class white Americans who simply don’t have a lot of connection to black people.

“That’s just the way those people are,” I remember one woman saying. Another friend said he wasn’t surprised at criminal activity from blacks, because about 80 percent of black men were in prison. (The real figure is closer to 4 percent, if I remember correctly.)

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