I Discover Playboy Magazine

Growing up,? no one ever told me about the facts of life. What I learned I picked up on my own . The summer before ninth grade, I remember finding a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in our attic. I had never heard of the J.D. Salinger classic and naively thought the book might have been about baseball. I started to read and was fascinated as if I was experiencing an entirely new and perhaps dangerous world for the first time. At thirteen I was too young to fully appreciate Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst, but I was thrilled with the use of profanity and the sexuality in the story. I read the entire book in one sitting, then went back a week later and reread it over several days. I didn’t tell anyone I had read The Catcher in the Rye. ?I wanted it to be my secret. It seemed the literary equivalent of looking at Playboy Magazine, which I also did for the first time that summer at a friend’s house. My friend had discovered a stash of old Playboys at the bottom of his older brother’s closest. We visited that stash of Playboys several times that summer.

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My friend Matt Gant was the adventurous type and often rode his Schwinn bicycle on excursions just to see what he might discover. On one of those excursions, Matt located a dumpsite in a wooded area that contained hundreds of old girlie magazines.? Matt called his discovery the porno pit and insisted that Kirk Bowser and I accompany him one night to further investigate. Carrying flashlights and filled with early adolescent curiosity and libido, the three of us rode bikes to the site, which as Matt had described was filled with hundreds of old skin rags from the 1950 and early 1960 s. Unfortunately, you would have paid some of the women pictured on the covers to keep their clothes on, rather than take them off. The covers of a few of the girlie mags indicated there were stories in some.? I still remember one title that caught my eye: “How JFK Killed? the Beatniks.” I never read the JFK-beatnik story. I didn’t know anything about sex, but I had enough sense not to touch those skin rags with a thirty-nine-and-a half-foot pole.

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