Rant #1,532: Playboy of the Western World

Just picking up on yesterday's Rant, where I talked about what I believe to be the demise of Playboy Magazine as we know it, so many images have gone through my mind since that time about my own personal encounters with the magazine that I have to laugh and laugh some more.

We have all had our own personal experiences with this publication, and I am sure that they are all very similar to mine.

I might have told the first story already, perhaps on the first incarnation of this blog--the one that was hacked, so don't go to it, please--but it is worth telling again. It says a lot about how young, pre-teen boys first encounter Playboy Magazine.

In my old haunts in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, I knew lots and lots of kids my own age. One was Michael S., and Michael S. came from a pretty large family. He was the only boy in the family, and he had about four sisters. Heck, I don't know how they all fit into even the largest apartment in the development, but somehow, they did.

Anyway, one day, Michael S. and I were playing in his house. We must have both been about seven years old. I don't remember what exactly we were doing, but suddenly, he tells me that he has something to show me, and he takes me into his room.

He bends down, reaches his arm under his bed, and takes out Playboy Magazine.

I have no idea what this magazine was about, but he hands it to me, and I open it up, and there, staring right at me, is a naked Kim Novak--yes, the actress. Funny with everything going on now about the magazine, in the photo I saw of her on those pages, she was not fully nude, and had a towel draped over her, if I remember correctly.

As little boys of this age will do when presented with such a magazine, both of us began to laugh, and I leaf through the pages, and there, I see actual naked ladies. We laugh and laugh, and after about five minutes of this, he takes the magazine and shoves it under his bed once again, and we go about playing with his toys or simply picking up from whatever we were doing before.

Heck, he had four sisters and a mother. He was more in tune with such things than I ever would be at that age.

Anyway, flash forward to 1979. It was Playboy Magazine's 25th anniversary, and they put out a special commemorative issue. I was 22 years old, far removed from by seven year old self, but still a bit naive.

My father, as a cab driver, always found things in the back seat of his cab that people would leave there, including newspapers, umbrellas, and today, cell phones. They would also leave magazines back there, and lo and behold, one of his customers left that commemorative Playboy Magazine in the back seat this one day.

He brought it home. My mother did not like such magazines in the house, and he shoved it into the magazine rack that we had, seemingly forgetting about it.

Well, for whatever reason, I was by that rack--I think it was because one of our phones was near the rack, and I had been on the phone--and I saw on the spine of one of the magazines in the rack "Playboy Magazine." I guess my heart rate went up, and I took it out of the rack. I opened the book up randomly, as I had done all those years previously when I was seven years old, and I turned to ...

Kim Novak. The same pose, with the towel.

It was eerie, brought up a memory that I had carefully stored in my personal memory bank for years, and honestly, I had to laugh once again. It was a different laugh than when I was seven years old, but it was funny ...

And to me, it still is.

There have been other choice encounters with the magazine.

I remember in I.S. 72 in the same development, somebody found a Playboy Magazine in one of the desks, a magazine which had apparently been left there by another student.

It was eighth period in I think seventh grade, so I was about 13 years old, as was everyone in the class.

The kid sitting by the desk with the magazine in it must have taken it out of the desk at some point, and he started to look at it, in a secret sort of way, on his lap.

Our teacher--I cannot remember what class we were in or who the teacher was--discovered what he was doing. He was so startled that he jumped, threw the magazine on the floor, and wouldn't you know it--and you couldn't do this if you wanted to--the magazine opened up on the floor with the full centerfold exposed, and yes, I mean top to bottom and everything in between.

We all laughed, but it wasn't funny to the teacher. I believe it was a woman, by the way, and I remember she got on the room phone and called the custodian, who promptly came and picked up the magazine as we were led out of the room so we wouldn't be further damaged by seeing a picture of a beautiful, but nude, woman, spread out on the floor of our classroom.

Another encounter came when I was in college. Jimmy Carter was running for President, and he gave a startling interview to Playboy, even startling to this day.

If you remember, he said that even at this stage of the game that he "lusted afer women," and this quote made headlines the world over.

I must have been 21 or 22 when he made this pronouncement, and I was taking a journalism class in college. The professor talked about the interview, and suggested that we--but never flat out said that we had to--get a copy of the magazine to read the interview ourselves.

So the industrious Larry L. decided that this gave him a reason to actually buy Playboy, so he went out and got one.

As I mentioned earlier, my mother did not like such things in the house, so as it was a cold winter's day, I bought the magazine and shoved it under my winter jacket as I entered the house.

My mother met me at the door for something, and me--carrying my books and with the magazine inside my jacket--tried to make my way past her, but to no avail.

As I tried to move past her, the magazine fell out of my jacket onto the floor.

There must have been an awkward couple of seconds of silence that probably felt like an hour to me, and my mother asked me why I had the magazine.

I told her the God's honest truth, just like I told you, and she did mention that she didn't like such things in the house and I am sure she said something against the professor who only suggested that we buy the publication for the interview, not the centerfold.

Boy, was I embarrassed!

There have been some other interesting encounters, and I actually subscribed to the publication for a few years in the late 1980s or so, but I am sure these encounters that I just described mirror a lot of what you have experienced, too, with the magazine.

Now that Playboy is changing over to a non-nude publication, young kids of today probably won't have the same experiences with the publication, which is one thing, but on another level, they won't know what they are missing, because Playboy Magazine will cease to exist in many of our eyes, or at least cease to exist as an entity where perhaps our own sexuality was discovered, as mine was, at an early age.

On some levels, that is a shame, on other levels, I guess it is OK.

We survived Playboy Magazine as it was, and we will survive Playboy Magazine as it is soon to become.

But those memories ... boy, it was fun growing up when I did, I have to say ...