Part One
Once upon a time, back around 1975 or so, I was eleven or twelvish, and I was feeling the pangs of puberty. I had discovered girls!
Now, part of my problem with this was the lack of information available. Plainly, some study was called for… but the library seemed remarkably short on information on the topic. What I really wanted was Playboy. Not only did they seem to have any number of articles on the subject of women, dating, picking them up, entertaining them, and getting them into bed, but they even told you what to wear, what kind of car to drive, and included illustrations of sample women!
(Y’gotta keep in mind, this was 1975. Playboy was about as serious as it got, as far as the subject of women went. And at age eleven, I was quite sure there could be no better guide to the subject area. My peer group firmly agreed.)
But I was no more than a puppy kid with a fuzz atop my upper lip that required me to shave every third day or so, lest my teachers try to wipe the dirt off with a kleenex. How was I to obtain such tomes of forbidden lore?
Well, plainly, I wasn’t. I was stuck. Until I discovered the *other drugstore.
*
My hometown had two drugstores at the time, the nice reputable one run by the guy who’d gone to high school with my mom, and at which I dared buy nothing more provocative than Detective Comics… and the other one, the one down near the movie theatre, the sleazy-looking one with the windows that hadn’t been washed since the Johnson Administration, the one with which my parents did not do business. What might I find there?
Well, actually, quite a bit. This other place was run by a guy who appeared to be about a thousand years old, who watched me like a hawk, quite certain that the minute he took an eye off me, I’d stuff half the store into my pocket and set the other half afire, to judge from his attitude. But when I checked his magazine rack, I was astonished. This guy had comics dating back to the sixties! Mighod! Didn’t he ever send his unsold copies back?
He did not. I forgot all about Playboy, and gleefully spent the four dollars I’d brought with me on comics. He solemnly sold them to me at cover price, too. He had to blow the dust off one to SEE the cover price.
Naturally, this should give you some idea what kind of a kid we’re dealin’ with, here. In fact, it may not even have been 1975. Perhaps it was earlier. I do remember that I went there to investigate Playboy, though, so I couldn’t have been all THAT young.
For weeks, when I got my allowance, I’d run like hell down to the old man’s drugstore and buy up ancient comics. I was terrified that someone else would find out about this treasure trove. As I became a regular fixture in his store, he got a little friendlier… even got downright relaxed about my presence, although I noticed that nobody else ever seemed to be in that store. Was I his only customer? Then again, who cared?
I depleted his magazine rack, gradually. No new magazines appeared. I didn’t mind. I could get new magazines anywhere, but this place was the next best thing to a time machine.
…and over time, I began to cast glances at his non-comics stock.
He did not carry Playboy, or Penthouse. What he did carry, though, looked decidedly interesting. The rack held a variety of interesting-looking magazines with titles like Men, Men’s World, Man’s Adventure, Grit, Sweat, Tough, Stud, Grunt, Stag, and so forth. Yeah, I may be mistaken about some of those titles – it’s been thirty years, after all – but judging from the cover illustrations, some of those woulda made good titles for some of these magazines.
They were all of a type, as recognizable as comic books. They invariably had painted illustrations on their covers, for one thing. The illustrations were always of one of these things:
***Two men fighting, while a woman with plunging neckline was nearby. She might or might not be watching the fight, and she could be in the background or foreground. Sometimes the men had knives; other times they fought barehanded. NEVER with guns, though.
Men with guns blazing away at some offscreen enemy. Sometimes the men wore military uniforms, sometimes torn rags. If military uniforms were present, they might be in foxholes, and there might be barbed wire present.
A scantily dressed woman with a gleeful come-hither look. There might or might not be appreciative-looking men on the cover with her.
Well, naturally, I was curious. I learned to watch for the old fellow out of the corner of my eye, and when he became distracted, I’d quickly flip through some of these magazines. What were they? What did they have?
…e-yow. In the few fleeting seconds I had to examine the magazines, I hardly had time to really check the content… but they DID have the obligatory photographs of women. Plainly, these, while not exactly Playboy, were certainly in the ballpark. Still, what would happen if I tried to buy any? I mean, this guy was old, and by age eleven, I’d learned what old people thought about such things. Would he, like, throw me out of his store? Then what would I do about all those back issues of *The Atom * and *The Flash * and Brave And The Bold?
I took a couple of weeks to think about it, while I made a point of buying up more of his comics. Especially the ones I knew I’d never be able to live without, if he threw me out and forbade me to come back…