Part 1 of a 14,389,003-part series that serves as a reminder that every time one of my kids does something dumb, I've done something dumber.
Every suburban neighborhood has its own set of local urban legends, be it the old woman up the street with a glass eye, the dog that bit off a mailman's leg, or the crazy man that shoots at you if you get too close to his shack deep in the woods.
Or the former teenager's clubhouse that is full of Playboy magazines.
When I was growing up, I was best friends with three other guys in my neighborhood. The four of us were whitebread wusses, but we were also money hungry. We were constantly concocting cockamamie schemes that might put a few quarters in our pockets. While most almost-teenagers would've converted those quarters into packs of cigarettes, we were more interested in buying wrestling magazines and playing a few video games at the Quickie Mart in town.
See? We were whitebread wusses.
One day we were riding our bikes when another boy in our neighborhood came running up to us. "Guys!" he yelled. "Look what I found!" And then he proudly held a Playboy magazine over his head. Of course, we all crowded around him like he was holding... a copy of Playboy over his head.
"Where did you get that?" one of us asked.
"In Fred's clubhouse," he replied.
"Won't he get mad?"
"He probably hasn't been out there in years. There's so many of them he won't miss one!"
"Can we have it?"
"No! Go get your own!"
And so the wheels were set in motion. Not only did the four of us want our own copy of Playboy magazine, we decided we would sell the remaining copies to nudity-deprived boys in our neighborhood. So we decided to all lay out of school one day and steal the magazines.
We met at 10:00 AM on that fateful day. One of us was even dressed in black from head-to-toe (it was probably me; even at such a tender age, I was still fairly neurotic). Chuckie, the chubbiest one of the gang, would be the lookout while the three of us entered the clubhouse and liberated the long-forgotten magazines. When we entered the clubhouse and saw the magazines, there really should've been a glowing light and the sound of angels playing overhead. It was that magical.
The three of us quickly gathered as many magazines as possible and hurried to the woods in my backyard to examine our booty (hahaha): thirty-one copies of Playboy and three copies of Hustler magazine (which made the Playboys look like issues of Highlights). The magazines weren't in the best of shape; they had been left in the elements for years. But we could see all we needed to see as we carefully peeled back the sticky rain-damaged pages (at least I pray to God they were rain-damaged pages).
I think it was Chuckie who said what was on all of our minds. "Guys? I think we should keep all of these for ourselves."
Or at least I thought we were all on the same wavelength. "No," John replied. "We shouldn't be looking at these. They're naughty. We should burn them." We talked John out of burning them and decided to hide them in the woods until Saturday. We decided to sell a few of them and keep the rest for ourselves.
When we met on Saturday morning, John didn't show up. Finally, we gave up on him and decided to go to the woods to get the magazines. When we got to the spot where we had hidden the magazines, all we found were their sad, pitiful, and charred remains.
Asshole.
Youthful Idiocy: The Great Playboy Heist
