Pron of Yore
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Myself and a pair of friends (my best friend and one other friend), all 9 years old, found an old Playboy Silver anniversary issue in the woods. This was the late '70s and this was the first time any of us had ever seen anything like *that.* It was big, thick, had a silver cover on it, and was kind of damp and warped from being out in the woods for a few days. It had a pictorial on vampires and hookers or something that really turned on my best friend, on each 'turn' that we took looking through the magazine at the cartoons and pictures, he would invariably go back to that one pictorial and just drool over it. He was the emerging metal freak of the group, so I think that was some kind of fantasy for him come true, two naked bisexual vampire chicks having sex with a male vampire in a coffin.
After a ten minute review of the pron, we three were instantly catapulted into an elite genre for our age. We had seen a naked woman and a "dirty" magazine. Woo-hoo! We hid the magazine under some pine straw near a fallen tree until we could figure out what to do with it and all left for lunch at our respective houses. My best friend and I, having a huge stroke of mental common sense and emergency grade hindsight, went back to get the magazine twenty minutes later and moved it to a 'safer' location, like in his backpack hidden inside a Judas Priest record album jacket under his big blue denim three ring binder that had all of his D&D characters and drawings in it. He used that to sneak it into his house past his parents and hid it under the mattress of his bed.
The other friend, as we had rightly figured, returned a little too slowly to take the magazine (and probably later claim that it vanished or was stolen when he went back to look at it) and when he couldn't find the magazine, he ran around and organized a neighborhood search party. Yes, this other friend had every kid in the neighborhood out looking for the Playboy that was hidden in the woods. My best friend and I returned to the same spot two hours later only to find twenty kids ranging from 4 years old to a pair of fourteen year old bullies looking for the mysterious Playboy that the other friend had told EVERYONE in the neighborhood about.
There were little girls in little groups with sticks hacking and slashing at piles of pine straw, throwing it in the air, even the guy's older sister and his younger sister were looking for the Playboy. My best friend and I stood around, watching the search party hack up the woods with sticks and branches and old golf clubs and then the other friend came over and accused my friend and I of taking the Playboy. We played dumb and pretended not to even know what he was talking about, that we had just stopped by to see why all the kids were in the woods. This got the other friend in a lot of trouble with the other kids since apparently he had promised the first one to find the Playboy five dollars (a lot of money back then, especially when you got like a $2 a week allowance).
My best friend and I left, laughing at the ring of children slowly closing in on the other friend. Three days later he told us that the two older guys had shoved him around, took his $5 bill, then picked him up and threw him in the creek. The sad thing is, that had been his lunch money for the next two weeks and my best friend and I watched and laughed each day as this guy sat in the cafeteria and didn't eat anything because he didn't have any money and he was too scared to tell his mom what he had been doing and why he didn't have any lunch money.
The funny thing is, four days after that, his little sister ratted on him because he hid one of her Barbie dolls and his mom found out that he had used his lunch money to bribe his sister and the neighborhood kids to look for a Playboy. He got grounded for two weeks. The Playboy, too hot to keep, was dismantled into individual pictures and given out to my other close group of friends. We threw away all the uncool stuff like the stories and news articles and just kept a few Gahan Wilson cartoons and the hot, hot, hot (to us) pictures. My best friend, the metal head, of course, put dibs on the vampire sex picture set and successfully defended his claim to it. I thought the lead girl in the picture set looked like Debby Harry of the group Blondie, only with white cake powder dusted all over her.
After that, we started looking in the woods at every vacant lot that year. We found quite a lot of 'dirty' magazines, which we came to know as GOLD! We couldn't believe that people were just throwing this stuff out in the woods!
There was even a quite impressive three story tree-house on a vacant lot, complete with crude fireplace, where the local bullies went to smoke pot. We 'raided' it one day during the holidays while the bullies were out of town and made off with two backpacks full of Cheri, Hustler, OUI, Heavy Metal, Penthouse, Playboy, and some others I forget. You try to climb out of a three-story treehouse, thirty feet off the ground, with a backpack full of twenty pounds of pron when you are 8 years old. It ain’t easy… but it was worth it!
That was the biggest haul ever. One guy later got caught, and his mom drove him over to the vacant lot with the tree house and made him climb back up and put the pron back in the tree house before she punished him. Luckily, the bullies were still out of town, but the later word around school was that someone or several someones was going to get a major ass kicking for stealing "stuff" from their tree house.
No one ever knew who it was or found out.
At least that friend had the good sense to keep his mouth shut over the fact.