Centerfold

June, 1986:

She was wearing a yellow rainslicker. It wasn't raining. Perhaps it had just stopped. Red lipstick, red boots. Nothing else. Nothing. Big brown eyes, and hair in brown ringlets. Among her likes were "rollerskating in the rain." Seriously. And this was written without a hint of cliche.


I hid them in the woods behind the backyard.

There was an old crate, resting on leaves and branches, turned on its side. It was big enough to sit in.  A perfect clubhouse. The wood at the bottom was slightly rotted, owing to the damp soil beneath.

It was for this reason that I had to use the plastic bags. I would carefully wrap each magazine in its own clear plastic Ziploc bag, like a giant version of the clear sleeves we used to preserve baseball cards.  The ones that had to be kept in mint condition, the McGwire Olympic Team card, the Ripken and DiMaggio rookie cards, and my collection of Don Mattingly cards, valuable not because they were rookies, but because it was Donnie Baseball.

They were all Playboys. That's the only of this sort of magazine I knew existed, because that's the only one my Dad had.

His hiding spot - buried in the middle of a stack of Popular Science, National Geographic, and Scientific American that rested on the back of his toilet- was elegantly brilliant, albeit flawed. Hidden in plain sight sure seemed smart. But in the end, a good part of his collection had been smuggled out, wrapped in plastic, and tucked underneath my wooden crate of a hideout in the woods.