Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“What, I drive around the square?”
“That's rat, honey. You makes the skwaya.” She was talking to me the way I would talk
to a French person. She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand,
though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they
weretobeemergingfromsuchanelegantlookingwoman.AsIwentoutthedoorshecalled
out,“Hitdoanreally matter anyhowcuzhitbe'sclosednow.”Shereally saidhit,shereally
said be's.
I said, “Pardon?”
“Hitbe'sclosednow.Youkinlookaroundthegrounzifyouwoan,butyoucain'tgoinsod.”
Iwint outsod thinking that Miss Hippy was goan be hard work.Iwalked around the square
lookingatthestores,mostofthemsellingmaterialsforacountryclublifestyle.Handsome,
well-dressed women bounded in and out. They were all tanned and rich-looking. On one
of the corners was a bookstore with a magazine stand. I went in and looked around. At
the magazine stand I picked up a Playboy and browsed through it. As one does. I was dis-
tressed to see that Playboy is now printed on that awful glossy paper that makes the pages
stick together like wet paper towels. You can't flick through it anymore. You have to prise
each page apart, like peeling paper off a stick of butter. Eventually I peeled my way to the
mainphotospread.Itwasofanakedparaplegic.IsweartoGod.Shewassprawled-perhaps
not the best choice of words in the context-in various poses on beds and divans, looking
pert and indisputably attractive, but with satiny material draped artfully over her presum-
ably withered legs. Now is it me, or does that seem just a little bit strange?
Clearly Playboy had lost its way, and this made me feel old and sad and foreign, because
Playboy had been a cornerstone of American life for as long as I could remember. Every
manandboyIknewreadPlayboy.Somemen,likemydad,pretendednotto.Heusedtoget
embarrassed if you caught him looking at it at the supermarket, and would pretend that he
wasreallylookingforBetterHomesandGardensorsomething.Buthereadit.Heevenhad
a little stash of men's magazines in an old hatbox at the back of his clothes closet. Every
kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought
was secret and which the kid knew all about. Once in a while we would swap our dads'
magazines amongourselves andthenimagine their perplexity whentheywenttothecloset
and found that instead of last month's issue of Gent they now possessed a two-year-old
copy of Nugget and, as a bonus, a paperback book called Ranchhouse Lust. You could do
this knowing that your dad would never say a word to you about it. All that would happen
would be that the next time you went back the stash would be in a different place. I don't
