Centerfold of My Dreams

It takes a special kind of woman to buy her husband a collection of old Playboy Magazines (circ. 1963) at an estate sale. Sharon did just that while I was out of town conducting a workshop. It was a pleasant surprise when I came home and for all the right reasons.

Perusing old centerfolds was fascinating because it took me back to a time and place that no longer exists for this country. The old magazines were a time capsule of our, some of us at least, lives. They proved to be a political, social, sexual and cultural study of America back in the Sixties. Nineteen Sixty-Three - more specifically, exactly fifty-five years ago.

This ‘real life’ anthropological study reflected many of our country’s mores, morals, hang-ups, misconceptions, prejudices, assumptions and naiveté most of which have all been washed away by time and fact.

I spaced out my collection to one magazine per sunset. Reclining on my lounge chair, I let my imagination and keen eyes savor those old tired, mainly black and white pages, of an era that existed primarily in the imagination of the publisher and his readers.

This time around I spent more time on the articles than the centerfolds. In fact, advertising today shows more eye-popping flesh than most of the centerfolds did back then. I actually read a lot of the articles unlike before when I just lied about that.

Even with a quick glance at those women with their eye-popping assets, one can see they must have been artificially induced. Appendages just don’t grow like that in real life. However, Playboy was never about ‘real life.’

But that imaginative image of the cool sophisticated male along with the Playboy penthouse, fast cars, exotic vacations and nightly rendezvous at some dark, smoky jazz club where ‘lucky’ was the constant number, was all part of the mystic, lore, stories, lies, wet dreams and rampant imagination that Hefner had connected with. With a monthly circulation of just under three million and at .60 cents a pop, the man/publisher/image-maker was clearly on to something.

Studied at length the magazines paint a primitive yet persuasive picture of the typical ‘man about town.’ It was a wonderful caricature imagined in the mind of Hugh Hefner and visualized in photographs, paintings, suggestive cartoons and the every-present ‘girl next door’ sans her clothing. I especially liked studying the Playboy Philosophy for Hugh’s take on sexual freedom, the ‘Who Reads Playboy’ ads for their subtle hint at materialism as the ultimate goal and especially anything centering on the collegiate experience.

Back in 1963, I was in my second year at the College of St. Thomas, quickly running out of money to pay the tuition and falling for the girl next campus. It was a whirlwind of confusing emotions and envy at ‘those guys’ on the quad who seemed to have the clothes, the cars and of course, the girls. I had gotten sucked up into the fantasy that was ‘Playboy on campus,’ a subtle yet powerful advertising mechanism to sell product and illusion to malleable young minds.

Those fading, mainly black and white, magazines brought back all those old memories of yearning for I didn’t know what, jealousy at the guys who got the girls, and envy for their perceived lifestyle.

The ads were wonderfully effective in their subtle yet persuasive manner of painting a picture of things I didn’t know I wanted or needed. The Playboy life style painted a façade of sophistication, education, money and women then somehow implied it was for all of us to attain.

The most impactful of these delusions occurred in the fall of 1964 when I was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco. While lounging in the enlisted men’s rec. room I happened upon the Fall Campus Edition of Playboy. There, spread out before my envious eyes, were beautiful coeds, Mustang convertibles and fashion-conscious jocks lounging about the quad in their latest duds and school flags. It was a world that seemed a million or more miles away and a lifetime out of reach. Looking at those beautiful girls made me sad, envious, and just a little bit lecherous.

As I learned over time, the girls or really the carefully crafted manikins’ of the same persuasion, were wonderful dangling carrots to dream about as I carved out an existence and make good use of my time while serving Uncle Sam. Upon my discharge, the illusions disappeared and reality with all of its warts, dreams and reality-bites took its place. As we used to say: ‘Welcome back to the real world.’

Then I would add with a grin, ‘but thanks for the dreams along the way.’

Old Man and the Sea

One of my many fantasies growing up in land-locked Saint Paul, Minnesota was to sail the seven seas on a tramp steamer. At the time I probably wasn’t even sure what a tramp steamer was. But the name conjured up images of beautiful brown girls, swaying palm trees and vast blue oceans. Perhaps it was some ‘50s Errol Flynn movie that warped my malleable mind into wondrous thoughts of riding the high seas.

The Run for Home by Leland Frederick Cooley

By my mid-teens, it had become a feverish dream burning a hole in my idle hours. I began perusing magazines, novels and seafaring books for clues on how to enter that maritime world. I devoured Joshua Slocum’s ‘Sailing Alone around the world’ and ‘Moby Dick.’ Jack London’s ‘The Sea Wolf’ gripped my imagination more than Dick Tracy or Tarzan ever could.

In fall of 1961, a Life magazine article pushed me over the edge. It was entitled: ‘Before the Mast’ and subtitled: ‘A farm boy ships aboard a freighter.’ The article went on to chronical the adventures of an Iowa farm boy who was selected by the Seafarers International Union hiring hall in New Orleans to work aboard the M/V Del Monte that was sailing off to Brazil. By the end of the article the young sailor was in Rio de Janeiro and getting a tattoo. I was hooked.  I sent off an introductory letter to some maritime union in Detroit seeking employment on any ship available. Their form letter response demanded an in-person interview and I didn’t have the bus fare to get there. Totally dejected, I went to college instead.

Fast forward several lifetimes and after college I went to live in Europe. I ended up working at a Danish laundry outside of Copenhagen. Weekends were spent wandering the harbor and talking to the marginal characters who inhabited that strange dockside world. After a month or so I applied for employment on a Norwegian freighter bound for who knows where. I can’t remember why I was turned down; lack of experience, my glasses or my foreign status. The only available work was as a deck hand or dish washer and I didn’t qualify for either. Go figure. A couple of rough weather weekend runs to Germany by ferry boat got that seafaring wanderlust out of my system for good. Or so I thought.

Upon my return to Minnesota I used to imagine Duluth as my gateway/getaway to the great lakes and the open seas beyond. Lake Nokomis became my Inland Ocean. My girlfriend and I used to drive up to the Twin Ports. We would find some forlorn hilltop overlooking the harbor and hunker down. We’d drink cheap wine, eat cheese and crackers, and wax philosophically about foreign lands and the exotic travels we imagined we might do some day.

Later on in life Sharon and I discovered river cruising in Europe. We found that pace much more to our liking. It was relaxed, controlled and manageable. My youthful fantasies had subsided and the thoughts of living in the same work clothes for more than twenty-four hours caused me a chill.

Recently a ten-day tour of Cuba put us on a cruise ship for the first time. The Celestyal Crystal is one of the smaller cruise ships in the cruise industry. It could hold more than one thousand passengers. Ours had only six hundred. But that was still about five hundred and fifty too many for my liking. Sadly, that ship is as close as I’m ever going to get to my tramp steamer at sea.

I’m an old man now (when I’m willing to admit it.) My imagined seafaring days never came to be and I’m OK with that. It was a fantasy born in boredom, a sense of abandonment and no inkling of the exciting years ahead.

As I matured and came to understand my own idiosyncrasies, quirks, strengthens and weak-nesses I realized it was best that I didn’t end up on some cluttered, vomit-strained deck somewhere. A deckhand’s life was not for me. Laguna Beach is a fair substitute whenever I feel the need to suck in salt air and feel sand between my toes.

My world became rich, involved, and stimulating. The women I knew and the men I befriended were all part and parcel of another world that wove a tapestry of memories as firm as any ships log possibly could. My life ended up a journey well taken with never a sea storm to swell against my ship of state. I crested life’s rolling swells of good and bad experiences always aiming for a horizon that promised only better times ahead.

It still does.