What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?
Recently, I took my eight-year-old fraternal twins, Maggie and Alison, and my wife Lara to a gastropub in South Redondo Beach on Catalina Avenue, an area referred to as The Hollywood Riviera. Lara and her close friend, both sixth-grade teachers, had eaten at the pub a few weeks earlier and had some cocktails after their parent-teacher conferences, and Lara said I’d like the pub’s spicy brussels sprouts and hot shrimp wontons, among other things, for my ritual weekly cheat meal.
My wife teaches English, and I teach college writing. Between us, we have close to fifty years of full-time teaching under our belts. You’d think our third-grade twins would be at the top of the class, but that’s not the case. Alison is doing okay, not great, just okay, and Maggie is about a grade behind in reading, writing, and math. Since she was in kindergarten, Maggie has been on an IEP, an Individualized Learning Program, a type of jargon I didn’t know about until becoming a parent.
We live about three miles from this part of Redondo Beach, but I rarely go to this block of clubs and restaurants anymore. This area reminds me of the late 90s when I was divorced and single, frequenting the clubs at a time I was still harboring illusions about being the sort of man who thinks he can wow the ladies with his remarkable charm and keen intelligence. I was so full of myself I actually liked the sound of my own voice and was proud of the bold opinions I blasted in public spaces for the whole world to hear. I have a hard time forgiving myself for that.
There are two other factors that make me avoid this part of town. For one, in the late 90s I remember some reality dating shows were videotaped in the area, and I was stupid enough to waste several hours of my life watching these shows on TV. For two, my wife and her friends joke about how the area is infamous for its large population of cougars, middle-aged women on the prowl for younger men.
Married with children, I look at my domesticated existence as a sort of witness protection program where I try to keep as big a distance as possible between where I am now and my sordid past. I don’t need to be around cougars, reality show dating sites, and other reminders of my moral recklessness.
I wish I could just laugh at myself for my “youthful indiscretions,” as a hack politician once said when trying to massage over some shabby behaviors that painted him as a moral hypocrite during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. But instead, I shoulder what feels like thousands of metric tons of guilt and self-loathing so that returning to this “scene of the crime” had me roiling with anxieties.
We parked in the spacious, mostly empty meter lot by the Trader Joe’s and walked a couple of blocks north on Catalina Avenue. I didn’t recognize half the restaurants, which had a low survival rate in this high-rent district. It was a balmy Monday evening in late January, and the streets were nearly deserted. I saw restaurant owners, long-faced and forlorn, standing outside their doors, and I imagined them calculating the amount of financial hemorrhaging they were suffering as their empty restaurants accrued rent, utility, and labor costs.
Rather than being excited about making a rare appearance from the confines of my suburban cave, I felt sorry for these hapless restaurant owners who, standing on the sidewalk, exuded an air of fear and desperation as we walked past them.
The gastropub my wife wanted me to try had a high-polish chrome bar that you could see from the sidewalk. You could hear techno pop droning from inside. Elevated high on bar stools, there were two attractive women sitting across from each other and two couples laughing at each other’s jokes. One of the men had a thick mustache and a coral orange V-neck velour with a gold chain draped around his neck. His bushy full head of brown hair may or may not have been real. Even his tanned face was suspect, possibly the result of some product you rub into your skin. He was laughing at something he had just told the others. He looked like someone I once knew, yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
The hostess, who also doubled as our server on this slow night, was wearing jeans and a jean jacket. She was in her early thirties, had unkempt dark hair and appeared somewhat flustered by running the front of the restaurant all by herself. She seemed like a sweet person by the way she looked at my daughters. I can tell fake from real adoration when it comes to how people look at my girls.
To be honest, the food that we ordered that evening was an abomination. The soggy brussels sprouts were steamed, not roasted, and drowning in vinegar, rancid oil, and hot sauce. The shrimp wontons seemed identical to those you purchase in the frozen food section of a grocery store. My “house” cheeseburger, which I ordered on the server’s recommendation, was nothing to write home about and cost three times more than burgers that were far better. Then there was the matter of my daughters’ “chicken tenders,” which looked like deep-fried cow pies flattened by a tractor, dried for several days in the hot sun, and then pried off the tractor’s tire treads. When I saw the “chicken tenders” steaming on my daughters’ plates, I looked up at my wife Lara and said, “Really?”
All of this substandard food, mind you, was endured with the inflated expectations of the grandiose online menu that I had studied for two weeks in anticipation of this event.
My being upset by the revolting food was tempered by my conviction that the server was a single mom struggling to pay the bills. Because I am convinced of this, I will not the name the restaurant. Nor will I write a nasty Yelp review. I don’t need to increase my Yelp reviewer ranking if it means I’d be threatening the livelihood of the server who for all I know can barely afford to feed her children.
Lara shared my assessment of the pub’s bad food. She said the brussels sprouts were vastly inferior to what she had had a few weeks earlier. Perhaps, she speculated, the cocktails she had enjoyed with her friend had compromised her powers of discernment.
To add to my disappointment, I had a lot riding on my cheat meal. I eat a rather austere, semi-ketogenic diet for six and a two-thirds days during the week and then have one precious meal where I allow myself to indulge.
At least the dessert was decent. We had some kind of ice cream thing coated in chocolate. We cut it four ways. After I scarfed mine down, I looked at my twins and saw that the dessert ingredients were smeared all over their hair, their faces, their fingers and even their black faux leather jackets.
“There’s no way they’re going to sit in my brand new Honda,” I said. “My car will be ruined!”
My voice was louder than I had wished. As was typical, I had failed to calibrate the pitch and volume of my words.
My wife stood up and said she’d take the girls to the bathroom to get washed up. “This might take a while,” she said.
I was thankful my daughters were going to get a thorough washing as the thought of those sticky dessert ingredients getting all over the interior of my new Honda horrified me.
Alone at the table, I heard an annoying cackle. I looked up and saw that it was the guy with the bushy mustache and the fake tan. He was leaning against his date, putting his cheek right next to hers. She was tolerating him, but she didn’t appear to be enjoying his company as much as he appeared to be enjoying hers.
In that moment I remembered who the mustached man reminded me of, an unpleasant figure from my younger days.
This memory would take me back to the summer of 1977. I was fifteen years old and already a competitive bodybuilder. Just about every day that summer, my mom would drop me off at Don Castro Lake in Hayward, California, where I’d work on my tan. These were the days before people worried about skin damage and skin cancer, so I doused my flesh with zero-sun protection Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil, which smelled of coconuts and bananas. The aroma intoxicated me. Whenever I think of the arousal of adolescent sexuality, I always remember the smell of that tanning oil.
It was at Lake Don Castro while I was engaging in dangerous, unbridled tanning that I saw a man who captured my curiosity. Never learning his name, I simply thought of him as the Playboy. In his late twenties and owner of a black 1974 Chevrolet Camaro with white racing stripes, the Playboy had wavy brown hair, a thick perfectly manicured mustache, an even brown tan showcased by wearing nothing but blue Speedo men’s briefs, and gold chain and white Puka shell bead necklaces, which dangled over his hairy chest. He always had a white Frisbee, a portable beverage cooler with the Playboy logo on it, and a boombox. He’d play the great disco hits from the time: KC and the Sunshine Band, Donna Summers, and the Bee Gees. He’d always meet girls and persuade them to play Frisbee with him.
Hearing him go through his spiel everyday, it soon became clear he was following a well-rehearsed script. He asked the girls the same questions in the same order and he told them the same details about his personal life in the same sequence. Every day I heard the following: The Playboy paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned a lot of real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. The Playboy would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra to the gates of paradise.
The Playboy checked every box to be a cliché of the smug male. It was as if he had gone to Smarmy Male University, had studied for years at mastering his playboy moves, and had graduated with honors.
This would be no exaggeration. I know for a fact that the Playboy had studied Eric Weber’s best-selling book How to Pick Up Girls! I was well aware of Eric Weber’s notorious pick-up book because a classmate had brought a copy to school, and I could tell the Playboy was using the book’s lines verbatim. The gist of that hideous book was that a man should shamelessly pursue any woman he wants with whatever crass means are at his disposal, that he should never accept a woman’s refusal, and that relentlessly stalking a woman was the ultimate strategy to being an effective womanizer.
Every day the Playboy seemed to have gotten cozy with a new beautiful woman. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach’s imported sand.
It should be no surprise that I idolized the Playboy. He was the template of manliness during my formative years. Learning how to be a man was my main focus, and I sought knowledge on this topic from some rather dubious sources.
One such dubious source for learning the finer points of manliness was Playboy magazine. My father, like a lot of ex-military men of that time, had a subscription to Playboy, and I read every issue religiously, not just ogling at the photos, but studying the articles for clues on what it would take to be a real man.
One thing you should know about me is that I have a photographic memory so that Playboy articles I read when I was eleven years old are still emblazoned in my mind. Here are a couple of examples: I read an article about how Americans eat sausages with a knife and fork whereas Europeans eat sausages the proper way, holding them in their hands while dipping the whole sausages in puddles of mustard. The writer wanted to persuade the American reader to adopt the “more civilized” European method.
Here’s another example from when I was fifteen: I was reading about my astrological sign, Scorpio, in which the author made the claim that Scorpio men, unlike any other men, are endowed with a prostate that produces a glandular secretion of potent musk and honeysuckle, and that this unique scent drives women crazy. When I recalled this article to my wife some time ago, telling her that because I was a Scorpio my sweat was the equivalent of a natural aphrodisiac, she laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair.
But most of all, I remember Playboy’s self-congratulatory tone evidenced in the caption: “What sort of man reads Playboy?” The answer varied every month, but it was essentially the same thing: The Playboy reader was manly, self-assured, successful, rich, independent, charismatic, cosmopolitan, forward-thinking, and a bit rebellious. Women flocked to him of course. And the message was if you’re not like this paradigm of masculinity, then start reading Playboy and join the club, because you’re missing out, loser.
So now at Don Castro Lake, I had met the consummate Playboy in the flesh.
There he was every day, hitting on women with the help of his book How to Meet Girls! And he was playing Frisbee with the beach’s most beautiful women on the grassy knoll. He was my hero, my role model, my image of what I would someday be.
In the mornings before I went to the lake to study the suave moves of the mustached Playboy, I’d work out for free at the nearby university gym where I met Paul, a tall muscular African American man who described himself as a former homeless drug addict and now a follower of Jesus. Paul had a thick unkempt beard, was bald on top, and wore baggy gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. He carried around a tattered green backpack filled with Bibles and religious pamphlets. While we were doing bench press together, Paul told me that he was once a track star at this very university, which now employed him as a maintenance engineer for the athletic department.
“I did it all, man, hurdles, shot put, discus. I was a national finalist in every category, but I started hanging out with the wrong crowd. Once I smoked a joint laced with PCP, and that made me go crazy. I started having flashbacks. Once I ran out of my house with a steak knife while chasing a UFO. Next thing I knew, I was homeless, playing the guitar under a bridge in the rain. But God found me in my despair. He always does.”
I nodded.
“Look, man, you’re young. You’re all muscle. You’re getting all the ladies, no doubt.”
This wasn’t true because I was too shy around girls at the time, but I didn’t contradict him.
“But let me tell you, man,” he continued. “You may be too young to understand this now, but someday you’re going to come across a mountain, and you’re not going to be able to climb up that mountain. Because every man finds there’s a mountain he can’t climb without the help of Jesus.”
He reached into his backpack and handed me a religious booklet. People in the gym were giving me a sorry look because I was dumb enough to let myself get into a conversation with Paul the Jesus Freak.
Even though Paul could be a little too preachy for my tastes, I continued to work out with him over that summer. It turns out we had a special connection in that we shared a favorite song, the Isley Brothers’ “Voyage to Atlantis,” which would often play over the gym’s loudspeakers. Whenever that song came on KSFX, 103.7 FM, Paul would use his key to open up the cabinet where there was a stereo. He’d turn up the volume just for that song, and then he’d start singing along with it. His voice was impressive, I told him, though no one could match the vocal of Ronald Isley.
One morning, Paul invited me to attend a Bible study. I told him I couldn’t go. I had to go to work. By “work,” I meant I had to go to Lake Don Castro, work on my tan, and feast my eyes on all the beautiful ladies.
That afternoon, I saw the Playboy. He was in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study the Playboy’s methods. I was half listening to the Playboy talk about how amazing he was and half reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander’s best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker.
That’s when I heard the Playboy give out an alarming howl.
“Oh my God,” one of the girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”
I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.
The bee sting’s effects were immediate. The Playboy began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.
“No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”
He was fighting the pain because the sort of man who reads Playboy is not a whiner in the face of small setbacks.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.
“I’m fine. Really, I am.”
He wasn’t letting the bee sting stop him because the sort of man who reads Playboy remains tough in the face of any challenge.
“I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.
“No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
He wasn’t going to let the two girls see him in pain because the sort of man who reads Playboy is a warrior who never shares his wounds with anyone.
By now, the man’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was giving him proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.
An ambulance came soon after. But it was too late. The Playboy had died of anaphylactic shock.
A small article describing the circumstances of his death was published in the local newspaper the next day. I remember being disappointed by the lack of masculinity in the sound of his name: Richard Abigail. Of course, the real cause of death was not in the article. His real cause of death was not a bee sting. It was vanity perhaps. Or bluster. Or some lame-brained definition of masculinity. Or all of the above.
As I sat inside the gastropub and thought about the Playboy’s demise, I heard a crash and looked up to see the mustached man had dropped his drink over by the bar. There were shards of glass on the floor. His girlfriend said, “You’ve had enough.”
“We’ll see about that, young lady.”
“Yes, we will.”
The girlfriend looked cross, the kind of expression that suggested she had witnessed him deteriorate at these evening functions more times than she wanted to.
There was silence. The few people in the bar stared at the unhappy couple as the bartender walked over with a dustpan and broom and swept up the mess.
I felt like I was in a morose ghost town. What happened to all the pep and excitement of the bar scene that I was a part of in the 1980s and 1990s?
Maybe the problem wasn’t them. Maybe the problem was me. I was too old to be here. Without all those hormones of youth pumping through my veins, I was just a ghost of my former self. My life was now so boring my biggest thrill of the day was to add Sriracha almonds to my smoked trout arugula salad or to switch from sandalwood shaving cream to patchouli or to “unbox” another Seiko diver watch I didn’t need so my YouTube subscribers could marvel at the way the Seiko provided “wrist presence” on my brawny forearm.
Lara and the girls came back from the bathroom. Lara said, “They’re clean now. Do they pass inspection for your new car? Or do I need to call Uber?”
“No, they’re fine,” I said.
I could tell by Lara’s tone that I must have been more strident than I wanted to be when I observed how messy the girls were. I hated myself for not being aware that I was being harsh with my family until well after the fact.
I thought of Paul the Jesus Freak’s words: “We all come across a mountain we can’t climb.”
What was my mountain? I’m sure there were too many mountains to count, but if I had to pick just one I’d say I needed to grow into a mature adult, not remain the intemperate selfish adolescent that is always on my trail finding a way to sabotage my best efforts. The damn thing is a stalker, and I seem to be fated to be constantly looking behind my shoulder to make sure it doesn’t overtake me.
What sort of man reads Playboy? That’s the wrong question. What defines a real man? That is the correct question. A real man is someone who identifies the mountain he must climb, and he climbs it. He may get help, or he may not. But he climbs that mountain all the same.
Comments