The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [30]
The magazines our fathers read had names like Dude and Swell and the women in them were unappealing, with breasts like deflated footballs and hips of abundant fleshiness. The women in Playboy were young and pretty. They didn’t look like somebody you’d meet on shore leave. Beyond the incalculable public service Playboy performed by printing pictures of attractive naked women was the way it offered a whole attendant life-style. It was like a monthly manual telling you how to live, how to play the stock market and buy a hi-fi and mix sophisticated cocktails and intoxicate women with your wit and sense of style. Growing up in Iowa, you could use help with such matters. I used to read every issue from cover to cover, even the postal regulations at the bottom of the contents page. We all did. Hugh Hefner was a hero to all of us. Looking back now. I can hardly believe it because really – let’s be frank – Hugh Hefner has always struck me as a kind of an asshole. I mean honestly, if you had all that money, would you want a huge circular bed and to spend your life in a silk dressing-gown and carpet slippers? Would you want to fill a wing of your house with the sort of girls who would be happy to engage in pillow-fights in the nude and wouldn’t mind you taking pictures of them while so occupied for publication in a national magazine? Would you want to come downstairs of an evening and find Buddy Hackett, Sammy Davis Jr and Joey Bishop standing around the piano in your living room? Do I hear a chorus of ‘Shit, no’s’ out there? Yet I bought it whole. We all did.
Playboy was like an older brother to my generation. And over the years, just like an older brother, it had changed. It had had a couple of financial reversals, a little problem with gambling, and had eventually moved out to the coast. Just like real brothers do. We had lost touch. I hadn’t really thought about it for years. And then here suddenly, in Oxford, Mississippi, of all places, who should I run into but Playboy. It was exactly like seeing an old high school hero and discovering he was bald and boring and still wearing those lurid V-neck sweaters and shiny black shoes with gold braid that you thought were so neat in about 1961. It was a shock to realize that both Playboy and I were a lot older than I had thought and that we had nothing in common any more. Sadly I returned the Playboy to the rack and realized it would be a long time – well, thirty days anyway – before I picked up another one.
I looked at the other magazines. There were at least 200 of them, but they all had titles like Machine-Gun Collectors, Obese Bride, Christian Woodworker, Home Surgery Digest. There was nothing for a normal person, so I left.
I drove out on South Lamar Street towards Rowan Oak, having first made the square, following the tourist lady’s instructions as best I could, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it. To tell you the truth, this didn’t disturb me a whole lot because I knew it was closed and in any case I have never managed to read a William Faulkner novel beyond about page three (roughly half-way through the first sentence), so I wasn’t terribly interested in what his house looked like. At any rate, in driving around I came across the campus of the University of Mississippi and that was much more interesting. It was a handsome campus, full of fine buildings that looked like banks and courthouses. Long shadows fell across the lawns. Young people, all looking as healthy and as wholesome as a bottle of milk, walked along with books tucked under their arms or sat at tables doing homework. At one table, a black student sat with white people. Things had clearly changed. It so happened that twenty-five years ago to the very week there had been a riot on this campus when a young black named James Meredith, escorted by 500 federal marshals, enrolled as a student at Ole Miss. The people of Oxford were so inflamed at the thought of having to share their campus with a ‘Niggra