Some of the best education I received came, not in school, but on the floor in front of the magazine rack in my father’s drug store, where I started waiting on customers when I was eight. (I learned to add and subtract by making change from the cash register. I was darn good at it.) I started out with comic books, but by age 10, I was ready for something more grounded in real life. Even Super Girl and Wonder Woman have their limitations.
The local magazine distributor wasn’t very discriminating, and the magazines we stocked were definitely second-tier. (A few years later, I’d have to go across the street to the Safeway to get my Seventeen fix.) Once a woman came up to my father and announced that we had “the dirtiest magazine collection in town!” For a time after that, he’d glance through the titles when they arrived and pull out one or two, but eventually he lost interest and the purience of our stash was again guaranteed. Thus, I had all sorts of areas to explore: True Crime, Modern Romance, Stag, Screenplay, Tiger Beat, Western Adventures, and the most coveted of all, Mad Magazine. (Some wag claims that girls couldn’t possibly appreciate Alfred E. Newman and his friends, but I inhaled them all: Spy versus Spy, Horrifying Cliches and those wicked movie parodies, especially “The Poopsidedown Adventure” and “Star Blecch,” all of it!)
I would usually wait until Sunday afternoons after church when the store was closed and my parents were napping to drown myself in pulp fiction. I’d grab a stack of magazines and a Coke from the water-filled cooler, hunker down on the cold tile floor behind the American Greetings card display rack and explore the adult world until my little cheeks were numb.
My pubescent 12-year-old self (with my 15 extra pounds and early-onset acne) particularly ate up the romance magazines. I remember one thrilling account of a girl who, after a long crush on a particular boy, finally ended up locking lips with him until “celestial chords of music rang in her head.” Two paragraphs later, she realizes she is pregnant. I was puzzled. Is that how it worked? What part did the chords of music play in her getting knocked up? Was there an effective birth control against such chords? This was much more interesting than comic books.
Grandma Pyne, the neighborhood sage who came in to dust and stock the shelves that I ignored, caught me reading the romances once, and shook her head. “Those aren’t so bad,” she said, smiling. “They’ll teach you a lesson.” And they did — None of those lovesick girls in the stories got away with ANYTHING.
The men’s magazines, however, mystified me. (Alas, there were no Playboys. Dad wasn’t THAT oblivious…) But the ones we got were full of gun and tackle ads, booze recipes, car accessory reviews and stories of leering men and victimized women. Where was the romance in that? It was the beginning of my suspicions that males were an entirely different species.
I used to scour the Hollywood magazines for stories about my heartthrob, Richard Chamberlain of “Dr. Kildare.” (Oh, great. I really carbon-dated myself there.) I knew all his likes and dislikes, had a nice collection of beefcake photos of him and even found an address where I could write to him. (Okay, fast forward 15 years, and imagine my CHAGRIN when I discovered the bitter truth. They LIED to me!) But I did love those star magazines, the precursors to the whole Entertainment Tonight industry. Why wasn’t I born Sally Fields? Why did I have to be me?
And then there were all the fashion/diet/style magazines, which gave me a head-start among all my peers in the self-loathing department. Even the fashionable seventh-graders didn’t have as many reasons to hate themselves as I did. And, no big surprise here, which of these magazine genres did I hang on to? (You’ll excuse me for a moment. I have to go throw away my collection of old Vogues…)
After my trial-by-magazines, it was only a hop, skip and a jump across the store to the twirl rack of paperback books, which were equally second-tier. I would put the more objectionable titles down the back of my pants and sneak them into the house, where I could finally read in comfort. “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex” and “The Valley of Dolls,” along with some Western fiction and the inevitable crime novels, completed my education. (Celestial chords? Ha! I now knew better!) What I also learned, even at such a tender age, was how terrible most of the writing was, and yet these works continued to get published — and read, if only by me.
For a time, my magazine habit had a unusual effect: I was a lot savvier than my little peers, and I had a really pumped up vocabulary. I knew how the world wagged and what wagged it. I had to dumb down my language and my conversation subjects until they caught up with me, which in our little corner of the vineyard didn’t happen until, oh, senior year.