The PB Club
By: Michael A. Van Kerckhove
Tags: LGBTQ, Personal Essay, Coming Of Age, 1980s, Playboy

All of this is very exciting. But perhaps even more so is the anticipation of the forbidden.

Meetings are at 4:00 so many of us have time to hang out beforehand. Our hang out of choice: the basement. See, Bill’s found his dad’s stash of Playboys­ (and Penthouse and Hustlers, among others) dated from the 1960s to present day. That would be the mid-80s. Bill climbs up onto his dad’s work bench littered with the hammers, nails, and wrenches of Scoutly activity, reaches into a high crevice, and brings back…Wow! Page after page of naked women. Boobies that do not belong to our mothers, nipples jutting out of see-through drapes of white silk like eyes or headlights. They glare at us as we huddle in our secret society away from watchful eyes of adults upstairs.

We are The P.B. Club — and if anyone asks that stands for “Police Badge.” Bill, our glorious leader, seemingly, randomly decides who is worthy of a prize in its own way bigger and better than a bead or a badge: Our very own page. To take home. To hide behind the right hand drawer of my painted yellow wooden desk that was once my mother’s, where I will dig it out when opportunity of absent brothers or parents arises.

Ah, the rituals and ceremonies of boyhood, both the socially sanctioned, and the underground, where the balance of inclusion and exclusion is delicate.

Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

You know, sometimes men are in the photos: accessories to the more important female models. One scene from a mid-1960s issue: a clothed man stands, his broad back faces the bottom left corner of the page. He looks over his shoulder at us. Clean cut dark brown hair. He smiles. A woman — naked of course — kneels down behind him. She has undone his belt and has pulled the back of his pants down just far enough to reveal his round and slightly hairy ass. Wow.

He winks! Do the other guys see it too or is this my own private invitation? He speaks! “Hey, Michael! The other boys can look at all the tits they want. But you, my young friend, can stare at my beautifully groovy butt as long and as hard as you want to.” Bill turns the page. Bastard.

“I got a page!” Proud of my badge of honor, I mistakenly tell this to Mrs. Warner, my favorite lunch mother at school who threatens to put me in a girls’ uniform jumper as I threaten to cross the invisible line separating the boys and girls at recess. I do not elaborate, but only use the code words — not that she asked — “police badge.”

After school, the phone rings. “You told!” I did not. “You told Mrs. Warner!” I didn’t tell her everything! “She’s not stupid — she can figure it out!” *Click*

My transgression does not stop club meetings. As wary as Bill’s mom may be, perhaps she would rather us stay in the basement instead of tromping dirt up the carpet on the stairs to Bill’s room. Maybe Bill’s dad is secretly rooting us on, reveling in our rites of discovery. Would he stop the meetings if he knew of my own secret? My loose lips do however close the circle of shoulders in front of me so as to cut off my view. No boobies or their owners’ bare-assed boyfriends. So I see what I want to see. Who needs your stupid pages, anyway? I have my own pictures in my head. I can look at them as long and as hard as I want to. But still…

My Scout days are long gone, but along the way, I have — I do find myself on the outside, standing on tip-toes, trying to look in. The boys have grown up, and their shoulders block so many of us from — shit, where’s that hammer..? No, no… What I can do is turn around, hold my lantern high and walk into the arms of my real life groovy guy whose ass is, well, wouldn’t you like to know? We don’t need a Playboy Bunny, that’s for sure! And in our little circle, we don’t need anyone else to deem us worthy of anything.