Skip to main content

Bryan and the Mystery of the Disappearing Playboys

When I moved to Utah, I felt like I was as out of place as a kid could get. That was last year. I’m 14 now so things aren’t that bad anymore.

I guess.

I moved here from California because my parents thought I would have to join a gang or something to get along in school. That was crazy. I’m white and I’m a nerd. Guys in gangs at my old school were tough Hispanic kids. I got offered weed one time, but that’s not like joining a gang. (It was on the playground when I was in fifth grade. I said no.) So, the summer between my last year of elementary school and my first year of junior high, we moved to Utah.

The adjustment to the people was the weirdest part. I’m not Mormon and everyone around here seems to be. I talked to some missionaries, but I really don’t care about going to church. (I’d rather role play at my friends house on Sunday than hear about God. I had plenty of that when I was in Catechism in California.) But it’s not just the religion thing, everyone around here seemed a little bit less like they were living. None of my new friends had even seen a Playboy until I moved in.

I wasn’t some porn-fiend or anything and Playboy isn’t exactly hard-core, but my Dad had had a collection of them going back to before I was born. He still had a subscription that would arrive like clockwork every month in a black plastic bag. The new issue would rest above the toilet in his bathroom while the last months issue would be put in the locked crates in the garage. That’s where he kept his collection.

It wasn’t so hard to get into the locked crates. My hands were small enough to pry open the doors of the crates with one hand and squeeze my other hand in and take out a magazine. When I first moved in to the neighborhood, I had no idea how rare Playboy’s were in the area.
My new friends had only heard about them, they were that scarce. They didn’t faze me anymore, I’d been around them as long as I could remember. In fact, they didn’t even really do anything for me.

But that wasn’t the point. I wanted to show my friends the magazines just so they could have that experience. I felt obligated to.

This story appears as part of the collection "The Cruel Kids: Four Short Stories".  You can get it for the Kindle or the Nook.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great story, Bryan.

Reminded me of a time when my buddy 'borrowed' his neighbor's dad's super 8mm Swedish porn movies and caught hell for it.

Keep writing, you're good,

Scott
9:02 AM
Anonymous said…
I don't know if I like your writing style, but you sure seem to have some Dad issues, don't you?

Careful you don't start writing the screenplay for "Daddy Dearest". He might leave you out of the will!
9:27 PM
Unknown said…
I don't know if I like my writing style either but it's all I've got.
10:36 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Scene - City Lights

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made. 
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it.
City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …
Post a Comment
Read more

Anatomy of a Scene: The Third Man

It's time again to break down a classic scene. One that's well-written and, in my view, a fine example of excellent craft.

I've done some of these articles from books (like The End of the Affairand Starship Troopers) and other movies (like Citizen Kane, City Lights, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but now it's time to take a look at a scene from The Third Man. It blends the best of Orson Welles (as he's in the film and drives this scene) and Graham Greene, who wrote this particular screenplay.

Before we get to the scene, we need some context.

The Third Man is a tale of the black market in Vienna, just after World War II. It's about a cheap, dime-store Western novelist named Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton) and his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles.) Lime offered Martins a job in Vienna, so Martins leaves America and arrives, only to find that Harry Lime is dead. Penniless, without a friend or reason to be in the country, h…
Post a Comment
Read more

50+ Rules and Tips About Writing I've Collected Over the Years

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…
3 comments
Read more