Punk'd in
1978
It was probably July
1977 when I walked into the liquor store at about 7 am. I had cooked all night
at a local 24 hour restaurant. I was tired and I needed a drink, so I had gone
in to get a pint of whiskey and a tall 6 pack of Buds.
I watched the magazine
guy drop off bundles of new magazines. One of the first bundles that hit the
ground from the truck looked up at me with the cover blazoned with "The
First Time Ever! Scratch and Sniff Centerfold!"
The idea was intriguing,
a scratch and sniff center fold. I was the first to pull a magazine out and
take it inside the store. I opened the magazine to the centerfold, but it was a
double, no triple, no quadruple-fold. The page was huge. It unfolded to a full
size model. The scratch part was in the
bottom right hand corner. The way it unfolded, I had to hold the top left of
the magazine where the centerfold was attached, and stretch my left arm high,
and I had to bend my face low as I scratched the .. uh .. snatch, and then hold
the paper to my face to smell. It turned out to be a rather awkward position,
and the smell was a disappointing sick rose scent.
It took me a minute to
refold the magazine and finally put it on the magazine rack. The clerk,
wondering what the hell I was up to, came from behind the counter. I showed him
the magazine cover and soon, he was going thru the same contortions as I had
been in. It was amusing to watch him go through the same dance I had just
finished.
That is when I suddenly
realized the joke that Larry Flint had just pulled on me and soon to number,
thousands of unwitting men around the country.
The model had widely spread legs and the object of the sniff was
smack in between them leaving the nude woman's body spread out above the
sniffer. There in the middle of the liquor store was a man with his face buried
in the middle of a poster of a woman's crotch.
I bought my whiskey and
beer and then sort of hung around to watch as others came in and fell for the
cosmic joke that Larry Flint had just punk'd all of the drinking men in
America.
