......Hey man, the teenagers of today don't know the difficulty of obtaining these magazines back in the day, bruh. It would be like secret reconnaissance missions.
Bro, you are not kidding!! True story: I grew up in Gary, IN, and one of my first missions once I got my first driver's license was to get my first copy of Players since the only store that I knew that sold them was on the other side of town.
It's summer vacation after my sophomore year of high school, and I've got my new driver's license. My best friend and I decide to go and get our first copies of Players, so I talk my dad into borrowing the car, and we go to the store that carries them. The store is a hole-in-the-wall hood store with an old, worn-out hardwood floor, a rack of candies and cookies in front of the register (today those candies and cookies and the cash register would be behind a thick panel of bulletproof glass), a few grocery items along the wall opposite the cash register, and a news stand in the back with the goods we came there for. We go to the news stand, get our copies of Players, along with a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times to hide them in. We go to the front to check out, and there's a cool, older brother working the register, and another HUGE brother sitting behind him. Both of these dudes were funny, real friendly, and super cool, but we couldn't help noticing that the huge brother sitting behind the brother working the register is strapped with a 357 Magnum on each hip. Every time we'd get a copy of Players, those two brothers would be there, and we would always wonder why "Big Percy" with the two heaters was there, since there was rarely anybody in the store and nothing in that store could have cost more than five dollars.
Fast-forward seven years, and I'm home for the summer after my first year of graduate school, and I read in the Gary Post-Tribune that my little hole-in-the-wall, hood, Players Magazine store has been shut down by the feds. It wasn't until I read that story that I remembered that the store we would go to was on the ground floor of an old four-story building. Turns out that old building was actually owned and operated by the Chicago Outfit, and the store on the ground floor was just a front. The actual action took place after the store closed. That piece of crap ghetto "store" was bringing in $10-15 million a year for Tony Accardo's boys. Turns out they were running craps, roulette, and other types of gambling on one floor, off-track betting on another floor, and prostitutes on another floor, which finally explained the reason for "Big Percy's" presence.
Today, a kid gets his first glimpse of porn with the flick of a finger on a phone. The adventures we had to go through made life much more interesting and much more fun, in my opinion. Plus, all those beautiful women we saw, both in the magazine and in the flesh in our day-to-day lives, all had some things in common: the hair on their heads was their own, the only parts of their bodies that were pierced was their earlobes, and seeing a beautiful woman with a tattoo was as common as seeing a woman with a beard. I wouldn't trade the time I grew up in for anything.
That's a wild story!
