In the Adult Diaper Aisle

By Steve Carr

My friends and I had a real clubhouse growing up. Not just a summer haystack fort fantasy, it was a converted gardener’s cottage behind a large colonial on South Boulevard in Idaho Falls. My best friend’s parents were pretty cool—they turned over the decorating and the skeleton key to us.

The clubhouse boasted a footlocker replete with “girlie” magazines. I remember once asking my friend how it was his older brother never said anything about his missing “reading material.” All I received was a shrug of his scrawny shoulders. Only years later did it hit me why we kids weren’t nabbed for pilfering the slightly salacious periodicals. What could the big brother do? Ask his mother who took his glossy magazines from under his mattress?

When the magazines were taken out of the locked hiding place, the guys would disguise them behind more “appropriate” periodical covers—just in case someone’s parents popped by for a visit. This memory came back to me as I sat reading in the doctor’s office, holding a coupon-laden AARP magazine together with a sports magazine. I chuckled at myself, but hung on to the more virile magazine.