Tuesday, December 23, 2008

PUFFIN, PLEASE!


Mr. Hefner, it's time to stop playing at being a player. You were an icon in your day. Hell, my dad took me to dinner for my 14th birthday at the New York Playboy Club and I still can't shake the smile every time I think about it. You challenged sexual taboos, the interviews were cool as shit, and you made it possible for an entire generation of young adults to begin jerking off to their first glance at an image of the real things. You lived most men's fantasy. But it's time to stop. Major league pitchers know when they can no longer throw the heat, then it's time to take that final walk off the mound, doff your cap to the crowd and stroll into the dugout with your memories and your dignity.

The Girls Next Door is amusing but no one's buying the bullshit that you were actually sleeping with three women. And only a retard would believe you're banging 19-year-old twins. When the high, hard one becomes the low, soft one, it's time to let go. If you weren't trying to keep the image going, you wouldn't be making your standard entrance in the ring-a-ding-ding outfit looking like horny old grandpa's gone on walkabout again. So, please. Take off the smoking jacket. You look like a raisin inside a bolt of red velvet. Lose the lascivious smile. Keep the pipe and the Pepsi. Add some slippers and a jaunty cap. But, please, Hef. Enough. It's getting silly. Like a thoroughbred horse giving rides at a kiddie birthday party. 

I want to keep my memories of you hosting Playboy After Dark with Lenny Bruce next to you and Steppenwolf playing "Born To Be Wild." Don't tarnish it. Go out in style.  Before you turn into a wrinkled, cadaverous Bob Hope ogling Brooke Shields. At some point, it transcends hip and just gets fucking disgusting.