Magazine Centerfold Story

Here is a story. When I was about nineteen, I was hanging out with my friend, walking up and down the strip mall, exploring different stores, going inside the stores and browsing. We will call him Dwayne. He had long blonde hair down to his shoulders, tall and lanky, sort of a hunchbacked boy, who had a slouch that, at the time, I thought was very cool, and a lumbering gait. Dwayne had a way of being laid back that all the girls loved. He would sit back and not say much, but when he spoke, he spoke in a low, gravelly tone that sounded like it should only be used in the bedroom, in intimate settings. I used to go over to Dwayne’s house, where we would drink an entire quart of whiskey, and then take a few rips of chronic-grade cannibis out of a five foot bong. Then, we would pass out for a few hours, get up, and do it all over again, multiple times. When we were sober (and sometimes while intoxicated) we played heavy metal music together, the genre Grind-core specifically. He was a highly skilled guitarist. Anyway, we were at this strip mall. We walked into a music CD store, and began to browse the magazine section. Dwayne picked up a guitar magazine, opened it up, saw something he liked, looked over his shoulder, to see if anyone was watching, and then pulled out this centerfold picture that came with each magazine, which was a free amenity that came with the issue. The cutout was a picture of one of his favorite bands, a guitarist playing music on stage with flashing neon lights behind him, and a mean grin on his face directed at the camera. Dwayne did not want to pay for the whole magazine to get this one centerfold piece, so he ripped it out, and slipped it under his shirt, then tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to the door, and we started to walk out the store. Suddenly, as we were passing through the door’s threshold, a woman came up from behind Dwayne, grabbed him from the back, around his waist, and pulled him back into the door of the store. She was security; she had seen him put the magazine piece under his shirt; we were getting busted. Dwayne struggled like a rabbit in a snare to get free of this lady, but this woman happened to be overweight, and was able to overpower him with sheer bodyweight capabilities. She pulled him through the door and onto the ground, and then dragged him to the back of the store, where the security room was, locked the door behind them, and called the local sheriff. Since I did not steal anything, I was not involved in the bust, but we came together in the same car, so I had to wait for this whole ordeal to be over, to find out how I would get home. A police officer came into the store about fifteen minutes later, and went into the back room with them. I could hear Dwayne shouting and defending himself for about fifteen minutes, along with loud talking by the cop and security lady. Yet, about ten minutes later, Dwayne emerged from the room and met up with me. He told me the cop laughed at the lady for busting him over a simple magazine centerfold, and said that she could have just let it slide, since it was only a harmless (and free) piece of paper. But the lady did not want to back off her charge. So Dwayne was issued a ticket to appear in court for a violation at some point. Dwayne and I were both angry, but then we went back to his house, got absolutely plastered, and passed out.