Seeing the stories on the cover of Open Salon today reminded me of my own little adventure at the Playboy mansion. Don’t get too excited, it wasn’t like that.

It was 1973, and I was a junior in high school. Two friends and I were on our way from the South Bay to a Beatles movie marathon at the Nu-Art in Westwood. We were in my friend J.’s family Corvair. It was pea-green, with a push-button transmission, and a habit of breaking down in the worst possible places. That Friday night would be no exception.

We were headed east on Sunset when smoke started coming out of the engine. So much, so fast, J pulled over on the nearest street. Bye-bye, Beatles.

This was long before cell-phones, and we were in a residential area with no payphones around. So we did what people used to do: we went up to the nearest house to see if we could use their phone.

The first house we went to, no one was home. Or at least, no one came to the door. The next house we went to, same story. At the third house, there was no door to go up to. There was a huge gate, at the bottom of what looked like a long driveway. Outside the gate was a buzzer and a speaker. We pressed the buzzer and a voice came out of the speaker.

We explained our situation – the car had broken down, we needed to call our parents, could we use the phone? The voice on the other end seemed highly skeptical. "Is it just the three of you?" He said.

We looked at each other in surprise, how did he know there were three of us? Then we saw the camera, a little lower to the ground near the speakers.

He grilled us a little more. Our story didn’t change. Okay, he said, c’mon up.

The gates opened. We went up the drive. It was dark, a peacock called, and for a split second we wondered if this was the right thing to do. 

At the top of the drive was a fountain, and the biggest house we'd ever seen. A security guard met us, and took us around to the guard house. While J. was dialing her parents, we tried to find out who lived there. He wouldn’t tell us. We knew it had to be someone famous, there were a lot of timecards in the security office check-in.

We made a plan to meet J’s parents at Ship's on Westwood. The security guy gave us directions and we started walking the curved streets through the neighborhood, thick with trees and millionaires. About halfway there, the security guard pulled up and offered us a ride.

We asked again to find out who lived there. He was off work now, and handed us his tie as a clue. What had looked like little dots were playboy bunny heads. We had rung the doorbell of the Playboy mansion.

From then on, whenever we were in Hollywood, we’d drive by the mansion to see what was going on. For better or worse, we never went in.