Playing Cards

In fifth grade there was a kid I'll call Cecil. He was big as an eighth grader, but not the shiniest spoon on the table - a clumsy, good natured guy with a great goofy smile. One night while his parents were at a party he decided to poke around in his dad's top drawer. After a bit of browsing around Bingo! He found a deck of nudie playing cards. After going through them carefully he figured that he could pocket a few and his dad would never notice. Not sharp thinking because when his dad found the queen of hearts, the black deuce and the jack of diamonds gone Cecil's days would be numbered. But that was for another time.

The next morning Cecil showed up at school and he was the most popular guy around.  (Teachers are always talking about boosting the self esteem of their students but I presume this is not an approved method.) Mind you this was the 50s so there were no sultry, come hither super models, just semi-unclad middle-aged women with uni-brows in open kimonos or artfully draped bathrobes. They all looked like they had peptic ulcers or at least extreme indigestion. Didn't matter to us, we all thought this was just terrific.

That night all over Dhahran guys were rifling through top drawers and cigar boxes stashed way back on the top shelf of the closet. The next day there were salacious playing cards all over the place and twice as many the next day. Nudie playing cards had gone viral. Boys were trading them like baseball cards, "I'll give you this one of the red head in a girdle for that one of the blonde in the sailor hat with those short suspenders holding up her stockings." Everything was fine as far as a certain demographic was concerned.

Wednesday morning Mr. Brock, the head of security, was spotted driving up to the school and word spread fast. Cards were being shredded all over the place, toilets were flushed repeatedly. The bottom had dropped out of the nudie playing card market.

Eventually the usual suspects were rounded up and about ten of us were sequestered in an empty class room. Someone had fingered Cecil, so he was the first one called in for grilling by Mr. Brock. After what seemed like hours he came out and told the next kid to go in. Cecil was supposed to leave immediately and he did, but a minute later he returned to get his books and quickly whispered to a kid that he told Mr. Brock that he was walking down an alley, kicked a rock and found the card beneath. Word spread among us in about ten seconds. I don't know what the second kid told Brock, but the next eight of us told him that while we had never seen such a thing, we had heard that a kid was walking down an alley, kicked a rock and found a card. Who knew that the alleys of Dhahran were paved in nudie playing cards? A stymied Mr. Brock finally left in a foul mood. 
Looking back it is hard to believe that the head of security of a major oil company would waste his time on some risque playing cards. But you have to smile when you think that deep in Aramco's archives somewhere between the drilling reports and the reams of seismographic records there is an extensive investigative report on the case of the nudie playing cards.