Paige Summers

I had a dream the other night about Paige Summers. She was the Penthouse Pet of the Year for 1998. Also, once upon a time, she was a friend of mine.

I worked for Penthouse for over ten years, and during the last five years or so of my run, the late '90s, I wormed my way into working with Pet promotions--writing "girlcopy" (the often inane biographical stuff that accompanies the pictorial), doing interviews with them for Penthouse Forum magazine, and attending promotions. I probably met three dozen Pets over the years, and became pretty close friends with a handful. One of them was Paige, a country girl from Morganton, North Carolina, whose real name was Nancy Ann Coursey.

The dream, though blissfully erotic, was also poignant to me, and I awoke with very mixed emotions, as I had a lot of affection for her. I first met her in the summer of 1996, just before her issue came out (she was Miss August). She was in the photo library, not yet twenty years old. I was 35. For whatever reason, I was fairly bold around the Pets, as if they weren't real people. So I chatted with her and actually asked her out. She laughed and politely declined, but as time wore on we became friends.

I met her several times over the course of a few years. She always seemed so happy to see me that it fed my ego like a seven-course meal. She laughed at my jokes--when she won Pet of the Year one of the prizes was a Kia, which was a new company in the American market at the time. She was kind of underwhelmed, and when I said that they went zero to sixty in five minutes she laughed.

Of course I had a crush on her. I would lie awake and imagine us as a couple, as ludicrous as that sounds. She had a boyfriend, and I met him and he was a real nice guy. He was a real man's man (a woman in the office confirmed that he was very good looking). She brought him into my office, which was adorned with her Pet of the Year poster, a large photograph of her with legs completely akimbo, her ladyflower completely spread open. He seemed completely nonplussed about it.

The highlight of my relationship with her was when I visited her in her home town. She spent most of her life in Morganton, a small town in western North Carolina. She invited me for a visit, and on Labor Day weekend in 1997 I drove down. The first night we had some drinks in the Holiday Inn bar (the county had just approved alcohol by the glass) and then, in my hotel room, we stretched out on the bed. Completely clothed and not touching, we watched her Pet of the Year video on a VCR we hooked up to the TV. Watching a woman nude on TV while lying next to her counts as one of the most surreal moments of my life.

It almost got more surreal. The next day we spent at her friend's house, where I took the picture above. It was one of the few times in my life I smoked pot, and it didn't do anything for me. I suspect I did something wrong. Later that night we went to where she got her start as a topless dancer. There was a TV over the bar, and the news was that Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. Yes, I heard about the death of Princess Diana while in a strip club in Hickory, North Carolina.

That kind of put a damper on the weekend, and it did not end as my fantasies would have it. We stayed in touch, though, until I was sacked by Penthouse in early 1999. I lost touch with all my Pet friends after that.

Thus I was shocked when I picked up an issue of Penthouse sometime in late 2003, and read the horrible news. On September 22, 2003, Paige Summers died of an overdose of oxycodone. Presumably it was an accident, as she was engaged to a guy from Morganton. She was a country girl, a family girl, a girl who liked to work in a garden, who listened to Tim McGraw, and though she showed off everything, had somewhat conservative morals. She knew she was beautiful--she once got a guy to buy her a car, with no kind of compensation, and regularly got out of speeding tickets by carrying her issue of Penthouse in the car with her.

But she was a sweetheart. She was 27 years old when she died. I miss her.