by Howie Gordon
“If there be any great pleasure in life without a woman at it, let others look to it.”
Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
Part One
Gordon Archive.
“History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or what we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders.”
Carol Tavris & Eliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)
Chapter One
We were headed across Kansas in my yellow Rambler convertible. The top was down, in more ways than one.
The year was 1971. I was a young man of twenty-three. It was summer. It was hot. I had my shirt off. I glanced over at my new lover, Melody. She was older than me and she was taking off her shirt too. There was no undershirt, no bikini top, not even a bra. Her breasts were bouncing in the breeze.
We were not on the back roads of Kansas. We were on Interstate 70. Truckers going by pulled wildly on their horns and yahooed out their windows. I had a shopping bag filled with marijuana in the backseat.
“Melody, what are you doing?” I asked.
“Well, it’s hot,” came the reply, “I figured I’d take off my shirt too.”
“Melody, are you crazy?”
It was the wrong question at the wrong time. In her eyes, I instantly changed from being this fabulously precocious, young, and sensitive man into LBJ napalming babies. I received my first real lecture on women’s liberation. And I received it all the way from the middle of Kansas, through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, right on up to the doorsteps of the commune in Berkeley, California.
I had left my girlfriend of five years and quit a big paying job in Washington, D.C., to be with this woman. I had been thrown out of my parents’ house after sleeping with her there. And now I was about to move into her space to live with her and her twelve-year-old daughter in this Berkeley commune.
Oops!
Chapter Two
“So what was the attraction to this woman?” Marty, my agent, asked. “She sounds like a loon to me,” he said.
“Well, she was beautiful. She could also be very magical,” I told him. “And when it came to sex, she had less shame and guilt than any other woman I ever met. If there was an Original Sin, it wasn’t hers. She was unabashedly noisy when we made love and that was very exciting. She was also the first woman I ever met who asked me to fuck her in the ass and that was incredible. She loved that.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Marty said putting up both hands. “You’re not planning on putting that in the book, are you?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Why not? It’s way too much information! We don’t want to know that about you. It’s not important.”
“Not important? Are you crazy? I left my girlfriend, quit my job, and moved 3,000 miles across the whole country just to fuck this woman in the ass and you’re trying to tell me it’s not important!?! She was spectacular!”
“This isn’t real, is it,” Marty asked. “You’re just teasing me.” Marty said that he believed in me. “If you were a horse, I’d bet on you,” he used to say, “but you’re too raw. You need editing, refinement, and you’ve got to stop writing about this shit.”
“Okay, Marty, relax it’s not real. It’s only fiction. It’s all just fiction.”
“Good,” he said, “then we still have a chance. Cause like I told you before, a guy like you is only believable in fiction.”
Chapter Three
“In hindsight,” my dad said, “it all gets on you pretty fast.” He lived to be ninety-two. “One minute,” he said, “I was twelve years old playing basketball and the next thing I knew, I was an old man with white hair.”
“Hello?” I said, picking up the phone.
“I don’t know if I have the right number,” the caller said.
“Well, who do you want to talk to?” I asked.
“Is there a Howie Gordon there?”
“Speaking,” I told him, “This is Howie Gordon.”
“Is this the Howie Gordon that was a Playgirl centerfold?”
This guy was going back a lot of years, a whole lot of years. “Yes, it is, I told him without bothering to think too much about it, what can I do for you?”
“You’re really good looking,” he said. It made me laugh. I knew right away where this phone call was going. I’d had a few of them in my day, but not in a very long time. Usually, they had a story. They were discovering me. They were offering me a part in a big-budget feature. They were going to take me to Belize, the Azores, somewhere exotic for a high fashion photo shoot. They were going to make me a star.
And then it would come. All I would have to do is meet them in their hotel room around midnight.
“Yes, I was good looking,” I said, “but that was thirty years ago, pal.”
“I bet you’re still good looking,” he said.
“Well, you’d lose that bet. How old are you?” I asked him.
“Forty-seven,” he answered.
“Well, I’m in my sixties now. My centerfold days are over. How did you get my phone number?”
“The Internet.”
“The Internet? I had no idea you could get phone numbers off of the Internet.”
“You can get anything off of the Internet,” he confided, “but don’t worry, I’m not a stalker or anything. I just thought you were really handsome.”
“Well, lookit, those pictures were taken over thirty years ago. I’ve had three kids since then. Childbirth has completely destroyed my uterus!”
He laughed. They always laugh at that. It’s a line I’ve used before. It was time to let this guy down easy and get off of the phone. One just hopes that it will end there. Still, despite all the warning bells, after all these years, I was actually tickled to be getting another one of these phone calls.
Chapter Four
“You still bragging about your sex life?” It was God. He and I talk from time to time, not too often, mind you, but every now and then, we talk.
“Well, I guess so,” I answered, “if that’s what you think I’m doing.”
“I thought by now you’d be done over-compensating for having a small dick.” What could I say? I was speechless. “And even though I let you be a porn star;” God said, “your sex life wasn’t all that great y’know. Midgets actually get a lot more pussy than you ever did.”
“They don’t call them midgets anymore,” I told him. “They’re called ‘little people.’”
“Blow me,” he said.
“What do you mean my sex life ‘wasn’t’ so great?” I asked him.” It ain’t over yet, is it? I mean, is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No, but you’re over sixty years old. I think it’s a fair assumption to suggest that you’re on the downhill side of things.”
“Moses lived to be what? 120?”
“Yeah, but I knew Moses and you’re not him.”
Chapter Five
In the house where I grew up, the hamburgers were made round, about the size of baseballs. My mother made them six or nine at a time in a special black baking pan.
As the Age of McDonald’s began unfolding in the early sixties, I took it upon myself to educate my mommy.
“This is America,” I told her one night as she was serving me one of those big old round hamburgers. “In America, they make the hamburgers flat.” My mother took her heavy spatula and smashed the hamburger on my plate.
“Now, it’s flat,” she said, “eat!”
Chapter Six
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory!
Hallelujah —
Wait a minute. Time out. “Stop the music!” I had a problem. I needed to know what the hell Jesus was doing with a bosom?
Having been born into a family of Orthodox Jews, I was largely unschooled in the matters of Jesus, but up until that moment of singing the fifth and final stanza of the stirring and patriotic “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in Miss Stewart’s fourth grade public school music class (take a breath), I had been under the distinct impression that Jesus Christ was a man.
So, tell me now, it’s important: What exactly was Jesus Christ doing with a bosom?
Chapter Seven
(Cue the violins.)
I didn’t start out in life as the sex star. I looked like the late Larry Mondello, the chubby best friend from TV’s Leave It to Beaver. Actually, I didn’t look like Larry Mondello at all except to say that we were both “husky.” And husky, of course, is what you called fat little boys when you were trying kindly to spare their feelings.
Fourth grade, fifth grade, six grade, those were not real happy times. I was “husky.” It only got worse when puberty came around to the young men in my crowd. I found myself pretty much standing at the very end of the line.
Y’know, when I was growing up, every man was wondering if he’d ever get to fuck Betty Boop. We all wanted the best that life had to offer. We all wanted to be Joe DiMaggio and marry Marilyn Monroe. We all wanted to be the one who solved the great mysteries and tasted the best fruits. Early on, however, things were not exactly working out that way for me.
Dennis Leibovitz had the super schlong. He should have been the porn star. Dennis was also the first to sprout the wiry pubic hairs around his cock that signaled the arrival of puberty. In time, Melvin, Davy, Lloyd and Louie, Huey and Spud, Barney, Baron, Goose and Stromberg, Stichweh, Shehady, Ronnie the Umbrella, and Wayne, everybody, even the pudgy-like-me Ellis had all sprouted their pubic hairs before I did.
We all belonged to a grade club that eventually would be called the MARQUIS and we played a lot of sports together. The Boys’ locker room became a nightmare for me. When I took off my clothes, my “friends” would check out my development.
To begin with, I had bigger tits than most of the girls we knew. They jiggled. Yep, it seemed that me and Jesus both had bosoms! And being so overweight, the fat bulged out around my hairless dick and made it look even smaller and lonelier than it was. Surprise, surprise, the fellas, my MARQUIS brothers, they would tease me. We had a wrestler in town nicknamed “Skull” Murphy because he had a shaved head. My friends used to call my dick Skull Murphy.
There was little saving face. I couldn’t fight everybody. Besides, one was always vulnerable to the truth. The young herd wreaked its havoc upon me.
I’m sure I sought my revenge where I could get it. And at the risk of spoiling all the remaining high drama for you, one might just guess that this period of my life had a lot to do with me later doing about four million push-ups and eight million sit-ups as I sculpted my body into the stuff of centerfolds. Sniff.
Chapter Eight
In the house where I grew up, I came to share my mother’s love for the underdog, chicken schmaltz, Judy Garland, and Mahalia Jackson. Despite her sentimental side, my mother was tough, Pittsburgh tough. She ruled the roost. She was also the unquestioned matriarch of her outside larger family, which included her five brothers. My mother contributed nothing but confusion to the popular notion that women were the weaker sex. I’ve often thought that she might have been far better served in this life had she been born a man.
On the other hand, my father was a non-aggressive, gentle soul, who complemented my mother well. He should have been born a woman. He was a hard-working man who was just happy to have gotten out of World War II alive. From him, I inherited a commitment to fair play and a tendency to keep all emotions deeply bottled up inside.
I had one sibling, a brother who was almost six years older than me who busted his ass in school. I don’t think he ever even saw a “B.” It was always all “A’s” in everything. We were not very close in those days. I did not share his enthusiasm for learning.
The early family predictions were that he was going to be a nuclear physicist and I was going to be a gym teacher. I loved sports. The fat kid was the catcher in baseball and played the line in football. Basketball wasn’t even an option. In band, they gave me the tuba. Oom-pa-pah, motherfucker.
Uncle Izzy also lived with us. He was one of my mother’s younger brothers. Uncle Izzy was mentally retarded, they said, and he came to live with us when my grandmother died back in ‘52. I was four years old.
At first, he was like having another older brother. After a while, it felt like we were the same age. After that, I got older and he just stayed the same. At one point he had undergone some psychological testing and was diagnosed as functioning at the level of an eight-year-old. He was some eight-year-old! Izzy was a source of both astounding joy and mind-numbing exasperation in our family. In the bonding we did around caring for him, our family reached its greatest triumphs. The rewards for our efforts seemed to come back doubled and tripled.
From Izzy, I inherited a precious appreciation for the robust silliness of just about everything in life:
“Hey, How! Guess what?” Izzy would ask.
“What, Iz?” I would reply.
“I can’t say, ‘Perry,’” he would tell me.
“What?”
“I can’t say, ‘Perry.’”
“You just said it!”
“No! You don’t understand!”
“Then explain it to me, Iz.”
“It’s haaarrrrrd!” he’d say, drawing out the word for emphasis. It was almost singing. “I watch Harry Mason and Harry Como on TV. I can’t say, ‘Perry.’” We easily had that same conversation over a thousand times. It was like our family’s version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”
At our dinner table, it was like if you couldn’t say something in about ten seconds, well, just forget about it because Izzy would say something and then we’d all be laughing. As you might well imagine, this severely hampered our abilities to resolve U.S. foreign policy problems or discuss the finer points of Shakespeare.
Uncle Izzy was the center of attention in the daily life of our family. He was the star of the show and my mom was his best straight man. Next came my brother and then my father and I brought up the rear. I learned to be a supporting player in this family dynamic and took my shots where I could.
There were no other American families like ours on TV. Father Knows Best? Leave It to Beaver? Ozzie and Harriet? Donna Reed? They were the popular TV shows of the day and no, they were definitely not like us.
My mom spent a good portion of her daily life taking care of Uncle Izzy. She fed him, shaved him, trimmed his nails, dressed him, and just generally tried her best to get him to pass for “normal” to the whole world at large. “You don’t understand,” if I may borrow a phrase from Izzy himself, but it was like gluing feathers on a cat and calling it a chicken.
From Izzy, we all learned of the total commitment to family. I did say that I loved my family, didn’t I? I did, each and every one. Still do.
Chapter Nine
The door to puberty opened when Susie Goldstein walked through it wearing only her bra and panties.
I was sleeping over at Melvin’s house that night. We were eleven or twelve. When the phone rang, we happened to be standing near it in this upstairs hallway. Melvin answered it. It was for his older sister, Susie. He called her to the phone.
She came out of her bedroom not knowing I was there. If this were a movie, she’d be moving in slow motion. Maybe a high-school senior, Susie was very much the fully developed woman. She was all jiggle and bounce as she made her way down the hallway to the phone. Full frontal. Dark hair. Flesh and panties and bra. It was voluptuous, even before I knew there was such a word, Rubenesque, as they say. I saw the dark patch right there through her panties.
God in Heaven, something so inside
me woke right up. Susie Goldstein came out to answer the phone and there was Puberty!
She caught sight of me then, me and her little brother Melvin. He was smiling diabolically like only a little brother can. Melvin knew exactly what he had done. Susie gasped. Her arms and hands flailed and failed to cover all that was mesmerizing me as she shrieked, turned, and bounced her buttocks back into her bedroom all in one dazzling moment that has lasted in my mind for over half a century. I can still see the crack of her ass through her panties as the bedroom door closes. Her bottom cheeks jiggled.
Oh, my God!
Chapter Ten
I learned about masturbation at summer camp. Chuckie Pearl was a year older when he took some of us younger guys into the bathroom and showed us how to jerk-off. He called it “creaming himself” and he did just that in a toilet stall while we all watched in amazement. Oi, on the one hand, it was completely disgusting. But, on the other, well, who could resist such knowledge? I don’t know what the other boys did, but I refrained from trying out this new activity until I got home from camp and found myself some privacy.
Whoa, as some of you may know, Chuckie was really on to something! I soon began dating myself in earnest — often two or three times a day.
“If you rub it, it will come!” the voice would call. And if I’m not mistaken, other boys may have heard this voice too. The voice called, and called, and called, like a telephone ringing. I pretty much answered it every time. I mean, who didn’t? Please take a moment, as Mike Meyers might tell you, and feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves.
Personally, I worried back then that a man only had so many orgasms in him. I worried that perhaps I was squandering my share foolishly, but I could not convince my dick of this. The only time my penis ever wanted me to stop was when I became raw from the friction of overuse. The cure, which I stumbled upon all by myself because I was far too embarrassed to ever broach the subject with another living human being, was to pack myself in Vaseline and just wait it out. I discovered that in a couple of days, I could start all over again. What a resilient little organ!