by Rick Gekoski
One day, though, I paused in my envious contemplation of this exclusive piece of furniture, and noticed the titles. It was a day – I must have been twelve – when my reading life was to change forever, a day after which reading was to become my major source of excitement and delight. The titles of those dull looking books, once focused on, though admittedly puzzling and obscure, had something to recommend them: Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual Aberrations by Wilhelm Stekel, MD. Sex, all sex! Anomalies (I looked it up) and Perversions? Bliss.
A chirpy ‘Can I borrow this, dad, it looks pretty interesting?’ was not likely to withdraw these books from their appointed shelf. If I wanted to read them I would have to be sneaky. That, it was to turn out, was part of the fun. Reading them was going to be exciting and dangerous, like a Hardy Boys adventure with nefarious foreigners. The entry of these books into my life coincided with the onset of puberty – indeed, they probably caused it – and they were to fuel my imagination for the next few years. I was so intensely stimulated that it was embarrassing just to be me. Surely, anyone would be able to tell? Mom would be able to tell. She would know. I was in a cringingly explosive cycle of lust, shame, delight and abandon. Nothing could better exemplify Carlyle’s dictum that ‘the best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.’
I liked Hirschfeld the best. The plots certainly weren’t up to much, there was too much medical jargon, and a deeply frustrating amount of the text dropped into Latin at key moments, but there was plenty to hold my attention. The characters were distinctly interesting, and each had a little story to tell. Not enough detail, of course: the stories were reprehensibly succinct, but there was sufficient to fire the imagination. Anyway I only wanted the dirty bits.
Rereading the texts, fifty years later, I was astonished how much I remembered. Oh my God, it’s her! It’s him! It’s that!
His first spontaneous sexual excitement occurred when, at the beginning of puberty, he saw himself for the first time full length in a mirror . . . There was an instantaneous erection and he grew excited. Excusing himself he pressed his lips to the mirror and covered his mirrored lips with kisses . . . He made the following statement in writing: my sexual appetite is directed towards myself and to lick my own member would give me the greatest pleasure.
There were further reports of an American girls’ boarding school where there was ‘a veritable epidemic of lesbianism’, an account of a thirty-year-old doctor much given to bottom kissing, a Parisian inventor of an electrical flagellating machine, and a serious and stern woman given to ‘punishing and cherishing’ her male lovers, while riding them about the bedroom. Though chapters on masturbation reassured me that it was not proven that it led to ‘softening of the brain’, nevertheless Hirschfeld did not recommend that one lathered one’s penis (like one of his masturbators) and carried on gaily. No, ‘the principal effect of masturbation is depression which may change to melancholia, leading to thoughts of suicide or even actual suicide.’ That didn’t scare me: as long as my brain stayed unsoftened so could my penis, lathered or unlathered.
Though unimaginably distant in time and place, Hirschfeld’s people were not, by-and-large, freaks or monsters. A few were distinctly to be avoided – chapters on Sadism and Sexual Murder required quick skipping over (who’d want to read about that?) – but many of these obscure mittel-Europeans became exemplars of human possibility. Who would have supposed human life so richly peculiar, so various in possibility, or imagined that adults – those distant, intimidating, over-dressed and other-worldly creatures – could have been so rude? For some time I lived the overheated inward life of a Viennese petit bourgeois. I scoured Huntington for ladies dressed exotically in furs, with nothing but corsets on underneath. I wasn’t sure what a corset was, but according to my sources it could elicit astonishing homage. Ladies with big breasts and protuberant bottoms were enticing, until I noted with dismay that my Granny Pearl pretty much fitted that bill.
The discovery of my father’s erotically charged books signalled the beginning of that period when mere proximity to a lockable space was sufficient to cause an erection. Obsessed though I was with reading and rereading my father’s secret library, it wasn’t long before I had internalized the most exciting bits, refined and extended them according to what I began to find were my own needs and desires. An internal catalogue of fantasies began to emerge, and they were every bit as satisfactory, inside those lockable spaces, as the books were. Better, even: no book to hide (try putting the two volumes of Psychopathia Sexualis under your shirt). No book to balance precariously whilst otherwise pressingly engaged. Fantasies were prompted by books, but they were better than books.
My bedroom had a rudimentary lock on the door, but it was hard to justify why one needed to be locked in there so often. Bathrooms – at home or away – were the best, because no one could question why you were in there, though they might well wonder why you needed to be there quite so frequently. I must have seemed to be suffering from chronic diarrhoea. And there is nothing that piques the interest and concern of Jewish parents and grandparents as thoroughly as trouble in the lavatory. Was I all right? I was asked, returning from a third trip to the bathroom in two hours. Oh, fine, yeah, all right, I’d say, hurrying away, ashamed. Did they know?
Granny Pearl did, I was sure of it. In her tiny apartment in the Hotel Brewster on Manhattan’s West 86th Street, there was a glass-fronted bookcase in the living room, with an assortment of books, each bearing poppa’s book plate STOLEN FROM THE LIBRARY OF NORMAN KORNBLUEH. There was one that I wanted to steal for sure, but presumably its absence would have been observed, and (worse) remarked upon. Written by two Danish psychologists called Kronhausen, its unassuming yellow and orange paperback covers announced the title Pornography and the Law: The Psychology of Erotic Realism and ‘Hard Core’ Pornography. There was nothing lurid about the book, but the promise of the title was sufficient to ensure that it sold in large numbers to a readership ostensibly interested in its liberal agenda.
To me though, and I suspect to most of its readers, the allure was simple: because the work was a serious intellectual enterprise it could, in the service of argument and analysis, quote from a vast range of dirty books which were otherwise unavailable through the normal American outlets of the 1950s. There were excerpts from Victorian pornographic classics like The Lascivious Hypocrite, The Autobiography of a Flea, or The Oxford Professor by L. Erectus Mentulus, which were then unfavourably contrasted to their apparently ‘higher’ counterparts, those novels that are erotically realistic rather than pornographic, and which need clear criteria to distinguish them as worthy of general release: books like Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Memoirs of Hecate County. My dad had some of these – I’d even pawed my way through a few – but I liked the proper dirty ones better. I was not interested in redeeming artistic quality, it got in the way of the sexy scenes, or diminished their impact. I wanted unadulterated smut. Who cared what the various characters thought, where they came from, what their aspirations outside the bedroom might have consisted of?
Not that the smut was unadulterated, even the Kronhausens weren’t allowed that. They could quote from the most salacious passages, but a frustrating semantic propriety pertained: no dirty words. Thus we have the ludicrously censored scene from The Strange Cult:
. . . on that nice little bed down there I’m going to give you a wonderful [vernacular for coitus]. After that, if you’re real nice, of course, I’m going to teach you [vernacular for fellatio]. Then I’m going to [vernacular for cunnilingus] till you [vernacular for orgasm], and then after that we’ll [vernacular for coitus] some more!
Even I skipped over this [vernacular for risible persiflage]. But there were sufficient passages to keep one’s pecker up. I spent hours with the book cradled in my lap, in a chair in the living room of the apartment, so that neither the cover nor my excitement would show, recurrently half hobbling ba
ck and forth to the bathroom. When mom or dad came to pick me up, granny would say, ‘Oh, Ricky’s been shpritzing over the books all day,’ which I was guiltily certain had a wry knowingness. (The Yiddish verb to shpritz usually means to add a dash of seltzer, but it also means to squirt or to spray.)
These early experiences of reading stolen erotica from family sources transformed the act of reading for me entirely. It would be catastrophic to be caught reading such books, for not only were they clearly not for me, but my excitement at reading them would mark me as a pervert of the class of those chronicled in the texts. (Though it did not signal my father or grandfather as similarly deviant, of course. They were intellectuals. I wondered how they kept mom and granny from looking at the books.)
Farewell, Hardy Boys. From now on, I would seek better and more exciting things to read, forbidden ones. I learned how to skim a page and instantly pick out the key words: breasts, nipples, vagina, buttocks, anus. My father’s whole library of fiction loomed. I began to skim it, book by book. Some piqued my immediate interest, only to disappoint. There was a copy of Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, which even I recognized as a peculiarly evasive title. I scoured the pages for illustrations and examples sufficient to ignite sexual fantasies, though this research was retarded by the inscription on the front end-paper, from my mother to my father: ‘For Bernie, in the hope that ours will be.’ I tried desperately to block that out, its implications unthinkable, and skipped through the pages in search of something to get my fingers round. I ignored all that detail – bit yucky – about periods and pregnancy. I skipped all of the stuff about something called the clitoris, and about female orgasm. I didn’t have one of those, and I had boy orgasms. This lack of curiosity was a mistake, and my first girlfriends (and I) would pay for it.
When, for my Bar Mitzvah, I asked for a subscription to the Book of the Month Club, it was mistaken for a precocious academic request, and honoured accordingly. What I was looking for, of course, was a new source of books with dirty bits. MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville had a couple of choice moments, but they were hardly worth the trouble of finding, and more frequently monthly offers were feel-good cutesy books like The Snake Has All the Lines, or Cheaper by the Dozen.
Anyway, I had already assimilated whatever fantasy material our family erotica could prompt, and there was no further supply of such books. The fever didn’t go away – it never does – but it abated, and left room for something more substantial than the Hardy Boys. It was time, at last, to start reading some proper books. It was time for literature.
3
CATCHING AND HOWLING
My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief telling people about it.
J.D. Salinger, talking about The Catcher in the Rye
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
Allen Ginsberg, footnote to Howl
‘High school.’ To this day the very words provoke in me the kind of anxious repulsion occasioned by terms like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘root canal’, or ‘George W. Bush’. I loathed being in high school, loathed it so utterly and viscerally that I was hardly aware of the cause of my discontent. I seethed with a restless unhappiness wildly in excess of the usual teenage surliness and sense of entitlement.
The recently constructed Huntington High was much admired by all save those who had to use it. A low brick building with endless corridors along the sides of which were austere, vaguely ominous, metal lockers, painted in institutional greys and greens, with linoleum floors, fluorescent lighting and an overactive boiler, the place looked like a film set of a laboratory where sadistic psychological experiments were performed. At the start and close of the day, and between classes, these aisles would be crammed with rushing, gossiping, overheated students, but during classes, they were transformed into a bleak no-go zone, patrolled by monitors and hawk-eyed teachers anxious to corral truants of any kind. You needed a pass even to go to the bathroom. The message was simple: this place was hard to break out of. You’d better knuckle under.
There was a dress code – no jeans, no sneakers, no shorts, dresses and skirts at an ‘appropriate’ length. Hair fell under opposite injunction: it had to be short, crew cut if possible, and I remember my mother, observing a trace of curling at my neckline, warning me, censoriously, of the consequences if it were allowed to fester. I cut it off, brutally, and whatever festering went on thereafter was purely internal.
Oddly, there were touches of great satisfaction: I was leading the life that most of the other kids aspired to. I captained a tennis team that won 110 straight matches. I was dating an exceptionally pretty and loveable girl, and having amazing fun with her. Nor were the classes unstimulating, though I proved curiously intractable in my post-Burgundy Farm ignorance, like the hero of Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’, who didn’t know much about history, biology or the French he took.
I was regarded as bright, but like Mr Cooke’s hero, I was not an ‘A-student’, which allowed my teachers enthusiastically to describe me as an ‘under-achiever’. I was nevertheless put in the top stream (called ‘XX’, as if a coded form of obscenity), which had the happy effect of giving one a bonus at the end of the year, whereby a ‘C’ would count as a ‘B’ in one’s grade-point average. Riding the back of this benefit, I finally managed an exact 3.0 average (straight B) which just allowed me to slip into the top 10 per cent of my graduating class. My transcript, if you looked at it even without this enhancement, was undistinguished. My grades in English classes were particularly disappointing.
The teaching was enthusiastic and competent, but the set texts were unstimulating. There were the thumping rhythms of Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race:
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
which even I, in the ninety-nine per cent white Huntington High School, could tell was total tosh. Then there was some pappy stuff from Stephen Vincent Benét, and lashings of homespun wisdom from Robert Frost, who liked choosing between different tracks in the woods, or building walls, and then making a fuss about it.
But XX English with Miss Wyeth, in my senior year, was a different kettle of literary fish. Relentlessly high-minded in the way bright and frustrated high school teachers can be, Miss Wyeth had composed a year-long crash course in Western Literature and Philosophy, beginning with Homer, through Plato, Aristotle and the Greek tragedians, and ending, via a commodious vicus of recirculation, with Finnegans Wake. Miss Wyeth was a moony fan of my father’s (who was president of the local Arts Council) and had decided that I should be the star of her show. She would pick me up from the back of class, where I sat slouched over my desk doing the New York Times crossword, to ask the most trenchant questions.
‘And what do you think, Rick, of the quality of this translation by Dudley Fitts?’ (This to a class illiterate in Greek, having read no other translations, and based simply on a sheet outlining a few possible alternatives for the Greek phrase in question.)
‘It seems to me admirably to exemplify the old phrase . . .’ Miss Wyeth gave me an anticipatory glare. ‘. . . if the Dudley Fitts, wear it.’
‘Out!’ she said, pointing to the door.
I knew the way to the principal’s office by then: word of mouth had led me there frequently enough. He looked up wearily as I entered.
‘What is it this time?’
‘Well, sir,’ I said, as contritely as possible, ‘I insulted Dudley Fitts in Miss Wyeth’s class.’
The principal was no classicist.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I was teasing him about his name, sir.’
‘Well,’ he said firmly, ‘I want you to go back to class immediately and apologize to Dudley. You know our Honour Code requires courtesy between students!’
‘I’ll be extremely happy to do that, sir.’
Retelling the story over din
ner, I thought my dad would rather admire my wit, though he was getting tired of coming to school to apologize for my behaviour, which I was generally unwilling to do on my own behalf.
‘She had it coming,’ I would say steadfastly, though I felt a little guilty. Miss Wyeth wasn’t a moron or a phoney, like many of the other teachers. This unpleasant dismissive language I had learned from my contemporary, a seventeen-year-old named Holden Caulfield, who was one of my closest confidants. You will remember him as the hero and narrator of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which was much my favourite book at the time.
Holden is a drop-out from a series of posh prep schools, but unlike me was no smart-aleck. Unfailingly polite, and inclined in public to take the blame for his many academic shortcomings – he too only liked English – Holden is internally scathingly dismissive of almost everyone who has taught him. He is a veritable walking crap detector, unfailingly sensitive to every cliché, insincerity, and bit of educational jargon. Counselled by yet another of his disappointed English teachers ‘to learn how to play the game’, Holden isn’t buying: ‘Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right – I’ll admit that, but if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.’
I, too, was on the other side, wherever that was. Holden and I, we were in opposition, unreceptive to second-hand wisdom, unwilling to take counsel from self-appointed betters. I took Holden’s example literally, mistook intensity for fairness of feeling. Teenagers do this, though it is a sign of retarded development in adults.