The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  “But it’s not him I feel sorry for. You could say he wasted himself, but it’s my old lady who’s the real waste. He at least did what he wanted. She never had anything she wanted to do. Her whole life is just a struggle to stay alive and get by. That’s all she wants to do, just to get by. Nothing makes her happy and nothing makes her sad. She gets up in the morning, she manages the store, she goes to bed at night. Somewhere along the way she eats two or three meals and smokes a pack of cigarettes. I’m positive she never slept with anybody but my old man, and they couldn’t have done much, not the way he drank. She still runs that store. If she made a hundred thou a year out of it she would live the same way, she wouldn’t change a thing. I go out there and see her maybe once a year. We have nothing to say to each other. It’s the most depressing thing in the world. Last time I saw her I walked out of that store so uptight I couldn’t take it. I thought I’d go home and drag Phil into bed but then I decided I couldn’t wait, and I stopped the first man I met. Took him by the arm. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m serious, this isn’t a gag, but I’m horny as a toad and would you like to screw me?’ First he thought I was kidding and then he thought it was a con and finally he decided I was crazy, but a screw is a screw so we went to his place and we did it, and I came, and then I felt better.”

  Marcia’s introduction to sex came at a very early age. Childhood seduction by an adult, often a relative, is a common element in the history of prostitutes and other promiscuous women. In Marcia’s case, the seducer was the proprietor of a candy store which she passed every day on the way to school.

  “I must have been seven or eight, no more than that. All the kids knew about Mr. Poulard. I’m surprised he never got arrested, but I guess he must have had good connections on the force. The word was that he would give you candy if you let him do things. No one ever said what the things were, but you sort of knew that they were dirty.

  “I went in there one day after school and said I wanted some candy and I didn’t have any money. I did it on a dare, another girl dared me to and I did it. God knows why. I said my little speech, and the old greaseball said he would be good to me if I would be good to him and pretend I was his own little girl. Somehow that sounded nice to me, I don’t know why, as though it would be fun pretending this dirty old man was my father. God knows why.

  “But I said I would, and he went to the front of the store and pulled down the shade and put the Back In Ten Minutes sign up, and then he took me into the back room and had me sit on his lap. He put his hand up my dress and played with my legs and touched me through my panties. Then I guess he popped, because he gave a sigh and put me down off his lap and let me pick out whatever kind of candy I wanted. I remember I took a Mars Bar. People remember the damnedest things.

  “I was a rare find for the old bastard. I never got scared, I never told a soul, and I came back for more two or three times a week for the rest of the year. At first it was the same routine, rubbing the legs and the crotch through the panties. He gradually worked himself up to bigger and better things. When he got to the point of taking down my panties and rubbing my slit with his fingers, I really began to enjoy it. It made me feel good. All tingly and warm and funny.

  “His big production number was going down. It was a long time before he got around to it, and when he first put his mouth to me I was shook, I thought he was going to bite it. But all he did was lick me. I guess I was too young to have an actual orgasm, but whatever I had would do until the real thing came along. Good old Papa Poulard. I got all hot and tense whenever he started eating me, and then I would relax and feel loose and warm and fine all over.

  “Eating was his big thing, but he also had me play with his penis occasionally. I thought it was really groovy the way it would start out small and get big and spit at me and then get small again. I felt very proud that I could make this wonderful thing happen.

  “He also had me suck him off once. just the one time and never again. I liked it well enough, but I guess he was scared that they would really string him up by the balls if they found out, because other times when I tried to do it he would push my head away.

  “By the time we reached the eating stage he told me it wasn’t right for me to call him Papa. But I did anyway. I liked to, I liked the sound of it, I got a kind of a kick out of it.

  “After a year of this he wouldn’t let me in the store. I guess he had gotten more involved with me than he dared, and he was worried about what might happen. Obviously I went with him for the kicks. He always gave me candy, but what kind of a big deal was candy? For Christ’s sake, my mother owned a candy store, I could have all the candy I wanted. I did it because it made me feel great.”

  • • •

  The oedipal implications of the whole affaire de Poulard are fairly evident, and deserve more attention than the scope of this book permits. It is worth noting, though, that Marcia differs from most victims of similar seduction in that she derived actual physical enjoyment from her seducer’s attentions. For most girls in such circumstances, the reward is either purely emotional—they feel needed and worthwhile and desirable—or financial—they receive money or gifts which would otherwise be denied them. In either case the seeds are sown for the development of the prostitute personality, the exchange of sexual favors for non-sexual gains.

  This was by no means the case with Marcia. While her association with Mr. Poulard did provide emotional gratification of a sort, it also provided pure physical pleasure. The association of sex with pleasure was established, and Marcia headed not toward the joyless sex of prostitution but the wildly sensual sex of polymorphous perversion.

  Her sexual development during adolescence followed a predictable route. By age 14 she had lost her virginity. and within a year afterward she had acquired a reputation for wanton promiscuity. “My name was on the wall of every high school men’s room in Queens.” Throughout this period she knew that what she was doing was considered morally reprehensible, that it gave her a bad reputation and damaged her prospects for a happy life.

  “But this didn’t matter. I was a sexaholic. I did everything the same as before, but I knew it was wrong, and so all I accomplished was I felt rotten about it and hated myself. It was like the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic—they both drink as much, but the alcoholic goes to the meetings and spends half his time feeling bad about it.”

  At sixteen, after a number of close escapes, the law of averages caught up with Marcia. She became pregnant, had the baby out of wedlock, and gave it up for adoption through a welfare agency. “I thought the world was over. I decided I would get religion, I would never let a boy touch me again until I was married. There was this home they kept us in out on Long Island, and there was this girl I knew there, a very sweet girl named Tanya, and we would have long talks about how boys were rotten and all they did was get girls like us in trouble, and didn’t respect us or care for us. You can imagine the dialogue better than I can remember it.

  “She was older, she must have been nineteen or twenty. And she’d been around. She did a bit at a girl’s reformatory for stealing a car. I suppose that was where she first made the lesbian scene. You must have seen it coming, the long earnest talks about how girls can get along better without men, how women can know real love but men are animals. If you did see it coming you were miles ahead of me, because I honestly didn’t. For a girl who screwed like a rabbit I was extremely ignorant. I didn’t know much of anything about the facts of life. I wasn’t a reader and nobody ever told me and all I ever knew was that it felt great when a boy got on top of you and stuck his cock in you. So I didn’t know much of anything about lesbians beyond the fact that they existed.

  “So one night Tanya got in bed with me. This was common there because a lot of the girls had little gay scenes going, but good old Marcia the Moron just thought it was friendship and cuddling together for warmth. She had two fingers up me before I knew what was happening, and by that time it was too late to do anything because I’d had the
bad luck to find out I liked it. Once I find out I like something that’s the end of the line for me. From then on until I got out of that hole I wouldn’t let Tanya alone. I was after her all the time, and if she wasn’t in the mood I found a girl who was. We did everything, eating and fingering, smuggling sausages from the mess hall and using them on each other as dildos. Everything.

  “Then I got out of there and went home, and within two days I let a guy in the neighborhood take me down to his cellar and lay me, and then I thought, hell, I was the lowest of the low, a pushover tramp and a lesbian besides, and I’d probably screw an elephant if I could figure out how, and I didn’t deserve to go on living. I used a razor blade on my wrists and I couldn’t even do that right. They found me bleeding all over the bathroom sink and rushed me to the hospital, and I had to stay there in the psycho ward for two weeks of observation. Then they sent me home and told me please, not to try to kill myself anymore.

  “So I went out and let a guy pick me up because what the hell else was I going to do. It went through my mind that I would have one final bang and then go home and kill myself permanently. So we balled, and it was good, better than usual, and just after I came, as I was lying there in that sweet rosy glow you get when it’s good, I had this thought. I said to myself, Marcia Musclehead, you damned fool, you could have missed this. You could of been dead and missed this. And right then I took an oath that I would never so help me God try to kill myself, and there have been good times since then and a thousand bad bad times, and I always kept that oath. I never tried to kill myself again.

  “And I never will. You reach a point where you say, okay, screw it, this is what I am, maybe it stinks, maybe it’s more bad than good, maybe it would be worlds groovier to be somebody else, but screw it, this is what I am and I’ll live with it. It was a lot more years before I got to that point but I’m there now and I’m not about to fall off. This is me, I won’t kill myself and I won’t eat my heart out. This is Marcia Duffy, so take her or leave her alone.”

  • • •

  The route Marcia traveled to this particular level of self-realization was as rocky a road as the one to Damascus. She made two bad marriages along the way. The first lasted for almost three years, the second ended in less than eight months.

  “My first husband was one of those nice guys who finish last. He was a college graduate with a job in sales promotion for a toy manufacturer. He took the job because they had a great profit-sharing and pension plan, and he got lots of expense-account lunches and the company paid his way to trade fairs. He wasn’t exactly a world beater. All he wanted was a nice comfortable life and a house and kids. I understand he’s remarried now and he’s happy. I can believe it, because he’d be perfect for the right girl, but the two of us, all we did was tear each other up.”

  Marcia married him because she saw marriage as her sole chance for a normal life. She thought it would change her, that the sexual outlet it provided would satisfy her. Love didn’t enter into the picture. “At the time I didn’t know about love. Love to me meant you could make it together. Howie and I could make it together so that was close enough to love for Duffy the Dumbbell. And Howie thought he was in love with me because we went to bed together, and I was his first. He had been with hookers but never a girl who did it with him because she wanted to. I met him at a party in the Village and went back to his place and we balled. He couldn’t believe it. He thought I was the greatest thing since tinned salmon, he went out of his head for me. For sex, really, but sex was me to him. And it was cool, because I thought I had latched onto the greatest stud since Whirlaway, because all he wanted to do was ball.

  “The thing was, it was the novelty that had him. By the time we were married the novelty had worn off for him. He had worked it all out of his system, and now he could go back to his true interest in life, which was being a bore.” She laughed at the memory. “Christ, it was awful. It would have been funny as hell if it had been happening to somebody else. Before we were married it was impossible to turn him off, and now it was impossible to turn him on. ‘We’ve got all our lives to make love,’ he told me one night. ‘We don’t have to use it all up now.’ It was just like his stinking pension plan. I told him he was putting all his extra sex in a bank so he could enjoy himself when he was sixty-five.

  “And at the beginning there was this big thing about how he loved me in spite of my past. Tramp or no tramp, I love you—that routine. Later on, when his schlong went into a permanent state of wilt, I heard a different version of that line. Suddenly it turned into Married or single, you’re still a tramp. I just recently learned the right word for Howie. Sanctimonious. He was a sanctimonious prick.”

  Marcia began leaving the apartment for long stretches of time and picking up strange men for casual sex. She waited for Howie to catch her at it, and when he failed she confessed. Each time he forgave her, and each time she swore to be faithful, and each time she broke her own vow.

  “I finally got the message. I was going to cheat until hell froze, and he was going to forgive me each and every time, and waltz me around again, Willie. I flew down to Alabama and came back with a divorce.”

  Her life between marriages was about what one can expect—intermittent affairs coupled with casual sexual encounters, occasional forays into lesbianism, and violent emotional upheavals. “I decided that if I was going to be the easiest lay in the world I might as well be the best lay in the world, too. But I didn’t like the kind of person I was turning into. Bitchy, aggressive. I know that a lot of girls like me like to be the aggressor. They want to select men and use them and throw them away. They enjoy being dominant. I didn’t enjoy it at all, I wanted to be courted and petted and chosen like anyone else, but I was being forced into behaving this way in order to have sex as often as I wanted it.

  “Then I went and did another stupid thing. I fell in love for the first time and it hit me like a bullet in the forehead. That was Jimmie, and I married the son of a bitch.”

  Jimmie was a far cry from Howie. A Greenwich Village artist who had never sold a painting, he somehow managed to live without ever working. “He was like hell an artist. In all the time we were together I never saw him paint a damned thing. He was an artist because it was a respectable way of being permanently out of work. What he did was drink wine and ball college girls. I was no college girl but I was ten years younger than he was and better in bed than six dormitories full of Barnard sophomores, and I guess that was enough for Jimmie, because we got married. I suggested it, but he was all for it all the way.”

  While the marriage was a fiasco, it did serve one purpose; it introduced Marcia to the swinging society. “It started with him bringing home guys, sometimes friends of his, sometimes strangers. He and the guy would sit around drinking for awhile and then he would say, ‘You see my wife? She ain’t the prettiest girl in the world but she might be the world’s best lay. If you’re in the mood, why don’t you throw it to her? I don’t mind, and she’s always ready. All you got to do is look at her and she comes in her pants.’ The first time he did this I thought all right, I’ll call the bastard’s bluff, and I hopped out of my clothes and hauled this friend of his into the bedroom. But it was no bluff. Jimmie dug watching us. Then when the clod put on his pants and went home Jimmie would be excited, and we would ball. I would lie there hating him but loving the sex.

  “Or else he would bring guys home for threesomes. He’d have me blow a guy while he laid me or the other way around. A few times he would pick up some college girl and get her drunk and bring her home and we would have a threesome that way. I didn’t like that, I didn’t care for it, it was taking advantage, but sexually I couldn’t help it. I dug it very much.

  “Then he came home with one of these tabloid papers with swinger advertisements in it. It cost a quarter so I’m sure he didn’t buy it. He must have found it in a trash barrel somewhere. He wrote a letter to one couple. Their ad was the usual sort of thing. Swinging couple, he 36, muscular, athletic, she 2
7, petite, 34-22-33, enjoy nudism, photography and French culture, the whole bit. They called us on the phone and we took a train up to their place. They lived in Westchester County, I forgot which town.

  “And it was a whole new world . . .”

  • • •

  The world Marcia found that night was one she had looked for in dreams without ever knowing it existed. It was a world in which people indulged their sexual appetites to the fullest without demeaning themselves in the process. It was a world in which a woman with her sexual make-up was looked upon not as a tramp or a pushover or a neurotic but as a member of the sexual elite. It was a world in which she could give herself with utter candor without sacrificing her femininity.

  “For years I was a doormat, and now people were putting me on a pedestal.”

  The sexual activities were as intense and unusual as any she had experienced, but that was only part of the new world. What really delighted her was the discovery that there were people who shared her sexual attitudes while remaining respectable, cultured, sensitive human beings. All this time, she said, she had thought that sexual adventurers were bums like Jimmie. Now she was finding out that this was not the case at all.

  “They had a lovely home, they dressed beautifully, they spoke like Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. And they were beautiful people, really striking. He had a marvelous build and she was really striking, jet black hair and a delicious figure. And they knew what to do in bed, that was the best part of all. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t. All the yo-yos who think you just get on and wiggle your butt and come as fast as you possibly can. They knew techniques I hadn’t even heard of and they prided themselves in their techniques. The guy’s object wasn’t to get his rocks off, it was to please me, to thrill me and make me happy.