by Terry Castle
We fell into bed one evening: she’d put Laura Nyro and Labelle’s Gonna Take a Miracle on the record player, and though basically straight as a one-dollar bill, was obviously in an experimental mood. The same thing happened a few times more and so I moved into her house—“to save on rent”—that last spring and early summer before I left for the Midwest. To my dismay—and I rarely seem to have been in any other state of mind in those days—she lost interest in the sex part almost at once, though we went on sleeping in the California King marital bed together. I remember being unsettled indeed when her six-year-old daughter Polly—as dark-haired and fey as Flora or Miles in The Turn of the Screw—would come into the bedroom in the morning and give us an eerie, impervious, reproving glance. I began to regress a bit in the odd situation; started to act in fact like one of the children. I wrote mysterious, droogy love sonnets, usually about P., but some about someone else known (enigmatically) only as “K.”
Granted, in the intellectual realm I was able to maintain—albeit feebly—a quasi adult demeanor. Karen and I shared an enthusiasm for Renaissance literary arcana and were much fired up that spring about alchemy, the Metaphysical poets, Sir Thomas Browne, and Hermes Trismegistus. Good old Hermes T.: wacky but cool. Karen’s specialty was Spanish literature of the Golden Age and with her long blonde hair illumined in the lamplight she would sometimes read Góngora poems to me, in the soft, lisping Spanish accents (or so I imagined) of a seventeenth-century infanta. But at the same time she was also a fledgling satirist and freethinker: embittered by her failed marriage, ferociously anticlerical, droll, caustic, and self-protective. This side of her, I have to say, appealed to me less than the infanta side. At the time I met her she was recovering from a brief and disastrous affair with a morose male undergrad named Richard (I knew him by sight) who’d dumped her in a painful and inexplicable fashion. His pink boy-skin, she would lament, had been that of an Adonis—the most delicious downy fuzz. But now she detested him. She had hatched an idea, she said, for a short story: a divorced woman in her thirties, having fallen madly in love with a college student and been rejected by him, hits a pedestrian while driving. The pedestrian turns out to be the student. Karen confessed to being undecided about the story’s ending: whether the accident would kill him or just leave him horrifyingly maimed—the Adonis features scarified, the beautiful fuzz caked with blood. It was the sort of technical question, we agreed, that a writer like Doris Lessing would know how to resolve.
When the Embarrassing Episode began to unfold that spring, Karen had by far the most jaded—and accurate—view of things. I had been nominated by my college for a fancy graduate scholarship sponsored by one of the great American dog food families. Given that in the greater world of higher education my college was regarded as distinctly subpar—the place wouldn’t be granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter until the late 1980s—the fact that I made it into the regional semifinals was considered a marvelous coup for the school. In anticipation of my interview—to be conducted, somewhat peculiarly, everyone thought, in the early evening at the newly refurbished Sea-Tac airport—I was “prepped” incessantly by a crack team of withered male professors. The group included a temporizing, semicretinous sociology prof whose main contribution was to observe I had “attractive hands” (unlike the Strewelpeter rest of me, presumably) and that I should accentuate all my answers to questions with graceful hand movements. (He demonstrated to loathsome effect.) They were worried, obviously, that I was eccentric—no doubt a bit troubled—and that given my well-known man-hating propensities would bomb out without some kind of last-minute makeover. My feminism in full spate, I was obliged to rail to friends afterward about what disgusting patriarchal pigs they all were.
They were right to be worried, though not in the way one might have expected. A day or two before the event, my interviewer, a humanities professor at one of the regional state universities, phoned me to arrange logistical details. His name was Keith, he said, and he was responsible for meeting with all the Dog Food Fellowship candidates of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Montana over the next week—hence the evening date at Sea-Tac. Having decided where we would wait for one another, he asked me what I’d be wearing so he would recognize me. I made some remark about our conversation being like that of two spies arranging an exchange of secret dossiers. We both laughed. Already I liked him. He would be in a blue work shirt, corduroy pants, and cowboy boots, he said: such informality suited him. I responded by saying I’d probably be wearing an Indian cotton ethnic-looking turquoise dress. The latter garment was in fact the only dress I owned, and while hardly appropriate by present-day standards, was the only thing I had that remotely approximated an interview outfit. Although so short, hemline-wise, one had to wonder if it was really meant to be some sort of tunic or long shirt (a peplum, perhaps?)—it had, nonetheless, a certain Pier One Imports je ne sais quoi. I used to wear it with a pair of baggy-kneed mushroom-colored tights I’d bought under Phoebe’s tutelage, and thus arrayed, imagined myself the very cynosure of hippy-chick chic. (If one had to be female, after all, one might as well be Janis Joplin.) On the afternoon before the interview I made an unusual concession to decorum by deciding not to wear my usual red print bandanna tied around my brow Apache-style, a countercultural fashion I had recently adopted with enthusiasm.
Karen drove me up to Sea-Tac in her rusty yellow Datsun: the plan was for her to pass the time reading in the airport while I had the interview, then we’d drive back. Keith, my interviewer, turned out to be instantly spottable: he was in his early forties, loose and lanky and boyishly handsome, with wavy brown hair and airy blue eyes that matched his work shirt. Unlike most professors I’d ever seen, he seemed vital, friendly, up-to-date. Had the hair been a little bit longer or less kempt, he might indeed have passed as an unusually good-looking member of a rock group—someone in Creedence Clearwater Revival, say, or maybe Country Joe and the Fish. And now that I think about him again, thirty years later, I realize he also bore some resemblance to George Plimpton: the same lazy-eyed, WASPy, good-sport affability. He was popping gum and smiling whimsically at everyone around him. Later on he would smoke a yellow corncob pipe. Once I’d identified myself to him, Karen wandered off—looking slightly ill at ease, I descried—and he and I sat down for our interview in one of the airport’s spiffy new lounge areas.
For reasons that will become clear in a moment, it is difficult for me to remember much of this first phase of the evening. Keith’s opening gambit has stayed with me, nonetheless, for three decades. The Dog Food people had asked that fellowship candidates give evidence of a religious/ethical commitment of one sort or another—not necessarily Christian, but something to indicate a thoughtful engagement with the spiritual life. I must have concocted some suitable white noise on the subject for my application essay—but whether I had declared myself a Taoist, a Gnostic, or a worshipper of Kali the Destroyer, I can’t recollect. Keith, however, went straight to it—my personal cosmology. Subjects more numinous than Ph.D. programs and research projects, it seemed, were to be our focus.
Keith prefaced everything by saying that he was going to ask me some “odd” questions about my life and beliefs, but that if any query troubled me, I might choose not to go down that road. He gave me a glowing look when he said this last; he didn’t want to be “oppressive,” he assured me, or take advantage of his apparent position of power and authority. Nor would he get too far into my “personal head space” if I didn’t want him to. That said, his first question was still ultrabizarre. It took the form of a Sufi parable to which I was to respond, as if on the analyst’s couch, with “whatever came to mind.”
A man is looking for a lost key. Another man comes to help him look. They can’t find it. The other man says, where did you lose it? The first says in the house. The other man asks, why then are we looking for it here in the garden? Because the light is better here, says the first.
Now it’s true, under normal circumstances, being asked to embellish (“without
censorship”) on a kooky little wisdom-tale like this one should have been right up my alley. (Ooh…yeah…I get it…Wow. The LIGHT is better here……) But I was dumbstruck. All I could think of was that Keith, still smiling beatifically at me, was amazing—warm, trippy, charming, colloquial, nothing like the person I had imagined or (hah) that my evil, square, and desiccated team of mock-interviewers had prepared me for. A Sufi parable? The real riddle, perhaps, was who was the stunning “Keith”? A shaman? A helper from another realm? Some sort of magus figure—like the one in the John Fowles novel or Hesse’s Glass Bead Game? He obviously possessed some refined and uncanny magic. For a man of his age, I noted, he had smooth well-preserved skin and fantastic wet dark eyelashes. I was frankly astonished, yet at the same time felt relaxed with him, in an almost metaphysical sense. As he continued looking deeply into my eyes I experienced a hot rush of gratitude: he acted as if he knew me—down to the squalid core—and was nonetheless prepared to cherish everything about me.
Granted, when it came, my answer was girlish and muzzy—some not very good made-up thing about how the light was “like life” and the house was “death.” I was trying to sound spiritual and deep. No doubt he sensed the spuriousness, however, for with what I immediately took to be yogic omniscience he told me that I had not yet brought all of my intuitive “power” to bear on the situation—I wasn’t really opening up to him. My psychic energy, usually febrile, was somehow blocked.
Me? Not using my intuitive power? Not opening up? Blocked? However gently proffered, this criticism of my visionary faculties could not go unmet. Though dimly aware I still wasn’t exactly responding to the Sufi thing, I began blathering away fairly wildly on the theme of “blockage” itself—how it reminded me of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich’s concept of armoring: the harmful binding of orgasm energy—“orgone,” in Reichian lingo—that modern society supposedly produced in human beings, resulting in war, destruction, neurosis, and Having-a-Pole-Up-One’s-Ass on a global scale. I had recently seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dusan Makaveyev’s X-rated 1970 documentary about Reich, and had been much impressed. As far as I was concerned, WR was a martyr in the struggle for sexual enlightenment. (The Food and Drug Administration imprisoned him for quackery in 1956! He died in prison! How grotesque! How sadly typical of our fucked-up country!) To channel the precious orgone in a healthful manner (or so I seemed to recall from several eye-popping scenes in the movie), you either had to sit in the nude in an orgone box—a sort of copper-lined Porta-Potty that somehow attracted cosmic rays—or else set off cascading multiple orgasms in yourself by lying supine, arching your back, and hyperventilating with the aid of a half-undressed Reichian massage therapist.
Yet these disjoint comments were all it took. In what was clearly a mind-boggling instance of Jungian synchronicity, it turned out that Keith—who had been listening to my WR divagation with a wry little buddha-grin on his face—knew all about orgone boxes: he had even sat in one while undergoing a course of Reichian therapy with his “lover, Jan.” (No one said partner in those days, but his frank word for her was still startling.) I must have seemed curious or else simply gaped in amazement, for he then began to elaborate in increasingly vivid terms. He enthused about the liberated Jan; their relationship, he said, just like those Wilhelm Reich advocated, was at once open, free, and deeply erotic. He was missing her greatly while he was on the road. No, they weren’t into sexual possessiveness, he said; the best relationships were uncoercive—self-actualizing for both members of the couple. Both he and Jan had other lovers. Yet thanks to the orgone therapy and similar ventures he and Jan were now sexual “equals.” He especially had evolved under the aegis of feminism and realized that the clitoris was as important, “spiritually and every other way,” as the penis. He had become far more nurturing. In several respects, he noted winsomely, he was now even more “female” than Jan was.
Needless to say, the Sufi parable—not to mention the Dog Food Fellowship—had been forgotten. But Keith now wanted to know more of my thoughts—on eros, feminism, penises, and the like—and I in turn, animated by his example, had become as eager to reveal myself as any boa-shedding exhibitionist. It was as if, beautiful eyelashes fluttering, he had given me a vial of truth serum.
While ponderous, elliptical, and half-mad, the epic journal entry I composed the day after our meeting shows frame-by-frame, Zapruder-style, how bad things quickly became. I began it with a blowsy endorsement of my companion, followed by some woozy metaphysical speculation and the obligatory I Chingiana:
I met him last night as a sorcerer, yet who was all good. Like the idea of God I had been thinking about—that God contained both good and evil, yet chose to be good, in the same way that mortals must choose that. When he talked about alpha waves, he said you know that I won’t do anything to fuck you over. I knew that, and I knew he had chosen the path of benevolence. The Helper.
He said the airport was unreal.
When he began to come across—it reminded me of that hexagram I got last week, 48, Yî, Augmenting. Yî indicates that (in the state which it denotes) there will be advantage in every movement which shall be undertaken, that it will be advantageous (even) to cross the great stream.
The wall made out of water? You pass through it?
(No answer possible to these last, self-posed rhetorical queries, I guess—so on to a description of some of Keith’s other questions.)
Did I think, he asked, I would have to support a lover, ever?—
(I can’t recall why this bizarre question came up; nor—to Blakey’s exasperation—what I said in reply. B. remains curious: What if she wants to take early retirement and live out her days at a spa-ranch in Arizona? Do I promise to shell out?)
Then—how many of my teachers in college had I fallen in love with? I gulped, thought for a long time. I thought about H., and said one, and he said only one? Puzzlement. Then I said why did you ask me that question—he said Far Out, because I’m trying to get a sense of you on sex and teaching, and where your erotic dispensation is. I said there won’t be much for you to pick up because I am consciously blocking it—then I told him I was homosexual; right away he understood all that had gone before, it all came clear. He wanted to know if I was out of the closet, and I said I hadn’t told my mother…. He said how good it would feel to come out. He felt like he understood gayness. He had several gay friends. He himself loved women—indeed worshipped the female genitals especially—but with Jan’s expert help, he had realized that some time in his life he would like to make love to a cock. He thought he might quite enjoy giving another man head.
If I’d had any residual doubts about Keith’s bona fides, I suppressed them forthwith.
I told him I was surprised by how much I had revealed about myself, but he said Christ Terry that’s where we live. He didn’t seemed surprised by my telling him I was gay, had instead been waiting for it. Prospero > alpha waves. The strangest thing—that his face kept changing; when I first saw him I thought that can’t be him he is far too young; later at the table when he smoked his corncob pipe and the light shone up from the bowl of his pipe to his face he seemed old, older than anyone. Inca-land. Ally, bodhisattva, animus, Jungian shadow, hero with a thousand faces.
Plus, one had to admit it: for a man, he was flattering and supernice:
He described myself to me—he said I had an incredible, overwhelming amount of power, but that I had not decided how to use it yet and was not using it. He said that when I did everything was just going to take off.
My momentary depression (still in the old world of success/failure) but as we walked onto the drawbridge to get stoned, he told me I did not have to worry about surviving.
The reference here to a “drawbridge” and getting stoned? A key part of the evening, I’m afraid. At a certain point any pretence we were having an interview dissolved and with a disarming giggle Keith asked me if I would like to go smoke hashish with him. I assented as if in a trance and the next thing I knew
found myself drifting out with him, like the eponymous heroine of La Sonnambula, onto the pedestrian bridge that connected the terminal with the upper level of the new multistory airport parking lot. (All this took place, of course, in those long-lost innocent days before antiterrorist bollards, no-go zones, closed-circuit video cameras, and endless security checks.) Once we’d found a secluded spot, behind a massive concrete pillar, Keith brought out a honking great spliff, stogie-sized in fact, which we then proceeded to smoke, furtively, right down to the roach.
The effects were instantaneous and phantasmagoric. Already, on our way back into the terminal, we were goofing happily: he looked at me with puckish pride and said, I perceive that your mind is somewhat blown. I found this hilarious, a bon mot worthy of Voltaire. He seemed delighted by the way everything was working out and asked me to join him for a delicious dope-enhanced supper in the airport VIP restaurant, courtesy of the Dog Food Foundation. This invitation too I dreamily accepted. (I had forgotten all about Karen and the drive back; she might as well have been sucked flailing and screaming into a black hole.) She later said she’d seen us, an hour or so after the interview was supposed to have ended, walking apparently aimlessly around the airport together, looking flushed and dazed.