The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  Gorden’s own lip was bleeding from his teeth biting down on it, and the maniacal look on his face and the intensity of his eyes convinced me that he would kill the boy. A female teacher was screaming for help. McVay was becoming pulp. My fingernails were digging into my palms from the vicarious beating of my archenemy, this villain who had changed my life. Each punch was my punch.

  Then, as I looked at the scarlet mess that was McVay’s face, I realized that the savagery of the attack was becoming too painful for me to watch, and I found myself wanting to shout out for Gorden to stop. I did not. A surprising revulsion overtook me. I could not stand more, and was about to turn away when finally Al Gorden desisted his furious attack. He stepped back, a snarling, sweaty animal, and regained control of himself. He stood for a few moments over McVay, like Hemingway over a slain lion. I looked at the vanquished Percival McVay lying half conscious on the floor and tried to drink it in, wanting so much to enjoy it, thinking that it would at last end my preoccupation with the humiliation that had afflicted me since the incident. What a shitty fighter he was. I had never thought I would see this, though wasn’t it what I had hoped for? But the sight gave me no comfort. A tremendous wave of pity replaced the revulsion and the vitriol, and I felt a sudden desire to help McVay up. I did not. I thought of his mother.

  A couple of nervous teachers on lunchroom duty, who had sensibly stood back during the fight, helped the pitiful figure to his feet and dabbed his wounds with paper napkins. A few boys taunted him that he had not landed a single punch; perhaps they, too, had been victims of his predatory habits to take such cowardly advantage of his condition. Ding dong the witch was dead. Percy McVay was now off the sociological map at DeWitt Clinton High School. He never returned to school.

  With hindsight, I have to admit that his demise afforded me closure of a sort. If I had not seen him so humbled, his power over me—or rather, my mind—might have continued. I slept more soundly, and I had more confidence, and I was a more productive TeenTone from then on. I never saw his face in the flesh again, though I cannot say that I have not seen him in my mind’s eye from time to time; more as the bleeding heap than the terrifying intimidator.

  The TeenTones did appear on the Original Amateur Hour, singing an up-tempo version of the Harptones hit “A Sunday Kind of Love.” We were up against NBC’s Cinderella, which had, I’m told, the largest audience up to that time in television history. Only our immediate families watched us, and even that is somewhat doubtful. The TeenTones did not win. We were defeated by a one-armed piano-playing post-office worker from Missouri.

  Chapter Four

  Push Like You Mean It

  Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, I met someone who would change the entire course of my life. We met briefly, and I haven’t seen her since, but I will be indebted to her as long as I live.

  It was around this time that two high school friends and I, shot through with 110-proof libido, began to contemplate our stifled Bronx teenage life. The notion arose that we had been virgins long enough. Manny and Joe were good guys, reasonably intelligent, fun, and like myself, plenty frustrated and at least tentatively determined to do something about it. Joe was a thickly built blond-headed boy with a wonderful disposition and an appealing tendency to smile a lot. In my upbringing, optimism was not a highly touted concept, and his glass-is-half-full outlook played well with me. He wore his blond hair cropped and reminded me of Moose Skowron, who played first base for the Yankees on those fifties championship teams, though Joe was much better-looking than the first baseman. He was as unneurotic and sanguine as could be, having never wanted for anything in his life, either emotionally or materially. Joe’s mother, it was said, had never missed a breast feeding and was known to have been punctual at all times, especially with regard to anything that affected her little Joey.

  Manny, on the other hand, was a worrywart, compulsively neat, perpetually washing his hands and in motion: fidgeting, examining objects. He was very smart and had an excellent sense of humor. He was tall and rather handsome, though his black horn-rimmed glasses gave him the stereotypic look of an intellectual, which he was not.

  In matters of sex, we were masters of inexperience, figures of futility, impatient, not hopeful. We were not Don Juans or Casanovas. We were horny. The three of us felt overdue and resolved to finally score, hit a home run, go all the way, get laid. To be sure, guys like us all carried a condom in our wallets just in case we got lucky; but no one seemed to get lucky, and in the wallets they stayed—in my case, for years. In fact, it caused a semipermanent impression of a ring in my wallet and on my left buttock, which looked like a miniature three-dimensional schematic of Belmont Racetrack. Never mind that the condom, three years past its expiration date, would have crumbled into dust if removed from the package.

  Clearly, the prospects for real sex in my middle-class life at that time were slim, as the neighborhood girls were “good girls” who would not yet engage in such things, repressed as we all were by the prevailing fifties culture. (I use expressions like “prevailing fifties culture” now, though I would not have had a clue about it back then.) There were “bad girls,” or so we heard, and rumors of sluts and tramps who would do anything with any guy (God bless them), but I never seemed to run into them. To hear the talk of certain boys, someone was getting it, but it sure wasn’t me or anyone I knew. At that time, my most advanced sexual experience consisted of a girl and I rubbing against each other fully clothed, the utterly frustrating maneuver known as dry humping. Before my hand was stopped in its tracks, I had experienced a couple of instances of feeling tiny bare breasts, and a glorious but brief digital touch of a vagina, that most divine of body parts, with which I longed to get better acquainted, but which seemed destined to elude me.

  All of this aroused me enormously with no orgasmic payoff, which sent me into painful cases of what we called “blue balls” among the boys. I know little or nothing of the male sexual and urological plumbing, but my sense of it as a layman and an individual who possesses this physiological setup, is that the condition is caused by the pressure of intense arousal for long periods of time, with no climax. The pain would result in a limping gait, not to mention much agony, and it reminded me of the pain incurred when trying to jump over a fire hydrant (which we often did as a dangerous macho challenge) but instead landing on top of it. A couple of testicles smashing into that hard, steel hexagonal nut at the top of the hydrant—enough said. Blue balls also required torturous explanations to my mother about why I was walking “that way.” “What’s the matter with your leg? Why are you walking that way?” “I’m all right, I’m all right, it’s nothing, Ma, I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”

  By necessity, expediency was the order of the day, and my main squeeze at the time was my compliant and always reliable right hand, frequently referred to as Mother Palm and Her Five Daughters. Masturbation was the savior of us all: the safety valve, our friend. Some parents panicked upon catching their boys in the act and issued dire warnings about hell, blindness, or worse. My mother had caught me a number of times since the age of five, rubbing myself in the prone position against the living room rug. She told me that my penis would eventually fall off if I did this regularly, but she had a smile on her face, which indicated that her declaration was said in jest, tongue in cheek. While I sensed that it wasn’t really true, I was gullible, as small children are, and would frequently check myself for possible penile breakage. All in all, I calculated the risk to be well worth it, which says quite a bit about the joys of orgasm and a risk-averse boy.

  Now I was fifteen and knew better, as my sexual organ had survived mightily, and far from having fallen off, had grown and prospered and was playing an increasingly important role in my young life. I knew there was a world out there where people were having sex. My father had a deck of cards from the thirties with black-and-white photos of real people engaging in real sex, confirming all the things I had been imagining. I had found it two years earlier, the consu
mmate bar mitzvah present, and it was, to a hormonal thirteen-year-old, like a paleo-anthropologist discovering the missing link. It was impossible not to share the find with some close friends, who liked to borrow the cards for quick, private games of solitaire in the bathroom. My father hid the French deck, as it was called (since such things were purported to have originated in Paris), in his sock drawer, next to his Trojan prophylactics, which I fiendishly counted to see how often my parents were having sex. The incessant use of these pornographic cards by pubescent boys resulted in a dilemma. When I found them, they were in pristine condition, never used; but now the edges had become frayed, and the box showed considerable wear and tear. If my father knew anything, he pretended not to notice and certainly would have been too embarrassed to bring up the subject. Time after time, the cards were right where I left them. He never removed them from their accustomed place in his sock drawer, since such a move would indicate that he knew that we knew that he owned them.

  This deck of cards got a real workout. The image was practically obliterated on the jack of diamonds, an acrobatic ménage à trois that was everybody’s favorite. It is not an exaggeration to say that this deck of cards and I went steady for over two years, and the courtship was most educational. I wish I could thank the skanky-looking cast of characters that appeared in these photos: the tough-looking men with greasy hair and black socks, and the homely whores doing the most fantastic things while tempting the wrath of hell and the law. They did a great service for us, these lay professors who risked jail and worse. It was not information generally available to us at that time, except through the hyperbole of older boys, who tended to exaggerate their experience and skill. I feel genuine gratitude when I think that these men and women performed these forbidden acts for the camera in the antiquated nineteen thirties, so that some hapless shleppers under the influence of powerful, natural, and unavoidable urges in the not-so-sexy fifties could get off once in a while. The closest thing to pornography that most of us had was a Marilyn Monroe calendar or a Playboy magazine, even though Hugh Hefner had not yet discovered the existence of pubic hair.

  And just where could kids like us have enough privacy to even imitate having sex? In New York City, no one could drive a car until the age of eighteen, so we had to content ourselves with stolen moments at parentally supervised teenage birthday parties, necking on top of the coats in the bedroom or dancing and groping in a dark room to the music of Johnny Mathis or the Cadillacs. These experiences were so frustrating that it was guaranteed that the boys would be limping home. Yet they were well worth the pain, these first encounters with holding, squeezing, and kissing a female, keeper of the elusive vagina, though not the adored object itself.

  Let me say that even though these events happened well before a more permissive, enlightened time, it was not some amorphous person I was attempting to fondle in the dark. It was Susan Gilbert and Suzanne Billitzer and Leona Fleigner and Flo Bierman, girls in my class, friends, whose gender did not make them automatic adversaries or depersonalized objects. They were wonderfully intelligent, positive, spirited girls with the highest self-esteem. The fact that they were mature for their age and in charge of themselves made my intimacy with them, such as it was, all the more exciting. The juxtaposition of a cool, public exterior and those primitive, private, intimate moments on top of the coats in the bedroom was very erotic. The girls, model citizens with first-rate brains, from good families, yet rubbing against me with a passion and loss of inhibition that they exhibited nowhere else in their lives—this was one of the enigmas of sexuality, but I felt no need to figure it out.

  Often the quest was just to dance close and slow and maybe explore a little in the darkness. The result was usually the good girl abruptly removing my hand from her breast when I’d gone too far, and saying something like “Robert, do you respect me?” “Yes, I respect you, I just want to touch your breasts.” There was plenty of guilt, embarrassment, and regret at having blurted this out; even though it was the truth—an unfortunate utterance of the id—this girl was my friend and was only trying to protect her reputation. I found out years later that she wanted me to touch her breasts as much as I wanted to touch them, but she was constrained by the prevailing pressures of family and decency. Weren’t we all? The girls, though, were especially victimized by a double standard. We all wanted to do something with a girl that we wouldn’t want our sister to do. When all was said and done, I had a sister at home, and she was a good girl, and I was thankful for that. But if we were to do it with a girl, it had to be with somebody’s sister: This was another contradiction of sexuality that I felt no obligation to solve. Anyway, why is something as good as sex thought of as bad? And why is the idea that it’s naughty so arousing? That’s an enigma and a contradiction rolled into one.

  In any case, it was clear that for the foreseeable future, what Joe and Manny and I sought to attain would never be accomplished with the girls we knew from the neighborhood. The answer would have to be a professional woman, a prostitute, a whore, or, as it was pronounced in the Bronx street, with two syllables: a hoo-ah. But who knew a hoo-ah? There were occasional “hot” phone numbers of supposed prostitutes bandied about, garnered from lavatory walls. All were hoaxes: the phone numbers of good girls, supplied by rejected boyfriends or demented mischief makers. Joe supplied the number of a “definite hoo-ah” that he got “off a guy” at the Fordham library. We worked up the nerve and called, giggling and goosy, only to hear some pathetic drunk female with a three-pack-a-day voice say, “I don’t do that anymore.” Surely not with the likes of hysterical teenagers like us.

  “Did you really used to do it?” I asked, fascinated that I might be talking to an actual hoo-ah.

  “Where did you get my number?” she spat, through a spate of bubbly wet coughing right out of the pulmonary ward at Bellevue. I pursued my fascination: “How come you don’t do that anymore?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “Why don’t you do it once more? Just once more,” I pleaded, determined to coax her out of her premature and inconvenient retirement. Manny wanted me to ask her if she would recommend someone else.

  “Grow up, you bunch a jerks,” she coughed, and abruptly hung up.

  The message seemed to be: “Wait till you grow up, jerk,” but none of us jerks had the patience to wait that long. We made inquiries in school, and along the fence at Mosholu Parkway, looking for a live clue. Around this time we heard a story from Nicky C., a boy in Manny’s biology class who had none too good a reputation. It was said that Nicky could steal your socks while you were wearing them, though his specialty was stolen bus passes. We were sitting in the lunchroom when he told us about a street corner in Harlem where, every Saturday night, twenty or thirty prostitutes of all descriptions would gather and openly solicit their wares. This sounded too good to be true, especially since it was illegal and being done openly, and more especially, since it came from Nicky C. But he stuck to his story, and it actually seemed to have the aura of truth, or so we hoped. Could it be the breakthrough we’d been seeking, the solution to our frustration? No embarrassing telephone calls, no doubts, take your pick . . . a sure thing, whores, tons of them.

  “Even the cops walk right by,” Nick told us, “as if nothing is going on.”

  “Wouldn’t someone try to jump us?” I asked. I reckoned that three white boys from the Bronx would be rather conspicuous in the middle of Harlem, especially with money on us.

  “Yeah, someone might jump you. I got friends down there, so no one would touch me, but for you mooks, it’s a different story. They can see a little white boy a mile away, and they could take your money. You gotta watch your ass down there, ’cause they know you don’t live there, and they damn well know why you’re there, capeesh?” said Nick.

  We capeeshed all too well. This was discouraging though not unexpected information. I wondered what a mook was. “How much does it cost?” Joe inquired.

  “Five bucks for a lay, but anything else is extra.”


  “Extra?” We were nonplussed.

  “You know . . . like blow jobs and shit like that.”

  “Five bucks each? Jeez. Could they do the three of us for ten bucks?” I asked in the spirit of thrift.

  Nicky C. got testy. “I don’t know. I ain’t no pimp, you’ll have to ask the hoo-ah. Mine really liked me. She told me next time she’d do it for free, ’cause she likes me so much.” Now, Nicky C. was an ugly unkempt sucker with a first-degree case of underarm odor, whose greasy hoodlum pompadour hadn’t been washed for weeks. Somehow I doubted that he had stolen the heart of a streetwalker. Maybe his whole story was bullshit, and maybe it wasn’t, but I wanted desperately to believe him, short of his self-aggrandizing embroidery, because what he had told us about that happy street corner had planted an erotic germ in my head, and maybe a determination: a carpe diem mentality. Well, some kind of diem mentality, I think it was carpe.

  I began fantasizing about it and nothing else, yet the thought always lingered that there was danger here, real danger, and a good boy in a protected life could get his ass kicked in the pursuit of the forbidden. It almost seemed fair, a kind of righteous symmetry, paying the piper and the price. Was that part of the allure?—the trade-off—that is, pursuing a naughty, forbidden goal in the face of adversity and even danger?

  Nick’s story became the subject of conversation every chance we got: between classes, in the cafeteria, on the walk to and from school. We talked and talked, and the more we discussed the pros and cons, the more it appeared that there were quite a few cons and a discouraging dearth of pros. Truth be known, there was only one pro: getting off the coital shneid. Among the cons we discussed were the prospects of getting robbed and beaten and horrendous venereal diseases. We mulled over the headlines and the effect on our families of being dragged dead from the East River or shot through the head, and not innocently, mind you. For the shameful fact, the locus of the affair that the bereaved families—indeed, the whole world—would know and be forced to live with was that these boys died seeking sex, in pursuit of pussy, in sin. We discussed these weighty scenarios for the better part of three minutes, and decided that they were small risks for such an intensely desired goal. We were ready, for such is the power of teenage lust.