by Gore Vidal
BUCK LONER REPORTS—
Recording Disc No. 721—
18 February
Dont know when I have ever come across a woman as awful as Myra Breckinridge she is wreaking total havoc with the program telling the students they have no talent and no chance of star dom which is downright mean not to mention bad for business so I had a talk with her in the back of the auditorium where she was holding her Empathy class which for reasons not clear to me is double the size of any of the other classes the kids are fascinated by her because of what she says and she is a sharptongued bitch no doubt of that theres seldom a class of hers where somebody dont run out crying to beat the band but they come back for more which is downright unhealthy as I told her in no uncertain terms you are undermining all of our work here at the Academy which is to build up capital c confidence exclamation point paragraph well she just gave me that high and mighty stare of hers and said you think lying to people is good for them you think telling somebody whos got cancer that he is all right and doesnt need an operation is the right thing to do of course not I said but if he has had the operation and is a terminal case I think you must keep him as happy as possible and in a good frame of mind under the circumstances well she said in a voice so loud that the students on the stage who were pretending to be billboards could hear her at least you admit that these cretins are terminal cases and that its curtains for the lot of them no it is not I said wanting to crack her one against the side of her head just to take that smirk off of her face no they are carefully selected as possible candidates for future stardom every last one of them well then she interrupts with a single swear word delivered in a hiss that I swear sent shivers down my spine like some mean old rattler out there in the sagebrush just waiting to sink his fangs into your leg well I was not about to be put down in my own Academy and so I said getting real tough you don’t talk to me that way and get away with it you consider yourself warned or else Ill have you out of here so fast you wont know what hit you to which she just smiled prettily and cocked her pretty head at me and said ever so sweet you just try it you motherfucker and Ill take this whole place away from you lock stock and Empathy class well I dont think no woman has ever spoke to me like that certainly no man would dare for fear of getting hisself beat to a pulp all I could say then was well you watch your step thats all and as for taking this place away from me I need to know a whole lot more about you than I do why I dont even know whether you was ever really mar nied to that fag Myron well I suppose I did go too far on that one for she hauled off and let me have it right in the kisser and I saw stars because this wasnt no girls slap no sir it was a goddam fist with what felt like a roll of quarters in it I nearly fell over it was such a jolt and the noise mustve been like a pistol going off for the kids all stopped pretending to be billboards and stared at us like we was putting on a show which is the way she handled it for cool as can be she said to the kids I quote now that is the classic stage slap delivered in such a way that though the person being slapped really seems to be hit hard he isnt its all fake later Ill show you how its done its a trick first used on stage by Miss Patricia Collinge in The Little Foxes so thank you Uncle Buck for the demonstration unquote and with that the bitch went back to teaching her class and I come straight back here to the office and canceled my appointment for massage I am too shook up and then phoned to Flagler and Flagler to ask if theres any report on her from the detective in New York they say the only thing theyve so far found is that Myron really was a fag quite well known in what they call the underground movie set and its thought he killed hisseif probably because of Myra about who they cant find out anything except there is no record of her marrying him in New York New Jersey or Connecticut they are meanwhile going to check the other forty-seven states it would be the happiest day of my life if I can find out she really wasn’t married to him and put her in the damned hoosegow for fraud on the other hand the three wills are all in order worse luck for me so everything depends now on that marriage license dont forget Bobbie Deans yoghurt with prune whip
17
I am sitting in a booth at Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood where the young Lana Turner was discovered by an agent. Of course the present Schwab’s does not in the least resemble the Schwab’s of thirty years ago. Today’s drugstore consists of two large rooms. The one where I am sitting contains booths while the other is occupied by drugstore, soda fountain and a large display of magazines and paperback books where out-of-work actors and actresses can be seen at any time of day or night furtively reading Silver Screen, or searching feverishly through the pages of novels looking for lurid passages whose crude imagery can be calculated to enliven sexual bouts with “loved ones” or, as one hippie said to another after sex, “I’ll tell you who I was thinking of if you’ll tell me who you were thinking of.”
It is curious how often the male (and sometimes the female) needs to think of those not present in the act. Even with Myron, I was always imagining someone else, a boy glimpsed at Jones Beach or a man observed briefly at the wheel of a truck or sometimes (yes, I may as well confess it) a slender blonde girl that used to live in the brownstone next door when we lived at the corner of 11th Street and Ninth Avenue. She studied at the Art Students League and though I never once spoke to her, I was constantly aware of her and learned a good deal about her from the owner of the Ninth Avenue Delicatessen where each of us had an account, ours too seldom paid on time.
Fortunately, I am no longer susceptible to the charm of the female body. Not that a straightforward invitation from the young Lana Turner or the young Ava Gardner might not, as they say out here, “turn me on,” but luckily for me there is no longer a young Lana Turner or Ava Gardner and so my lust has taken a different and quite spectacular form since Myron’s death.
Rusty has been avoiding me ever since the day of his humiliation. He has even taken to cutting Posture class, which is a serious matter. This morning as I was on my way to Empathy II (held in the auditorium because of the students’ desire to be taught by me: the other teachers are mad with envy!), I bumped into Rusty—literally collided with him at the turning of a corridor. I dropped my briefcase, which he swiftly retrieved.
“I’m sorry, Miss Myra.” He handed me the briefcase at arm’s length as though it contained a ticking bomb.
“You really should watch where you’re going.” I was severe and he gulped like Gary Cooper, his attractiveness greatly enhanced by a total inability to look me in the eye.
“You’ve missed two Posture classes in a row. That’s very serious, Rusty. Very, very serious. You know how Uncle Buck dislikes that, and how it is bound to count against your final grade.”
“But I been real busy, Miss Myra. Working, see . . .”
“The garage?”
“No, with these friends, helping to start this business. Anyway, next week I’ll be back in class and that’s for sure, Miss Myra.” He looked at me with such frightened sincerity that it was all I could do to keep my hands off him right then and there. Gone was the easy masculine arrogance that had characterized him in our early relations. Now he was jittery and profoundly hostile, and all because of me! Though the corridor was air-conditioned to a polar temperature (like so many fat men Buck suffers from heat), a bead of sweat appearing at the tip of one sideburn reminded me to say, “I still have the T-shirt you left in my office.”
Bright red at this reference to his humiliation, he said that he was sorry to be so forgetful and that, if it was all right, he would come around sometime and retrieve the garment. Then the bell rang for class and we parted. I watched him a moment as he ran down the corridor, the buttocks that once I had beheld in all their innocent naked glory covered now by thick corduroy. Soon I shall have occasion to examine them again, at leisure, as his education continues, impelling each of us inexorably toward the last degree.
The class went well until Buck decided to look in. I tolerated his presence. But then when he became critical of me I was forced to take a stern line with him. In fac
t, after he made a direct challenge to my authority, I struck him. All in all, it was a most satisfying thing to do and it will be some time before that keg of lard dares to cross me again.
Afterwards, in the faculty room (wall-to-wall champagne-beige carpeting, piped-in music, and a color television set), two of my colleagues joined me for coffee from the mechanical dispenser. Apparently “everyone” has heard that there was some sort of contretemps between me and the president of the Academy. But I assured them that Uncle Buck and I could never quarrel about anything. “Oh, perhaps a disagreement or two about how far one should go in telling the students whether or not they really do have talent.”
Unfortunately both my colleagues share the Buck Loner philosophy. One of them is a Negro queen named Irving Amadeus. A recent convert to the Bahai religion, he lives entirely on organic foods raised in a series of pots in the backyard of a large house at Van Nuys which he shares with a number of fellow cultists. There are, incidentally, nine Negro teachers but only seven Negro students. Though I suspect that Buck dislikes our dusky cousins, he has done his best to integrate the school at the teaching level, leaning over backwards to give work to almost any show-biz-type Negro who comes his way (the Stepin Fetchit Lecture Series, however, fell through at the last moment, due to a contractual snag). But at the student level, integration has not been easy. A vocal minority are prejudiced, possibly because many young white males fear the Negro cock. Time and again I have observed white youths inadvertently clench their buttocks at the approach of a black man, as though fearful of anal penetration, not realizing that the legend of Negro size is just that—legend. The dozen or so jungle bunnies I have trafficked with were perfectly ordinary in that department . . . in fact, two were hung like chipmunks (Myron, incidentally, was larger than any of them, a fact which, paradoxically, caused him not joy but despair). The physiological origin of the myth was once explained to me by Dr. Montag. Apparently the Negro penis limp is almost the same size as it is when erect, a phenomenon which, though it causes consternation in a shower room, brings no added joy to the bedroom. Nevertheless, uneasy white males still continue to tighten their rosy sphincters at the approach of spooks.
In defense of the Buck Loner philosophy, Irving Amadeus (he pretends to have been Jewish before his conversion to Bahai) spoke of love. “It is necessary to have love for all things, particularly those young people entrusted to our care.”
“Love,” I said, “ought never to exclude truth.”
“But love does not wound.” He continued for some time in this vein. Fortunately Miss Cluff, the other teacher, has no interest in love, at least of the caritas sort. She is lean and profoundly Lesbian, forever proposing that we go to drive-in movies together in her secondhand Oldsmobile. Temporarily she is teaching the Bell Telephone Hour Course in Song in order to make enough money to pay for a concert debut in New York.
“Nonsense!” she said to Bahai, cutting him short. “We must wound if we are to create artists. I myself am the result of an uncle whom I hated, a teacher of piano who forced me at the age of nine to practice seven, eight, ten hours a day, striking my lingers with a stick whenever I got a note wrong. This was in Oregon.” We all recognized the plot of The Seventh Veil and so were able to ask the right questions in order to help her complete the fantasy whose denouement was that, in spite of everything, she had come through, become an artist, after the obligatory nervous breakdown, et cetera, and she owed it all to her uncle who had been cruel but cared.
I found this conversation pleasing, for I am always happy when people resort to the storehouse of movie myth in order to create for themselves attractive personas. I was not prepared, however, for her next observation. “There is really only one talented student in any of my classes and that is a girl called Mary-Ann Pringle.”
I sat up, almost spilling the dregs of my coffee. Had I missed a trick? “But I know the girl. I have her in Posture. She is a complete nothing.”
“Except,” said Black Beauty, “for her connection with Rusty Godowsky. I have him in Atavistic Rhythm, and I am here to tell you that that ofay boy has really got sex appeal in spades!” (All in all, not a happy figure of speech, I thought.)
“I know what he’s got,” I said too quickly, and not quite accurately.
“Then you know he is absolutely total man, or, as we in Bahai believe . . .”
“What,” I turned to Miss Cluff, drowning out Mother Africa, “is so talented about Mary-Ann Pringle?”
“Her voice! It is the pure, the white bel canto. Untrained, of course, like a smudged diamond, but a jewel no less. She could be a star of the same magnitude
“Kathryn Grayson?”
Miss Cluff is too young to know from experience the Forties and too self-absorbed to attend films seriously. For her the movies are simply a pretext for getting girls onto the back seat of her secondhand Oldsmobile. “She could . . . she must sing opera.”
But Darkness at Noon saw, perhaps rightly, another fate for Mary-Ann. “As long as that young man wants her she won’t have a career. And from what I’ve seen of him these last two years, he shows no sign of losing interest. Every girl in Atavistic Rhythm has made a play for Rusty, and no dice.”
Miss Cluff looked grim. “Women’s rights are never won! Never! To think that a girl of her talent is prepared to waste her life—and genius—on a hulk, an oaf, a thing, a man!”
“A mighty cute thing,” giggled Heart of Darkness, but then recalled himself to add, more seriously, “and talented, too, possessing a natural animal magnetism, and of course highly photogenic as we all of us saw last spring, before Myra joined us, when he acted in a Rod Serling classic on the closed-circuit TV . . .”
Although I usually collect every comment testifying to Rusty’s male attractiveness, adding bit by bit to the vivid mosaic that is Rusty the Man (soon to be shattered by me into a million fragments, that I may then rearrange him along other and more meaningful lines), I suddenly found myself morbidly eager to hear about Mary-Ann. Miss Cluff, eager to tell, told. And I believed her. Though mad as a hatter, Miss Cluff is every bit as toughminded about the arts as I am. And so I am tempted to believe her when she tells me that Mary-Ann has star quality.
The columnist Sidney Skolsky has just entered the main part of the drugstore. Everyone stares at him. As well they might! With Louella and Hedda gone, he is Mr. Movies. They say his office is upstairs.
18
I am home now. The blinds are raised and I have been staring for some minutes at the bespangled ten-times-life-size girl as she slowly turns in front of the Château Marmont. For me she is Hollywood, and mesmerizing.
No further encounter with Rusty. He attended one Posture class but we did not speak and he was more than ever nervous and sullen in my presence. His T-shirt is still in my desk drawer, which now smells of him, a musky disturbing odor that makes me quite weak since, regretfully, I am not able to smell the original, for he keeps half a room’s distance between us. I must soon make operative the second phase of my plan.
Meanwhile, to my surprise, Mary-Ann has been unusually friendly. When I told her yesterday that Miss Cluff thought her very talented, she was enormously pleased. “Miss Cluff is nice to say that. And I do like singing but, like Rusty says, there’s only room for one star in any bed . . . I mean family.” She stammered, blushing deliciously at her error, which was no doubt a lovers’ joke.
“I’m sure that’s what he would say. It’s the usual male view.”
“But I like it. Honestly I do. I think the man’s got to be boss so a girl knows where she is.”
“I’m afraid that’s a slightly outmoded point of view.” I was careful, however, not to sound too sharp. “Particularly now when the relationship between the sexes is changing so rapidly, and women are becoming aggressive and men passive and . . .”
“Which I just hate!” Mary-Ann was unexpectedly vehement. Good. The subject has occurred to her before. Excellent. “I hate these boys who just drift around, taking pot and trips
and not caring if—well, if it’s a boy or a girl they’re with. It’s just terrible the way so many are now, and I guess that’s why I’m so hung up on Rusty. He’s all man.”
I thought with some amusement of “all man’s” defenseless bottom, quivering at my touch. I have the power forever to alter her image of Rusty. But that is for later. Now I must win her friendship, even love. The plan requires it.
Although Dr. Montag and I write each other at least once a week, I feel somewhat guilty for not having told him what I am up to (these notes will be your introduction, dear Randolph). On the other hand, we do discuss the one topic we most disagree on, the changing relationship between the sexes. Being Jewish as well as neo-Freudian, he is not able to divest himself entirely of the Law of Moses. For the Jew, the family is everything; if it had not been, that religion which they so cherish (but happily do not practice) would have long since ended and with it their baleful sense of identity. As a result, the Jew finds literally demoralizing the normal human sexual drive toward promiscuity. Also, the Old Testament injunction not to look upon the father’s nakedness is the core to a puritanism which finds unbearable the thought that the male in himself might possess an intrinsic attractiveness, either aesthetically or sensually. In fact, they hate the male body and ritually tear the penis in order to remind the man so damaged that his sex is unlovely. It is, all in all, a religion even more dreadful than Christianity.
Dr. Montag, however, is a thoughtful man, aware of the damage done him as a child growing up in the household of a kosher butcher whose wife wanted their son to be a rabbi. But even then Randolph was a nonconformist; he chose to be a dentist, that last resort of the rabbi manqué. But dentistry soon palled (it was the tongue, not the teeth that interested him) and so he became a psychologist, and his book, Sexual Role and/or Responsibility, made a complete shambles of Karen Homey, among others.
