by Gore Vidal
Since that traumatic experience for us all, Randolph has been, in some ways, a new man, a changed dentist. Now he almost believes those stories his younger patients tell him of parties where sexual roles change rapidly, according to whim and in response to the moment’s pleasure, stories he used to reject as wish-fulfillments. Between a beautiful girl and an unattractive man (between Gloria and Clem), I shall always be drawn, like any healthy-minded woman, to the girl, as I was last night when, very simply, I took both of Gloria’s breasts in my hands and stooped to kiss the appendix scar just to the right of her navel, for all the world like a delicate dimple, so marvelously had the surgeon done his work.
“Chick, you are turning me on!” Gloria exclaimed as she flung my dress willy-nilly upon the bed with all the other clothes. Then she clutched at my panties, but I restrained her, reminding her of the agreement with Clem.
She frowned and pouted. “Not even for me?” she asked, fingering my lovely breasts already partially revealed through the lacy mesh of the bra.
“Later,” I whispered, looking over Gloria’s shoulder at my escort who was stripping down. It was evident that what he lacked in conversation he made up for in other ways. Beneath a not unpleasantly curved beer-belly, a large white object sprouted, as inviting to the touch as a well-wrought pitcher’s handle.
On his way to the door, my hand snaked out and seized him, causing him to stop abruptly. I held him just long enough to achieve a small but exquisite sense of power (he was not able to move, so powerful is my grasp). Then I released him. Shouting “Crazy!” he vanished into the darkened room where the party was.
Impressions: varied, some pleasant, some not. All in all, not my sort of scene. I need one man to break down, not twenty to serve. But visually the scene was appealing. Mattresses spread at random across a tile floor. Towels hung from every lamp, giving a festive look to a room whose only light came from a single Moroccan lamp of intricately chased silver inset with red and blue glass.
Aesthetically, the decor was all that one could have wished and so were the girls; the men had seen to that. In fact, simply on circumstantial evidence, one could tell that a man had selected the guest list, for though there were several attractive young studs in the room (two of the five members of the Four Skins were present), the majority resembled Clem: physically unimpressive males forced to rely upon personality and money to get girls to bed. For my taste, they are exactly the wrong sort to have at an orgy, which, no doubt, is the reason why they are always the leading instigators of what is known locally as the “gangbang.”
The party lasted four hours. That is as long as the male can hold out. Women of course can go on indefinitely if they are allowed occasional catnaps between orgasms. At one point Gloria experienced twelve orgasms in as many minutes (supplied her by the ex-waiter from Romanoff’s, a really formidable man, capable of quite astonishing endurance and restraint); then she promptly fell asleep with her head in the lap of Clem, whom she had been attending to in an absentminded way. To his great alarm, she could not be awakened. Fortunately, we were able to pry her mouth open and salvage the tiny treasure before serious damage was done. Ten minutes later our Gloria was wide awake and ready for fun. This time Clem provided it. Having strapped on a formidable dildo because, as he said, “You got to have head,” he was able to give her maximum pleasure with a minimum of exertion on his part.
My own participation was limited. I watched, and only occasionally helped out: a tickle here, a pull there, a lick, a bite, no more, except for one sudden rude intrusion from the rear which I did not see coming. It was one of the Four Skins, a hillbilly type who explained to me, as he was relieving himself, that he had first committed this particular act at the age of twelve with a sheep and so, to this day, he not only preferred back to front but sheep to goats, or did he say girls? Like the rest of the Four Skins his conversation is as difficult to understand as the lyrics they sing. Had there been a pair of shears at hand, I would have made a steer of him on the spot but since there were not I did not, suffering in silence and even, to be honest, deriving a certain perverse, masochistic, Myronesque enjoyment from the unlikely situation of Myra Breckinridge, victorious Amazon, laid low.
Then, having discharged himself, the Skin abandoned me and proceeded on his bully way. I shall of course take my revenge upon him some day, somehow . . . even if I must wait twenty years! Myra Breckinridge is implacable and pitiless.
These graphic notes are really for your benefit, dear Randolph. Examples of the way that the goyim you essentially despise behave (of course Clem is Jewish but he has been entirely absorbed by California, that great sponge into which all things are drawn and promptly homogenized, including Judaism). Yet even you, with your prejudices, could not help but be impressed at the ease with which these young people let themselves go, without any apparent fear of commitment or of compromise. The males do not worry about acting out what the society believes to be the man’s role (brutal, destructive, vagina-centered); they play with one another’s bodies in a sportive way, and seem to have no secret dreams they dare not act out. All is in the open, or as one of them said to me as he rested on the floor between engagements, “After a scene like this I don’t need it again for a week. I’ve had it, and there’s nothing left I want, and I never feel so good like I do after a real party.” So the Dionysian is still a necessity in our lives. Certainly its absence has made the world neurotic and mad. I am positive that access to this sort of pleasure in my adolescence would have changed me entirely. Fortunately, as it turned out, I was frustrated. If I had not been, Myra Breckinridge could never have existed, and the subsequent loss to the world of Myra, the self-creation, is something we, none of us, can afford at this time.
As I write these words, I suddenly think of Myron making love to Gloria Gordon! Why? How strange—just the thought of such a thing makes my eyes fill suddenly with tears. Poor Myron. Yet, all in all, he is better dead.
One must not underestimate the influence of these young people on our society. It is true that the swingers, as they are called, make up only a small minority of our society; yet they hold a great attraction for the young and bored who are the majority and who keep their sanity (those that do) by having a double sense of themselves. On the one hand, they must appear to accept without question our culture’s myth that the male must be dominant, aggressive, woman-oriented. On the other hand, they are perfectly aware that few men are anything but slaves to an economic and social system that does not allow them to knock people down as proof of virility or in any way act out the traditional male role. As a result, the young men compensate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.
It is the wisdom of the male swinger to know what he is: a man who is socially and economically weak, as much put upon by women as by society. Accepting his situation, he is able to assert himself through a polymorphic sexual abandon in which the lines between the sexes dissolve, to the delight of all. I suspect that this may be the only workable pattern for the future, and it is a most healthy one . . . certainly healthier than the rigid old-fashioned masculinity of someone like Rusty whose instinct to dominate in traditional ways is bound to end in defeat or frustration, excepting perhaps in his relations with the old-fashioned Mary-Ann . . . relations which are currently at an end, for she has still not heard from him, or so she says. I suspect he has been busted. And just as I was about to make my final move. It is too unfair!
The party ended in an orgy of eating. Delicate girls devoured cold cuts as though they had not been fed in weeks, while spent youths lay snoring among tangled towels that smelled of new—made love. How Myron would have enjoyed all this! Though I’m afraid he would have paid more attention to the boys than to the girls and perhaps imitated my bull-like Skin who, waiting until one young
man had assumed the classic position between a girl’s legs, leapt upon him and forced his way in, to the obvious irritation of the raped youth who, nevertheless, had sufficient aplomb (and Dionysian abandon) not to break his own stride, as it were—oh, how various are the ways of power!
BUCK LONER REPORTS—
Recording Disc No. 751—
27 February
Well so far she has got the jump on me this morning she came into my office and gave me this Mexican wedding license apologizing for not having got it sooner but it was mislaid Uncle Buck I tell you when she calls me Uncle Buck like that Id like to break her neck she is living hell and theres no doubt about that she also said she was getting impatient for her share of the estate and she hoped quote mean old Flagler and Flagler would soon see their way clear to the half million dollar settlement unquote half million dollar settlement I asked it was three fifty that we finally agreed on before well she says quote that was before but I have been kept waiting and waiting while your detectives have been trying to get something on me like I was criticizing General Motors or something and so I regard the extra one fifty as damages for the mental anguish you have been causing me unquote well I controlled myself as best I could and said quote now Myra you know what lawyers are and after all we never did meet before and whats to keep a total stranger from barging in and claiming to be married to my late nephew question mark end quote oh I see your point of view she says in quotes of course I do but you must also see mine and realize just what it is I have been going through since Myron died leaving me entirely alone in the world and broke well we kicked that around the poor defense less widow number and then she again gave me until April one to pay up or else she goes to court and really gets mean so I do my best to soothe her putting the blame on Flagler and Flagler but the thing is still fishy even though theres no doubt she was involved deeply with Myron because though I didnt know him I sure as hell knew Gertrude and at one point Myra let slip the fact that she personally had always found Gertrude hell particularly the way she used to save worthless things like newspapers and string and keep the icebox jammed with food that had gone bad that she was too damned miserly to throw out well Myra didnt make that up and we both agreed that anybody who had a meal at Gertrudes was courting ptomaine but then when I said Gertrude really loved that boy of hers Myra frowned and said oh no she didnt Uncle Buck she just loved herself well dont we all I said no she said not to that degree unquote but she wouldnt open up any more obviously the two girls did not get on hard to say which is the worst no not hard at all Myra is the worst woman I have ever met exclamation mark paragraph she then asked me if I had had news of Rusty Godowsky and I said no but that our students often disappear for a time like that and then show up again like nothings happened but she said she was concerned because of poor Mary Ann being so heartbroken Mary Ann hell Im sure Myras got her eye on that stud like half the girls on campus and is now demonstrating the edginess of a filly in heat anyway I said I would look into the matter of his disappearance beginning by calling up my friend the Sheriff a good Republican and ask him if the boy has been incarcerated in a hoosegow since he was on probation to begin with period paragraph then Myra asks me for permission to look at the medical reports on the students which are kept in my outer office and are private because quote I am doing some research on the I think she said post Rosenberg generation she is probably a Commie along with everything else but I have to handle little Miss Dynamite with kid gloves so I gave her permission after all theres nothing interesting in any of them reports just a routine physical checkup at the beginning of their academic life we did consider once taking naked pictures like they do at Yale but the girls objected or to be exact the mothers and fathers of the girls objected even though this is the era of the Playboy bunny so that very good idea came to naught period paragraph change masseuses appointment from this afternoon to tomorrow as I must go in to town for a conference with Letitia Van Allen the best actors agent in this town for young stars of tomorrow having in her pocket practically her own key to casting at Universal dont forget to pick up sour cream for Bobbies beef Stroganoff
21
I am sitting beside Mary-Ann at the CBS television studio on Fairfax Avenue. Though it is only a caricature of a film studio, the ultimate effect is impressive. So impressive in fact that I am more than ever certain that the movies are now a mere subsidiary to this electronic device for projecting images around the world at, literally, the speed of light. What it will mean, I have not yet worked out. But it is now plain that the classic age of films has ended and will not return any more than verse drama, despite the wonder of the Jacobeans, has a chance of revival.
“Of course visual narratives will always be filmed and shown if not in theatres on television. Yet the nature of those narratives is bound to change as television creates a new kind of person who will then create a new kind of art, a circle of creation that is only now just beginning. It is a thrilling moment to be alive! And though I yearn romantically for the classic films of the Forties, I know that they can never be reproduced since their era is as gone as the Depression, World War II and the national innocence which made it possible for Pandro S. Berman and a host of others to decorate the screens of tens of thousands of movie theatres with perfect dreams. There was a wholeness then which is lacking now and neither Alain Resnais nor Andy Warhol (the only film-makers of comparable stature today) can give us work which is not hopelessly fragmented. I except always Warhol’s Sleeping Man, which broke new ground aesthetically and proved a radical theory I had always held but dared not openly formulate: that boredom in the arts can be, under the right circumstances, dull.
“I find it altogether too satisfying to be sitting beside Mary-Ann in the audience that has been assembled for the Art Linkletter Show. An M. C. is trying to warm us up with bad jokes. In a few minutes we shall be on the air, performers, technicians, audience, viewers—all made one by the magic of the tube. I find this particular show absolutely unbearable, preferring as I do the total electronic effect of, let us say, Milton Berle. But I am here because Mary-Ann wanted me to come and I usually do what she wants me to do for we are now curiously united by Rusty’s disappearance. Of course she continues to believe that I dislike him and think him an ape, and I do nothing to disabuse her of this notion. I find almost unbearable the painful sweetness of knowing that I shall one day possess, in my own way, what she believes to be entirely hers, assuming of course that Rusty ever returns.
Mary-Ann believes that if he is not in prison (the likeliest possibility since a boy with a police record is prone to constant false arrest in the Los Angeles area where only professional criminals are safe from harassment by the local police), he has gone off with some of his wild friends, possibly to Mexico. I do my best to soothe her, and we have long “girl-talks” about men and life and about her career.
Unlike the other students, Mary-Ann could be professional. Miss Cluff is absolutely right and I for one would like to cut a corner or two and present her directly to an agent, instead of waiting until June, the usual time for the students to show what they can do which, traditionally, is not much. Miss Cluff tells me that in the seven years that she has been at the Academy no student has ever got a job on television or appeared in a film. This is a remarkable record. Some do get jobs modeling but that, is often just plain whoring.
When I asked Buck about the dismal showing his students make in the professional world, he seemed not at all taken aback. “Honey,” he said, knowing how much I hate to be called “honey,” resembling, in this, the former First Lady, “what matters is making people happy and while the kids are here they are happy. Now there is, I am willing to admit, a real letdown come June when our kids realize that the outside world of show biz is a big cruel place with maybe no place for them. Yes, I admit that’s an awful thing for them to find out and I’ve even toyed with the idea of never allowing any agents or professional people to come to the June exercises but of course if I really kept them away I’d go out of
business, so we all have to suffer through the June Letdown which is immediately followed by the Buck Loner July Spectacular which is a series of awards based closely on the actual Academy Awards, with many Oscars (or Bucks as the kids call them) to be given out by some real-life celebrity on the order of Bobby Darin and that, let me tell you, sure as hell makes up for June.”
“Yes, but sooner or later they will have to go out into the world . . .”
“Why?” The question was straightforward. “As long as they scrounge up enough money to pay the tuition they can stay here for life. Look at Irving Amadeus. He came here fourteen years ago as a student to become a singing star on the order of Paul Robeson and he is with us still, on the staff now as an invaluable teacher with over three hundred recordings to his credit. If that isn’t as good as being a real star I don’t know what is!”
This curiously hateful philosophy has made Buck Loner rich. But then, to be honest, all that I care about at the moment is my share of his wealth. That and Mary-Ann’s career which she does not take seriously. “Only one star in the family,” she keeps quoting Rusty. To which I invariably reply, “You’re the star. He’s the garage mechanic.”
